Chapter 95

Judging from the title, it seemed to have been written by a believer temporarily staying at the church.

Jiang Liu blew the dust off it and sat down somewhere to examine it carefully.

The notebook’s owner was a coachman who had come to this town to take a wealthy young lady to a manor for leisure. Unexpectedly, after arriving, news spread that someone in the town had contracted a terrible disease. Upon hearing the news, the young lady hastily left with her servants, leaving most of her staff behind.

The coachman was one of those left behind. He was not a resident of the town and had no assets, so he had no choice but to seek temporary shelter at the church.

Regarding the origin of this disease, he wrote as follows.

“After Miss Salita left, many nobles in Sliben Town also left in a hurry. When I arrived the day before yesterday, there were still many pedestrians on the street, but now every household has its doors tightly shut. A farmer told me that things are about to change here.”

Just as Jiang Liu and the others had learned, the disease spread very quickly, paralyzing the entire town in just two days. The coachman, afraid of becoming one of them, began to pray daily with the church.

“Many people come to pray. This church has become the spiritual sanctuary for the residents of Sriben. I recite scriptures and pray with them every day, but I can never find peace in my heart. It must be because they won’t let me near the Holy Wall! Heavens! Although I am an outsider, I should be treated fairly, shouldn’t I?”

The so-called Holy Wall in the notebook referred to the innermost wall of the main hall. The coachman saw many people gathering to pray at the wall every day and suspected they were being exclusive, holding a deep resentment about it.

One evening, he heard the coming and going believers say how many more people had fallen ill. Finally, he could bear it no longer. When no one was looking, he came to the Holy Wall to pray, but unexpectedly—

“Heavens, I must have witnessed a miracle.”

This was the final entry in his notebook. There were no further records after that.

“A miracle?” Zhao Ziming scoffed at this. “Isn’t this kind of thing just for psychological comfort?”

Jiang Liu didn’t speak. She casually handed the notebook to Tang Rui and stood up, following the record in the notebook to find the innermost wall.

As she approached, she suddenly frowned, pushed aside the chair in front of her, and leaped over.

The area was too empty, and the distance made it hard to spot any irregularities. But now that she was close, she realized that the entire white wall was covered with countless words.

They weren’t written with conventional pen and paper. The marks looked more like words forcefully carved into the wall with a sharp object, layer upon layer, the messy handwriting intertwined, making the entire wall mottled and broken.

“I pray—” she muttered, staring at the nearest few words, but because the marks overlapped with other writings, the following words were blurry and indecipherable.

Looking at the words “I pray,” a bold idea arose in Jiang Liu’s mind: could this have been carved by the patients?

“My goodness, how many years did it take to get like this?” Zhao Ziming saw Jiang Liu standing there in a daze and patted Jiang He, signaling him to go over and see. As he got closer, he froze in astonishment.

The upper part was fine, as few people could reach it, but the area around his waist was a disaster zone for the entire wall. Some marks were already deep enough to hide things in.

“Did these people write this while kneeling?” Jiang He scratched his head, gesturing to his own height. He felt that this angle looked very much like someone kneeling on the ground and looking up.

Jiang Liu squatted on the ground without a word, her hand gently brushing over the marks. Her fingertips were stained with some white powder. She suddenly turned to look at Zhao Ziming and said out of the blue, “I’ve been to this instance before.”

“Huh?” Zhao Ziming was startled. His first reaction was to pull Jiang Liu back, afraid that this wall could actually corrode people’s minds.

Jiang Liu speechlessly slapped his hand away and continued to ask, “Do you remember how Hou Yuqiang described it back then?”

Zhao Ziming stared at her for a long time, then stroked his chin and slowly recalled, “I think he said that the people who came here to pray, after they left, all—”

It had been a while since they left the photo studio, and those memories were already blurry. Zhao Ziming could only rack his brain to reconstruct the scene, speaking with some hesitation.

“All died,” Jiang Liu finished his sentence and continued, “But strangely, the families of the deceased never sought to investigate the matter. Even knowing that people would die, people still came to pray every day.”

Prompted by her, the memories in Zhao Ziming’s mind gradually resurfaced. He added uncertainly, “Later, because the death rate was too high, it was forced to be demolished despite objections, right?”

Jiang Liu hummed in agreement, a glimmer of light flashing in her eyes.

She thought she understood the crux of the problem.

The church trip in her dream was from many years ago when it was still revered. What Hou Yuqiang experienced was its decline. Now, today, what they were seeing was the stage of its revival after its decline, only to be overthrown again.

The question was, if you knew you would die after praying, why would you still come?

Jiang Liu repeatedly deduced in her mind and could only come to one conclusion—

That you knew in your heart that this prayer could be granted.

As soon as this idea was proposed, it was immediately refuted by Zhao Ziming. “Not likely.”

He affirmed Jiang Liu’s logic, but this conclusion was absolutely impossible. “As far as I know, there are indeed a few instances in the system that can grant wishes, but there must be certain rules and restrictions.”

After all, you can’t just wish for something, say you want to leave the system and return to reality, and then just say bye-bye the next second, right? The system itself wouldn’t allow such a thing to exist.

Jiang Liu wasn’t very knowledgeable about this. She frowned at him and said, “The price was their lives, doesn’t that count?”

Zhao Ziming’s expression was a bit strange. He gritted his teeth and chose his words carefully, trying to describe it to Jiang Liu. “Sis, in an instance, a human life is the least valuable thing. Although I can’t put my finger on it, the ‘wish’ seems a bit exaggerated. Even if it can really be granted, there must be some other side effects.”

He had never experienced such an instance himself, only heard people talk about the underlying logic. Now, he was stammering and couldn’t explain it clearly, which made him frown in frustration.

On the other hand, Jiang He, who had been listening for a while, suddenly asked a seemingly unrelated question. “Sis, what do you think this wall looks like?”

What could a wall look like?

Jiang Liu and Zhao Ziming stopped thinking and looked at Jiang He in unison.

He had had contact with Hou Yuqiang. Although his attention was focused on the photo that trapped Zhang Xiaochen in the photo studio at the time, he had still heard a few of their words.

Recalling it now, he felt it was a bit strange.

“Hou Yuqiang said they were trapped in a room and met a mysterious NPC.”

When Jiang He was thinking, his expression was very focused, and his hands gestured up and down. “We’ve seen the guest rooms upstairs. Except for the one Sister Yang is staying in, the others are all narrow single rooms. It would be a squeeze even for the four of us, right?”

Without waiting for Jiang Liu’s answer, he continued on his own, “Four grown men squeezed in there, where would another person even stand? Do you think that NPC could have been on the wall?”

Jiang Liu subconsciously fiddled with her ring twice and gave a puzzled answer. “You mean, a screen?”

Jiang He quickly clapped his hands, his eyes shining as he looked at her with admiration. “Something like that. But I mean, could this wall be like that photo, with a space inside hiding something?”

Jiang Liu pressed her lips together and didn’t answer for a long time.

She walked away and gestured at the wall a couple of times, a new idea suddenly sparking in her mind.

Whether there was a space inside or not wasn’t important, because the female NPC—that is, herself—couldn’t have appeared inside wearing her work uniform. But Jiang He’s words had reminded her.

What if it was a projection? A wall and an image, isn’t that a perfect match?

She vaguely remembered Hou Yuqiang mentioning that a young girl in his group had talked about it being related to something parallel, or time.

Could this be a prophecy wall?

Her younger self had seen the future of many years later here, foreseen her and Yang Caisi’s fate a century later, and that’s why she had chosen later players through some method to arrange for them to meet her again.

“Sister Jiang! Come and see this!”

As Jiang Liu was pondering the possibilities, she suddenly heard a loud shout from Tang Rui, who hadn’t spoken for a long time, instantly drawing everyone’s attention.

Tang Rui hadn’t joined the crowd. Instead, he squatted on the ground, engrossed in reading the notebook. He had originally intended it as a way to pass the time and look for clues, but he had actually found something.

The first few pages of the notebook recorded the coachman’s past, which Jiang Liu had skimmed over. Now, Tang Rui had found it again and pointed to a page, saying, “Look here.”

The line of text was written when the coachman had just arrived in Sriben. It contained a lot of local customs and looked very tedious and dull. The line pointed out by Tang Rui read—

“The guard couple in town is very interesting. Mrs. Qiaose looks tall and sturdy, able to swing a hammer with one hand. In contrast, Mr. Qiaose is thin and weak, almost shorter than my youngest son at home. Although they don’t seem to match, their relationship is harmonious and very enviable.”

Tang Rui couldn’t help but hold his breath. “Could this Qiaose be the one we know?”

The name and position were the same, but what they had seen was the complete opposite of what the coachman had said.

“If it’s the same person, how did they become like they are now?”

Jiang He recalled the scene of being chased and beaten by Anna and couldn’t help but shiver. He thought that if he had been chased by a strong, muscular woman, his face wouldn’t have looked so pale at the time.

“Is there more?” Jiang Liu couldn’t help but look at Tang Rui.

“There’s another paragraph, on this page.” Tang Rui quickly turned the page and pointed to the next two sentences, reading them aloud. “Today, I ran into the Qiaose couple at the church. After a few words of small talk, he comforted me not to worry about the disease, and that I would be able to go home soon.”

Jiang Liu’s expression finally showed some fluctuation. She stared at this line for a long time and came to a firm conclusion. “Qiaose lied to us.”

He had said that he had never been to the church, so he wasn’t sick.

What reason did Qiaose have to hide the truth?

Or was it because he had been to the church that he had become so different from before, and was healthy?