Chapter 2426: The Figure in the Mist
Xu Huo stopped washing the dishes and pointed at the window. "I just saw a figure walk past, but I haven't heard any knocking for a while."
Seeing his gesture, the woman's expression changed, and she quickly lowered her voice. "Don't speak!"
The other two people in the room also tensed up, warily rushing into the room to carry the two children out, covering their ears.
As Xu Huo and the Painting Woman looked on in confusion, a knock came at the door:
"Knock, knock, knock."
The rhythmic knocking repeated twice in succession. Xu Huo patted the woman's sleeve, pointed at the door again, and silently asked if she wanted to open it.
The woman pressed her lips tightly together, staring at him with sharp eyes, then shook her head vigorously.
Xu Huo obediently stood still. The knocking sounded once more, then fell into endless silence.
Only after these people relaxed did he ask, "Who was knocking just now? Is there someone... bad living here?"
He deliberately spoke vaguely, but the old woman understood his meaning. "It's not someone else. There are no bad people here. Even if there were, the bad ones wouldn't dare come out at night."
Xu Huo sat down at the table, adopting a posture of willingness to listen.
Over there, the Painting Woman shared two fruit candies with the children, who then pulled her to sit down and begged the old woman to tell a story.
The old woman finished her tea, chewed up all the tea leaves in the cup, and then began the tale passed down through generations.
"The Hidden Friend."
It was similar to what the game background introduction mentioned. Several generations ago, figures began to appear in the mist here. At first, everyone thought it was just their eyes playing tricks—after all, with thick fog and dense trees, it wasn't strange to see all sorts of bizarre things.
But gradually, as more and more people saw these figures, some of them suddenly disappeared. One today, one tomorrow. At first, no one suspected the figures, thinking they had simply gotten lost in the forest or been eaten by wild beasts—before the forest's mutation and evolution, quite a number of people lived here, and the woods weren't as dense or vast, nor were they as devoid of large predators as they were now.
It wasn't until later that someone personally witnessed another person being called away by "himself."
This is how it happened: Two people entered the forest to hunt, one after the other. They knew each other. The one behind caught up to the one ahead and wanted to invite him to travel together. But before he could speak, the person ahead suddenly raised a hand and waved into the distance, responding and calling out the name of the person behind him, shouting for him to wait and walk together.
At the time, the distance between them was only about ten meters. Although the person behind wasn't sure if there was really someone ahead, he could be certain that person was definitely not himself.
Under normal circumstances, the person behind would have just thought the one ahead had mistaken someone else or that an acquaintance was playing a joke. So he quickened his pace to catch up, intending to call out to the person ahead. But ahead was a thick fog, and before he had gone far, the person ahead had vanished. After shouting a few times with no response, he gave up.
The next day and the day after, the person ahead never returned. The one behind went back and asked mutual friends about their whereabouts that day, confirming it wasn't a friend's prank, and then he told his story.
By then, many people had seen figures in the forest calling out to them or greeting them. The number was too great to dismiss as mere visual tricks, so they devised a countermeasure.
Those who saw the figures were usually alone, so entering the forest required companionship. If someone greeted you, don't respond until you saw their face clearly. This worked for a while, but people grew unsatisfied with mere self-preservation and wanted to find out what had really happened to the missing.
So some began entering the mountains alone with equipment. None of them actually captured the "figures" on camera, but some disappeared along with their gear.
The story gradually spread, and authoritative agencies came to investigate and search. They eventually concluded that magnetic field disturbances caused visual and auditory hallucinations. As for the figures themselves, they saw nothing at all.
After several such incidents, experts jokingly called these figures "The Hidden Friend."
At that time, this place was still a fairly large town. Despite the legend, most people didn't live in the forest, and at worst, they simply avoided it. So relocation wasn't considered—until a plant mutation occurred. In an extremely short time, a massive number of mutated plants surged from the forest, engulfing the town along with two nearby major cities.
At that time, aside from those who had gone out for work, all the original residents of these cities died, not even a single corpse found.
Perhaps because of this tragic disaster, many of the residents who had been outside began experiencing hallucinations, always seeing figures in the mist calling out to them. In fact, the fog originating from this mutated forest had already begun spreading to the surrounding areas.
Originally, this matter would have ended with some people being admitted to psychiatric hospitals. But then mutations occurred in other regions as well. Human living spaces shrank repeatedly, and the safe zones established new rules. Some people who couldn't protect themselves were abandoned—not directly driven out, but given the beautiful name of being sent out to explore.
Some of these abandoned people survived in the undeveloped areas and even built cities here.
But with so many mutated plants, after repeated destruction and reconstruction, the people living here had no choice but to use local materials. They lacked resources and talent, and few players appeared among their descendants. So they struggled to survive.
"Being able to live in this forest is a great fortune for us," the old woman said. "At least there are no mutated beasts here. The Hidden Friend... we don't need that kind of friend."
From the experience of those living nearby, their methods were enough for self-preservation. But the old woman's story mentioned that "The Hidden Friend" sometimes changed its methods of finding friends. In the past, it only appeared in the mountains and forests, but no one knew when it started appearing outside houses. Sometimes it even imitated outsiders. Just now, when Xu Huo and the others knocked, "The Hidden Friend" might have imitated him to knock.
The knocking just now was just a trigger Xu Huo had set off, but someone really did come knocking—most likely a player doing the instance.
However, "The Hidden Friend" had existed for such a long time, yet none of the instance data near the Better Tomorrow Station mentioned it. It was simply classified as a strange anecdote.
Surely not every player who entered the instance failed to come out alive?
"It's getting late. You should rest early. The children's room has been prepared," the old woman said. The story finished, the two children had fallen asleep contentedly in their parents' arms. The old woman was also a bit tired, but she still instructed, "If someone calls out from outside tonight, don't answer."