His head felt as if it would split open. Li Si didn’t dare open his eyes. He listened quietly, listening for whether there were bird calls, dog barks, and human shouts outside. He feared he had once again returned to the reincarnation nightmare. But outside was utterly silent. Li Si slowly opened his eyes.
He was lying in the side room. In the courtyard there were no birds, no dogs, and no Tong Jie either. Li Si exhaled. He knew the hidden suggestion game should have been broken. He walked out of the side room and excitedly called out for Wu Wen: “Wu Wen, where are you…”
There was no Wu Wen at the Tong household. Besides Li Si, there was no second person. The misty rain continued falling. The empty alleys of Gutan Village also had no one. Li Si’s heart pounded wildly. He came to Niu Sao’s home. The door was open, but there was no one inside.
Physician Xing’s home was the same. So was Fu Xiaosheng’s.
In the entire Gutan Village, only Li Si remained. Could Wu Wen have left first? Li Si rushed out of the village, rushed past the stone statue beneath the mulberry tree. The road leading out of the mountains was still blocked by densely packed giant rocks. He had clearly broken the game—why was he still trapped in Gutan Village… Why? What was wrong?
Suddenly, Li Si remembered Fu Xiaosheng’s words before he lost consciousness: “You only found half the answer…” Half—he had only found half. That is to say, another half of the answer still existed.
But everyone had disappeared. Where could he find the other half of the answer?
Li Si began coughing violently. When he raised his hand, he saw it covered in chicken-skin wrinkles. He staggered to the water pond. The water reflected his appearance… After one sleep, he had actually become a white-haired old man, his face full of crisscrossing wrinkles. His features were carved with the passage of years. Li Si shouted with a hoarse voice: “No, this is impossible, this is impossible!”
Li Si roared in the ghost-like ancient village, yet no one would run out to look at him even once. Gutan Village seemed to have been lightly flicked by a celestial giant god, flicked into a corner that would never be discovered, abandoned by the entire world. Li Si wandered through the village like a lost soul. He exhausted all his strength to climb the mulberry tree at the village entrance, gazing out at the settlement.
What exactly was the other half of the answer… The aged and decrepit Li Si half-opened his eyes, reaching out to grope in the void, murmuring: “Shen Rou, am I about to let you down again…”
Shen Rou’s shadow vaguely appeared in a corner of the village, seemingly gazing at him. Li Si softly hummed:
“Soul beneath the stars, white snow upon the celestial mountain. I will guard you—Kalavinka… Kalavinka!”
Shen Rou, did you hear my song?
Li Si’s eyelids suddenly twitched incessantly. If people had disappeared, did that mean the other half of the answer wasn’t on people, but outside of people… Gutan Village? Was the other half of the answer hidden in this mysterious village?
Actually, since arriving here, Li Si had never truly and properly observed this settlement. Li Si opened his eyes wide, memorizing every place in Gutan Village. He counted clearly the number of houses in the village—fifty-three. Wait, the layout of these houses looked so similar, so similar to—that painting!
The mysterious letter in the painting he had received in Hu’an—the letter depicted over fifty, no, exactly fifty-three grapes. These grapes were densely arranged in an irregular pattern on pale yellow paper. Their positions were the same as the fifty-three houses in Gutan Village. In the painting, twenty-six grapes bore characters. Their arrangement positions were at… Li Si wracked his brain, recalling one by one the positions of the twenty-six grapes and the sequence corresponding to the character meanings.
Distant ends of heaven, gazing toward you from afar. Thoughts like pure wind, can you remember your beloved.
Guiyun Prefecture, Mo Town, Gutan Village.
—Shen Rou
The first character “distant” corresponded to the third grape from the top at the easternmost edge. Li Si found the corresponding house in Gutan Village, then the second “distant” character… the third “heaven” character… Li Si’s consciousness drifted near and far. Memorizing was extremely difficult, but he understood he needed to remember it all at once, because he no longer had surplus strength to climb the mulberry tree again.
Finally, Li Si memorized everything. Then he climbed down the mulberry tree and began walking to the first house.
What disappointed Li Si somewhat was that this was a ruined house with no signs of habitation. The beams were covered with spider webs. Besides dust and fallen leaves, there was nothing else. The courtyard outside was also overgrown with wild grass. Li Si stood dejectedly in the courtyard, not knowing what exactly he should be searching for inside and outside the house. Could it just be a pure coincidence? It couldn’t be.
Just like when solving the Ding and Sun case earlier, the clues were right beside him, only they often went unnoticed and were easily overlooked. Had he overlooked something again? Li Si ran through the letter in the painting once more in his mind: characters, painting, grapes!
Grapes—that was it.
Li Si actually found a strand of grapevine in a corner of the courtyard. Li Si followed the grapevine and dug open the ground. In the wrapping of the grapevine’s root system, he discovered a grain-of-rice-sized red crystal. Li Si pulled out the silk handkerchief he had found at Widow Sun’s house and carefully wrapped the tiny red crystal.
Li Si didn’t know what the red crystal was or what kind of answer it would bring him, but he was certain he had found the right direction. Next was the second house, the third, the fourth, the fifth… the twenty-sixth. Li Si found twenty-six grapevines and discovered twenty-six tiny red crystals. Red, red! Li Si thought of something. He found paste from the medicine hall, diluted it with water, and stuck the twenty-six red crystals together one by one. They finally became a human-eye-sized red crystal.
Red eyes! The guardian deity that had lost both eyes! These were its eyes…
Li Si staggered to the village entrance and stuffed one complete red eye into the guardian deity’s stone statue. The guardian deity suddenly shot out a beam of red light, but it quickly dimmed again. It wasn’t enough—the other eye was still missing.
But he had searched all twenty-six houses. Where would the other eye be?
Li Si suddenly remembered that in the letter in the painting, one grape was especially bright red, as if saturated with blood. Its position was at the very center of the grape cluster. Corresponding to Gutan Village, Li Si slowly gazed toward the ancient pond in the village center. He still remembered when he fell into the ancient pond last time, he seemed to glimpse red eyes at the pond bottom. The other eye was at the pond bottom. Li Si was convinced.
The pond water was ice-cold and bone-piercing. Li Si smiled miserably. With his current physical condition, even if he could find the other eye at the pond bottom, he might not have the life to come back up. But this was already the only way out. He could only leave it to fate.
Li Si jumped into the ancient pond with a “splash.” The bone-piercing sensation was like countless death tentacles instantly wrapping around him. Li Si’s teeth chattered unceasingly. He took a deep breath and dove to the pond bottom. At the clear pond bottom, Li Si discovered a strange and sinister red grapevine. It was rooted in the soft mud and sand at the pond bottom. Its red tendrils twisted upward like distorted bloody hands. At the very top of the grapevine grew a blood-red grape. Suddenly, air pressure struck Li Si like a giant hammer. Li Si struggled desperately and grabbed toward that red grape, then his body tumbled upward…
His body gradually lost all sensation. He didn’t even know whether he had actually grabbed that red grape in his hand. If he had, would he still have the life to escape the water pond? If he hadn’t, then this ice-cold clear pond bottom would be his burial place.
After his limbs lost sensation, his mind became unusually calm instead. Li Si figured out the other half of the answer: The twenty-six characters in the letter in the painting—they formed a twisted and strange pattern along a unique trajectory. When Li Si stared at this pattern before, he felt heart palpitations. Actually, the image of this pattern was an eye, and the blood-red grape in the painting’s center was the pupil—blood pupil! He hadn’t actually fallen into the hidden suggestion game after arriving at Gutan Village. Rather, from the very beginning when he received the letter in the painting, he had been trapped. The blood pupil pattern was the key to the hidden suggestion.
He didn’t know what kind of hidden suggestion the “blood pupil” concealed that made everything so incredible. After receiving the letter in the painting, he and Wu Wen arrived at Gutan Village. So Wu Wen was also a result after hidden suggestion. He might not have come to Gutan Village at all, which was why he disappeared together with Tong Baiquan and the others… But Wu Wen was a real person. What about Tong Baiquan and the others—were they also real? Not just these people, but himself too!
After being subjected to the blood pupil’s hidden suggestion, had he truly come to Mo Town, come to the mysterious Gutan Village?
This answer could not be known.
What terrifying magic power! If he hadn’t come to Mo Town or Gutan Village, then what was this “me” trapped here? A person, or a soul…
Lao Sitou’s final assessment of hidden suggestion: The terror of hidden suggestion’s confusion isn’t trapping people, but trapping souls. When a person’s consciousness, thoughts, emotions, and memories are all trapped in a Gutan Village they can never walk out of, then they’re equivalent to being dead.
So the truth of the Ding and Sun case was only half the answer to breaking the game. The other half of the answer wasn’t in others, nor in the mysterious Gutan Village, but in his own heart—the countless bonds in his heart were the ultimate reason he couldn’t walk out of this haze. Li Si found the answer. The shadow of Shen Rou in a corner of his heart gradually receded. He gradually emptied himself.
Then, after a long sinking, Li Si floated to the water’s surface.
After that, holding the blood grape (which was also the other blood-colored eye), he came beneath the mulberry tree and stuffed the blood grape back into the stone statue’s hollow eye socket… Boom! The stone statue exploded. The huge explosion blasted Li Si into midair. Li Si felt his body shatter into pieces and segments. He slightly opened his eyes and saw:
The rain haze that had shrouded Gutan Village for so long receded, revealing bright sunlight and a rainbow of seven colors.
The rainbow was like an open door that sucked Li Si inside.
Farewell, Gutan Village.