Chapter 80: Chapter 80: The First Taboo
Tang Xiaoxiao’s foot had already left the ground.
Lin Yue saw it happen in the strange, slowed clarity that fear sometimes lent to a moment—one heartbeat she was frozen against Mu Qingge’s side, and the next her body had simply decided, without her permission, to answer.
He crossed the distance without thinking about it.
His hand closed around her wrist.
Firm. Cold. Absolute.
"Let go," Tang Xiaoxiao said, and her voice broke apart even as she said it, thin and pleading, nothing like the voice she’d used all evening. "Please, let go, that’s... that’s my mom, that’s her voice, I know her voice, let me—"
"It isn’t," Lin Yue said.
"You don’t know that!" Her free hand clawed weakly at his fingers, without real strength behind it, the desperate motion of someone who wanted to be stopped even as she fought to be released. "You don’t know what she sounds like, you never met her, how would you know—"
"I don’t," Lin Yue agreed, voice level. "But I know what’s outside that gate isn’t your mother. Those are different claims. Only one of them matters right now."
"Xiaoxiao." The voice came again, softer this time, achingly close, wrapped in a tenderness that made Zhou Ke visibly flinch a step backward. "Sweetheart. Why are you standing so far away?"
"Mom—" Tang Xiaoxiao’s knees buckled, and only Lin Yue’s grip kept her upright, kept her from collapsing entirely toward the sound. Tears streamed freely down her face now, unashamed, unstoppable. "Mom, I’m here, I’m right here—"
"Xiaoxiao, don’t answer it!" Xu Ran’s voice cut through, urgent, low. "Whatever you do—"
"That’s easy for you to say!" she screamed back at him, raw and furious in the particular way only grief could make someone furious. "It’s not calling your name!"
He Jian moved to help restrain her, and Luo Ming stood frozen a few paces off, arms still crossed but his face gone pale in the guttering lamplight, eyes fixed on the gate as though it might swallow them all at any second.
"Everyone stay where you are," Lin Yue said, not raising his voice, though something in the flatness of it carried anyway, cutting through the rising panic like a blade through fog. "Nobody moves toward the gate. Nobody answers anything. That includes you, Tang Xiaoxiao."
"You don’t understand," she sobbed. "You don’t have anyone left to lose, so you don’t understand—"
The words landed exactly where they were meant to land, deliberately or not, and for the briefest instant something in Lin Yue’s chest went very still, very quiet, an old wound touched by an unrelated hand.
He set it aside.
There would be time to examine that later. There was no time now.
"You’re right," he said instead, calm and even. "I don’t. Which is precisely why I can see this clearly, and you can’t. Cover your ears."
"What?"
"Cover your ears," he repeated, releasing her wrist only long enough to guide both her hands upward himself, pressing them firmly against the sides of her head. "Now. And keep them there."
Mu Qingge crouched down beside her, one arm wrapping protectively around her shoulders, murmuring something too low for the others to catch, a steady stream of comfort meant to anchor her back into her own body. Tang Xiaoxiao’s breath came in ragged, hitching gasps, hands trembling against her ears, eyes squeezed shut.
"Someone explain what the hell is happening," Luo Ming said, voice tight, "before I start assuming the worst."
"The voice has called her name three times," Lin Yue said, turning to address the group at large, his tone the same clinical calm he might have used to describe weather. "That number matters. I don’t think it’s a coincidence."
"Three-call taboo," Xu Ran said quietly, and something dark passed behind his eyes. "I’ve heard variations of it before. Never survived close enough to confirm the mechanics."
"Then confirm what you can," Lin Yue said.
Xu Ran exhaled slowly. "In the old stories, if something calls your name three times at night and you answer, you’ve accepted an invitation. Doesn’t matter what it looks like when it comes to collect you." His gaze flicked toward the gate, wary. "The catch is always the same. It never sounds like a stranger. It sounds like whoever you’d answer without thinking."
"So it’s not actually her mother," Zhou Ke said, voice unsteady despite the relief clearly trying to surface in it. "It’s just... using her voice."
"Using implies effort," Lin Yue said. "I don’t think it’s imitating anything. I think it’s reaching directly into whatever she needs to hear, and producing that."
"That’s worse," Luo Ming muttered.
"It’s more accurate," Lin Yue said. "Which is worse, yes."
He crouched slightly in front of Tang Xiaoxiao, meeting her wet, unfocused eyes despite the hands still clamped over her ears. "Listen to me. Whatever you’re hearing right now isn’t real. I need you to understand that with your mind, even if your body doesn’t believe it yet. Can you do that?"
"It sounds so real," she whispered, voice cracking. "It sounds exactly like her, Lin Yue, exactly, down to the way she says my name, nobody could fake that, nobody—"
"Nobody’s faking it," Lin Yue said. "That’s the point. It isn’t a performance. It’s something that already knows precisely what you need, and is offering it to you freely. The only thing standing between you and the gate right now is whether you let yourself believe convenience over reality."
"That’s not fair," she said, and something in her voice cracked open further, brittle and raw. "You’re asking me to just... not believe my own mother, when she’s right there—"
"I’m asking you to survive the next ten minutes," Lin Yue said, without softening. "Grieve after. Not before."
Something in the bluntness of it seemed to reach her more than any gentler approach might have, and her breathing hitched once, twice, before steadying, marginally, into something closer to control.
"Keep your ears covered," Lin Yue said, straightening. "Keep your eyes on the ground, if that helps. Don’t look at the gate."
She nodded, jerky and small, and said nothing further, curling in against Mu Qingge’s side with her hands still pressed hard over her ears.
The voice did not call again immediately.
Instead, after a long, unbearable stretch of silence, it shifted.
"Zhou Ke."
Zhou Ke went rigid.
"That’s—" His voice came out strangled. "That’s not possible. That’s my... that sounds like my sister, that’s not—"
"Don’t listen to it," Xu Ran said sharply. "Whatever it says next, don’t listen."
"Zhou Ke," the voice said again, warmer now, achingly familiar in whatever way it had chosen to be familiar to him specifically. "Why haven’t you come to see me? It’s been so long."
Zhou Ke’s hands flew up to cover his own ears without needing to be told, face gone bloodless, breath coming in short, panicked pulls.
"It’s not just her," Lin Yue said quietly, more to himself than to anyone, though Xu Ran caught it anyway.
"No," Xu Ran said grimly. "It’s not."
"Luo Ming."
Luo Ming’s jaw tightened, and to his credit, he didn’t flinch, though his knuckles had gone white where his arms remained crossed over his chest.
"I’m not answering," he said, more to himself than to the voice. "Whatever that is calling, I’m not answering it."
"It’s testing everyone," He Jian said, voice tight with the effort of maintaining composure. "One at a time. Working down the group."
"Then everyone covers their ears," Lin Yue said. "Now, before it reaches you specifically. Waiting until you hear something you can’t ignore is already too late."
The group moved with ragged, hurried compliance, hands rising to ears all around the courtyard, a silence falling over them that was somehow more oppressive than the voice itself had been, everyone left alone with only their own thundering heartbeat and the terrible awareness that the voice was still out there, patient, still choosing.
Only Lin Yue kept his hands at his sides.
He needed to hear it. Needed to understand its rhythm, its pattern, the shape of what it was doing, and covering his ears would have cost him exactly the information he required most.
The voice did not call his name.
Not once, not across the entire agonizing stretch of time it spent working through the others, testing, probing, withdrawing when a name proved unresponsive and moving to the next.
Interesting, he thought, noting the omission away among the fragments already accumulating. Either it can’t find anything in me worth using as a voice. Or it’s already decided I’m not worth the attempt.
Neither possibility was comforting. Both were useful.
A flicker of light caught the edge of his vision.
[WARNING!]
[Player Lin Yue has interfered with a scripted Event.]
[Calculating penalty...]
He went very still, reading the message twice before it fully settled.
So the System considers this scripted. Not incidental. Not environmental. Deliberate, and monitored closely enough to flag interference within seconds.
The message flickered, text stuttering at its edges as though struggling to hold its own shape.
[Calculating penalty...]
[Calculating pena—]
It vanished.
No penalty followed. No further warning replaced it. The space where the notification had hung simply closed over, as though it had never opened at all, and Lin Yue found himself staring at empty air, turning the absence over with the same careful attention he gave everything.
That shouldn’t happen, he thought. A calculation doesn’t simply stop. It resolves, or it fails outright. It doesn’t hang mid-process and vanish without consequence.
Somewhere, far beyond the reach of his understanding, something had reached into that calculation and closed it before it could finish.
He did not need proof to know what. He only needed to feel the faint, familiar warmth stirring beneath his skin, steady and quiet, an acknowledgment offered the same way it always was—without explanation, without demand.
You again, he thought, neither surprised nor entirely at ease with the thought. Watching closely enough to catch that before it resolved. Close enough to stop it.
He wondered, distantly, what expression accompanied that intervention. Whether it was made with the same detached indifference Gu Yanchen wore for everything else, or whether—
He set the thought aside before it could finish forming. There would be time for that later, too.
The voice fell silent.
All at once, without warning, the way it had arrived—simply gone, leaving behind a silence so total it felt like its own kind of pressure, pressing down against the courtyard from every direction.
"Is it over?" Tang Xiaoxiao’s voice came muffled through her still-covered ears, small and uncertain.
"I don’t know," Lin Yue said honestly. "But it’s stopped for now. You can lower your hands."
One by one, hands came down, faces pale and drawn in the dim lamplight, everyone glancing toward everyone else as though needing confirmation that the ordeal had genuinely passed.
"That was—" Zhou Ke’s voice shook badly. "That was my sister. My actual sister. She died two years ago, and that was her voice, exactly; I’d know it anywhere, how does something even—"
"It doesn’t matter how," Xu Ran said, low and tired. "It matters that you didn’t answer."
"Small comfort," Luo Ming muttered, though his own hands were still trembling slightly where he lowered them.
Fang Yao, who had said almost nothing throughout the entire ordeal, stood near the edge of the group with her arms wrapped around herself, expression unreadable in the shifting lamplight. Lin Yue noted the way her eyes had not left the gate even once, not from fear, he thought, but from something closer to recognition.
She heard something like this before, he thought. She isn’t surprised. She’s remembering.
He kept the observation quietly beside the rest.
From somewhere beyond the courtyard wall, a new sound rose.
A single, cracked voice, older, hoarse with age, answering something none of the players could hear.
"I’m coming," the voice said, thick with tears and something that sounded almost like relief. "I’m coming, just wait, I’m coming—"
"That’s not one of us," He Jian said sharply, moving toward the wall. "That’s a villager."
Through a gap in the shuttered window across the narrow street, Lin Yue caught a glimpse of movement—an elderly man, thin and stooped, stumbling toward his own front door with tears streaming down his weathered face, hands trembling as he fumbled with the latch.
"Someone stop him," Mu Qingge said, horrified.
"We can’t leave the courtyard," Xu Ran said, voice tight. "Chief Chen was clear. Whatever happens out there, we don’t go past these walls after dark."
The old man’s door swung open.
He staggered through it, out into the street, arms already outstretched toward something none of them could see, his voice breaking apart into sobbing, joyful fragments of a name none of the players recognized.
The darkness beyond him rippled.
It was the only word Lin Yue’s mind could produce for what happened next—not a shape emerging, not a figure stepping forward, but the darkness itself folding inward around the old man’s silhouette, swallowing him whole in a single motion too fast and too silent to properly register.
Every window along the street slammed shut in the same instant, shutters crashing closed with a sound like gunfire in the sudden quiet.
The old man was simply gone.
No cry. No struggle. No sound at all beyond the fading echo of his own joyful, tearful greeting, still hanging absurdly in the air after the thing it had been directed toward had already taken him.
Nobody in the courtyard spoke.
"He answered," Xu Ran said finally, voice hollow. "Whatever was calling him. He answered, and it took him instantly. No fight. No warning. Just... gone."
"Why didn’t anyone stop him?" Tang Xiaoxiao whispered, horrified. "Why didn’t the other villagers—"
"They know the rule," Lin Yue said quietly. "Better than we do. That’s why every window closed the moment it happened. They weren’t abandoning him. They were protecting themselves from whatever came to collect him."
"That’s monstrous," Tang Xiaoxiao said.
"That’s survival," Lin Yue said. "In a place where the correct response to someone else’s death is to close your eyes quickly enough not to share it."
The silence that followed felt different from the silence before—heavier, sadder, edged with the particular horror of having watched something happen and understood, immediately, completely, that intervention had never been an option.
It was Bai Wuyin’s small, trembling voice that broke it.
"Lin Yue gege," he said, tugging gently at Lin Yue’s sleeve, voice pitched exactly the way a frightened twelve-year-old’s voice ought to sound. "I don’t like this. Can we go somewhere else? Please?"
Gege? It’s the first time Bai Wuyin called him gege; even in the Game Hall, or in their room, Bai Wuyin never called him gege.
Lin Yue looked down at him. Wide eyes, genuinely wet at the edges, small shoulders hunched forward, sketchbook clutched protectively against his narrow chest. A performance so complete that if Lin Yue hadn’t already learned to look past it, he might have believed it entirely himself.
"There’s nowhere else to go," Lin Yue said gently, playing his part in turn. "We’re safest here."
"But the voice," Bai Wuyin whimpered, glancing anxiously toward the gate. "What if it comes back? What if it calls you next?"
"It won’t," Lin Yue said, with a certainty he didn’t fully feel. "Stay close to me."
Bai Wuyin nodded, small and grateful, and pressed himself against Lin Yue’s side, precisely the posture of a child seeking safety in the nearest available adult.
Nobody looked twice at them. Attention had already scattered outward, toward the wall, the gate, the fading horror of what had just happened beyond it, and in the gap that scattered attention created, Bai Wuyin’s voice dropped, instantly, into its true register.
"It never crossed the boundary," he murmured, barely audible even to Lin Yue standing directly beside him. "The voice. It stayed exactly at the edge of the talismans the entire time. Testing the line, not breaking it."
"You’re certain?"
"I watched the whole time," Bai Wuyin said. "Every time someone got close to answering, the talismans nearest them dimmed. Not broke. Like something was leaning its weight against them and waiting to see if they’d give."
Lin Yue’s gaze flicked toward the wall, toward the pattern of talismans he’d studied earlier, toward the gap in the northeastern corner he’d already marked as significant.
"And the gap?"
"Brightest talisman on either side of it dimmed the most," Bai Wuyin said. "Whatever’s testing this barrier already knows exactly where it’s thinnest. It didn’t waste time testing anywhere else."
"It learned the wall," Lin Yue said quietly.
"It had fifty years to learn it," Bai Wuyin said. "Maybe longer."
"Lin Yue." He heard He Jian calling him from behind.
Bai Wuyin’s expression dissolved instantly back into wide-eyed fear, shoulders curling forward, the transition so smooth it might have been a single continuous motion rather than two entirely different children occupying the same small frame.
He Jian approached, expression drawn with exhaustion. "You two doing alright over here?"
"We’re fine," Lin Yue said.
"He’s scared," He Jian said, glancing sympathetically at Bai Wuyin, who nodded miserably without lifting his eyes. "Understandable, given everything. Keep an eye on him."
"I will," Lin Yue said.
He Jian moved off again, and the moment his attention shifted elsewhere, Bai Wuyin’s true expression resurfaced, calm and sharp, entirely unbothered.
"There’s something else," he said quietly. "Near the fence. Something’s been watching us since before the voice even started."
"Watching how?"
"Small," Bai Wuyin said. "Low to the ground. I only caught it twice, both times right at the edge of the lamplight, gone before I could look directly at it."
Lin Yue’s gaze swept the courtyard’s perimeter, methodical, unhurried.
Near the fence separating the courtyard from the narrow street beyond, a small shape crouched in the shadows just past the edge of the lamplight—barefoot, pale, utterly still, watching the courtyard with an expression that held no fear, no curiosity, nothing at all beyond blank, patient attention.
A child. No older than seven or eight, dressed in old, faded mourning clothes, the white fabric gone gray with age and dirt.
Lin Yue did not react outwardly, though something in his chest tightened at the wrongness of it—the absolute stillness, the complete absence of breath fogging in the cold night air, the eyes that did not blink even once across the several seconds he studied them.
"Bai Wuyin," he said quietly. "Look at the fence."
Bai Wuyin’s gaze drifted over, unhurried, and something flickered behind his mismatched eyes—recognition, though not surprise.
"That’s not one of the villagers’ children," he murmured.
"No," Lin Yue agreed. "I don’t think it is."
The child tilted its head, slow and deliberate, the motion carrying none of the natural looseness a living child’s neck would allow, more like something operating a body it had only recently learned to wear.
Then, without any visible transition, it moved.
It did not walk or run. Simply appeared closer, several feet nearer the fence’s gate than it had been an instant before, close enough now that Lin Yue could make out small, delicate hands holding something folded and white.
It knelt, unhurried, and placed the object carefully on the ground just outside the courtyard gate.
Then it looked up.
Directly at Lin Yue.
For a single, suspended moment, its blank expression flickered into something almost like a smile—small, close-lipped, unreadable—before it was simply gone, vanished the way smoke vanishes, without sound or trace.
No footprints marked the dirt where it had knelt.
"Did you see that?" Zhou Ke’s voice came, shaky, from somewhere behind them. He’d caught the movement too, apparently, eyes wide and fixed on the empty space beyond the fence. "Tell me I’m not the only one who saw that."
"You’re not," Xu Ran said grimly, already moving toward the gate.
"Don’t," Lin Yue said, quiet but firm. "Not tonight. Whatever it left, it’ll still be there at sunrise."
"And if it’s dangerous?" Xu Ran asked.
"Then it’s dangerous whether we look at it now or in the morning," Lin Yue said. "The difference is whether we look at it inside the safety of these walls, or standing just outside them in the dark."
Xu Ran considered that, then nodded once, stepping back from the gate.
They waited.
At the first pale hint of dawn breaking over the courtyard walls, Lin Yue crossed to the gate himself, crouching before the small white shape left just beyond it.
A paper crane, folded with careful, precise creases, small enough to fit easily in his palm.
He picked it up.
Bai Wuyin appeared silently at his shoulder, all trace of the frightened performance gone now that the sun had begun its slow climb, expression sharp and calculating once more.
"Open it," Bai Wuyin said.
Lin Yue unfolded the crane with deliberate care, smoothing the creased paper flat between his fingers.
Characters, small and neatly brushed, covered the inside surface—old-fashioned script, slightly archaic in its phrasing, the kind of writing meant to be puzzled over rather than simply read.
Beneath the roof no rain can find,a bride still waits with open eyes.Follow the moon that chose to fall,where silver sinks and shadows crawl.Ask the water what it knows;it answers all, yet never boasts.It cannot wander, cannot roam—for every secret calls it home.
Lin Yue read it twice, then a third time, turning the words over with the same unhurried attention he gave everything, searching for the shape hidden beneath the language.
"’Follow the moon that chose to fall, where silver sinks and shadows crawl.’" Bai Wuyin murmured, reading over his shoulder. "That’s not the sky it’s talking about."
"No," Lin Yue said slowly. "I don’t think it is."
"There’s a well in this village," Bai Wuyin said. "The Chief mentioned it near the edge of the forest, when he was listing places we shouldn’t wander alone. He called it the Moon Well."
"A water in the well reflects what’s in the sky," Lin Yue said, mostly to himself, the shape of the riddle beginning to resolve, fragment by fragment, into something almost legible. "Water instead of sky. The moon wouldn’t rise there. It would only ever be reflected, and drowned, the moment it touched the surface."
"’Ask the water what it knows,’" Bai Wuyin repeated quietly. "It answers all, yet never boasts."
Neither of them spoke for a moment, the weight of the riddle settling between them alongside everything else that remained unresolved—the bride, the missing talisman, the gap in the wall built to hold something specific, and now, apparently, a well that remembered things it had nowhere else to keep.
"We should tell the others," Lin Yue said finally.
"Tell them there’s a riddle," Bai Wuyin said. "Not that a ghost child handed it to you personally while pretending to be a normal, terrified twelve-year-old standing beside you the entire time."
"Obviously," Lin Yue said.
They did not have long to discuss it further.
The first note of a drum sounded, low and distant, from somewhere deep within the village.
Then another, closer.
A shrill, wavering cry followed it—a suona, thin and mournful, its melody twisting through the narrow streets in a way that made the hair along Lin Yue’s arms rise despite himself. Wooden clappers joined next, sharp and rhythmic, a slow, deliberate beat that felt less like music and more like a countdown given voice.
"That’s not the flute from before," Zhou Ke said, voice tight with fresh alarm, the entire group already turning toward the sound.
"No," Xu Ran said grimly. "That’s a funeral procession."
Chanting rose beneath the instruments, ancient and wordless, dozens of voices layered together in a rhythm too perfectly synchronized to be human.
The players moved instinctively toward the courtyard’s inner wall, putting distance between themselves and the gate, and Lin Yue watched as, at the far end of the narrow street beyond the fence, shapes began to emerge from the pre-dawn gloom.
Paper effigies. Dozens of them, life-sized, robed in funeral white, faceless where features should have been, only smooth, blank paper stretched across the space where eyes and mouths belonged.
They were not carried.
They walked.
Each step landed in perfect, unnerving unison, matched precisely to the wooden clappers’ rhythm, arms swinging with a mechanical looseness that mimicked human movement without ever quite achieving it.
"That’s not possible," Tang Xiaoxiao whispered, her earlier breakdown giving way now to a fresh, quieter horror. "Paper doesn’t walk."
"It does here," Lin Yue said quietly.
The procession advanced down the narrow street with unhurried, patient certainty, drawing closer to the courtyard with every synchronized step, the funeral music swelling around them like a tide rising toward some inevitable shore.
Nobody in the courtyard moved. Nobody spoke.
The lead effigy reached the courtyard gate.
And stopped.
Its blank, faceless head tilted, slow and deliberate, the same unnatural motion Little Qiao’s had carried moments before, and turned—inch by inch, impossibly smooth—directly toward the players gathered just beyond the wall.
The funeral music cut off.
All at once.
Absolute silence swallowed the courtyard, the street, the entire waking village, as the faceless paper figure stood motionless before the gate, its blank head fixed unerringly on Lin Yue and the players behind him, and waited.
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