Chapter 79: Chapter 79: When the Night Calls
The flute did not stop.
It followed them through the gate like something reluctant to be left behind, thin and searching, threading between the narrow stone houses on either side of the path. Lin Yue noted the way it seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, no single direction the ear could commit to, and set the detail aside among the others already accumulating: the Chief’s fear of the sky, the ritual weight of names spoken aloud, the ancient carvings of women who wept without ceasing.
The village unfolded around them in the fading light. Narrow stone paths, uneven and worn smooth by centuries of feet, wound between wooden houses whose eaves sagged with age. Strips of white mourning paper hung beneath every roofline, fluttering faintly despite the windless air, a detail that struck Lin Yue as wrong in the same way the motionless moon had struck him as wrong, movement without a cause.
Faded talismans clung to doors and window frames throughout the village, some barely legible, ink bled into the yellowed paper until only ghost-shapes of characters remained. Lin Yue counted them as they passed, an old habit, and found that no house bore fewer than three.
"They really don’t want anything getting in," Zhou Ke murmured, falling into step beside him, eyes flicking nervously toward the shuttered windows. "Or maybe they don’t want anything getting out."
"Possibly both," Lin Yue said.
Zhou Ke laughed, short and humorless. "You’re not exactly comforting either, you know that?"
"I wasn’t attempting comfort. I was attempting accuracy."
"Yeah, well." Zhou Ke rubbed the back of his neck. "Sometimes I miss the inaccurate kind."
Behind a shuttered window to their left, something shifted, a pale shape withdrawing just as Lin Yue’s gaze passed over it, there and then not. He did not stop walking. He did not turn his head to confirm it. He only noted it, the same way he’d noted the flute, the paper, the talismans, one more fragment in a shape that had not yet finished revealing itself.
They are watching us settle in, he thought. Curious, or cautious. Possibly both.
Bai Wuyin walked several paces behind him, sketchbook clutched to his chest now instead of open across his knees, small shoulders hunched forward, eyes fixed on the ground in front of his own feet. He had not spoken since the gate. He had not looked toward Lin Yue once.
It was, Lin Yue thought, an entirely different performance from the one at the gate. There, he had been the frightened child clinging to something familiar. Here, walking into a village that radiated wrongness from every shuttered window and fluttering paper strip, he had become something smaller still, a child overwhelmed into near silence, exactly the kind of presence that invited protection rather than scrutiny.
He decided the village required more caution than the Game Hall did, Lin Yue observed.
The Rest Courtyard sat near the village’s center, walled in gray stone worn soft at the edges, a single wooden gate serving as its only entrance. Paper talismans lined the inner walls in uneven rows, some fresh and vivid red, most faded nearly to blankness, their characters worn down to suggestion rather than legible script.
"Here," Chief Chen said, gesturing them through with a small, formal bow. "You’ll be safe within these walls until sunrise. I would ask that you not test that safety unnecessarily."
"Define unnecessary," Luo Ming said flatly, arms still crossed, eyes already moving across the courtyard with open suspicion.
"Leaving the courtyard before dawn," Chief Chen said, smile unwavering. "Removing the talismans. Speaking certain names after dark within these walls. Small things. Easily avoided, if one simply follows the rules of hospitality."
"And if we don’t know all the rules yet?" He Jian asked, tone even but pointed.
"Then I would suggest," Chief Chen said, "that you ask before you act, rather than doing it after. The village is patient with questions. It is considerably less patient with mistakes."
He bowed again, shallow and practiced, and withdrew through the courtyard gate without waiting for further questions, robes trailing soundlessly against the stone.
The moment he was gone, Luo Ming exhaled through his nose, sharp and unimpressed. "’Considerably less patient with mistakes.’ Reassuring."
"He’s not wrong to warn us," Xu Ran said quietly, already moving along the courtyard’s inner wall, fingers hovering just above the surface of the nearest talisman without touching it. "Villages like this one don’t survive as long as this one clearly has by being generous with second chances."
Lin Yue moved to join him, studying the talismans with the same unhurried attention he gave to everything.
They were old. Centuries old, at a conservative estimate, the paper gone the color of weak tea, brittle enough at the edges that a careless hand might crumble it entirely. The ink had faded to little more than shadow in most of them, characters barely distinguishable from the natural discoloration of age.
And yet something remained in them. A faint pulse, warmth without heat, pressure without touch, the sensation of standing near something that had once burned brightly and had not finished dying.
"They’re old," he said quietly, "but they aren’t empty."
Xu Ran glanced at him, something sharpening behind his eyes. "You can feel that?"
"Can’t you?"
"Some of us," Xu Ran said, "spend five instances learning to notice the things most players walk straight past." He studied the talisman a moment longer, expression unreadable. "You’re right, though. There’s something left in these. Dying, maybe. But not dead."
"Dying is the part that worries me," Mu Qingge said softly, coming to stand beside them, arms wrapped around herself against a chill that had nothing to do with temperature. "If something’s dying, that usually means it’s running out."
"Running out of what?" Tang Xiaoxiao asked, voice small.
Nobody answered her immediately.
Lin Yue continued his study of the wall in silence, moving slowly along its length, counting talismans, noting the pattern of their placement, evenly spaced, deliberate, a barrier built with purpose rather than superstition scattered at random. Some pulsed faintly stronger than others. A few, he noted with quiet unease, barely pulsed at all, their paper gone gray and thin, closer to parchment than ward.
Whoever built this, he thought, understood exactly what they were protecting against. The question is whether anyone since has understood it well enough to maintain it.
"Well," He Jian said, clapping his hands together once, the same decisive gesture he’d used at the gate. "Safe or not entirely safe, it’s the only shelter we’ve got before sunset. Let’s get settled. Rooms, supplies, whatever passes for both in this place."
The group began to disperse, sorting through the modest compound, low wooden buildings ringing the courtyard’s edge, doors hanging slightly ajar, the smell of dust and old incense drifting from within.
Lin Yue lingered by the wall a moment longer, and felt, rather than saw, Bai Wuyin drift close beside him, small and quiet, eyes still downcast.
"They’re weaker than they look," Bai Wuyin murmured, barely above a whisper, voice utterly unlike the frightened tone he’d used with the others. "Even for talismans this old."
"I noticed," Lin Yue said, matching his volume. "How much weaker?"
"Enough that I wouldn’t trust them completely." Bai Wuyin’s mismatched eyes flicked briefly toward the gate, then away. "Whatever’s supposed to stay outside these walls at night, it’s been testing this barrier for a long time. Long enough to know exactly where it’s thin."
"You can see that? Or sense it?"
"Both," Bai Wuyin said simply, and said nothing further, tucking his hands back around his sketchbook and letting his shoulders curl forward again just as He Jian glanced back toward them.
"You two good over there?" He Jian called, tone gentle in the particular way adults reserved for children.
"Fine," Bai Wuyin said, voice small and uncertain, eyes dropping to the ground. "Just... looking at the walls."
"Don’t wander off on your own, alright? Not here." He Jian offered a reassuring smile before turning back toward the others.
Bai Wuyin’s expression didn’t change, didn’t so much as flicker, and Lin Yue found himself, briefly, almost admiring the precision of it.
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Dinner was served in the courtyard’s central building as the sky continued its slow bleed from purple into deeper red, low wooden tables arranged in uneven rows, villagers moving between them in silence, setting down bowls without meeting anyone’s eyes.
The food was plain—rice, pale and slightly undercooked. Pickled vegetables, the color leached out of them by whatever process had preserved them. A thin, colorless soup that smelled faintly of ginger and little else. Lin Yue ate without complaint, noting flavor and texture with the same detachment he gave everything, and it was several minutes before he noticed the detail that mattered.
Small portions of bright red food sat at the edge of every bowl. Some kind of preserved fruit, dark and glistening, unnaturally vivid against the muted palette of everything else on the table.
No one touched it.
Not the villager who had served them. Not the elderly man eating quietly at the far end of the room. Not the small child who peered briefly through the doorway before being pulled back by an unseen hand.
Lin Yue looked down at his own bowl. The same small portion sat untouched at its edge, red and glistening, conspicuously vibrant.
Interesting, he thought, setting his chopsticks down beside it without comment. Whatever this is, it isn’t decoration. It’s a rule everyone already knows, and no one has bothered explaining to us. Lin Yue said to himself.
"Anyone else notice nobody’s eating the red stuff?" Zhou Ke asked, poking at his own portion with visible suspicion. "Or is it just me?"
"I noticed," Fang Yao said quietly, not looking up from her own bowl.
"Should we ask?" Tang Xiaoxiao ventured.
"We should ask," Xu Ran said, "very carefully. And probably not tonight."
"Why not tonight?" Luo Ming asked, already leaning forward, suspicion sharpening his voice. "Seems like exactly the kind of thing we should be asking about immediately. Along with, why the Chief looks like he’s about to be sick every time someone mentions the moon."
A woman near the head of the table, one of the villagers assigned to oversee their meal, went very still at that, gaze flicking briefly toward Luo Ming before dropping back to the floor.
"You noticed that too," Luo Ming said, satisfaction creeping into his tone. "Interesting."
"Luo Ming," said a new voice, calm and steady, cutting gently through the rising tension. "Maybe let’s not interrogate the people feeding us before we’ve been here three hours."
Lin Yue turned toward the speaker, a young man he barely noticed before, seated near the end of the table, broad-shouldered and easy in his posture despite the surrounding unease. He hadn’t spoken during introductions at the gate, Lin Yue realized, or if he had, it had passed beneath notice in the tension of the moment.
"And you are?" Luo Ming asked, arching a brow.
"Wang Heyan." The man offered an easy, unbothered smile. "Sixth instance. I didn’t say much back at the gate, figured there’d be time." He glanced toward the villager woman, then back to Luo Ming. "I’m just saying, we’ve got a whole night ahead of us in a place that clearly doesn’t want trouble. Maybe we save the interrogations for daylight, when we’re not standing in the one safe room they’ve given us."
"That’s assuming this room is actually safe," Luo Ming said.
"It’s assuming we don’t make it less safe by picking fights before we understand the rules," Wang Heyan said, still mild, still unbothered. "I’ve been in six of these. The instances that go bad fastest are the ones where somebody decides suspicion is more important than survival before they’ve even learned what they’re dealing with."
Luo Ming’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing further, arms crossing tighter across his chest instead.
"He’s got a point," He Jian said quietly, glancing toward Luo Ming with something like appreciation for the interruption. "Ask questions. Just, maybe, not accusations."
"Fine," Luo Ming muttered. He turned his attention back toward the villager woman, tone only slightly softened. "The red fruit. What is it?"
The woman’s eyes flicked toward the doorway, toward some unseen point beyond it, before answering, voice barely above a whisper. "It is not for guests."
"Why not? If it’s not for guests, and the villagers don’t eat it, then for whom is it?"
"It is not for guests," she repeated, and said nothing further, retreating quickly toward the kitchen without waiting to be dismissed.
Luo Ming looked around the table, something almost triumphant in his expression. "See? That’s not an answer. That’s a wall."
"Maybe walls exist for reasons," Mu Qingge said quietly.
"Or maybe," Luo Ming said, "walls exist because someone doesn’t want us asking what’s actually behind them."
Lin Yue said nothing throughout the exchange, attention drifting instead toward Chief Chen, who had entered the room partway through dinner and now stood near the doorway, watching the table with his usual practiced warmth.
His gaze flicked, briefly, toward the untouched red fruit in every bowl.
Something tightened at the corner of his mouth, gone as quickly as it appeared, replaced instantly by the same warm, unbothered smile he wore for everything.
He knows exactly why nobody eats it, Lin Yue thought. And he’s relieved, quietly, that none of us have yet either.
After dinner, as the last of the daylight thinned toward dusk, Lin Yue stepped out from the central building alone, restless with the accumulating fragments that had not yet resolved into anything usable.
An elderly woman sat near the courtyard’s entrance, small and hunched on a low wooden stool, hands folded in her lap. Her eyes, pale and clouded, stared fixedly at some point in the middle distance, unseeing.
She can’t see, Lin Yue noted, and old enough that her presence here, unattended, unremarked upon, suggested either deep trust from the village or complete irrelevance to it.
He approached slowly, deliberately unhurried, the same careful pace he used around anything he hadn’t yet decided was safe.
"Grandma," he said, polite and even. "Are you well out here alone?"
Her head turned toward his voice, though her clouded eyes never quite settled on him. "You’re the one," she murmured, voice soft and papery, "who watches more than he speaks."
"I’ve been told that."
A faint, dry sound escaped her, something between a laugh and a sigh. "Good. This village does not reward the ones who speak too freely." She was quiet a moment, fingers curling slightly tighter in her lap. "Come closer, boy. My ears are better than my eyes, but even they prefer things said softly."
Lin Yue crouched slightly, closing the distance without hesitation. "May I know your name, Grandma?"
"They call me Granny Wu." Her voice dropped further, barely more than breath. "Listen well, my child. The moon is hungry."
Lin Yue went still.
"And the bride," she whispered, "is waiting."
Before he could ask anything, before the words had even finished settling into the shape of a question, her expression closed over entirely, blank and distant, as though the effort of speaking had cost her something she could not easily spare again.
"Grandma," Lin Yue said carefully, "what bride?"
She said nothing. Her lips pressed together, thin and final, and no further sound escaped her, no matter how gently he asked.
He straightened slowly, setting the exchange aside with the rest: the moon is hungry, the bride is waiting, two fragments offered freely and neither one explained, and let his gaze drift toward the courtyard entrance.
Chief Chen stood there, half-shadowed by the gate’s frame, watching.
The moment Lin Yue’s eyes met his, the Chief’s gaze shifted deliberately away from Granny Wu, refusing to acknowledge her presence at all, the same careful non-recognition Lin Yue had seen practiced by people determined not to be caught looking at something they feared.
And Granny Wu, for her part, offered no acknowledgment of the Chief either, her blind eyes fixed resolutely away from the gate, as though the two of them had long ago agreed to share the same space without ever quite sharing it.
Neither trusts the other, Lin Yue thought. Or neither wishes to be associated with whatever the other represents.
He kept the observation carefully alongside everything else and said nothing, moving instead back toward the courtyard’s inner wall, where the talismans waited, patient and thinning, for a final inspection before nightfall.
The light had gone the color of old blood by the time Lin Yue completed his observation, a more careful pass along the courtyard wall, tracing the pattern of talismans with unhurried precision.
They were arranged deliberately, he confirmed, not randomly scattered but placed according to some design, evenly spaced, symbols repeating in a sequence he could almost, not quite, resolve into meaning. Rows of characters half-erased by age, some talismans brighter than others where recent hands had clearly reinforced them, patched paper layered over older paper in careful, practiced repair.
And then, near the courtyard’s northeastern corner, a gap.
Not damaged paper. Not faded ink. An empty space where a talisman should have been, the wall behind it bare stone, undisturbed, as though it had simply never been placed at all, or had been removed with enough care to leave no trace of its absence beyond the absence itself.
Lin Yue crouched before the gap, studying the surrounding pattern.
The talismans on either side leaned subtly inward, he noted, as though oriented toward whatever had once occupied the missing space, a design built around a center that was no longer there.
Whatever this pattern is meant to do, he thought, it was built assuming every piece stayed in place. One gone changes everything downstream of it.
"Found something?"
He looked up. Bai Wuyin had drifted close again, sketchbook tucked beneath one arm, voice dropped once more into its true register now that the courtyard had emptied of watching eyes.
"A missing talisman," Lin Yue said quietly. "Right here."
Bai Wuyin crouched beside him, studying the gap with narrowed, calculating eyes entirely unlike the wide, frightened ones he wore for the others. "That’s not decay. Someone took that."
"Recently?"
"Recently enough that the stone underneath hasn’t weathered to match the rest of the wall." Bai Wuyin traced a finger just above the bare patch, careful not to touch it. "Someone wanted a hole here. Specifically here."
"Or something wanted it made for them," Lin Yue said.
Bai Wuyin’s mismatched eyes flicked toward him, something unreadable passing behind them. "You think it let itself in."
"I think," Lin Yue said, "that a barrier this old and this deliberately maintained doesn’t lose a single piece by accident. Not in the one place clearly meant to hold the whole pattern together."
Neither of them said anything further, the weight of the observation settling quietly between them, and Lin Yue rose to his feet as the last color drained entirely from the sky above the courtyard walls.
It happened all at once.
One moment, the sky held its slow, bruised gradient, purple into red, familiar now after hours of watching. The next, the color simply broke, draining from the horizon like water through a cracked vessel, darkness pouring in from every direction simultaneously rather than spreading gradually from the west as sunset should.
The temperature dropped with it, sharp and sudden, cold enough that Tang Xiaoxiao gasped audibly, wrapping her arms tighter around herself.
"That’s not normal," Zhou Ke said, voice tight. "That is not how sunset is supposed to look."
"Nothing here is supposed to look like anything," Luo Ming muttered, though even his usual cynicism had gone quiet and watchful.
The ordinary sounds of the village, the faint creak of wood settling, the distant murmur of villagers moving behind shuttered windows, vanished entirely, replaced within seconds by something else.
A low, mournful chanting drifted from somewhere beyond the courtyard walls, wordless, ancient, rising and falling in a rhythm that pulled uncomfortably at something instinctive. Somewhere further still, the sound of weeping, thin and distant, impossible to place. A slow, rhythmic knocking, wood against wood, patient and unhurried, as though counting something out.
"Everyone inside the walls," He Jian said, voice tight with authority. "Now."
The group moved quickly, pulling closer together within the courtyard’s protected center, and Lin Yue found himself standing near the bronze mirror mounted against the inner wall of the central building, old and slightly warped, its surface catching the last dying light in strange, fractured reflections.
Something moved within it.
He turned his head slowly.
Gu Yanchen stood inside the reflection, still and silent, robes dark against the mirror’s tarnished surface, expression carved from the same detached stillness Lin Yue remembered from every prior encounter. He was not looking at the room. He was not looking at the courtyard, or the villagers, or the mournful sounds rising beyond the walls.
He was looking directly at Lin Yue.
The mark beneath Lin Yue’s skin warmed, faint and steady, an acknowledgment offered without words.
You’re here again, Lin Yue thought, holding the reflection’s gaze without turning fully toward it, without drawing attention from anyone else in the room. Even here. Even now.
Neither of them moved. Neither of them spoke. Whatever passed between them existed entirely in that fixed, unreadable stare, until the mirror’s surface rippled once, subtle as a held breath released, and returned to ordinary reflection, empty of everything but Lin Yue’s own face and the dim, guttering lamplight of the room behind him.
No one else had noticed. Bai Wuyin, seated nearby with his sketchbook once more open across his knees, gave no outward sign, though his pencil had gone still mid-stroke, just for a moment, before resuming.
He felt it too, Lin Yue thought. Of course he did.
The courtyard settled into a silence unlike anything they’d experienced since arriving, absolute and watchful, every sound beyond the walls, the chanting, the weeping, the patient wooden knocking, folding away into nothing all at once, as though something out there had simply stopped to listen in return.
Nobody spoke. Nobody moved.
Tang Xiaoxiao sat pressed close against Mu Qingge’s side, knees drawn up, eyes fixed on the courtyard gate.
And then, from somewhere beyond it, a voice.
Soft. Gentle. Achingly warm, the kind of voice one might use to soothe a frightened child back to sleep after a nightmare.
"Tang Xiaoxiao."
The girl’s breath caught audibly.
Nobody outside the gate could be seen. No shadow moved against the faint lamplight spilling from the courtyard’s edges. No footstep sounded against the stone path beyond the walls.
Silence stretched, thin and unbearable.
Then, again, closer now, or perhaps only clearer, the same soft, affectionate warmth threading through every syllable.
"Tang Xiaoxiao."
"Don’t," Xu Ran said quietly, voice low and urgent, eyes fixed straight ahead. "Don’t answer it. Whatever you do. No matter what, don’t acknowledge it."
Tang Xiaoxiao’s hands had begun to tremble, knuckles white where they gripped the fabric of her own sleeves, eyes wide and fixed on the gate as though pulled there against her will.
"I won’t," she whispered, though the words came out thin, uncertain, less a statement than a plea directed at herself. "I won’t, I won’t—"
The voice came a third time.
"Tang Xiaoxiao."
And this time, it did not sound as though it came from beyond the gate at all.
It sounded as though it stood, patient and gentle, directly behind her.
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