“What does that mean? What is this Haunted Palace?” Wang Tanzhi asked.
“Your next question is going to be, can you eat it, right?” Feng Bujue asked.
“I’ve already passed the age where people will find me cute for asking question like that… Plus, I’m being very serious, okay?” Wang Tanzhi argued.
“Well, take a look for yourself.” Feng Bujue stood up, allowing Xiao Tan and Brother Long to see what he had been inspecting earlier. When the two leaned closer, they discovered handwriting on the wall. It seemed to be carved with some kind of knife, and the words were all in English, but the players could open their menu to see the translation. It seemed to be an English couplet that read:
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace,
Radiant palace reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion,
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion,
Over fabric half so fair!
“What is the meaning of this?” Wang Tanzhi was befuddled by the poem.
“This is probably an article called The Haunted Palace, and there are six stanzas in total?” Long Aomin made a guess. Both believed that… since Feng Bujue was with them, they could just ask him after all; the man seemed to know everything. However, when they turned around, they discovered that the man had gone missing.
“Brother Jue?” Wang Tanzhi looked around and took one step back to look up the stairs to the second floor. “Where is he? He slipped away when we weren’t looking?”
Long Aomin looked around, and he could not see the man either. In the end, he could only shrug and sigh. “He mentioned the benefit of splitting up earlier, so he must have slunk away when we were studying this poem.”
“Then, let us go and look for some clues as well,” Wang Tanzhi said. “After all, Brother Jue did say that we will meet up here again after the main quest is updated.”
Long Aomin nodded before starting to explore the first floor separately. They opened all the doors that could be opened, paying attention to clues or other stanzas of The Haunted Palace.
…
Inside the complicated corridor of the first floor, two female players moved forward cautiously. From the looks of it, they had already run into things like traps. Passing Rain had a glinting sword in her hands. Even though the item was only of normal quality, she managed to use this simple weapon to earn the title Heartless Decapitator; this went to show how good she was.
Laughing Soul did not arm herself. Her conclusion was similar to Feng Bujue’s. If this scenario featured mostly ghosts and traps, so there was no reason to use her guns.
“Hmm?” Laughing Soul, who walked at the back, suddenly stopped and said after a few seconds, “Huh… Seems like they’ve triggered a side quest.”
Passing Rain looked at the quest details and asked, “Should we cooperate to find this Haunted Palace then?”
“Hmm… There’s no need for us to specifically do that,” Laughing Soul answered after thinking about it. “For now, we have no idea what that is, and furthermore, haven’t we been looking for clues all this time?”
“Okay, then. Let’s continue,” Passing Rain said before resuming their exploration.
…
On the second floor, Invincible Champion was standing inside a very large room. Similar to the living room, the windows in this room were long and narrow, and they were placed high up on the wall, a distance away from the dark rubber tree wooden floor. A reddish glow filtered through the window, and it landed on the more conspicuous things in the room, but the question was, on such a dark night, what could be giving off this red glow outside the window?
Invincible Champion had trouble peering into the further corners of the room or the carved paneling on the edges of the walls even with his good eyesight. Of course, these details mattered not to the man; after all, what was the point even if he had a good look? The only information that he needed was whether or not there were monsters hiding in the room.
Flowing curtains draped on the walls and the furniture had seen better days. They were old and decrepit, looking exceptionally uncomfortable. The books and musical instruments that littered the ground did not help to improve the liveliness of the room. A scent of melancholy hung in the air, and the chilly atmosphere seemed to seep into every corner.
After hearing the system audio, Invincible Champion glanced at the menu. His first thought was that the two female players had found something in the house and thus triggered the side quest. He did not even consider that it could have been the three plebs who were behind this.
Even though he was not good at puzzle-solving, Invincible Champion was a professional gamer. He might be lacking in analytical skills, but it could be made up through gaming experience. He roughly rummaged through the room to look for equipment or consumables, but the only things that appeared barely useful were a wooden guitar and a violin with broken strings. His bare hands were more effective than those fragile wooden objects. His title, The Reckless Boxer, provided the passive effect of improving the damage of his punches.
Giving up on the equipment, Invincible Champion started to look for quest items. He had no idea what The Haunted Palace was and had no interest in reading through the books that littered the ground. He walked directly toward the object that looked like a clue the most—an envelope on the table.
The other readable items in the room were either on the ground or piled in the corner; the only exception was this enveloped, which was placed under an inkwell.
Taking up the inkwell, Invincible Champion noticed that some ink had leaked out of the bottle, staining the envelope. But the stain was dry. He picked up the envelope and blew off the layer of dust before opening it and retrieving the letter inside.
The letter was incomplete because many places were blotted out by the leaked ink, and the other places had gone blurry from time. The beginning of the letter and the writer’s signature were both unreadable, but from the content, he speculated that the letter was written by the owner of the house to his friend.
The writer said that he suffered from a serious illness due to some kind of curse, and he was tormented by the illusions. He desperately wished to see his best friend, his only friend. He wished that this friend could come visit him, and perhaps this might improve his condition.
There were indeed signs of mental instability in the words, but most of the content was incomprehensible due to the writer’s shaking hands and inscrutable sentence structure.
Even though Invincible Champion was none the wiser after reading the letter, he carried the letter with him. He scanned the room one last time before turning to leave.
…
Inside a darkened stone tunnel, a flashlight suddenly came on to shower its light on the short path before the man. Feng Bujue looked at his surroundings and started to mumble, “There are serious issues with this house… What is this? Castlevania? There is spatial incongruity and now there’s even hidden passageway.”
A few minutes ago, it had not been his intention to slither away from Xiao Tan and Brother Long. He had merely walked to the other side of the living room because he wanted to take a closer look at the painting on the wall…