Chapter 1847 - 1692: Escape Game 44
Chapter 1847: Chapter 1692: Escape Game 44
Miao Shuangshuang raised an eyebrow and looked at Old Jin, who was staring at her and Xiao Zhongjing. "Boss, what’s wrong? You don’t look so good. Did something happen?"
Old Jin clenched the fist hanging by his side. His tone was stiff and hard, with a hint of viciousness. "Something happened on the island again. Two more islanders died. I feel awful."
After he finished speaking, Old Jin turned around and stomped up the stairs to the second floor of the inn. Miao Shuangshuang and Xiao Zhongjing exchanged a look, both of their expressions a bit heavy.
Xiao Zhongjing was the first to speak. "Why do I feel like this Old Jin has deep hostility toward the two of us? He wasn’t like this at the start. He looked at all the players the same way. What’s with him today?"
Miao Shuangshuang, however, was focused on something else. "Do you remember what Old Jin said before? He said the demon on Shadow Island comes out at night to eat people. But it’s still broad daylight and two more people have died on the island. Doesn’t that feel off to you?"
Reminded by Miao Shuangshuang, Xiao Zhongjing fell into thought. "It is a bit off. Old Jin’s attitude is too strange. The news about the monster appearing at night came from him. It might not be true.
And I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but that Old Jin... I keep feeling he isn’t sad about people dying on the island, he’s angry."
Miao Shuangshuang rested her chin on her hand. "And there’s no fear. Logically, with the demon killing so frequently, they should be panicking.
But whether it’s Old Jin, the other people on this island, or even the families of the dead, no one looks scared."
Xiao Zhongjing said, "Unless the islanders actually know what the demon is and know how to avoid being killed. No, that doesn’t work. If that were the case, people wouldn’t be dying. It doesn’t add up."
"Maybe they did know before." Miao Shuangshuang glanced toward the second floor. "But after we showed up, that method of avoiding death stopped working."
......
Right after Old Jin finished talking about the deaths, the sky had only just turned dusky when mourning music drifted in from outside. The funeral procession appeared again, and this time two processions walked together.
Miao Shuangshuang and Xiao Zhongjing stood at the inn entrance, watching the funeral procession pass in front of them. Miao Shuangshuang stared at the crowd of mourners and suddenly said, "I noticed something."
Xiao Zhongjing looked at Miao Shuangshuang in confusion. "What?"
Miao Shuangshuang pointed her chin toward the funeral procession. "Whether it was yesterday or today, there are no children among the mourners. Yesterday the one who died was a young girl, which you could still explain away.
But look at who died today. It’s clearly a middle-aged man and woman. At their age, if they had kids, the children would be around seven or eight, or maybe ten or so.
The two bodies are being buried separately, so they’re obviously not a married couple but from two different families. Fine, maybe one never married and has no kids, but it’s impossible that both reached middle age without marrying, right?
Even if both of them are lifelong singles, we’ve been walking around the island for so long and haven’t seen a single child. Don’t you think that’s very strange?"
Xiao Zhongjing thought back to the people he’d met after coming ashore and reached the conclusion that on this Shadow Island, he really hadn’t come across a single child.
Unconsciously, Xiao Zhongjing recalled his first mission and said to Miao Shuangshuang, "When we were in the Ghost Groom’s game, there were no girls in Lao Mountain Village. That was because of Zhou Liang’s curse.
Could this Shadow Island be like Lao Mountain Village, cursed by something as well, which is why no children are being born?"
Miao Shuangshuang watched the funeral procession receding into the distance. "It’s different. If no children are born, the people on this island would slowly vanish. But this island’s population has lasted for over hundreds of years.
If there are no kids, how do they continue their bloodline? Lao Mountain Village had no girls, but they still had a way to reproduce, which is why they didn’t die out.
So on this island, either there’s some method for them to reproduce, or the time since children stopped being born isn’t very long yet, not long enough for the island’s population to disappear."
Xiao Zhongjing said thoughtfully, "Do you think the secret of this Shadow Island might be about why children vanished and stopped being born—or how exactly they’re continuing their bloodline?"
Miao Shuangshuang nodded. "Based on the information we have now, that’s about eighty to ninety percent likely."
The two of them stopped there, because the inn’s waiter had already come back and was preparing dinner and cleaning the rooms the players were staying in.
By the time they sat down for dinner, He Qianyin had also returned. She saw Miao Shuangshuang and Xiao Zhongjing and came over to sit with them. The three of them ate together while sharing intel.
He Qianyin spoke first. "I walked around the island all day today and didn’t find anything wrong. On the contrary, this Shadow Island is pretty lively, and the islanders are very enthusiastic.
You two went up that mountain to see the Sky Pit. Did you find anything strange? Were demons really sealed in there?"
"There should have been demons sealed there. There are a lot of huge claw marks at the bottom of the Sky Pit, but nothing else."
Miao Shuangshuang just gave a simple description of the situation at the bottom of the Sky Pit, skipping over the part where she dove into the water and found the Xuanwu corpse, and also not mentioning what she’d gained.
He Qianyin picked up a piece of green vegetable with her chopsticks and looked at Xiao Zhongjing. "Any other news?"
Xiao Zhongjing said calmly, "Another thing we found: there are no children on this island. But Shuangshuang and I mainly went up the mountain, so we didn’t see the whole place.
You were out for so long. Did you see any children? If you also didn’t see any, then the people on this island likely have a reproduction problem."
This wasn’t the kind of information that needed to be kept secret, because the absence of children was so obvious that even if no one noticed it today, in another day or two someone would realize something was off.
So from the beginning, Xiao Zhongjing and Miao Shuangshuang hadn’t planned on hiding this. That was why, when Xiao Zhongjing said it out loud, he didn’t bother lowering his voice.
Old Jin and the waiter weren’t around. The dining area was full of players. Hearing what Xiao Zhongjing said, all of them instinctively started thinking back over their exploration of the island today, wondering if they’d seen any children.
Then, once they compared notes, they were shocked to find that not a single one of them had seen even one child on this island. The only half-grown teen of about fourteen was a player.
Miao Shuangshuang, Xiao Zhongjing, and He Qianyin sat eating while their ears tuned in to the noisy discussions among the players nearby. After listening for a long time, they didn’t hear any useful analysis—just all kinds of wild guesses.
Xiao Zhongjing sighed in mild disappointment. He had hoped that spreading the news might prompt some useful speculation from the other players or at least bring in some helpful information, but it turned out to be all nonsense.
Miao Shuangshuang’s attention stayed fixed on Tang Jinyi and Chen Mo. Those two were the most experienced players; if anyone had something genuinely useful, it would probably be them.