Xingwang Hotel
Chapter 378.2: The real show is just beginning.
However, no matter how panicked he felt inside, Wen Jianyan couldn’t fully control his body for now. He could only grit his teeth and, under the influence of this chilling force, take step after step forward.
Tick, tick.
The rain continued to fall, and another chunk of dirt fell from his face.
Wen Jianyan’s eyelashes fluttered, and the dirt pieces fell off, merging with the raindrops at his feet.
He slightly raised his eyes and looked up.
The sky was dark gray, and light raindrops fell from the sky, hitting his body.
Rain…
Only the nightmare-created mirror world had rain, but in the real “Xingwang Hotel” instance, there was no rain. The reason for this, Wen Jianyan still hadn’t figured out.
But…
Suddenly, a glimmer of light flashed through his mind.
Wen Jianyan froze for a moment, and an earlier, almost surreal image flashed in his mind.
A woman with eyes wide open, one eye replaced by writhing red flesh, not resembling human eyes, and the other eye battered, vacant, and constantly spilling tears.
Suddenly, Wen Jianyan remembered that before he approached the well, the broadcaster who could write with his talents had given him a guiding drawing—disordered, childlike doodles, with a crooked well at the bottom, and a large, wide-open eyeball from which countless raindrops emerged.
Or perhaps… fell?
That’s right, fell.
After all, mirrors and reality are opposites.
Wen Jianyan was stunned.
Wait a minute!
Does that mean the rain in the mirror instance town… is actually the tears of the woman in white? Or, rather, the tears of the real, suffering human?
After all, the writhing, crimson eyeball was clear inside, and there were no tears falling from it.
Wen Jianyan still couldn’t fully control his body, but in some ways, this was a good thing. At least he could now focus his energy on thinking carefully.
Why were these tears appearing?
Combining his previous experiences in the rainy town and the images he saw during his lost consciousness, a vague guess slowly emerged in Wen Jianyan’s mind.
Perhaps, the rain in the town was created to stop something.
What was it trying to stop?
The answer was obvious.
It was trying to prevent the broadcasters from bringing more drawings into the hotel, from preventing the banquet, so the rain would kill anything trying to enter the town. As time passed, the closer the banquet came, the harder the rain fell, and the greater its murderous intent.
By the end of the instance, the mirror instance had become dilapidated, and rain poured into the buildings from every crack. Perhaps there was no need for the nightmare to maintain the mirror anymore, but at the same time, it was because the rain’s power had increased.
It was trying to stop everything.
By flooding everything with rain.
This rain was clearly not a product of the mirror instance, or rather, not something created by the nightmare.
On the contrary, it was a product that defied the nightmare’s will.
The real woman in white had not only nailed her eyelids shut to prevent herself from falling into a dream, where her body would be controlled by entities from beyond the world, but even in her last moments, she jumped into the well with the terrifying entity threatening to consume her will, carrying a box containing a crucial soul.
—Under the well, her corpse showed signs of crushed cervical and cranial bones.
However, although the nightmare no longer maintained the mirror instance, the rain, originally confined to the mirror instance, did not disappear. Instead, it invaded the real instance.
Wen Jianyan felt a chill running down his spine.
He felt that he was very close to the truth now.
Only one final crucial clue remained, and everything would connect.
The rain continued to fall, slowly, drop by drop. It wasn’t much, or rather, compared to the torrential rain in the town earlier, it was more like a light drizzle.
Wen Jianyan felt as though he had regained some control over his body.
His fingers, hanging by his side, moved slightly.
Soft.
Under the influence of his willpower before losing consciousness, his stiff fingers had maintained their original position, and at that moment, the white mask was hanging from his finger.
Thankfully…
Wen Jianyan breathed a slight sigh of relief.
He glanced beside him.
Wu Cheng was still there.
Like him, his body was also controlled by some invisible force, taking stiff steps, slowly moving forward. His mask was half broken, with half of his face visible, while the other half was covered in thick dirt, from his eyes to his nose, ears, all completely concealed.
In the drizzling rain, the unaware ghosts moved slowly ahead.
As time passed, the dirt on Wen Jianyan began to fall off, and the human scent slowly leaked out.
Several corpses beside him sluggishly turned their heads, their hollow gazes falling on Wen Jianyan. Perhaps because some dirt remained, they hadn’t attacked yet, but once the rain washed away all the dirt, they would probably strike without hesitation.
Wen Jianyan gripped his mask, trying to remain calm under the gaze of these “eyes,” walking step by step with the ghostly group.
Now was not the time.
Seconds ticked by.
A shadow appeared ahead on the road, like some…
A building?
Wen Jianyan’s heart skipped a beat, and he immediately understood what it was.
It was Xingwang Hotel!
As expected, just as the brown paper had said, they had indeed left the graveyard and returned to the hotel!
However, before Wen Jianyan could feel any joy, the building ahead was rapidly getting closer, and he began to see the full picture of Xingwang Hotel.
“……!”
Wen Jianyan’s pupils shrank.
His joy froze; a heavy weight settled in his stomach, making him feel extremely uncomfortable.
In the distance, at the end of the road, the building was clearly Xingwang Hotel as he remembered, but it was also not entirely the same.
The appearance was similar, but the material was completely different from what he remembered!
It was a building made of flesh and blood, crimson in color, with exposed muscles twitching irregularly in the open air, like human muscle stripped of skin, wet and sticky, oozing disgusting, blood-red slime. The gaps between the muscles split open, revealing countless crimson eyeballs, rolling wildly as if searching for something.
This was simply a test of the human tolerance threshold.
“……”
Damn, so disgusting.
Wen Jianyan’s face turned pale as his stomach churned again. If he hadn’t lost control of his body, he would have likely vomited right then and there.
…In a way, this was also a good thing?
Wen Jianyan tried to comfort himself bitterly, but he could only stiffly move forward, walking with the ghost group.
The closer he got, the more the grotesqueness of the building made him feel sick.
He suddenly remembered that in the mirror instance, when he was in the collapsing Xingwang Hotel, on a whim, he had peered into a crack in the wall and locked eyes with an eyeball staring out at him. At the time, he thought something evil was hiding behind the wall watching him, but he never imagined…
This was the true appearance of the Xingwang Hotel!
Wen Jianyan suppressed the churning in his stomach and continued to move forward, step by step.
Some of the rules in Xingwang Hotel resembled those in Changsheng Building, but clearly, unlike Changsheng Building, it was not human-made. On the contrary, it was created by those huge eyeballs he had briefly encountered in the Fantasy Amusement Park.
It had started as an illusion in the dream of the diary owner, never existing in the real world, but over time, with nightmare after nightmare, it had gradually invaded reality, becoming a real building, even taking on a seemingly “real” shell.
The group suddenly stopped.
All the ghosts halted in place, no longer moving forward.
?
What’s going on?
Within the range of his control, Wen Jianyan carefully turned his body, adjusting his angle, and peered through the gaps between the ghosts ahead.
At the bottom of Xingwang Hotel, among the blood and flesh, a gap had appeared, leading deep into darkness, like the only large door or perhaps a giant, gaping, black hole of a mouth.
The shape of the gap…
Wen Jianyan felt a bit familiar, but for a moment, he couldn’t recall where he had seen him before.
However, this was an opportunity.
Wen Jianyan withdrew his gaze, clenched the mask in his hand, and tentatively moved his hands and feet.
Hmm, almost there.
He glanced sideways at Wu Cheng, who still appeared to be under control, standing straight and stiff with an eerie, frozen breath, motionless.
Rescuing him was still possible.
This guy might still be useful.
His thoughts whirled quickly, and Wen Jianyan made up his mind.
He raised his hand and placed the mask on his face.
The moment the mask covered his face, the gazes that had been clinging to him since earlier vanished, and Wen Jianyan breathed a sigh of relief. He slowly moved toward Wu Cheng, raised his hand, and cautiously began to peel the dirt off his face. As the mud fell away, Wu Cheng’s motionless posture shifted slightly, as if he was gradually starting to wake up.
After removing only half of it, Wen Jianyan stopped.
Wu Cheng’s mask was half-shattered, and because of the dirt, it hadn’t completely fallen off. He couldn’t guarantee that once he removed all the dirt from the other person’s face, it wouldn’t cause the mask to fail and return him to a human state.
There were ghosts all around.
Becoming human again wasn’t a good option right now.
Wu Cheng, whose eyes had just been covered with mud, blinked, showing a dazed expression, seemingly unaware of what had just happened.
Wen Jianyan lowered his voice, “Don’t ask questions, follow me.”
After saying that, he turned and restrained his movements as much as possible, slowly making his way through the crowd of ghosts toward the building.
The distance was closing slowly.
Wen Jianyan could see that the gap in the wall was getting closer.
Beneath the mask, he frowned, momentarily distracted.
That shape… where had he seen it before?
Only a few steps left.
As the distance narrowed, Wen Jianyan began to realize that the “gap” wasn’t very large, just about the height of one person, only wide enough for one person to pass through; it would be a tight fit for two.
The hotel’s main door, though small, wasn’t this small.
It almost looked like a picture frame—
Wen Jianyan’s pupils constricted, and he suddenly stopped.
Behind him, Wu Cheng, who hadn’t anticipated the stop, collided into him unexpectedly.
The mud on his face, which had been loosely attached due to the rain, fell off in pieces, dropping to the ground.
At that moment, it was as if the ghosts on the road simultaneously sensed something or received some command, and they slowly turned their heads, all staring in this direction.
“Run!”
Wen Jianyan shouted.
He then gathered all his strength and charged toward the gap in the flesh wall!
Wu Cheng was quick to activate his life-saving item, gritting his teeth, and followed closely, rushing after Wen Jianyan’s back!
Against so many vengeful ghosts, even the rarest of items would only last for two seconds.
The cold, deathly aura followed closely.
Wu Cheng was covered in cold sweat, his body trembling.
Only three steps left.
Two steps.
One step!
Time was running out, and the chilling aura was too close, almost at his back. But in order to survive, Wu Cheng clenched his teeth, closed his eyes, and pushed himself with all his strength, charging into the nearby door!
Because of his intense speed, he fell face first onto the ground and rolled a few times before finally stopping.
Wu Cheng, dizzy, slowly raised his head, taking several seconds to realize that he had really escaped death.
He stared blankly at the place he had come from.
The wall was still the hotel’s wall, smooth, with nothing on it.
No hole.
Outside the hole, there was no road leading to the unknown world, nor were there any vengeful ghosts. Everything that had just happened seemed like a hallucination.
The dim red light above was calm.
Wu Cheng shakily stood up, a sense of surreal disorientation washing over him.
“Ugh!”
A clear dry heave pulled him out of his thoughts.
He turned his head, looking toward the direction the sound had come from, filled with mixed emotions.
The person who had led him into that life-or-death situation and then saved him from it was now hunched over, supporting himself against the wall, with his mask pulled aside. His slender back trembled as he vomited uncontrollably, looking pitiful.
This really was…
So strange.
Wu Cheng sighed deeply and walked over to pat Wen Jianyan’s back. “Are you alright?”
“…I’m fine.”
Wen Jianyan lowered his head, shook his head weakly, and replied.
…It didn’t look like he was fine at all.
Wu Cheng held back his words.
After a while, Wen Jianyan finally recovered from the nausea caused by the grotesque blood-flesh monster with eyes everywhere.
He shakily straightened up and looked toward the place he had entered from.
The wall had returned to its original state.
There was no door or hole.
“I checked,” Wu Cheng, noticing Wen Jianyan’s gaze, said, “The door we came through doesn’t exist. I think, whatever we saw earlier, whether it was the road or the door, it didn’t exist in the same dimension as ours.”
Though the physical locations overlapped, they were essentially in different worlds.
Wen Jianyan absentmindedly nodded.
He raised his hand and pressed it against the wall.
The wall under his palm was cold and solid, with no signs of illusion.
Yet, Wen Jianyan could still clearly visualize the shape of that doorway in his mind.
—Just like the large hole beneath the picture frame in the virtual space created by the Ouroboros.
Wen Jianyan still remembered how Wu Zhu had fiercely stopped him from entering there when he was out of control, and how he had been warned not to go near it once he regained his senses.
“…”
Wen Jianyan took a long, deep breath, pressing his heated forehead against his cool palm.
It was now clearer than ever.
At first, he had believed that the black hole beneath the picture frame connected to the Xingwang Hotel, which had been sealed in the garden world. However, the reality was far from that.
The hole actually led to a desolate, ghost-filled, deathly place.
Now everything made sense.
Why Wu Zhu had been so adamant in stopping him from entering, and…
The final crucial piece of the puzzle was now in place.
The question that had plagued him for so long was finally answered.
Wen Jianyan’s mind was in turmoil.
He closed his eyes, taking several deep breaths, trying to calm himself down.
This was all a trap, a huge, intricate trap, not only targeting him but something far larger and more terrifying.
At that moment, Wu Cheng’s voice came from beside him:
“Uh…”
Wen Jianyan looked up. “?”
“There are footsteps coming this way,” Wu Cheng said nervously.
In the distance, regular footsteps echoed, and shadowy figures moved under the dim red light, walking toward some direction.
“They’re guests attending the banquet.”
Wen Jianyan said.
“!” As someone who had been tricked into a deadly situation on the first day, Wu Cheng, though he missed a third of the instance, understood what the word “guests” meant in the Xingwang Hotel.
They were ghosts.
He couldn’t help but tense up:
“What do we do now?”
“Where do we go to avoid them?”
Wen Jianyan rotated the Ouroboros ring on his finger, his eyes narrowing.
He now knew exactly what he was going to do next.
“We’re not avoiding them. We’re following them.”
He said.
“Eh?”
Wu Cheng was stunned.
What, follow them?
He turned his head, staring blankly at the young man beside him, as if not believing his ears.
“That’s right,” Wen Jianyan smiled slightly.
He raised his hand, pushing his damp hair back, his pale face now looking full of energy. He winked at Wu Cheng.
“The real show is just beginning.”
It’s rare to see a humane act from another anchor. Bet that wink was mesmerising though