Lakeside Ghost Story 7

Late at night, the vast shore of Golden Lake was utterly silent. The drowned revenants seemed deeply afraid of the man with the crocodile head, and one by one, they slipped back beneath the lake.

For the moment, the cabin was safe.

Zhuo Yu dragged the still-living Fang Hao into a cupboard. It was protection of a sort, and out of sight, out of mind. He had no intention of killing anyone in this horror studio, and saw no point in it. Deliberately ending someone's life was worlds apart from self-defense or fighting back.

Especially when the other man was no longer capable of resisting.

Zhuo Yu had no desire to be so crude. Nor did killing the helpless offer him any pleasure.

More than any of that, he wanted to know what had happened at Golden Lake. Thinking back to the crocodile-head mask, he suddenly found it familiar.

Crocodiles...

Right. Seven-Day Tales had a story about crocodiles.

Zhuo Yu carefully opened the old book with its curled edges. This time, he read it closely.

This story began two thousand years ago.

One blistering summer, all things withered and the earth split open. The Springwell tribe suffered through a drought, wandering for a very, very long time before finding a spring in the mountains. They settled there temporarily and drank their fill.

More than ten days passed. Before long, they discovered that the place seemed to hold a mysterious power. Wounds did not become infected, and sick livestock recovered. Greedy, the chieftain decided it was a treasure land. He began a great construction project, intending to turn it into tribal territory and live forever in that paradise-like world.

But they felled trees, fouled the water, and disturbed the god of that paradise. The god had only just been born and was still weak. Timidly, It warned the chieftain to leave. The chieftain took It for a spy from another tribe and captured It alive, binding It hand and foot.

Thus, on the first night of the seven days of suffering, the chieftain cut off the newborn god's head.

What he did not expect was that, the next morning, the god sat intact inside the cage. There was not even a wound on Its neck. The chieftain was astonished, then furious. He had been a warrior. There was nothing he could not kill.

The chieftain had to supervise the work by day and was extremely busy, so he could only execute the god at night.

On the second night of the seven days of suffering, the god was fed to the crocodiles in the swamp.

Being eaten by crocodiles may have been the cruelest death imaginable at the time. As the god died over and over in their rolling maws, Its body was torn apart completely. Just as the chieftain was congratulating himself on his cleverness, that unkillable thing appeared before him again, whole as ever.

This utterly enraged the warlike and brutal chieftain.

On the third night, as promised, came the fire. The god was tied to a stake, Its smooth skin blackening and shriveling inch by inch in the flames. Yet It still did not die.

On the fourth night, the chieftain gathered every member of the tribe and declared that the god was a devil sent by heaven to stop them from staying there. Then hundreds of people flayed the god alive, each taking a turn with a blade.

At this point, Zhuo Yu could not help frowning deeply. He lamented the ignorance and obstinacy of those primitive people. Their deeds filled him with an extraordinary revulsion, and an endless tide of hatred seemed to steam out of him. Only when he came back to himself did Zhuo Yu realize he had clenched his fists so hard that blood seeped from his palms and beneath his nails.

What was going on? Did the role he was playing know something? Was that why he had reacted so strongly?

Zhuo Yu did not stop. He kept turning the pages.

On the morning of the fifth day, the god, reduced to a skeleton, grew Its flesh back. As before, It was perfectly whole. But gods could feel pain too. It did not understand why It had been treated this way, and so It stared blankly up at the sky.

Then a boy drew close. The god knew him. He was the only one who had not hurt It the night before.

The boy seemed to feel the god's pain as his own. He secretly brought water from the spring and food he had hidden away, wanting to make amends for the harm his tribe had done the god. Even though he knew nothing he did could make it right, even though he knew he would be discovered, even though he knew he might be beaten half to death.

It took all his courage to approach the god.

The god did not accept the gifts. It merely smiled at the boy. What a holy smile it was, holding not the slightest trace of displaced anger toward him.

In that instant, the boy fell in love with the god. And the god came to like the kindhearted boy as well.

On the fifth night of the seven days of suffering, the tribesmen who had flayed the god alive saw that It still would not die. They decided that power could belong to the tribe. Desperately, they extolled the benefits of joining them: together, they could kill others and plunder resources. Their greedy faces were laid utterly bare. They even forced the boy to persuade the god. But every one of those foul words was blasphemy to the god. The boy clamped his mouth shut, unwilling to let the god suffer the slightest further pollution.

On the sixth night, the tribe's food ran short. At last, they stopped cursing the god for not knowing what was good for It and began giving thanks. Not for any other reason, but because they knew this thing could regrow Its flesh. They treated the god as livestock raised for meat and ate It.

The boy who loved the god went mad. He slashed the chieftain with a knife and was seized by the others and thrown into a cage.

On the final night of the seven days of suffering, the god watched these true devils in human form cut off the head of the boy from Its own tribe and peel away his scalp.

At that moment, the god, who had never begged no matter what torments It endured, suddenly let out a mournful cry. It wept blood with every sob, and before long, It collapsed to the ground. The chieftain tested Its breath and heartbeat. This time, the god truly was dead.

Its heart had died.

The god that could not die, but in the end did, was tossed into the spring and became the Fountain of Youth.

When he finished the whole book, Zhuo Yu sat lifelessly in his wheelchair, his fingers trembling without stop.

Personally, he should not have been so moved, so empathetic. He was a horror specialist. He had seen crueler real-life cases, more shocking serial murders. Yet the tale in Seven-Day Tales made him feel as if he had lived through it himself.

Besides, Seven-Day Tales was a religious story. To an outsider, its events might seem excessive, merely exaggerating humanity's evil until it became contemptible. There could not really be that many bad people in society.

But Zhuo Yu knew that this story was the Lucifer effect through and through.

Stanford University had once conducted a study. It divided volunteers into two groups, prisoners and guards, and ultimately concluded that even someone others regarded as exceptionally mild-mannered could, given absolute power, force, and supreme status, be shaped by the environment into a cruel demon who abused the weak.

That was why the boy in the story was so rare.

Zhuo Yu rubbed his temple as he looked at Seven-Day Tales. A new theory came to him.

On the first night, only the chieftain tortured the god. That was why, on their first day at Golden Lake, only one drowned revenant had arrived. On the second day, the god had been fed to crocodiles. That was why the nearly unbeatable crocodile-headed man had appeared just now.

Then what about the third day?

Zhuo Yu already had an answer in mind.

Holding the book, he decided he could not keep stuffing it into his wheelchair. This was an important prop; he had to protect it. The System had given him three slots of grid space, hadn't it? Perhaps he could put the book there.

Zhuo Yu experimented repeatedly. Sure enough, the grid space could store the book, then summon it back out again without a single thing missing.

While he was examining the slots, he suddenly felt an uneven patch along the spine.

Zhuo Yu raised an eyebrow and explored it carefully. With the sharpened fork, he cautiously pried open the cover and tore it all the way to the spine. Sure enough, a small folded note fell from a gap in the binding.

Zhuo Yu unfolded it and found it covered in numbers. Judging from their arrangement, it should have been some kind of cipher.

"Wait. This handwriting..."

In amazement, Zhuo Yu stroked the note. He wheeled over to the fire, picked up a fragment of charcoal, and casually wrote several numbers on the cabin floor before comparing them with the ones on the note.

"This is my handwriting..." Zhuo Yu murmured in confusion. He turned the note over and over, able only to tell that the ink had dried a long time ago and had even faded in places.

An idea suddenly struck Zhuo Yu. With effort, he shifted himself down onto the floor and examined his wheelchair.

"Everest and Jennings!" The brand name on the plaque inside the wheel came to him at once. As someone with a disability and a little money to spare, he had always replaced his wheelchair with the newest and best models on the market. He knew medical-equipment brands extremely well.

That company had built the world's first folding wheelchair, establishing its brand in the process. Even now, its products remained the foundation of modern wheelchair design.

But... that brand had only been popular in the middle of the twentieth century.

Sure enough, a concealed corner bore the wheelchair's manufacture date. It had been made in 1938.

Zhuo Yu grew excited. He had caught the tail of the "unknown role"!

Zhuo Yu hurried back into the wheelchair, reopened the cupboard, and quickly stripped Fang Hao's clothes off. Fang Hao's shirt had a strong retro rural style from the 1980s, but Zhuo Yu's own clothes were even more antique. The stitching varied subtly; it did not look like a product of modern factory manufacturing.

"If this film is styled like a late-eighties cult gore flick, then I'm an existence that doesn't belong in that era." Zhuo Yu made a fist with his right hand and struck his left palm. "I get it. I get it!"

His role was not from the same era as Zhou Wu and the others at all! Going by that wheelchair, the gap was a full fifty years or so. And after so many years, the wheelchair could not possibly still be so sturdy and sound. It simply defied common sense, unless it had been frozen in a particular year.

In other words, he had died fifty years ago!

The instant Zhuo Yu realized the truth, he could barely suppress a pleased hum. He smiled and began searching the entire cabin.

Zhuo Yu started at the cabin's front door. The threshold alone bore quite a few old wheelchair tracks. The thin, narrow marks would look like ordinary wear in the wooden floor unless one inspected them closely.

At first, Zhuo Yu had not paid much attention to such things. But he had lived alongside a wheelchair for far too long. Once he looked carefully, he could pick out those incongruities.

And the tracks had been made by the same model as the wheelchair he was sitting in now.

It was a glaring clue. Zhuo Yu believed that the cabin's true owner was the seemingly harmless Traveler himself.

Then he found something else that was rather strange, something he had noticed the moment he entered the cabin.

The cabin was huge, with everything from saws to axes, yet it did not have a single small knife. He had searched the kitchen for a paring knife or table knife that would be useful to conceal, but found nothing. In the end, he had to make do with a dinner fork.

It was another detail his teammates had not paid much attention to, but Zhuo Yu took it to heart.

The cabin bore heavy signs of habitation, yet the table knives and paring knives Westerners used most often were gone. It seemed rather deliberate.

Zhuo Yu toyed with his sharpened fork, put it into grid space, and followed the wheelchair tracks to the room where they were heaviest.

For the time being, he identified the room with the large mural, which looked like a storage room, as "his room."

There, he made an even more startling discovery.

The room was piled with odds and ends and planks, broken furniture, and animal bones. After Zhuo Yu struggled to push those obstructions aside, he indeed found square indentations near the window. They were marks of wear left in the floor by a four-poster bed.

This had once been a bedroom.

And once the clutter was moved, signs of a struggle that were too obvious to miss came into view.

Pits where blunt weapons had struck the floor; old tape discarded in the corner; chaotic, desperate nail marks... These clues had been there for many years. Of all the possibilities, Zhuo Yu believed they had been left fifty years ago.

According to the memories supplied by the System, people had begun vanishing frequently from this place exactly fifty years earlier.

What had this bedroom, or rather the Traveler himself, experienced?

Zhuo Yu furrowed his brow and scrutinized the claw marks on the floor again. Suddenly, a piercing pain bloomed in his head.

As if spacetime had gone out of alignment, scattered images flashed through his mind like fragments of broken film. Zhuo Yu felt himself surrounded by a group of people, powerful hands pinning down his legs.

He struggled with all his strength, saying something over and over, but those people would not let him go. Tape bound his ankles tight. All he could do was scratch futile lines into the floor with his hands, unable to escape even after his nails split apart.

"Do it, now! If that freak comes back, we won't get another chance!"

"Hahaha, that's disgusting. Don't tell me they're like that?"

The words were indistinct, but their voices brimmed with malice.

Then an axe and hammer flashed silver as they cut through the air beside Zhuo Yu's ears. With a crack, bone-deep pain swept through his entire body.

Zhuo Yu abruptly came back to himself. Cold sweat rolled unceasingly down his forehead.

He touched his legs. The phantom pain still lingered there, telling him that what he had just seen was not mere imagination, but something that had truly happened to him.

The despair of being unable to fight back, the fury of being brutalized, and the longing to protect someone he would never be able to see again... For the first time in his life, Zhuo Yu felt emotions so complex and intense.

At that moment, he seemed to become one with the Traveler.