C7— Strange Tales By The Lakeside

Late at night, the vast golden lake was silent, and the Yin corpses seemed to be very afraid of the crocodile-headed man and dove back into the lake.

 

The cabin was temporarily safe.

 

 

Zhuo Yu dragged Fang Hao, who was still alive, into the cabinet as if protecting him, plus he’d be out of sight; after all, he didn’t want to k-ill anyone in this thriller set and felt it was meaningless. Subjectively terminating a person’s life was vastly different from self-protection and counterattack.

 

 

Moreover, the other party lacked the ability to resist.

 

Zhuo Yu didn’t want to be a person without style, and ki-lling an incompetent person wouldn’t bring him much pleasure.

 

Compared to that, Zhuo Yu wanted to figure out what happened at Golden Lake. He recalled the crocodile mask for a moment and suddenly felt it was somewhat familiar.

 

Crocodile…

 

By the way, the Seven Day Talk talked about crocodiles!

 

 

Zhuo Yu carefully opened the curled ancient book, and this time he carefully studied it.

 

The story went back 2,000 years.

 

On a hot summer day, everything withered, and the land cracked. The Spring tribe suffered from drought and migrated for a long time before finally finding a spring among the mountains. So they temporarily camped there and drank heavily.

 

 

More than ten days had passed, and they quickly discovered that this place seemed to have a mysterious energy. Injured people wouldn’t be infected, and sick livestock had also recovered here. The greedy clan chief believed that this was a treasure trove, so he made a big move to turn it into a tribal territory and live in this fairyland-like world forever.

 

 

However, they cut down trees and polluted the water, which shocked the god in the fairyland. The god had just been born and weak. He timidly warned the patriarch to leave here, but the patriarch thought he was a spy sent by other tribes and caught him alive.

 

So, on the first night of seven days of suffering, the clan leader cut off the head of the newborn deity.

 

What he didn’t expect was that the next morning, the deity sat intact in the prison, without even a wound on his neck. This surprised and angered the tribe leader. He came from a warrior background, and there was nothing he couldn’t k-ill!

 

The chieftain had to supervise the work during the day and was very busy, so he could only be executed at night.

 

 

On the second night of seven days of suffering, the deity was fed to the crocodiles in the swamp.

 

Being eaten by crocodiles may have been the most brutal way of dying at that time, as the body of the god was twisted and torn apart until death. Just as the chieftain was proud of his wisdom, the immortal creature appeared once again in full before him.

 

This completely angered the belligerent and cruel chieftain.

 

 

On the third night, the cremation arrived as scheduled, and the deity was tied to the stake. His smooth skin was burned black and shrunk inch by inch by the flames, but he still didn’t die.

 

 

On the fourth night, the chieftain summoned all members of the tribe and declared that the god was the demon sent to stop them from staying here. So, hundreds of people cut the god alive with each strike.

 

Seeing this, Zhuo Yu couldn’t help but furrow his brows. He sighed at the ignorance and stubbornness of these primitive people, which made him feel extraordinary disgust towards their behaviors from the bottom of his heart. A constant stream of resentment seemed to steam out of his body. Zhuo Yu regained his senses and only then realized that he had clenched his fists tightly, with blo-od streaming from his palms and nails.

 

 

What was going on? Did the character he played know something? Was that why he had such a big reaction?

 

 

Zhuo Yu didn’t stop and continued flipping.

 

 

On the morning of the fifth day, the deity with only one skeleton grew back flesh, as intact as before, but the deity also felt pain. He didn’t understand why he had been treated like this, so he stared blankly at the sky.

 

At this moment, a young boy approached his body, and the god knew that he was the only one who had not harmed him last night.

 

The young man seemed to empathize with the pain of the god. He secretly brought water from the spring and brought his hidden food, hoping to make up for the harm caused by the tribe to the god, even if he knew that nothing was useful, even if he knew that he would be discovered by doing so, and even if he would be beaten to half death.

 

He used a lot of courage to come to the other party’s side.

 

The deity didn’t accept the gift; he only smiled at the young man. How holy that smile was; it held no resentment towards him.

 

At that moment, the boy fell in love with this deity, and the deity also fell in love with the kind boy.

 

 

On the fifth night of the seventh day of suffering, the tribe members who had once cut the deity alive saw him still alive and felt that this power could be owned by the tribe. They desperately instilled the benefits of joining the tribe, and they could ki-ll others and plunder resources together. Their greedy faces were evident, and they even forced the youth to persuade the other party. However, all these filthy words were blasphemous to the deity. The young man kept his mouth shut, unwilling to let the other person suffer any more pollution.

 

On the sixth night, the tribe, which no longer had sufficient food, finally went from cursing at him for being unkind to being grateful, but not for any other reason. Because they knew that this guy could recover meat, they treated him as livestock for meat and devoured the deity.

 

The boy who admired the god went crazy, wielding a knife, he injured the clan leader, and was escorted to a cage by the crowd.

 

On the last night of seven days of suffering, the deity looked as these humanoid demons that cut off the head of their fellow tribesman and peeled off his scalp.

 

 

At this moment, the deity, who had suffered torture and didn’t beg for mercy, suddenly let out a mournful cry. His voice was filled with sorrow, and soon he fell to the ground. The chieftain went to test his breath and heartbeat, and now the deity was really dead.

 

 

——His heart had died.

 

 

The deity who could not die but ultimately died was thrown into the spring and transformed into an immortal spring.

 

 

After flipping through the entire book, Zhuo Yu sat in a wheelchair lifelessly, his fingers trembling constantly.

 

As an individual, he shouldn’t have felt such empathy, because he was an author. He had seen even more brutal real-life cases and even more sensational serial murders, but the story of “Seven Days Talk” made him feel like he was in the real world.

 

Moreover, “Seven Days Talk” was a religious story, and the scenes inside may seem too exaggerated to outsiders. It simply exaggerated the evil of human nature, making people shameless. In real society, there wouldn’t be so many bad people.

 

 

But Zhuo Yu knew that this story was a complete light-bearing effect.

 

 

Stanford University once conducted a study in which volunteers were divided into two groups, one being prisoners and the other being prison guards. In the end, it was concluded that even a person who was perceived as extremely gentle by outsiders, with absolute power, force, and supreme status, would become a cruel demon for violence against the weak due to the influence of the environment.

 

So the most rare part was the youth in the story.

 

Zhuo Yu rubbed his forehead and looked at “Seven Days Talk.”  He had a new guess.

 

 

On the first night, only the clan leader tortured the god, so on their first day at the Golden Lake, only one Yin corpse arrived. The next day, the deity was fed to the crocodile, so the almost invincible crocodile-headed man just appeared.

 

 

So what about the third day?

 

Zhuo Yu already had judgment in his heart.

 

He held the book and felt that he couldn’t fit it in the wheelchair anymore. It was an important prop that must be protected. Didn’t the system give him three squares of space? Maybe he could fit this book inside.

 

 

Zhuo Yu repeatedly experimented, and sure enough, the grid space could store it, and he could summon the book with all its ends.

 

Just as he was studying the grid, he suddenly felt an uneven area on the spine of the book.

 

Zhuo Yu raised an eyebrow and carefully explored, carefully picking open the cover with a sharpened fork and tearing it all the way to the spine of the book. Sure enough, a small folded piece of paper fell out of the gap between the spines.

 

Zhuo Yu unfolded it and found that it was filled with numbers. According to its arrangement, it should be some kind of password.

 

“Wait, this handwriting…”

 

Zhuo Yu touched the note in surprise. He shook his wheelchair and went to the campfire to pick up a piece of broken coal residue. Then, he casually wrote a few numbers on the floor of the wooden house and compared them with the note.

 

“This is my handwriting.” Zhuo Yu murmured in confusion. He flipped it over, and the only difference was that the ink on the other one had been dry for a long time and even faded slightly.

 

 

Zhuo Yu suddenly had an idea. He struggled to move his body and sat on the ground, observing his wheelchair.

 

 

“Aviris and Jennings!” He blurted out the trademark on the inside of the wheels. As a disabled and somewhat idle person, he had always gotten the latest and best wheelchairs on the market, so he was quite familiar with the brands of medical devices.

 

 

This brand created the world’s first folding wheelchair and established its own company brand, with their work still serving as the foundation of modern wheelchair design to this day.

 

But this brand was only popular in the mid-20th century.

 

As expected, in a hidden corner, the construction date of this wheelchair was marked; it was made in 1938.

 

 

Zhuo Yu became excited; he had gotten a hint about the “unknown character”!

 

Zhuo Yu quickly sat back in his wheelchair, reopened the cabinet, and searched Fang Hao’s clothes. His shirt had a strong 80s retro-rural style, but Zhuo Yu’s own was even more antique than that one, with slight differences in stitching, unlike modern factory products.

 

“If the style of this movie is a cult plasma film from the late 1980s, then I am an out-of-place presence in this era.” Zhuo Yu’s right hand was used to make a fist on his left palm. “I understand, I understand!”

 

His character wasn’t even from the same era as Zhou Wu and the others! The gap, calculated based on that wheelchair, was about fifty years long! Moreover, after so many years, the wheelchair couldn’t be so sturdy, it wasn’t in line with common sense at all, unless it had been frozen in a certain year.

 

 

In other words, he died fifty years ago!

 

 

At the moment when Zhuo Yu realized the truth, he could hardly suppress his happiness. He smiled and began to investigate the entire house.

 

 

From the entrance of the wooden house, Zhuo Yu could see many old wheelchair marks on the doorstep alone. The narrow wheel marks, if not carefully examined, would only be seen as natural wear and tear on the wooden floor.

 

 

At first, Zhuo Yu didn’t pay much attention to these places, but he had been in a wheelchair for too long. As long as he carefully distinguished them, he could see these discordant places.

 

 

And this wheel print was the same model as the wheelchair he was currently sitting on.

 

 

This was a clear clue. Zhuo Yu believed that the true owner of this cabin was the seemingly harmless “traveler”  himself.

 

Secondly, he also discovered a strange point when he had just entered.

 

This was a huge cabin, equipped with saws and axes, but he couldn’t find a small knife. He found nothing in the kitchen when searching for a fruit knife or dining knife that was beneficial for self protection, and ultimately had to use a fork.

 

This was also a detail that his teammates didn’t pay much attention to, but Zhuo Yu took it to heart.

 

 

After all, the traces of life in this cabin were very heavy, but the most commonly used knives and fruit knives by Westerners were missing, which seemed somewhat deliberate.

 

Zhuo Yu played with his sharpened fork, placed it in the grid space, and then found the room with the heaviest marks along with the wheelchair marks.

 

He tentatively identified the room with the large mural that looked like a storeroom as “his room.”.

 

 

Here, he made even more astonishing discoveries.

 

 

The room was piled up with debris and wooden boards, as well as broken furniture and animal bones. After trying to push aside these obstacles, Zhuo Yu did indeed find square indentations near the window, which were the wear and tear left by a four-pillar bed on the floor.

 

This used to be a bedroom.

 

And after removing the debris, some overly obvious signs of fighting immediately appeared.

 

 

The craters on the floor from a blunt object, the aged duct tape skimmed in the corner, the messy and desperate fingernail scratches… These clues were old, and Zhuo Yu was more inclined to say they were left fifty years ago than any other guess.

 

 

In the memory given by the system, the starting point for frequent disappearances here was exactly fifty years ago.

 

 

What exactly did this bedroom, or the traveler himself, encounter?

 

Zhuo Yu frowned and carefully examined the scratches on the floor. Suddenly, his head began to tingle.

 

Like time and space displacement, fragmented scenes came to mind, like fragmented films. Zhuo Yu felt surrounded by a group of people, with strong and powerful hands pressing down on his legs.

 

He struggled with all his might and kept saying something, but those people didn’t let him go. His ankles were tightly bound with tape, and he could only leave scratches on the floor with his hands in vain until his nails cracked and he couldn’t escape.

 

 

“Hurry up; we won’t have a chance when that monster comes back!”

 

“Hahaha, it’s really disgusting. Isn’t it that kind of relationship?”

 

The conversation was blurry, but their tones were full of malice.

 

Subsequently, the silver flashing axe and hammer made a sound of breaking the wind in Zhuo Yu’s ear, and with a click, a piercing pain swept through his body.

 

Zhuo Yu suddenly regained his senses, and cold sweat kept rolling down his forehead.

 

 

He stroked his legs, the phantom pain still lingering on them, telling him that what had just happened was not just his imagination but a real event that had happened to him.

 

The despair of powerlessness to resist, the anger of being harmed, and the longing of wanting to protect someone but never being able to see them again… Zhuo Yu, in all his years of living, felt such complex and strong emotions for the first time.

 

At this moment, he seemed to blend in with the traveler.

 

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TN:

 

We’re all caught up, onto the next chapter. See ya tooomorrow  ✌