Chapter 147#

Free Hunt 04#

As if Vincent’s words had taken half an effect, the next day the good-night announcements suddenly dropped by nearly half.

Yu Feichen’s table now held forty-three chess pieces — twenty-two white, twenty-one black.

He ordered a drink stronger than yesterday’s and leaned against the window.

The force deep inside him that lured him toward the hunt had grown stronger — it had been building with each successful kill, subtly reshaping a person’s character.

That was true for him, and by extension, true for everyone else.

So it wasn’t that the unhinged ones had genuinely taken Vincent’s advice. It was that, despite looking like their heads were all a little loose, they didn’t actually want their heads to become truly broken.

In another day, Yu Feichen planned to stop as well.

Night fell, and the blackboard exchanges opened again.

[Red Doll]: Well then — has everyone turned over a new leaf?

[Acri]: Hehe, just here to watch the show.

On the third day, the death announcements suddenly surged again.

Yu Feichen was still on top of the cargo ship, surveying the full scope of the docklands.

More people were emerging from their hiding places and joining the hunt.

——Because after the previous day’s drop in announcements and the contents of the chat, they had formed a theory: persuaded by Vincent, the most prolific harvesters had suddenly stopped. This meant their personal danger had dropped considerably — no need to worry about the praying mantis stalking the cicada while the oriole stalked the mantis. They could now boldly go out and acquire force.

After all, whatever the City of Mist intended to do — what did that have to do with them? Force was the only thing that truly belonged to oneself.

And the day before, Four of Diamonds and Acri had performed their small acts of charity, dumping the locations of seven newcomer spawn points all at once — meaning anyone who had seen that day’s exchange now knew exactly where to go hunting, and could even choose their venue based on mood.

The City of Mist ignited a frenzied carnival of slaughter among the ordinary players.

Yu Feichen slowly withdrew his gaze. Having witnessed several bouts of frenzied killing, he could confirm that some people’s minds had already been affected.

Over these days, the number of new players had also been growing — each day, more people knocked at the gates of the City of Mist than the day before.

It seemed that while the people inside the foggy city were plundering each other for force, the search and scramble for keys out in the Eternal Night was equally in full swing.

This was likely the “show” that the entity calling itself Acri — presumably some kind of outer god — had come to watch.

Using special items acquired over these three days, Yu Feichen’s silhouette drifted ghost-like above the docks. A few quick strikes felled several players who had lost themselves in the killing frenzy, and then he withdrew from the area.

The second hand moved forward and back, but ultimately advanced more than it retreated, pushing past the eight o’clock position — and it was still creeping forward.

Yu Feichen returned to the alley where the inn stood.

The hunting urge disrupting sanity had happened to everyone — was the strange scene in the grey mist a universal phenomenon too?

He looked at the weeping-angel glass lamp at the inn’s entrance, repeated the motion of walking toward it, and waited. The same scene as that day didn’t reappear.

Yu Feichen reflected on the state he’d been in then.

He had been calm — mildly guarded in the dark — walking casually toward the inn entrance. The glass lamp had swayed in the wind, its glow near and far in turns.

He had wandered through the dangerous quarters of many worlds, walked through countless dark alleys. Scenes like this were utterly ordinary to him — the kind of thing that happened every day.

And then the grey mist had risen up around him.

And then——

Yu Feichen suddenly found he couldn’t remember what he had seen inside the grey mist.

As if a stretch of memory had been cleanly severed, he retained the knowledge that he had “entered a special scene,” but could recall none of its details whatsoever.

He tried to think back to the encounter outside the city walls, and the same thing: nothing.

Strange. That was Yu Feichen’s first instinct.

He had experienced more bizarre things than he could count, yet this was the first time the word “strange” rose in him — because this meant there was something wrong with his own memory.

But everything has a source.

Just as he suspected the grey mist scene had a specific trigger condition.

He cleared his mind of all thought and emptied himself. Yu Feichen walked toward the inn again. The lamp still swayed in the wind. He didn’t spare it a glance, walking straight through the white ash-wood door.

“Welcome, sir. How may I help you?”

The ground floor was too crowded with tables, sometimes noisy. Yu Feichen went upstairs to the second floor, took a window seat in one of the private booths, and ordered a light fruit wine — the attendant mentioned it was the establishment’s signature drink, renowned across the city.

The drink arrived. Yu Feichen thanked the attendant. He behaved like a longtime local, going through his daily routine, passing through the most unremarkable of days.

Grey mist began to curl and rise around him.

——Here it comes.

The grey mist spread rapidly. The floor, the table, the window frames all turned a deep, lacquered black. The attendant dissolved into a vague smear of dark vapor. Pale light streamed in through the windows, illuminating the space.

And illuminating the person seated across from him.

Loose golden curls draped lazily over his shoulders. A youthful-looking person quietly sipped his light fruit wine in small mouthfuls, crystalline ice stacked at the bottom of the glass, a few small dishes of snacks arranged on the table.

Him again. Yu Feichen thought.

The moment he entered the grey mist, the memories of the first two times surfaced with sudden clarity.

The first time: meeting someone at the city gates. The second time: patrolling the city streets to apprehend someone. And this time — sharing a table at a tavern without any arrest taking place, as if some under-the-table arrangement had been reached.

The golden-haired youth sampled his wine while watching the people coming and going on the street below with evident interest, as though this were a sight he rarely had the chance to see. Yet every expression on his face was faint — only someone very familiar with him could detect anything at all.

To anyone else, he looked like an exquisitely crafted, expressionless doll.

He didn’t speak. Yu Feichen didn’t speak either.

Finally, when both the food and drink had been more or less thoroughly dealt with, the youth narrowed his eyes slightly — the picture of lazy, satisfied contentment.

A curl-eared cat. The phrase surfaced in Yu Feichen’s mind again.

The attendant brought the bill. Yu Feichen paid.

The curl-eared cat glanced at the figure on the bill with no particular sense of its meaning, then looked away, and once the attendant had left, gave Yu Feichen a soft curve of his lashes and said: “Thank you.”

Having said his thanks, he turned to look at the street again.

But whatever he saw seemed to be something unpleasant.

“Why are they here too?”

Several blurred dark figures were filing into the tavern below, dressed in black academic robes embroidered with pale totemic patterns that carried a faintly religious air.

The gaze of a certain person looking at him was perfectly calm — and yet it communicated three words.

What do we do?

Yu Feichen confirmed once more that this visit to the tavern had also been a transgression. And those figures in academic robes were the ones with authority to apprehend them both.

The faint sound of people ascending the stairs drifted up. Going down would mean a head-on encounter; staying put would mean being found.

Yu Feichen opened the window.

The youth moved naturally to the windowsill.

The clothes Yu Feichen was wearing came with a cloak. He reached back and pulled it forward, draping it over the golden hair, wrapping it firmly around that face to cover it completely.

Then he gathered the person horizontally into his arms and jumped out the window.

They landed without a sound. A horse stood right at the door.

The horse, which had been idly marking time in place, looked up at the sudden appearance of two people before it and let out a bewildered snort.

Yu Feichen kept the cloak shielding the person in his arms and guided the horse away from the spot.

Behind them, voices seemed to drift out.

“Did any of you just see the Knight-Commander?”

“Where?”

“Hm, maybe I imagined it…”

“Why would the Knight-Commander possibly be away from the temple at this hour — you must have seen wrong…”

“Then why are we even outside the temple right now…”

Beneath the cloak, the person had to loop an arm around his neck to keep from falling.

When those voices drifted over, the body in his arms shook in small, brief tremors.

——He was laughing.

The grey mist dispersed.

Inside and outside the grey mist, something like a lock severed all memory. Yu Feichen tried to look back, but it was like the moment just after waking from a dream — at first he could still catch stray fragments, and then, a moment later, even those vanished entirely, leaving only the feeling of having seen something faintly familiar.

He only remembered that the version of himself inside that scene must have been feeling very…

Happy?

In the glass of light fruit wine before him, crystalline ice cubes were stacked one atop another, refracting a faint, scattered light.

Yu Feichen returned to his room. By then, the black slate chat had started up again. Some people were typing tildes, some were raving, some were cursing the mist, others were exchanging notes on which street had the best food — all idle, meaningless chatter.

Yu Feichen thought for a moment, then finally picked up the quill beside the slate.

The moment the tip touched the black slate, the system chimed and asked him to enter a name.

He glanced at the chaotic, mismatched usernames of everyone currently chatting, and typed a few characters into the name field with zero psychological resistance.

For online anonymity, obviously you wanted something unrecognizable — and something that blended in with the environment.

[I Have Amnesia]: Does anyone here suddenly get pulled into a scene?

[Brain Doctor]: Hello — how long has this been going on?

[Red Doll]: ?

[Glass Person]: What kind of scene?

[I Have Amnesia]: Like a different stretch of time and space in the same location.

[Brain Doctor]: Oh, resonance.

[Red Doll]: Oh, resonance.

[Four of Diamonds]: Oh, resonance.

Apparently a perfectly commonplace occurrence with its own dedicated terminology, Yu Feichen noted.

[Red Doll]: …Wait, someone resonated with the City of Mist?

[Brain Doctor]: …Wait, someone resonated with the City of Mist?

After a cascade of copies, another line drifted quietly into view.

[Ghost Ghost]: Ah, I think I had that too… I’ve been meaning to ask.

[Grateful Heart]: +1.

[Destroy the Eternal Night]: I had it outside the city — is it when a cloud of grey mist appears and then something strange happens?

[Red Doll]: …May I ask everyone: how old are you this year? Where are you from? And what did you resonate with?

[Destroy the Eternal Night]: I felt like I was a blade of grass that got crushed by a horse’s hoof. Lmao. For f*ck’s sake.

[Grateful Heart]: Mine was better — I was a flower. Lmao. I’ve made peace with it.

[Brain Doctor]: Definitely resonance. Moving on. The City of Mist isn’t a closed system — not unusual.

[I Have Amnesia]: What is resonance?

[Acri]: Educational briefing — @Vincent

Scattered through the chat, a few more people who’d been dragged into strange scenes chimed in, describing wildly absurd experiences — one had been a brick, another a statue. The most evolved creature in the accounts was a horse.

Going by a vague instinct, Yu Feichen suspected his own role in that scene had not been quite so lowly.

Of course, there was one obvious difference between him and these fellow sufferers.

Everyone else remembered what they’d seen. He had forgotten.

So this wasn’t a problem with the City of Mist. It was a problem with him.

Time passed. Eventually Vincent sent a series of messages.

[Vincent]: Let me give an example first. None of you are newcomers to the Eternal Night — you should know that the force that constitutes each of us is also part of the Eternal Night. Everyone’s force carries a subtle resemblance to their home world, and the two can produce a resonance. This is why some people in the Eternal Night are captured by their own shattered homelands.

[I’m Going to Copy This]: Mm mm mm mm.

[Brain Doctor]: Mm mm mm mm.

[Ghost Ghost]: Mm mm mm mm.

[Vincent]: When the two similar forces come into contact, the person who enters the world gets continuously pulled into memories from that time — this is resonance. Constantly switching between past memories and a shattered homeland is an extremely painful experience, and the mortality rate among those who enter their own home worlds is very high.

[Ghost Ghost]: So the City of Mist is our homeland…? How come I didn’t know that.

[Destroy the Eternal Night]: Hello, fellow local. (I didn’t know either.)

[Vincent]: That was just an example. Besides homeland resonance, there’s another scenario: if a person acquires a fragment of some world while in the Eternal Night and converts it into their own source force, encountering that world again will also produce resonance. This kind is relatively peaceful — it doesn’t generate painful emotions. Like when someone just mentioned they became a flower — that means they once captured the force of that flower. The City of Mist has existed for many eons, so it’s inevitable that some of its force has scattered and been captured by others. A normal occurrence.

[Vincent]: Resonance is time-indeterminate at the level of consciousness, but in reality it lasts only an instant. It poses no danger. Don’t worry.

[Ghost Ghost]: Thank you for the explanation — that’s reassuring.

[I Have Amnesia]: Thank you for the explanation.

[Grateful Heart]: Thank you for the explanation.

[Ghost Ghost]: Amnesia, what were you? @I Have Amnesia

Yu Feichen genuinely tried to remember.

But his mind was blank. In the end, only one word surfaced.

[I Have Amnesia]: I was a curl-eared cat.

[Ghost Ghost]: Let me pet you!

[Destroy the Eternal Night]: Let me pet you!

[Grateful Heart]: Let me pet you!

[Brain Doctor]: Hello — how long has this been going on?

Yu Feichen left the group chat.

His name was Yu Feichen. What did that have to do with “I Have Amnesia.”

Thanks to Vincent’s conscientious briefing, the day’s chat was remarkably peaceful. Everyone behaved like a gaggle of eager kindergarteners, raising all manner of doubts about the Eternal Night in the channel — and most questions found someone willing to answer them.

After all, when you were ordinarily busy surviving in the Eternal Night, you never had the chance to rub shoulders with powerful deities like these, let alone ask them anything.

The convivial atmosphere held through the latter half of the night.

Yu Feichen looked up from his examination of items, and amid the dense, eclectic torrent of messages scrolling across the blackboard, an inconspicuous line slipped past.

[Here Comes the City of Mist]: yg, nzm?

Yu Feichen: “…?”

He had a vague premonition — but then he thought of his own username, and found he wasn’t particularly inclined to reply.