Ch. 37 - The Haunting Graves in the Fog

The forest, already gloomy enough, now felt bone-chillingly cold. Cold wind swept through them, making their bodies shiver.

Worse still was the creeping dread that they’d been exposed—that the ghost wife might already know.

“Everyone calm down…if the ghost wife really knew for sure, she wouldn’t be testing us—she’d be straight up killing us right now,” Su Yuening said, sensing the panic bubbling up.

Sun Qian thought it through for a moment and nodded: “Exactly. If she’s not attacking yet, then she’s only suspicious. If we just reply with something like, ‘Dear, what are you talking about? I never painted any Dreamscape,’ we might get away with it.”

“But…what if the painting does exist?” Xu Bing said, voice tight. “If it does, and we didn’t find it…aren’t we fully exposed then?”

Sun Qian’s face tensed. “Yeah, that’s possible. But we went through every painting in the stash. Every single one—except Dreamscape. If it really exists, where the hell did it vanish to?”

Once again, they all fell silent, tangled up in the same deadlock.

Does Dreamscape exist or not? They couldn’t tell. 

Is the ghost wife probing them, or did she already see through them? They couldn’t tell that either.

One wrong word in the reply, and they’d be finished. It felt like they’d come full circle, right back to the edge of the same cliff.

So how could they respond to this letter? How could they dodge the ghost wife’s suspicion, when they didn’t even know if the painting was real—and slip past her with half-truths she wouldn’t catch?

It was a nightmare puzzle.

“…No matter what, let’s get out of here first. Xilin is too damn dangerous.” Su Yuening shivered as she looked at the darkening sky. Something about this place felt more and more off.

“She’s right. Back to Lin Yuan’s cabin first. We’ll figure out the reply there,” Sun Qian agreed at once.

Between the ghost wife’s looming suspicion and this twisted forest, neither was good news, but they could only fight one at a time.

They packed up Lin Yuan’s paintings to bring it back. Money, shovels—they left those behind. Too heavy, and right now speed was worth more than loot.

But this time, luck didn’t stick to them like it had on the way in. Without them realizing it, white mist began to swirl through the deep forest. The fog thickened fast, blurring everything ahead.

“Stay close. Don’t get separated,” Sun Qian barked, forcing everyone to bunch up tight.

Bai Wan’s brow furrowed when he saw the rolling mist. His sister’s warning came back to him, clear as a bell:

“Grandpa said once, a hunter went into the grove to hunt. A fog rolled in. He got lost, and ended up somewhere full of gravestones—like the living world had vanished and he’d stepped into the land of the dead.”

His eyes flicked through the fog, tensing up.

What they were facing now was eerily similar to what the hunter had encountered back then. Was that lurking danger in the forest about to emerge?

He glanced at his Mushroom Shop timer. Half an hour more—just thirty minutes, and the Large Sunshine Mushroom would arrive.

He just needed to hold on until then. With it, he’d have one more trump card to face whatever horror crawled out of this forest’s belly.

…

Xu Bing pressed closer to the group, her eyes scanning every shadow through the haze.

She’d always hated crowds, always hated being forced together—but now she stuck to the others like glue. The irony almost made her laugh.

She’d been an outcast since school, preferring empty classrooms and quiet corners. The day she first found that black invitation on her library desk, she’d barely cared. Her life was so dull she’d just thought: Fine. If I die, I die.

But inside this hellish game, she realized she’d been wrong. 

She didn’t want to die. She was terrified of dying. She wanted to live—even if it meant crawling back to that suffocating old classroom, she’d take it in a heartbeat.

So she glued her eyes to her teammates’ backs, following them like a shadow. As long as she stayed with them, she’d live.

But then—a flicker of doubt.

Her eyes narrowed. Something felt wrong. Why was it so quiet?

Too quiet. Tense, sure—but this quiet? Not a single whisper, not a single breath.

Too quiet. It was like the whole forest had been stripped of sound.

A chill ran up her spine, she pushed her steps faster, trying to catch up to the figures in front of her.

But as she closed the distance, the figures… dissolved and vanished. Her heart clenched tight. She froze, then spun around.

Gone.

Everyone was gone.

She turned again—the trees were wrong, unfamiliar. The markings were gone too. 

She had fallen behind.

She’s now alone.

Xu Bing’s mind raced, her eyes darting around the blank white void.

I’m lost!

The forest pressed in. She sucked in a cold breath, and then a rustle in the brush snapped her head to the side. Something moved—or maybe not. The moment she focused on it, the sound melted away.

Then her pulse hammered so violently she could hear it roaring in her ears. A heartbeat so loud it drowned out her thoughts.

THUMP THUMP THUMP! THUMP THUMP THUMP!

She could barely force her lips to move: “Wha…wh…who’s there?”

Her heartbeat only got louder—not slowing at all, pounding like thunder right next to her eardrums.

THUMP THUMP THUMP!

Her breath caught, panic clawed up her throat. She yanked a black finger out of her pocket—her strongest item, a severed entity’s finger from her last dungeon.

It dripped blood the moment it touched the air, thick drops splattered to the dirt, and her paranormal coins started burning away.

But then, the blood stopped. Dried up. The finger turned cold and dead in her hand, useless.

Xu Bing’s face went ghostly pale. She knew what that meant—whatever was in this forest was so far beyond her that her prized artifact might as well be trash.

“This can’t be right… Even if the finger wasn’t enough to hold off what’s in this dungeon—gone in just a second—how—”

The heartbeat was deafening now.

When she looked up again, the mist had parted to reveal a graveyard. Tombstones jutted out of the earth like rotten teeth, stretching on and on—and somewhere in that sea of stone, she heard faint sobbing.

Something ice-cold clamped around her ankle.

“AHHH—!”

Her scream split the trees—then cut off in an instant.

Xu Bing vanished without a trace.

…

Back on the trail, Sun Qian and the others jolted at the echo of her scream.

Earlier, as they were walking, they suddenly realized Xu Bing had vanished at some point and most likely met a grim end. The scream confirmed it—she was gone.

“This fog is cursed… Everyone, st—” Sun Qian tried to bark out a warning, but the words died in his throat.

His own heart slammed against his ribs.

THUMP THUMP THUMP!

The rest froze—they all felt it too.

Another heartbeat warning. Whatever hiding in Xilin was about to show itself.

“RUN!”

Sun Qian’s shout tore through the forest. They bolted—but Bai Wan, glancing back, stiffened.

Through the swirling mist, more tombstones were surfacing out of nowhere. His pulse raced even faster, like a drumbeat of dread.

It’s here.

The worst horror in Xilin is coming.

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