Chapter 35: Chapter 35: The Mimicking Horde
The silence in the hall did not break; it thickened.
It became a physical weight, pressing against the eardrums of the six remaining players. Forty-eight, fifty faces, or maybe even more. The mourners had filled the gaps between the pillars, the shadows beneath the beams, and the narrow aisles leading to the coffin. They stood shoulder to shoulder, a sea of blurred features and charcoal-grey robes, their collective gaze fixed on the living with a predatory, patient stillness.
Lin Yue did not blink. He watched the front row.
Li Qiang was the first to break. He shifted his weight, his boots scraping softly against the floor.
Three seconds passed.
Then, as if a signal had been sent through an invisible wire, the first three rows of mourners shifted their weight. The sound was a synchronized, sliding rustle—a delayed echo of Li Qiang’s movement.
The players froze.
"Did they just..." Chen Hao whispered. He was standing close to Lin Yue, his shoulder nearly brushing Lin Yue’s arm. His breathing was shallow, rapid.
Lin Yue didn’t answer. He was watching a mourner three feet to his right.
Chen Hao subconsciously gripped the fabric of his own trousers, his knuckles whitening.
A moment later, the mourner’s hand rose. It gripped the coarse grey fabric of its robe. The movement was not fluid. It was slightly staggered, like a film skipping a few frames, arriving at the final position just as Chen Hao’s hand began to relax.
"They’re copying us," Xu Ning whispered. Her voice was barely a thread of sound. "Not exactly... but they’re following."
"It’s just a trick," Li Qiang said. His voice was too loud, cracking at the edges. "It’s a psychological play. They want us to panic. Just... ignore them."
Li Qiang reached up to wipe sweat from his forehead.
The delay happened again. One. Two. Then, fifty pairs of arms rose in a slow, stuttering wave. Fifty hands wiped foreheads that had no skin, only blurred impressions of faces.
The sight was profoundly wrong. It wasn’t a mirror; it was a lagging reflection, a broken recording struggling to keep up with the original.
"Stop it," Chen Hao hissed, his voice trembling. "Stop moving. Everyone just stop moving."
They stood in a rigid, suffocating tableau. For several minutes, the only sound was the distant, rhythmic sobbing of Madam Luo and the hiss of the burning incense.
Lin Yue remained the most still. He used the stillness to observe.
As his eyes scanned the crowd, he noticed something. The mourners were no longer identical. The charcoal-grey robes were the same, but there were... additions.
A mourner in the second row had a sleeve that was slightly too long, frayed at the edge with a distinct, faded floral pattern.
Sun Mei, Lin Yue thought.
Another figure, standing slightly slumped, had a stiff, white collar peeking out from under the grey cloth—a fragment of a dress shirt that looked exactly like the one Liu Fang had been wearing.
Further back, a figure stood with a rigid, military-straight spine, its chin tilted at a precise, stubborn angle.
Zhang Wei.
The details were subtle. They weren’t wearing the players’ clothes; they were wearing fragments of their identities, stitched into the grey void of the mourners’ forms.
"Do you see it?" Xu Ning whispered.
"See what?" He Rong asked. Her voice was steady, but she had moved a few inches away from the nearest mourner.
"The clothes," Xu Ning murmured. "The sleeves. The collars. They... they have pieces of the others."
He Rong glanced at the crowd. Her eyes narrowed. "You’re imagining things. It’s just grey cloth."
"I’m not," Xu Ning replied.
"Quiet," Li Qiang snapped. He was staring at the coffin, his chest heaving. "We need to focus. We are still in the ritual. If we stop the ritual, we die. That’s the only thing that matters."
"How can we do a ritual with that watching us?" Chen Hao asked, glancing at the horde. He shifted closer to Lin Yue, his arm now pressed firmly against Lin Yue’s.
Lin Yue didn’t move away. He didn’t offer comfort, either. He simply existed as a stable point in Chen Hao’s collapsing world. He could feel the heat radiating from Chen Hao—the raw, pulsing energy of panic.
"We do it perfectly," Li Qiang said. His voice had taken on a sharp, commanding edge, though his fingers were twitching. "That’s the key. If we are precise, if we are unified, there’s no room for error. No room for the system to find a gap."
"Since when are you an expert on the system?" He Rong asked softly.
Li Qiang turned to her. His eyes were bloodshot. "Since we’re the only ones left who can actually lead! Do you want to end up as a piece of fabric on a wall? Because that’s where we’re headed if we just stand here shaking!"
"Leading is different from shouting, Li Qiang," He Rong replied.
"I’m not shouting! I’m organizing!" Li Qiang’s voice rose.
Behind him, the mourners’ chests expanded. A delayed, collective inhalation. The sound was like a giant lung drawing air—a wet, heavy wheeze that filled the hall.
Everyone flinched.
The mourners flinched a second later.
"God, stop it!" Chen Hao choked out. "Stop doing it!"
"Don’t react!" Li Qiang barked. "Everyone, listen to me. Now, we are going to perform the next sequence of bows. We will do them in perfect unison. On my count. No one moves until I say. No one breathes out of sync."
"This isn’t a drill, Li Qiang," Xu Ning said. "The mourners... they’re not just copying. They’re closing in."
Lin Yue looked at Xu Ning. She was right.
The mourners hadn’t walked, but the space between the players and the first row had shrunk. They were now barely two feet away. The smell of old ash and cold earth was overwhelming.
"I don’t care if they’re closing in!" Li Qiang yelled. "We follow the ritual! That is the only rule that has kept us alive! Now, get in position!"
Li Qiang began to bark orders.
"Chen Hao, move two inches to the left. Align yourself with the pillar. He Rong, straighten your back. Zhao Ming—are you even listening? Stand up straight!"
Zhao Ming, who had remained unnervingly silent since the start of the instance, didn’t respond. He simply stood there, his eyes vacant, staring at the coffin.
"Fine! Be a statue!" Li Qiang snapped. He was vibrating with a mixture of terror and a desperate need for control. "Now, we bow. Three times. If anyone messes up the timing, we start over."
"This is insane," He Rong whispered.
"Do it!" Li Qiang screamed.
The players complied, mostly out of a desire to stop Li Qiang from shouting. They lined up, a fragile row of human nerves.
"One," Li Qiang counted. "Two. Three. Bow!"
They bent at the waist.
One second. Two.
Then, the hall collapsed into motion. Fifty figures bent in unison. The sound of their robes snapping forward was like a single, giant wing beating against the air.
"Up!" Li Qiang commanded.
They straightened.
The mourners straightened a moment later.
"Again! Bow!"
Li Qiang was breathing hard now. He was treating the ritual like a military exercise, his voice becoming increasingly sharp, his corrections more aggressive.
"Chen Hao, your head is too high! Lower it! You’re ruining the line!"
"I’m trying!" Chen Hao whispered, his voice cracking.
"Try harder! If you fail, we all fail!"
Lin Yue watched Li Qiang. He saw the way Li Qiang’s jaw was locked, the way his eyes darted frantically to the mourners behind them. Li Qiang wasn’t trying to save the group; he was trying to drown out his own fear with the sound of his own voice. He was attempting to impose a human order on a supernatural chaos, and the friction was only making the atmosphere more combustible.
Lin Yue shifted his gaze to the mourners.
He began to analyze.
He focused on the one directly in front of him. He watched the chest.
The mourner’s chest didn’t move. There was no rise, no fall. No rhythmic expansion of lungs. It was a static sculpture of a human, moving only when the "original" moved.
He looked at the eyes.
The players’ eyes were darting. They were searching for exits, watching the coffin, glancing at each other. The mourners’ eyes were fixed. They didn’t track movement; they simply oriented toward the target.
He looked at the posture.
When Li Qiang shouted, the players’ shoulders tightened. Their muscles coiled in a fight-or-flight response. The mourners’ mimicry of this was... off. They copied the shape of the tension, but not the feeling. They looked like puppets being pulled by strings, arriving at the correct posture but lacking the organic transition of muscle and bone.
They are not human, Lin Yue thought. They are recordings. Low-fidelity copies of our behavior.
This realization brought a strange, cold clarity.
The others were deteriorating because they saw the mourners as people—as ghosts, as monsters, as threats. They were reacting to the horror of the mimicry.
Lin Yue viewed the mimicry as data.
If the mourners were merely echoes, then the danger wasn’t in the mimicry itself, but in what the mimicry was designed to trigger: paranoia.
The system didn’t need to kill them with claws or teeth. It just needed to make them stop trusting the person standing next to them.
"Is he still human?"
The whisper came from Chen Hao. He was looking at Zhao Ming.
Lin Yue glanced at Zhao Ming. The man was still, too still. He hadn’t spoken in an hour. He hadn’t reacted to Li Qiang’s shouting. He hadn’t even flinched when the mourners’ collective inhalation had filled the room.
"What do you mean?" Lin Yue asked quietly.
"Look at him," Chen Hao breathed. "He’s not... he’s not breathing. I’ve been watching him for three bows. He hasn’t moved a muscle. Not even a twitch."
Lin Yue looked closer.
Zhao Ming’s chest was indeed motionless. His gaze was fixed on the coffin with a terrifying, glassy intensity.
"Maybe he’s just in shock," Lin Yue said.
"Or maybe he’s one of them," Chen Hao whispered. "Maybe the replacement doesn’t always happen in the coffin. Maybe some of them just... slide in. How do we know? How do we know any of us are still us?"
The seed was planted.
Lin Yue felt the shift in the air. He looked at He Rong. She was no longer looking at the coffin; she was looking at Xu Ning.
Xu Ning noticed. She stepped back, her expression guarded.
"What is it?" Xu Ning asked.
He Rong didn’t answer immediately. She looked at Xu Ning’s hands. "You’re shaking," He Rong observed.
"I’m terrified!" Xu Ning snapped. "Of course I’m shaking!"
"Or maybe it’s a glitch," He Rong murmured. "A delay in the movement."
"What are you talking about?"
"Just a thought," He Rong said, though her eyes remained cold and calculating.
The fragile trust of the group was fracturing. The suffocating presence of the mourners was acting as a catalyst, turning every small inconsistency into a sign of monstrosity.
The instance is now utilizing psychological erosion, Lin Yue noted. The goal is to isolate the players. A divided group is easier to mark.
Amidst this, Lin Yue’s mind drifted.
He thought of the corridor. He thought of the man who had stood there, watching him with an intensity that felt like a physical touch.
Gu Yanchen.
The Arbiter had appeared multiple times now. Each time, he had been a ghost in the periphery, a cold presence that existed outside the rules of the instance.
But there was a pattern.
Gu Yanchen had never spoken to Li Qiang. He had ignored He Rong’s calculations. He had looked through Chen Hao as if he were made of glass.
He only spoke to Lin Yue.
Why?
Lin Yue analyzed the question with detached precision.
The Arbiter was an enforcer of the System. His purpose was to maintain order and eliminate anomalies. By all logic, Lin Yue—who broke rules, who remained unnervingly calm, who resisted the emotional triggers of the instance—should be the first person Gu Yanchen eliminated.
Instead, he observed.
Observation? Lin Yue wondered. Or something else?
The others knew Gu Yanchen existed—they had seen him—but the interaction was exclusive. It was as if there was a frequency that only Lin Yue could hear, a bridge that only the two of them could cross.
It was abnormal. Highly abnormal.
In a world where abnormality usually led to erasure, this exclusivity was a variable Lin Yue couldn’t yet solve. Was he being groomed? Was he being studied as a specimen? Or was the Arbiter himself a glitch, drawn to the one thing the System couldn’t predict?
He didn’t feel flustered. He didn’t feel a sense of kinship. He simply found the mystery unsettling, like a piece of a puzzle that belonged to a different box.
"Settle down!" Li Qiang’s voice boomed, breaking Lin Yue’s train of thought.
Li Qiang had moved to the center of the group. His face was flushed, a vein pulsing in his temple. He looked like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown, clutching the remnants of his authority like a shield.
"Stop whispering! Stop looking at each other! Look at the coffin! That is the only thing that matters!"
He stepped closer to the group, his presence aggressive and stifling.
"We are going to do the final sequence of the night. The deep bow. It is the most difficult. It requires the most precision. If one person is off by a fraction of a second, the whole ritual is void."
"Li Qiang, we can’t do this right now," Xu Ning said, her voice trembling. "The mourners... they’re too close. I can feel them breathing on my neck."
"They aren’t breathing!" Li Qiang yelled. "They’re copying! So stop giving them something to copy! Be perfect! Be absolute!"
He stepped in front of them, his eyes wide and manic.
"I will demonstrate. Watch me. Do not deviate by a single millimeter."
Li Qiang took a deep breath. He straightened his posture, pulling his shoulders back with a sharp, audible snap of his joints. He placed his hands flat against his thighs.
"Watch the angle of the back," Li Qiang commanded. "Forty-five degrees. No more, no less."
He began the descent. It was a slow, controlled movement. He lowered his torso with a rigid, mechanical precision, his eyes fixed on the floor.
Behind him, the mourners responded.
One second. Two.
Fifty figures bent. The movement was a mirrored image of Li Qiang’s, but with that same, sickening delay. The sound of their robes was a heavy, synchronized thud.
Li Qiang reached the bottom of the bow. He held it for three seconds.
"Now," Li Qiang whispered, his voice strained. "The rise."
He began to straighten up.
As he ascended, he glanced back over his shoulder, his eyes scanning the mourners to ensure they were following his lead. He wanted to see the perfection. He wanted to see the control.
He saw the mourner directly behind him.
The figure was mimicking him perfectly. The angle of the back, the position of the hands, the tilt of the head.
But as Li Qiang reached a full upright position, the mourner didn’t stop.
The figure continued to rise, but its movement didn’t end at the vertical.
The mourner’s right arm, which should have been flat against its thigh, began to move.
Slowly, the arm began to bend backward.
The elbow didn’t fold inward; it snapped outward, moving in a direction that no human joint could possibly accommodate.
Crack.
The sound was loud enough. The sound of a green branch snapping under a heavy boot, or a bone being forced through a layer of muscle.
The players froze.
The mourner’s arm was now bent at a grotesque, ninety-degree angle, facing the wrong direction, the hand dangling uselessly against its own spine.
The rest of the mourner’s body remained perfectly still. Its blurred face remained fixed on Li Qiang.
The silence that followed was absolute.
Then, the mourner’s head tilted. Matching the exact angle of Li Qiang’s confused, horrified expression.
A second later, the mourner’s mouth opened.
It didn’t speak. But from the depths of its throat, a sound emerged.
A wet, distorted echo of Li Qiang’s own voice whispered from a throat that had no vocal cords:
"...Be perfect."
