Half Immortal

flashlight, which was as brilliant as his expression. 

“Don’t you think it’s laborious for the matron to climb the mountain and go down the well?” Yan Wei said nonchalantly. 

“Oh, she’s so old that we won’t have to work hard to become the boss.
Apart from stones and insects, there are several traces of dragging on the ground — this is a place with ghosts.
It’s normal to have these marks from dragging bodies or something.
What the hell are you looking at?”

Yan Wei hooked the corner of his mouth.
“I’m looking at the width of the drag mark, which is very thin, much thinner than a girl’s figure.”

He didn’t say much, but Lin Zhen was not one of those novice players in the first-floor instance.
Just this sentence was enough.

Judging by the matron’s efforts to hike the mountain and go down the well, she is just an old lady with an ordinary physique, so she may not have the strength to carry anything a little heavier.
The drag marks on the ground were not made by skinless female ghosts who could disappear in the room in an instant but by the matron.

The mark was too narrow, not even the waist width of a girl, and was not a trace from dragging a corpse.

What was the matron dragging?

She brought nothing when she went down the well and most likely caused the dragging trail when she took it out.
What was not too big, but also had a certain weight and could be dragged out every time without the matron having to bring it inside?

—The skin and bone umbrella that disappeared in the main hall of the mountain temple during the day.

Now it seems he could form a more understandable logic of what is happening.

The matron used the skins and bones of girls as umbrellas and threw their bodies down the well.
Something may have transpired in the middle, there has been a change here, and the corpses of those girls turned into ghosts.
The emergence of the skin and bone umbrellas represents the appearance of the skinless female ghosts.
At night, the matron places the umbrellas at the doorways, and the skinless ghost appears in the room accompanied by singing, killing the person with the umbrella beside them.

During the day, the umbrellas that cause no deaths will return to the well.
If the matron still needs to use the skin and bone umbrella to lure the ghosts to kill, she’ll have to go down the well and drag these umbrellas out again.

Except for the one who caused the player’s demise, the other umbrellas that did not cause any deaths disappeared and appeared — or returned — to this unique well.

The matron is the one who takes the umbrellas out again.
Therefore, the trace is very thin, presumably the width of several umbrellas in a bag.
The slightly furry old moss on the mark is facing outward because the umbrellas are only dragged outside, not inside.

“Why don’t we go inside and take an umbrella for fun? It’s raining outside, so it saves the effort of buying an umbrella.” Lin Zhen had already shot several arrows, rambling, “Hey, this is the way to go.
I think it’s fun using my bow and arrow to clean.”

Yan Wei asked, “Can you figure out why there’s a change here and why the matron is doing this?”

“Maybe it’s because we’re good-looking and she wants to make us into umbrellas.”

“There’s no need to pretend.
You have to help me if you lose the bet, but I know better than you that we are not teammates who can hand over our backs,” Yan Wei chuckled, his distinct voice echoing in the narrow hole, “You’re not stupid, and you have your guess.
If you don’t want to tell, just shut up and don’t waste time fooling me.”

Lin Zhen was offended by him, but he didn’t get angry.
His smile widened. 

“Hey, little pet.
Why were you so cute around Yan Mingguang yet so vicious now? However, you guessed the clue of this mark.
I won’t compete with you for the point.
You can say the answer.”

Yan Wei mentioned the mark, and he and Lin Zhen both had the answer in their mind, but the tower’s prompt didn’t sound, indicating that the answer point needed to be analyzed before it could be determined.

Yan Wei shook his head.
“Now is not the time to say it.”

What he has to do is not just score, but… to control the score range of all players.

He jabbed Lin Zhen with the flashlight.
“Hurry up and open the road.
It’ll take us several hours to get back to the mountain temple.
I don’t want to stay here until evening.”

Lin Zhen was without ambiguity.
With one move of the longbow, several arrows shot out in succession.
His mouth wasn’t idle.
“It would be nice to drag it till the evening.
There might be more bloody and abnormal images to see…”

The footsteps of the two were accompanied by the sound of arrows breaking through the wind.
The light from the flashlight stretched in the darkness.
Within moments, the accumulated light spread more and more, and their footsteps echoed a little longer.

“Oh, the front looks wider–” Lin Zhen’s voice suddenly stopped.

Behind him, Yan Wei’s eyes solidified, and the relaxed expression disappeared.
His eyes crossed Lin Zhen’s shoulder and slowly landed on the unexpectedly spacious cave ahead.

The gradually widening cave seemed to have ended.
The ground had enough space to accommodate fifty or sixty people standing at once.
Under the bright white light of the flashlight, pale umbrellas were neatly lined up, and submerged treachery filled the silence.

Even Lin Zhen’s breathing stagnated subconsciously.

“…Ah, how many are there?”

Yan Wei blinked and said word by word, “127.
Aren’t you going to play with them? They should be enough for you.”

Lin Zhen: “…”

“Oh, it seems that you don’t even need to go get them,” Yan Wei looked straight ahead, his eyes flashed, and his tone slightly prolonged, “They’re coming towards us.“

Footnotes

The code name Yan 燕 – Yan in Yan Wei 晏 – Yan in Yan Mingguang