Scenario One: Painted Skin — 3

Lin Seven wore a crisp white shirt and dark gray slacks. He looked much thinner than Bu Jianhan remembered, and he had traded his buzz cut for a head of naturally curly hair, making him considerably more handsome as well.

He shuffled over in a pair of house slippers, muttering as he came. "Smells amazing... Mmm, what's for dinner tonight? An all-meat feast! God, that looks delicious. What are you still sitting around for? Aren't you going to join us?"

"I'm waiting for your brother, Lin Eight," Bu Jianhan answered honestly. "He went upstairs to use the bathroom and change his clothes."

"Oh, there's no need to wait for him." Lin Seven took his place at the table as though this were perfectly natural. "Once he goes into a bathroom with a toilet, he won't come out for at least an hour. When our parents confiscated his phone in high school so he'd concentrate on studying, he got into the bad habit of sneaking it into the bathroom to play with while pretending he was constipated. He still hasn't grown out of it. I've warned him plenty of times that sitting there so long will give him hemorrhoids, but he never listens... Let's eat before the food gets cold."

Bu Jianhan: "..."

Did this game really have to be so realistic about such utterly unnecessary details?

What went through the developers' heads?

Suppressing the torrent of wisecracks bubbling inside him, Bu Jianhan obediently sat down at the table.

The dining table was a large oval. In addition to the seats at its head and foot, four chairs lined either side—exactly enough for the Lin parents and their eight children. Ten immaculate new place settings had been laid out for the ten seats. The center of the table was crowded with serving dishes, each piled with richly fragrant, beautifully presented meat. Everything looked, smelled, and no doubt tasted exquisite; his mouth watered before he had taken a single bite.

Unfortunately, a candelabrum also stood at each end of the table, each holding three pale yellow candles. The wicks hissed as they burned, releasing faint smoke and a foul odor. Mingled with the aromas of the feast, it became a nauseating, bloody reek.

Lin Seven sat in the last seat on the left. After a moment's hesitation, Bu Jianhan took the chair opposite him.

The instant he sat down, an icy presence shot up his spine from his tailbone. His vision blurred. As though something had possessed him, the scene before him abruptly transformed.

The candles' warm glow went out, replaced by eerie green ghost fire. Nine translucent figures materialized in the other nine empty chairs. Twisted and misshapen, they silently bowed their heads over the vivid red flesh on their plates.

Goose bumps erupted all over Bu Jianhan's body.

"Hey, what's wrong?" Lin Seven's concerned voice came at just the right moment, rousing him from the hallucination. "Are you not used to using a knife and fork? Sorry, we don't normally keep chopsticks at home... Would you like me to cut up your meat for you?"

"Oh—no, no thanks," Bu Jianhan replied. "A fork is fine."

He tried to stick his fork into a strip of black-pepper beef—and something astonishing happened.

Just as when he had first picked up a piece of meat in the kitchen, the beef rose into the air before his fork could touch it. It hovered about half an inch from the tines, floating along as he lifted his hand.

Bu Jianhan fell silent.

Don't ask. The Force was feeding him.

At the same moment, a new message suddenly appeared in the game interface.

[Current Objective: Find Lin Seven. [Complete]]

[Current Objective: Accept the invitation to spend the night at the villa.]

Bu Jianhan: "...?"

Hadn't Lin Seven come inside ages ago?

Was the system suffering from a little too much lag?

Watching the magnetically levitating chunk of meat dance before him, Bu Jianhan genuinely lost his appetite. He put it down, and Lin Seven immediately asked, "What's wrong? Is the food not to your taste?"

"No, it's fine." Bu Jianhan had no idea how to explain to an NPC just how unappetizing ingredients governed by quantum mechanics could be. "My digestion hasn't been great lately. My doctor told me to eat more vegetables."

To prove it, he spooned up a helping of tomato from the tomato-and-meat casserole.

The tomato stew clung to the spoon no matter how he turned it, in a flagrant violation of gravity that could have raised Newton from the dead out of sheer outrage—but at least it was better than quantum meat.

Throughout the entire dinner, Bu Jianhan ate nothing but a bowl of tomato stew.

Lin Seven expressed regret that he could not enjoy the meal and lamented the waste of such a magnificent spread, but otherwise said nothing.

By the time they finished dinner, night had fallen completely outside. Lin Seven remarked that it was getting late, then invited Bu Jianhan to spend the night at the villa, adding that a guest room had already been prepared for him.

Remembering the system's new objective, Bu Jianhan agreed at once.

[Current Objective: Accept the invitation to spend the night at the villa. [Complete]]

[Current Objective: Watch television with the villa's owner for a while.]

Was this supposed to be a horror game or a dating sim?

Bu Jianhan's head was full of question marks.

"Why don't we watch some television first?" Sure enough, Lin Seven made the suggestion. "We have a few movies here. You can choose one so the evening won't be too dull."

Fine... Bu Jianhan looked at the mere seven discs in the case, shut his eyes, and chose one at random for Lin Seven to put in the player.

A moment later, a bloodcurdling voice issued from the television.

"Why would a promising young man roam naked through the night?"

"Why do screams repeatedly ring out from a villa on the distant outskirts?"

"Who is responsible for the bloodstains splattered across the corner of the kitchen?"

"And what secrets unknown to the world lie hidden in the mysterious depths of the toilet?"

"Behind it all, do we find the corruption of human nature—or the collapse of morality?"

"Tune in at 11:59 tonight for our network's annual television spectacular, Dear Brothers. Follow our reporter's camera as we enter the real inner world of a pervert..."

Bu Jianhan: "..."

This game had way too many memes!

Just then, the landline on the coffee table beside Bu Jianhan began to ring. He picked it up without thinking and only then remembered that he was in someone else's home. He glanced at Lin Seven, who merely shrugged to show that he did not care.

So Bu Jianhan said, "Hello? May I ask who's calling?"

"Oh, thank God—someone finally answered!" The caller was audibly gasping for breath, as if struggling against terrible pain. "Who are you? Please, help me... Ah... It hurts... I'm going to die..."

"Wait. Who are you?" Bu Jianhan instinctively straightened in his seat.

"I—I'm Lin Five..." The man's voice came in broken fragments, interspersed with muffled cries of pain. "Someone's trying to kill me... Help... Help..."

In an instant, Bu Jianhan remembered the scenario's background description.

He had seen a missing-person notice for Lin Five in the newspaper.

"I'm a friend of Lin Seven's. I'm with him at his house right now," Bu Jianhan said quickly. "What's happening to you?"

To his surprise, the man reacted violently. "Lin Seven! You mean my younger brother, Lin Seven?! Get away from him! Get as far away as you can!"

Bu Jianhan's heart lurched. "Uh... Why?"

"That can't be Lin Seven!" the man claiming to be Lin Five roared. "Lin Seven is dead! I watched him get murdered, right in front of me... That lunatic smashed his head to pieces! I remember it perfectly. His skull split open, and his brains and blood splattered all over the wall... Run! Ngh..."

There came a tremendous clatter, as though the phone had fallen to the floor, followed by a wash of crackling static. Then the call disconnected. After two seconds of dead silence, a rapid busy signal began to sound in the receiver.

Bu Jianhan's spine tingled. His muscles locked in place, and he felt as if cold sweat were trickling all the way down his back.

Slowly, he forced his rigid neck to turn toward Lin Seven. The young man in the white shirt seemed not to understand what had happened. He was smiling at Bu Jianhan with innocent confusion.

Lin Five had said that Lin Seven was dead.

Then what was the thing standing in front of him?!

Bu Jianhan tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat.

A moment ago, when he had forked that piece of quantum meat, the system had abruptly updated his current objective. He had mocked it for lagging.

Perhaps the system had been right. Perhaps there had been no lag at all.

He truly had found Lin Seven.

Lin Seven was not sitting at the table. He was on the table!

"What's wrong?"

The young man in the white shirt and slacks, fuzzy rabbit-eared slippers dangling from his feet, looked at him in confusion. He seemed so harmless and innocent that even those two simple words sent an eerie wind crawling over Bu Jianhan's skin.

"Nothing!" Bu Jianhan answered at once.

He answered too quickly, only making Lin Seven suspicious. Doubt entered Lin Seven's expression as he pressed, "Who was on the phone? What did they say to you? Why are you making that face?"

I don't even have a face—how the hell can you tell what expression I'm making? Bu Jianhan thought. Remembering the chilling phone call, he instinctively tried to cover it up. "It was really nothing... You're imagining things. What expression am I making? It wasn't important. Why do you care so much?"

Lin Seven did not believe him. He rose from the sofa on the other side, walked past Bu Jianhan, and headed for the landline on the coffee table. "No. You're definitely hiding something. I'll know who called and what they told you as soon as I call them back."

"Don't!" Quick as a flash, Bu Jianhan pressed down on the receiver. Meeting Lin Seven's questioning gaze, he desperately scrambled for an explanation. "It really was nothing. Your brother called to check on things... Yes, that's all. He heard I was your friend and that I was here at home with you, so he didn't have anything else to say."

To make his story sound more convincing, Bu Jianhan repeated, "It was your brother. Lin Five."

To his surprise, Lin Seven's face turned deathly white. His eyes widened and his lips parted, his expression a mixture of shock, terror, panic, and disbelief.

"N-no. That's impossible." He was so frightened he could barely speak coherently. He stumbled back two steps. "How could it be him? Is someone playing a prank?"

At his reaction, Bu Jianhan's heart lurched. "He definitely called himself 'Lin Five'... Why couldn't it be him? What happened to him?"

"M-my brother Lin Five disappeared a week ago. I even placed a missing-person notice in the newspaper." Lin Seven's face was bloodless. "Three days ago, the Police Department contacted me to confirm that he was dead and told me to claim his remains... It really was him. When he was little, he mangled his right index finger while chopping vegetables. I recognized that shortened finger! His body was horrible... All his skin had been peeled away. There was nothing left but bloody flesh and white sinew... I just..."

His voice suddenly choked off. Then he cried out in terror, "That wasn't my brother... That was a ghost. It had to be a ghost! This house is haunted!"

Bu Jianhan stood frozen, still struggling to process this when the chime of an objective update sounded.

[Current Objective: Watch television with the villa's owner for a while. [Complete]]

[Current Objective: Determine who in the Lin Family Villa is actually a ghost.]