Chapter 2 Tunnel and Mirror

Feng Bujue continued down the tunnel. The terrifying sight from before had no effect on him. He advanced as normal, without any pressure.

Before long, he arrived at the end of the tunnel, in a narrow and damp cellar.

There was a prison door in the cellar. This was not strange. In more distant times, cellars beneath such large houses were often used as prisons for some evil purpose, and now served as a place to store the dead. The floor and walls of the corridor were carefully covered in copper. The heavy iron prison door was extremely heavy, and when pushed open, the hinges emitted an unusually loud creaking sound. In the very center of the cell stood a coffin. A flashlight beam from several steps away revealed that the lid was not nailed down at all, and wasn't even properly aligned...

Feng Bujue brazenly pushed open the iron door and walked in. However, he wasn't in a hurry to lift the coffin lid. Instead, he used the flashlight to search the surrounding walls. Sure enough, he found something. On one of the walls, he found another section of "The Haunted Palace," this time written in blood:

【But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate;
(Ah, let us mourn!—for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.】

"Hmm... is this the fifth section?" Feng Bujue muttered to himself after reading.

A system prompt sounded: 【Side Quest Progress Updated】

The task bar information also changed to: 【Find all six sections of "The Haunted Palace," current progress 3/6】

Feng Bujue walked to the coffin. Holding the flashlight in one hand, he made a fist with the other and knocked on the coffin lid three times as if knocking on a door: "Hey, Miss Madeline, are you still there?" It was unknown how he knew this name.

…………

As time passed, Valiant Champion's fright value had gradually increased to about 15% and stabilized at that number. His panic was not due to encountering any substantial monsters, but because after searching for a while, he could not find a way to leave the second floor...

Every corridor, every room, and the paintings, sconces, and decorations on the walls all seemed unfamiliar, yet vaguely familiar.

The building exhibited obvious spatial anomalies. Its interior was far larger than its dimensions appeared from the outside. The length of the corridors seemed to change constantly, and counting the doors on either side of the corridor always yielded a different number. Moreover, Valiant Champion had so far failed to successfully reach the end of any corridor. Whenever he reached the end of a section, he would see a new corner or intersection.

Performing normal walking actions consumed very little stamina. Only "long-term" walking would result in a noticeable decrease in stamina. This was quite similar to the situation in reality. If you make a person walk continuously for more than twenty minutes, he will feel slightly tired. After forty minutes, his legs will ache, and after an hour, he will definitely have to stop and rest. Of course, the example here is an ordinary person, not a professional athlete or something like that.

This fatigue accumulates gradually and becomes more and more obvious. Under the erosion of fear, Valiant Champion's reaction accelerated. When he saw his stamina value begin to decrease at a visible rate, he did not calmly choose to rest, but instead chose to increase his speed...

He was no longer exploring, but running away.

He had received a strong psychological suggestion that if he didn't do something quickly, he would be more than just trapped. When his stamina dropped to a certain level, something in the darkness would probably come for him...

"Haa... haa..." Valiant Champion's breathing became heavy. He looked at the game menu. He clearly had nearly 1000 stamina points left, and he wasn't running, just walking briskly, so it shouldn't be like this.

He stopped, placed his hands on his knees, and tried to catch his breath, swallowing a mouthful of saliva. At that moment, he suddenly felt something strange in his abdomen, but he couldn't quite describe what it was.

"What's going on..." Valiant Champion muttered to himself. Talking to himself could counteract some of the effects of fear and help him concentrate.

Suddenly, his gaze caught something. He turned his face and found that there was a mirror next to him, a square mirror about two meters high, embedded in the wall of the corridor, surrounded by a carved wooden frame, the carvings simple yet refined.

"Strange... was this here before?" he couldn't help but ask, a look of doubt on his face.

At this point, Valiant Champion was already numbly looking ahead, burying his head and moving forward towards the end of the corridor in the distance, no longer paying attention to how many doors there were on either side of the corridor, let alone observing the decorations such as paintings, sconces, and sculptures. But this corridor wasn't particularly wide, and something like a mirror was appearing for the first time, and such a large mirror at that, so there was no reason he wouldn't notice it.

When he noticed the mirror, Valiant Champion was facing it sideways, in a posture with his back bent over and his hands supporting his knees, but after transferring his attention to the mirror, he instinctively straightened up and turned to face it. This turn nearly scared him to death.

The image in the mirror looked no different from his real self, but the him in the mirror had his entire abdominal cavity exposed. There was no clothing or skin in the abdominal area. Looking at it, you could directly see a mass of intestines.

Valiant Champion instantly gasped, his face pale, and took several steps back, leaning against the opposite wall of the corridor. He stared with wide eyes, his breathing stopping for nearly ten seconds.

"Illusion... this is an illusion..." After regaining some composure, he walked to the mirror with a fierce look on his face, "Who are you trying to scare... it's just seeing my own internal organs." He said this, but his fright value didn't lie. He was still very afraid, but when people are extremely afraid, they have all sorts of different reactions, and getting angry and acting tough is one of them.

Valiant Champion's gaze involuntarily fell on the position of his abdomen in the mirror. You could see that the intestines inside seemed to still be wriggling. Looking more closely, you could even see some strange details...

The cross-section of the intestines looked stranger and stranger... it looked like... like a corridor!

He felt a chill down his spine, his neck too stiff to turn. Two seconds later, he roared and kicked the mirror, shattering it, then turned to leave.

Unexpectedly, as soon as he turned around, he found that there were many such mirrors on both sides of the corridor in front of him. All the original doors were gone, but mirrors were almost everywhere.

"Ah!!!" Brother Invincible roared, rushing forward headfirst, without looking sideways. He didn't know whether this situation was an illusion or an actual change in the mansion, but he felt fear and danger, and he didn't want to stay in these corridors for a second longer.

With a crash, a figure shattered a glass window and burst out of the mansion's second floor.

Valiant Champion was unprepared for the moment he fell from the air. One second he was in the corridor, running in the middle of the corridor, where there was clearly a way forward. The next second, the feeling of glass cutting his skin and the pain of impact suddenly came, and he seemed to have hit something, and his body immediately lost its balance and began to fall.

In the brief moment before death, he saw the scene outside the house.

Mold-covered stone walls, withered trees surrounding the area, and a twisted and huge black reflection in the stagnant water of the mountain pond. A ghastly aura oozed out of the pond water, the mountain walls, and the depths of the mansion, and darkness simultaneously poured into the material and spiritual worlds.

In the intangible silence, Valiant Champion fell into the mountain pond outside the house. The ghostly swamp swallowed him, and he couldn't even make a sound in his throat. The huge house was like an indifferent demonic shadow, looking down on the withering of another life.

The last thing reflected in the eyes of this professional gamer... was a waning blood moon setting in the sky.

…………

【Team Member: Valiant Champion, has died, a plot item has been transferred】

The system prompt sounded, startling Wang Tanzhi and Long Aomin.

"No way! A level fifteen professional player just died like that!" Wang Tanzhi exclaimed, specifically opening the game menu to check the team column to confirm. Sure enough, the player's name displayed there had turned gray, and the words "surviving" next to it had changed to "deceased".

At this moment, Long Aomin and Wang Tanzhi had searched a considerable number of rooms, but had found nothing substantial. Apart from encountering a few traps where the floor suddenly collapsed and the underground was covered with spikes, there were no clues and no rewards.

"If the two of us were also acting alone, then those few dangerous situations we encountered just now could also have been fatal," Long Aomin replied, and then added, "I wonder if Brother Feng is also in danger acting alone."

"Don't worry about Brother Jue... since he proposed to split up, he must have considered the risks," Wang Tanzhi said, "By the way, I read some game instructions when I was idle in the login space. If a player dies while carrying a plot item, the item will randomly appear near one of his teammates after he dies."

Long Aomin had experienced more team scenarios and was more experienced than Wang Tanzhi. He replied, "Yeah, I know, let's look for it now."

The two immediately searched around, but as the saying goes, unintended actions can yield unexpected results. They didn't find the letter, but they found another section of the poem "The Haunted Palace" on the floor under a pile of debris:

【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.】

【Side Quest Progress Updated】

【Find all six sections of "The Haunted Palace," current progress 4/6】