"What do you mean? What is the 'Ghost Palace'?" Wang Tanzhi asked.

"Were you about to ask, 'Can I eat it?' next?" Feng Bujue said.

"I'm past the age of asking 'Can I eat it?' to deliberately act cute... and I'm being serious right now, okay!" Wang Tanzhi said.

"See for yourselves." Feng Bujue stood up, allowing Xiao Tan and Long Ge to see what he had been examining while crouching.

The two approached and discovered words on the wall, seemingly carved with a knife. The content was entirely in English, but players could see the translation by opening the game menu and observing.

It appeared to be a short English poem of some kind, which read:

【In the valley's emerald deep,
Where angels pause and vigil keep,
A palace once stood, fair and bright—
A glorious thing—that soared to light.

Within the realm of "Mind" it stood,
In towering, solemn solitude;
No six-winged angel e'er did soar
To fairer palace than before.】

"What does this even mean?" Wang Tanzhi asked, utterly confused after reading it.

"Maybe this article is called 'Ghost Palace,' and there are six sections in total?" Long Aomin guessed randomly.

They both thought... since Feng Bujue was around anyway, and that guy knew everything, they could just ask him. Unexpectedly, when they turned around, they found that the kid was gone...

"Brother Jue?" Wang Tanzhi looked around, then stepped to the side and looked up at the stairs leading to the second floor. "Where'd he go? He vanished without a trace?"

Long Aomin looked around as well but couldn't find him. He could only shrug helplessly and say, "He already said we should split up. He must have sneaked away while we were reading this poem."

Wang Tanzhi said, "Then let's go look for clues too. Anyway, Brother Jue said to come back here after the main quest changes."

Long Aomin nodded, and the two began to investigate the first floor, pushing open any doors they could and checking the rooms for the remaining sections of the "Ghost Palace" or other clues.

...

Inside the complex corridors on the first floor.

Two female players were advancing slowly and cautiously. Judging from their posture, it was clear they had already encountered some traps.

At this moment, Si Yu Ruo Li was holding a shiny long sword. Although it was only of ordinary quality, she had obtained the title [Ruthless Decapitator] with this ordinary weapon, which was enough to prove that she had something special about her.

Bei Ling Xiaogu did not take out any firearms. She and Feng Bujue had come to a similar conclusion: if this scenario was all about ghosts and traps, then guns would probably be useless.

"Eh?" Bei Ling, who was walking behind, suddenly paused and said a few seconds later, "Ha... they actually found a side quest."

Si Yu Ruo Li looked at the quest details and asked, "Should we also cooperate and look for this 'Ghost Palace'?"

"Hmm... we don't have to look for it deliberately, do we?" Bei Ling replied while thinking. "We don't even know what that is yet. Besides, we're already looking for clues."

"Then let's continue," Si Yu Ruo Li replied and continued forward.

...

On the second floor, Yongzhe Wudi was in a very large room. Like the living room, the windows in this room were long and narrow, located high up, some distance from the dark oak floor. The red glow shone through the window lattices, just enough to illuminate the more conspicuous objects in the room, but no one knew where the red light outside the window came from in the middle of the night...

Yongzhe Wudi strained his eyes but could not see the distant corners of the room or the coffered ceiling with swirling patterns. Of course, he didn't care about these details. What was the point of seeing them clearly? He just needed to know that there were no monsters hiding in the corners.

The surrounding walls were hung with dim tapestries, and all the furniture was large and unsuitable, old and dilapidated, and did not look comfortable at all. The scattered books and musical instruments did not add any vitality to the room. A sense of sorrow seemed to permeate the air, and a gloomy and depressing atmosphere floated everywhere, permeating everything.

After hearing the quest notification, Yongzhe Wudi glanced at the menu. His first reaction was that the two female players had discovered something in the mansion, triggering the side quest. He didn't think the other three noobs could have found it.

Although he wasn't good at solving puzzles, Yongzhe Wudi was still a professional player. If he couldn't reason, he still had game experience. He first roughly searched the room, trying to find equipment or consumables. Unfortunately, the only things in the room that he could pick up and swing were a wooden guitar and a broken violin. Using these fragile wooden objects to smash monsters was worse than fighting with his bare hands. The special ability granted by his title [Reckless Brawler] was to passively increase the damage of his fists.

Unable to find equipment, Yongzhe Wudi began to look for quest items. He didn't know what the "Ghost Palace" was, and he wasn't interested in picking up and reading all the books scattered on the floor. He simply walked towards the thing in the room that looked most like a clue—an envelope on the desk.

Everything else in the room that could be read was either dropped or piled on the floor, but this envelope was still on the desk, held down by an ink bottle.

When he picked up the ink bottle, Yongzhe Wudi noticed that some of the ink had soaked through the envelope, leaving a stain on it, and it had long since dried. He picked up the envelope, blew on it hard, and gently patted it a few times to dust it off before tearing it open, taking out the stationery, and starting to read.

The letter was incomplete, with many places obscured by ink stains, and many of the remaining parts were also blurry. The beginning and signature of the letter were not visible, but judging from the visible content, the letter should have been written by the owner of the house to a friend.

The writer said that he was suffering from a sudden illness due to some kind of "curse" and was tormented by mental derangement. He longed to see his best friend, his only confidant, and hoped that this friend could come and stay for a few days, which might improve his condition.

The lines of the letter did indeed reveal some signs of mental disorder. Some of the content was purely difficult to understand due to the writer's hand shaking or the disorganized sentences in his mind.

Although Yongzhe Wudi couldn't figure anything out, he still put the letter away to take with him. After scanning the room one last time, he turned and left.

...

In a dark stone tunnel.

The light of a flashlight suddenly lit up, illuminating a short section of the road ahead. As soon as Feng Bujue saw the scene in front of him, he muttered, "This house has serious problems... It's a Castlevania? Spatial distortion and teleportation?"

Actually, a few minutes ago, he didn't intentionally sneak away from behind Xiao Tan and Long Ge. He just walked to the other side of the wall in the living room and wanted to take a closer look at a painting hanging on the wall...