Fantasy Game: Infinite City

"I'm in trouble this time."

One hour later, at Hoshimi Shrine.

A small group of people gathered here, looking around and occasionally communicating with each other. Their expressions were very unnatural, and it seemed that they did not come here on their own initiative.

"Qiu Ning, just now..."

"Yeah, I saw it too, so I said, I'm in trouble this time."

A man wearing jeans and basketball shoes, a black shirt, but with a bulletproof vest on the outside, replied to his companion and wiped the sweat from his forehead. His name is Liu Qiuning, one of the few players in Infinite City who uses his real name to play. Similarly, he is a star player.

The person who was talking to Liu Qiuning was a mixed-race person. Everyone called him Jerome. He was a tall and thin man wearing a magician's tuxedo, but with a woolen hat.

"Liu Qiuning? Jerome? Are you two the same?"

"Su Wen? You too?"

"Well, I just entered the Infinite City and someone pulled me in with the leaves of the World Tree. It seems someone is in big trouble and pulled so many people in."

Su Wen was wearing a very revealing robe with many runes engraved on it and a bone necklace around her neck. She looked like a female shaman doing a marginal live broadcast.

"Wow! What a coincidence! You three are here too?"

A charming man wearing ancient Persian Immortal Army armor came over and started talking to the three people. This man gave himself the nickname Xerxes, the same name as a Persian king. Of course, he was indeed a Persian, but he spoke fluent Dragon language.

The four of them knew each other, not just because they were all star players, but also because their levels were similar, so they would occasionally be matched together. After a while, they became familiar with each other.

"This team is great! They have control, assassins, and mages. I'm in the front row, and the only thing missing is a healer and a shield."

"Um... I don't know if I can do it?"

The four turned around and saw a person dressed in the uniform of a battle sister, carrying a gorgeous two-handed sword.

"Meng Rou?! You came in too? Aren't you...?"

"I had just completed my job transfer quest, and the countdown to the end of the dungeon hadn't finished yet, but I was pulled in."

Meng Rou also joined the team. The five of them briefly exchanged information and found out that all five of them were pulled here by someone using the leaves of the World Tree.

And based on how to use the leaves of the World Tree, the person who called them here should be someone who knows the five of them.

"But that's not entirely true. In a sense, the five of us are considered 'celebrity players'. I wouldn't say there are many people who know us, but there are quite a few. It's possible that we're just passers-by."

"Let's take a look at the surrounding information first. As long as we clear the dungeon, we will receive a prompt from the system and know who pulled us in."

"Where are the others? Aren't there five or six people besides us just now?"

"Strange, it was here just now... Hey! Come over here and take a look!"

Xerxes was standing at the outermost of the five people. He noticed something unusual. He found that there were some more marks at the place where he stood at the beginning, like the marks of some heavy objects being dragged.

"Judging from the depth of the marks, whatever was being dragged could not have made no sound, and Xerxes was the closest, so it is impossible that he did not hear it."

Su Wen squatted down, grabbed a handful of dirt on the traces, and gave her own thoughts. From her observation, these traces should have appeared just now.

"Let me see, backtrack!"

Jerome took out a tarot card, threw it on the trace, snapped his fingers, and some shadows began to appear in the air.

"Skill name: Backtrack"

"Skill effect: Shows a past shadow with pictures and sounds"

"Skill range: 10 meters"

"Cooling time: 200 seconds"

"Skill Description: Tarot cards with mysterious powers allow you to take a brief peek into the past. The length of time you can look back is related to your magic power. The longer you look back, the more magic power you will consume."

The shadows in the air quickly reorganized and turned into the scene three minutes ago. The five people saw that the five or six people around them were suddenly broken their necks silently by something and fell to the ground.

But just before they hit the ground and made a sound, something seemed to catch their bodies and quickly but quietly dragged their bodies away, dragging them to a house far away from the five people.

"Either some invisible enemy, or... a ghost."

"It's not easy to do this, no matter what it is, it can be done quietly a few meters behind us. How do you explain it?"

Su Wen folded his hands across his chest, rubbed his chin with his index finger, and after thinking for a while, he gave his suggestion.

"Maybe we should investigate that room. Those people were dragged there, it must not be a random incident."

The other four people nodded, agreed with Su Wen's idea, took out their weapons, prepared for battle, and quickly approached the room.

The house was a typical Fuso-style building. Standing in front of the sliding door, the five people saw that on the single-layer wooden sliding door were some talismans written in Fuso characters. Through systematic translation, the five people learned that this should be a key step in sealing the barrier. However, there were some burnt talismans scattered on the ground, and it seemed that the barrier had been destroyed.

After opening the door, I saw several pairs of clogs neatly arranged under the table at the entrance. The ropes on the clogs looked badly worn, and they must have been worn by their owners for a long time.

"Qiu Ning, should we take off our shoes?"

Among the five people, only Liu Qiuning and Jerome wore shoes, Su Wen and Meng Rou were barefoot, and Xerxes wore Persian-style gold chains on his feet.

"You'd better take it off. There may be some kind of rules in this house."

Liu Qiuning and Jerome took off their shoes and put them together. The five of them stepped onto the stage together, walked to the entrance hall, and entered the corridor inside the house.

Although the architectural style of the house is traditional Fuso style, there are some differences. This house is not as narrow as traditional Fuso buildings. Instead, it is very spacious, even enough for five people to walk side by side.

"No, the size of the house we saw outside just now can't be this big."

"Yes, this corridor is wide enough for the five of us to walk side by side. But just now, when I looked outside, this house is only about 100 square meters. There is no way there is such a wide corridor."

"Everyone, be careful. Don't act alone. This is probably a dungeon with special rules. If you have any information, you must communicate with each other as soon as possible."

The five people changed their marching formation. Xerxes, who was in the front row, stood at the front, Meng Rou, who could provide treatment for the team, stood in the middle of the team, Liu Qiuning and Su Wen stood on the left and right of Meng Rou, and Jerome stood at the end of the team, forming a cross-shaped queue.

"Snapped."

"Click."

There was a sudden noise behind them. Jerome, who was at the end of the team, saw that the door they came in through closed automatically, and a fire quickly started from the bottom. However, the fire was small and tightly wrapped around the door.

As the flames burned quickly, the door that was used to enter suddenly disappeared.

"The exit is gone. We should have entered the barrier."

Liu Qiuning said something, and just as he finished speaking, the room suddenly fell into pitch-black darkness, and in the darkness there was a noisy sound of the wall moving. Meng Rou took out a gorgeously carved lantern, which emitted a holy light, illuminating the dark space.

Under the light, the five people saw the changes around them. The walls of the house became dilapidated. Through the gaps in the walls, they could see all the furnishings. Almost all of them were very old and looked weathered, at least several decades old.

The whole house exuded the smell of rotting and damp wood, mixed with some other unknown smells. Almost all the walls and ceilings were covered with all kinds of weird and illogical dirt. But the strange thing was that the dirt was not dried blood as the five people expected, but something unknown.

"This feeling... is very uncomfortable."

Meng Rou releases a buff aura, which dispels abnormal states and increases the team's energy recovery speed.

"How about it?"

"Nothing has changed. It's probably not an abnormal state. I just feel very uncomfortable. How are you?"

After Liu Qiuning asked other people, he found that only Su Wen was better. It might be because Su Wen's job required frequent contact with souls, so he developed a certain resistance.

"It seems that there should be special rules in this barrier that can cause harm to the soul. Be careful."

I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or someone did it on purpose, but Liu Qiuning, Jerome, Su Wen, Xerxes, and Meng Rou all have more or less methods or weapons and equipment to attack the soul, but they have very few methods or equipment to defend against attacks at the soul level.

After walking forward for a few minutes, a wall appeared in front of us, a cement wall with wallpaper that was out of place with the wooden building. The wallpaper was mottled with traces of time, which might be one of the few places inside the building that was not damaged by dirt.

The corridor splits into a T-shaped fork in front of the wall, leading to the left and right sides respectively. On the wall in front are several photo frames hung from left to right. On them are some elderly people wearing traditional Japanese costumes, both men and women, who should be the successive owners of this building.

There was a table in front of the wall. One of the legs of the table was broken, but because the table was close to the wall, it did not collapse. There were some candles and bowls on the table. There was some rotten rice in the bowls, and there was a lot of incense ash.

There was also a broken photo frame on the table. The style of the frame was similar to those hanging on the wall, but the photo inside was of a young woman who looked to be in her early 20s. And unlike the other frames, the photo inside was in color.

"There wasn't much dust on the frame, so it must have been moved recently, but I didn't see any nails to hang it on."

As one of the characteristics of his profession, Jerome had very good eyesight. In the relatively dim environment, he used the light of the lantern to look high up on the wall and found that there were no extra nails or holes on it, nor were there any signs of photo frames hanging on it.

"Then why is this photo frame here? Qiu Ning, take a look at this photo frame and see if there is anything special about it."

Meng Rou moved the lantern closer, and Liu Qiuning picked up the broken photo frame. The outside of the frame was normal, and there was nothing special about it except that it was a little damaged.

Turning the photo frame over, opening it, and taking out the photo, everyone discovered that there was a small key on the back of the photo, which was used to open the old-fashioned long padlock. Liu Qiuning handed the key to Xerxes, who had the highest defense among the five people present.

They took out the photo, turned it over, and with the light of the lantern, the five people carefully observed the contents of the photo. The young woman in the photo was not very beautiful, but had a cold temperament, but an unnatural smile on her face.

She was holding a kitten in her arms. The cat looked very abnormal, with its back hunched and teeth bared, its hair standing up, and it was staring in one direction, looking frightened.

The cat has a small bell on its neck, and there should be something written on the bell, but the cat was probably moving around a lot, so it's hard to tell what was written on it. There's another strange thing about the woman in the photo, she has her eyes closed. Generally speaking, such an error is not possible in such an important photo, so it must have been done on purpose.

After looking at the photo over and over again and finding no other information on it, Liu Qiuning put the photo back into the frame. Just as he was about to put the restored frame back to its original place, he discovered that there seemed to be a line of small words engraved on the table where the frame had originally been.

However, before the five people could see the words clearly, different songs were heard from the forks on the left and right. In the corridor leading to the left, traditional Fusang songs were heard, which gave off a very strange feeling in the dim environment.

The corridor on the right is relatively better. You can hear old jazz music and the faint sound of vinyl records rubbing against each other, which sounds like it comes from a phonograph.

The two completely different songs did not mix together into a noisy noise, but were independent of each other and were not affected by each other at all.

"What do you mean? Which way?"

"The left side should be a person singing. According to the tone of this area, there will probably be a fight if we go over there. The right side should be the sound of a phonograph. It should be relatively safer than the left side. I suggest you go to the right side."

"But I think we can't rule out the possibility that the right side is a bait. It may be the opposite of what we thought. The left side may be a relatively safe position."

The five people discussed it for a while but couldn't come to any conclusion. After everyone exchanged their ideas, they found that what everyone said made sense and was possible.

"Let's vote. There are exactly five of us, so there won't be a tie. I choose the right side." Su Wen chose the fork on the right.

"I choose the left." Liu Qiuning chose the left fork which might be relatively dangerous.

"I vote on the left, too." Jerome chose to support his friend.

"I choose the right side. My defense against soul-type attacks is relatively average." Xerxes chose the fork on the right.

"It's a tie at the moment. Looks like it's up to Meng Rou to decide which side we go on."

Meng Rou did not rush to confirm, but released a skill. A ball of light appeared in front of her, then quickly sank into the ground, forming an arrow.

"Skill Name: Divine Guidance"

"Skill Effect: Shows a safer route"

"Skill range: five meters"

"Skill description: Choose the lesser of two evils"

"I choose the right."

Meng Rou looked at the flashing arrow on the ground pointing to the right and made her own choice.

"Then it's decided. We'll go to the right."

The five people gathered together and moved cautiously towards the corridor on the right. None of them was a rookie, and in this situation, acting in a group was the right choice. As for the route, it was actually not important because both routes would be completed sooner or later.

Following the direction of the jazz music, the five people soon arrived outside a room. Compared with other places inside the building, this room seemed normal except that it was a little dilapidated.

Through the hole in the wooden wall, Jerome found an old-fashioned phonograph against the wall of the tatami mat. It was playing a vinyl record, and occasionally he could hear the friction sound between the vinyl record and the phonograph needle.

"This is the room. Let's go in and take a look?"

"Ah."

Gently opening the door, five people cautiously walked into the room and approached the phonograph.