Rules-related weird stories: 4016

Chapter 305: Sunken Ship, Castle, Sea, and… the Night Watchman

“Huh… something’s not right! That’s not a plank!”

Lin Yi widened his eyes, seeing that the object floated with a cold aura under the scattered light, resembling a rough, hard, yellowish-brown, large square stone more than a plank.

“Is it a stone?”

“Is it… that kind of stone?!”

Lin Yi was no stranger to this kind of stone; it was clearly the same large yellowish-brown stone block from the staircase passage in the art building!

The square yellowish-brown stone blocks, each about half a person's height, were piled at the bottom of the pool, having been there for an unknown amount of time.

It seemed that this place was formed after a certain passage was flooded. The stone walls seemed to be carved with abstract symbols and words, now covered by growing moss. The moss was like a thick green carpet, as if covering up history.

However, the sound of the iron chains did not disappear because of this. In the depths of that dark passage, that eerie figure still existed. It must be moving; otherwise, how could it drag such heavy-sounding iron chains?

It must be thick iron chains, like… the kind attached to ship anchors!

[Lin Yi… ]

[Come here… ]

[Come here… ]

The voice floated out from the darkness like a bubble, accompanied by a "glug glug" bubbling sound, like the last cry of someone about to drown.

Lin Yi shook his head violently.

A voice in his heart said, “Hallucination! It’s all a hallucination! This is just a swimming pool! Just a swimming pool!”

He swam upwards, passing through the area filled with floating light, getting closer and closer to the surface.

He seemed to see the lights on the surface of the water. The lights swaying in the ripples were like broken reflections of the moon, seemingly calling out to him.

Just as he approached the surface, he seemed to hear a sinister, sometimes near, sometimes far, eerie laughter behind his head…

[Ha… Hehehe hehe… ]

The next moment, he broke through the surface with a "Poof—!", his head emerging from the water!

“Huff, huff, huff…”

He tried hard to breathe in the fresh air, feeling the unique smell of the swimming pool in the air… Hmm?

Why… isn’t there the smell of a swimming pool?

There was a fishy smell in the air, along with a rotten stench. The surface of the water undulated, the waves not large, but the momentum was not small, pushing him along like a small boat.

“This… isn’t the swimming pool!”

This is…

“The sea?!”

“Splash—”

“Splash—”

“Splash—”

Black waves surged from the mist, one after another. There were also dense raindrops in the sky, falling like soybeans, hitting his cheeks and the skin exposed on the surface of the water with a burning pain, also completely blurring his vision through his swimming goggles.

He seemed to see endless mist, but he couldn't tell whether it was the mist on the sea surface, the water vapor on his goggles, or both.

He vaguely saw overlapping peaks, but he couldn't tell whether it was the appearance of the mist in the light and shadow, or a real coastline, or some kind of mirage.

[Lin Yi… ]

[Where are you going this time… ]

[Where are you going… ]

Intermittent calls came from the depths of the mist…

And within these sounds, there seemed to be another sound…

It was not human language, but a low moan mixed with painful storms, like the eerie syllables chanted by shamans of ancient tribes during rituals. It was also the full version of that sentence call that Lin Yi hadn't heard for a long time—

[I Avgru… Nnen av tKe… og mrke jaGer for… Tapte Sjeler… fanTome]

[fanTome… ]

[… fanTome… ]

[I Avgru… Nnen av tKe… og mrke… ]

Such sounds quickly overwhelmed the roar of the waves and the impact of the rain on the sea surface, turning into a torrent of sound waves, echoing under the gray mist wave after wave!

Lin Yi felt a surge of undercurrent beneath him. He looked down, and the water on his goggles actually allowed him to see the scene underwater clearly!

He saw a torrent of fish-like creatures in the deep water, making uneven calls and rushing in a certain direction.

He raised his head in that direction, and suddenly… his vision flickered at a terrible frequency.

A booming sound appeared in his mind, followed by his vision suddenly crossing an unknown distance, seeing a coastline!

Mountains rose and fell on the coastline, but there was only one cliff, as if it had been forcibly placed there.

Above the cliff, there was a magnificent castle.

The castle was shrouded in a storm, dense clouds obscuring the sky, leaving only a black sun, hovering like a roulette wheel above the side of the castle clock tower.

Before a certain cliff in the castle, a black figure like an iron tower, his windbreaker fluttering, carrying a green lamp, quietly looked at the gray mist that covered the sky.

The Night Watchman.

“‘Night Watchman’!”

Lin Yi naturally knew who that was, but seeing the Night Watchman in this “perspective,” seeing him standing alone in the endless darkness, standing alone before the castle, while feeling infinite respect, he also felt a sense of inexplicable sadness and sorrow.

It was as if the fate of the entire world was shouldered by the Night Watchman alone.

Just as he “saw” the Night Watchman, the Night Watchman also saw him.

At this moment, a cluster of scarlet-golden flames suddenly rose on the Night Watchman's faintly shrouded face, as if a golden sun had ignited the long night.

With just this one glance, Lin Yi felt that he was about to melt away. He wanted to turn his head, but found that he had no control over his body at all.

After staring at each other for a few seconds, Lin Yi felt that he could no longer see anything else. It seemed that only the Night Watchman's sun-like eyes remained in his eyes.

Suddenly, the Night Watchman’s tightly pursed and slightly downturned lips finally loosened. He slowly opened his mouth, and his deep, heavy, and majestic voice, like the sound of an ancient bell, crossed the shackles of time and space, forming a terrifying precept, shattering the waves and storms, and resounding over the gray mist sea:

“「De som jager lyset i tke blir til slutt fantomer！」”

He raised the green lamp, and thunder also tore through the night sky.

“Boom— crack!!!!”

The world seemed to be torn apart, and endless brilliance poured over like a flood.

In Lin Yi’s “lens,” he felt like his face was hit by a wave of Ultraman’s beam, and the whole world turned into a blinding white…

“Lin Yi… Lin Yi…”

“Lin Yi!”

He felt someone shaking his shoulder.

As the white light faded, his vision gradually returned.

He saw the brightly lit water surface and tiles, the softly lit incandescent lamps, and the buoy right in front of him.

The sound became clearer, and he turned his head to see Li Huiyuan's face, which was full of anxiety.

When he saw Li Huiyuan, a look of joy and tears immediately appeared on Li Huiyuan's face, and a layer of mist floated under her swimming goggles, it was unknown whether it was water vapor or water mist swirling in her eyes.

She exclaimed excitedly to the side: "Boss, boss, Lin Yi has come back to his senses!"

"Boss?" Lin Yi was stunned for a moment, and then he realized that the boss had unknowingly walked to the edge of the swimming pool next to him.

Seeing that he had regained his senses, the boss's eyes immediately returned to their cold appearance, and the remaining concern also disappeared.

"The 'Ashes' have been cleared all at once, but you have to explain to me exactly what happened this time." The boss said coldly on the shore, her cold eyes filled with unquestionable color.

Li Huiyuan also said: "Yes, Lin Yi, I just told you not to go to the deep water area, how did you swim here with a flick of your tail? I wanted to stop you, but you pushed me away!"

Her tone was very dissatisfied, but it still revealed a bit of worry. While she was talking, she also rubbed her… well, her chest.

Lin Yi's eyebrows twitched subconsciously.

Could it be…?

No way…?

I… have no impression at all!

But he couldn't care about thinking about these things and immediately fell silent as he looked at the buoy in front of him.

He was indeed in front of the buoy.

But… he wasn't on the shallow water side, but had come to the deep water side!

Li Huiyuan said: "You plunged down with a dive, and I waited for you for a long time without seeing you come up. When I was about to come down to see what was going on with you, you drilled out of the water again, but you had passed the buoy and reached the deep water area, and you were motionless like you had lost your soul. I thought you were possessed!"

"I…" Lin Yi's eyes flickered, and the scenes just now flashed through his mind.

The illusion of a sunken ship in the water…

The illusion of the submerged castle passage…

The illusion of the sea surface shrouded in storms and mist…

And… the illusion of facing the Night Watcher's eyes…

Moreover, he didn't know why, but his intuition told him that this time he didn't rely on his own strength to escape the illusion, but the Night Watcher shattered the illusion and sent him back to reality.

Or rather, it was because he made eye contact with the Night Watcher in the illusion that all the illusions around him were annihilated.

Then the question comes—what exactly is going on with the sunken ship, the castle, the sea…?

Could it be a Matryoshka doll-like illusion like Inception?

And the abyss! And that haunting figure locked in chains in the abyss!

Except for the sea at the end, where I didn't hear the sound of chains, the other layers of illusion seemed to be pierced by its sound!

And another key point is, what exactly is going on with him?

Why are the illusions becoming more and more frequent, and… appearing more and more smoothly, appearing without any warning?

Moreover, in the most recent illusion, he clearly knew it was an illusion, but it was as if his spirit had been hit by a hard control, as if an invisible force was holding him down in the illusion!

Could it be… the swimming pool?

"Hey, hey, hey, are you okay? I'm talking to you, why are you just spacing out?" Li Huiyuan reached out and waved in front of him again and again.

Lin Yi quickly came back to his senses.

The boss at the pool said: "If you're okay, come up first."

Lin Yi then climbed ashore and looked back at the swimming pool with lingering fear.

The pool water was very calm, with only a few ripples.

The surface of the water reflected the broken incandescent light and some LED lights, but there was no strange or uncomfortable feeling, as if nothing had happened.

"Boss, you just said… all the 'Ashes' in my body are gone?" Lin Yi looked at the boss.

Hey, hey, hey, do you have network lag? What about the things I said to you? Why don't you reply to me? Is the boss's words all that's on your mind? Li Huiyuan put her hands on her hips on the side, of course she didn't say these words out loud.

She could still tell what was important, so she compiled all these words with her eyes, but of course Lin Yi couldn't decipher them.

"That's right, a very strange phenomenon." The boss said, "Even though the 'Ashes' in your body were already almost gone, the last part shouldn't have been absorbed so cleanly all at once. What did you do?"

"Could it really be related to the Night Watcher?" Lin Yi muttered to himself.

"Night Watcher?" The boss narrowed her eyes. "What's going on?"

Lin Yi then explained the contents of the brand-new version of the illusion that had just appeared to him, including the final eye contact.

"Perhaps it's because of that eye contact," Lin Yi said.

The boss hesitated and said: "Illusions… after all, they are illusions. Those things are all things that your brain reflects. How can they be effective?"

Lin Yi was stumped by the question.

He suddenly longed for Tian Gongzi to be here.

If Tian Bufan were here, a more reasonable deduction could be made for this kind of question.

But he could only speculate to this level: "Could it be… that through some positional channel, I really made eye contact with the Night Watcher on some level?"

The boss's expression was a little unnatural: "I haven't heard of this kind of operation… Have you had such an experience before?"

"Uh… this is still the first time," Lin Yi admitted.

The boss fell silent.

After a moment, she shook her head slightly: "Then it's not for reference. But if there is such a situation in the future, you can write it down and look for the pattern."

"If that's the case, it might become your most powerful trump card."

"Okay… then I'll pay attention," Lin Yi scratched his head. Although what the boss said made him very excited, this thing was still uncertain. Even if it was true, there were too many coincidences.

"Also, you…" Just as she was speaking, the boss's body suddenly paused for no reason, and the words that came to her lips also stopped abruptly.

The boss seemed to sense something and cursed inwardly: "Not good!"

"What…" Lin Yi was about to ask when his heart also seemed to be grabbed fiercely, and his whole body trembled suddenly!

He saw that a layer of… mist had floated on the surface of the swimming pool at some unknown time!