Chapter 10 Back Then

Time rewinds to over ten minutes prior. At that time, Brave Invincible was not yet dead, and Feng Bujue was still in that cellar.

Feng Bujue knocked on the coffin lid and said mockingly, "Hey, Miss Madeline, are you still there?"

Naturally, he didn't expect someone in the coffin to reply in an unpleasant tone, "Get out!"

Because he knew it should be empty inside.

After seeing the first section of the Ghost Palace, Feng Bujue speculated that the setting of this mansion was likely the House of Usher from a certain novel. Now that he came to this cellar and saw the coffin and the fifth section of the Ghost Palace on the wall, he was even more certain.

It's true that Feng Bujue was knowledgeable and had a good memory, but he hadn't reached the point of photographic memory. Besides those things that were swept out of the memory attic as information garbage, other memories... such as this novel he had read before, he could generally recall about sixty to seventy percent of the content.

It would be impossible for him to stand there, finish reading the first section, and recite the entire six sections of the Ghost Palace. Therefore, later on, he first had Xiao Tan and Brother Long say some words to remind himself, and the two sections of poetry in his memory slowly became clear.

Of course, Feng Bujue remembered the general plot of that novel relatively clearly.

Many people know the name Edgar Allan Poe. He was the founder of detective novels, and his *The Murders in the Rue Morgue* is considered the first true detective novel in modern literature. He used the term "tales of ratiocination" when it was published.

But that was in 1841, and *The Fall of the House of Usher* was written before that story. It is a Gothic horror novel, and the whole text is filled with an extremely gloomy black atmosphere.

The plot of the story is roughly like this: The protagonist's old friend, Roderick Usher, whose family has suffered from a mysterious genetic disease for generations, lives in a large house that seems to be bound by some kind of strange curse. For hundreds of years, the Usher family has passed down from father to son, making the original name of this ancient house gradually forgotten by people. The building and the family have become synonymous. When people mention "the House of Usher," they are referring to both the mansion and the family.

One day, Roderick wrote a letter to the protagonist, claiming that he was dying, that the disease had tormented him, making him haggard and mentally disturbed, and that the unknown terrifying power in the House of Usher would destroy his reason and take his life.

The protagonist came to visit and accompany his old friend, hoping he would get better. But on the very night of the protagonist's arrival, Roderick's sister, Miss Madeline, "passed away."

She was Roderick's only relative in the world, his only companion for many years. Miss Madeline had been suffering from a serious illness for many years and was incurable, but she had been fighting the disease and had never been bedridden. Roderick's unusually melancholy and near-collapse mental state was mainly due to her.

Roderick requested to find a cellar to keep his sister's body for fourteen days before burial. The protagonist helped his friend put Miss Madeline in the coffin and place it in the cellar, but no one knew that she was not dead...

Seven or eight days later, the grief-stricken Roderick had fallen into madness. On that terrifying night, the protagonist witnessed the terrifying Miss Madeline appear in the house, scaring her brother to death, and then finally she breathed her last breath as well, while the protagonist fled the House of Usher and saw the building collapse into the mountain pool with his own eyes.

There are many "unscientific" things in this story, such as why Madeline was buried alive without anyone noticing? How could a woman who struggled in a coffin for seven or eight days still have the strength to kill her way back to the mansion? How did the mansion collapse? Local earthquake or directional blasting?

However, the readers of the 19th century would not raise such questions about a horror suspense story. On the contrary, in the years after the end of the 20th century, "professionals" whose main business was "over-interpretation" and "nitpicking" gradually increased in various fields, especially in the cultural field. If Poe lived in the 21st century, any academic swindler with the title of "professor" would dare to denigrate him to nothing. Or they would express some non-existent views in the original work by "deeply" interpreting his works.

Let's not discuss this topic in depth, let's go back to the story.

According to the plot in the novel, this coffin must be empty. Regardless of whether the ghost shadow Feng Bujue saw in the tunnel just now was Madeline's ghost or not, her body is no longer in the cellar, but in the mansion.

Feng Bujue pushed open the coffin lid, and sure enough, it was empty, without a body. He waved his hand to disperse the dust, and then used his flashlight to illuminate the inside of the coffin. He quickly found a line of small characters engraved on a wooden board at the head end, which looked like traces scraped out little by little with fingernails.

There was only one sentence on it: "He knows," without punctuation, and the characters were crooked. Thinking about it from her perspective... in the coffin without light, Madeline couldn't see whether the letters she wrote were neat or not, and she had to maintain a certain posture to engrave these above her head, so it was already good enough to be recognized.

[Hidden mission triggered.]

Feng Bujue heard the system prompt and immediately opened the menu. At this time, he saw another prompt window covering the front:

[The hidden missions in the script can provide you with very considerable rewards, but the difficulty of discovering and completing hidden missions will be higher than that of the main and side missions.]

[The system prompts related to hidden missions, including voice, text, and mission content in the menu, are only visible to the player who discovered the mission. If a hidden mission is discovered in a multi-player situation, the players present will jointly obtain the mission. However, hidden missions cannot be shared with a delay. After one or more mission executors describe the mission content to other players, the other party can obtain the mission content and progress in the menu, but it is not considered as accepting the mission, nor can they get the completion reward.]

[The above prompts only pop up when the player discovers a hidden mission for the first time. If you need to read it again, you can search and view it in the game instructions.]

"That is to say... whoever discovers it has to solve it themselves, and then one person gets the reward." Feng Bujue read, he closed the two prompt windows and glanced at the mission: [Rescue Miss Madeline's Soul]

Feng Bujue said, "Oh... that's the situation..." He already had a deduction about the plot direction in this script, but now the question is how to get out of this cellar?

He raised his flashlight again and conducted a more detailed search of the surroundings, but found nothing. He turned his gaze back to the coffin. Besides the line of words and some scratch marks left on the wood, there were no more valuable clues.

Feng Bujue placed the flashlight diagonally inside the coffin, tilting the luminous end to stabilize it, then bent down, picked up the heavy coffin lid from the ground, leaned it against the wall, and looked at it front and back, but there was nothing on this large piece of wood.

"Wait..." Feng Bujue's movements suddenly stopped, and he thought, "The person lying in the coffin should be supine, and if she wanted to carve words, she should have carved them on the coffin lid. Even if she was worried that someone would ignore the carvings on the coffin lid when opening the coffin, so she carved them in the position above her head, but why isn't there even a trace of struggle on this board... The scratch marks and kicking marks are all in other places, and this coffin lid is like new."

Feng Bujue picked up the flashlight, shone it on the coffin lid leaning against the wall, squatted down, and stared at the piece of wood, "Hmm..." He reached out and knocked on it again. The coffin lid made a very ordinary solid wood sound, and it didn't sound like there was a hidden compartment.

At this time, Feng Bujue made a very bold decision (at least for others). He raised the coffin board, vertically covered two-thirds of the coffin, then he got in, lay down, held the coffin lid with both hands, lifted it up hard, and restored the coffin to a covered state.

He lay inside, feeling uncomfortable, not because of psychological reasons, but because the coffin had no built-in soft cushion, it was purely wood. He was like sleeping on a hard bed without anything laid on it.

Feng Bujue put himself in the same situation as Miss Madeline, he shone the flashlight on the coffin board, and said, "How did you get out..." As he said, he tried to push the coffin lid with one hand.

Unexpectedly, he couldn't push it at all.

"Oh?" Feng Bujue was stunned, he immediately pillowed the flashlight next to his neck, used his hands and feet together, tried hard to push a few times, and kicked a few times, but the coffin lid remained motionless.

After tossing for a while, just as he was about to stop and catch his breath, he saw the piece of wood on the coffin lid, facing his face, slightly bulge up, gradually turning into the appearance of a human face.

The gender of that face was indistinguishable, and the voice speaking sounded like an old witch. It said to Feng Bujue, "Dying person, do you want to get out of here?"

"Yes." Feng Bujue replied, he wanted to see what tricks this coffin monster had.

"What can you give me?" the coffin lid asked.

At this time, a system prompt sounded: [You can offer a piece of equipment of ordinary or higher quality to let the monster teleport you back to the space outside the cellar]

"Oh... 'can' offer, huh..." Feng Bujue thought, "That is to say, I can also choose not to offer." He thought, "And... what if the player doesn't have equipment that meets the conditions, wouldn't they be trapped here? Hmm... there must be some other way."

"Coffin, I don't want to give you anything." Feng Bujue replied.

The face suddenly changed drastically, its eyes and mouth opened strangely, becoming exceptionally hideous, which would definitely scare ordinary people. However, it was just a slightly bulging human face floating on the coffin board, it was impossible to attack the person in the coffin, at most it could scare them.

"Then you will be trapped here forever, dying in fear and hunger, even if your fingertips are worn to a bloody mess, even if your toes and knees are broken, it is impossible to break..."

*Kacha*, Feng Bujue took out the M1911A1 pistol from his bag and turned off the safety.

"Let me introduce you..." Feng Bujue pointed the muzzle of the gun at the center of the face's eyebrows, "Some interesting little gadgets born after the Second Industrial Revolution."

"The damage your weapon does to me is not enough for you to escape. A few small scars are nothing." The coffin lid replied.

"I know you can change and self-repair, but what about the coffin around me, above my head, and under my body?" Feng Bujue said.

"Hehehe..." The face on the coffin lid actually laughed. At the same time, the writing engraved by Madeline on Feng Bujue's head, and the traces on the surrounding wood all disappeared. "As long as I want to."

"Hmm... I see. Anyway, the mission has been accepted, and the secret of the coffin has been discovered, so these detailed hints like the engravings are no longer needed, right..." Feng Bujue said, putting the gun away.

"Now, do you want to change your mind?" the coffin lid said again, "Maybe you can offer me the weapon you just had, and I will send you out."

Feng Bujue almost without pausing took out the [Western Kitchen Knife] and the [Mario's Pipe Wrench] from his bag, "You have two choices. First, send me back to the mansion and end this pleasant conversation." He raised his hand and slashed the coffin board with a knife, leaving a knife mark, "Second, I'll dismantle you and burn you as firewood."

A few dozen seconds later, Feng Bujue successfully reappeared in the mansion, but the location was no longer in the initial living room, but in a corridor. There was also a painting hanging on the wall next to him, but it didn't depict the cellar, but an ugly and abstract human face.

He didn't stop, he just confirmed that his Survival Value was still full and his Stamina Value was still high, and then he continued to explore...