A Gamble
Translated by boilpoil
Edited by boilpoil
Fei is so anxious she could faint.
This is already the fourth time she’s experiencing this village that came out of nowhere.
Each cycle is so utterly long and draining, repeatedly filling her with hope and shattering her into hopelessness by dropping her into inevitable doom.
If everything just keeps repeating, and her failure just keeps repeating, then what’s the point of restarting it all?
Simply to experience more failure?
Just as Mu Jiashi was in his previous scene, Fei hasn’t realised at all that she can leave this scene;
She is stuck thinking about how to resolve it, not finding a way to escape this…
This is a conservative village rather out of touch with modern society. The people living here are still getting by with traditional subsistence agriculture.
They farm for their daily necessities, supplemented by hunting and gathering.
The younger generation of the village has largely left the rural life behind, accepting the modern way of living and thought.
Something must have gone wrong in the process, as the village only turned more and more xenophobic as a result.
According to the clues Fei has gathered the few cycles, it is likely because, one of the children that has left the village, thought his home village was a matter of ridicule and disdain which lowered his standing among his fellow students, so in a fit of rage, he chose to cut off ties with his parents and relatives entirely.
Since he departed, he never came back again.
For such a conservative and closed-off village, it is quite the burden to support a child studying abroad. They have everything they need in this small place, but when they leave it behind, they realise all too tragically how much they are unable to adapt to modern life.
So with the latest incident of that child they now call the ‘traitor,’ the village elder sorrowfully and angrily proposed for all children to stay and never go to school anymore. They live well enough off the land.
They would become their own Shangri-La.
However, there are still a few of the children who were the same generation as the traitor and studying outside.
The village decided that if they wanted, and their parents agreed, then the elder would turn a blind eye on their continued studying, but he still demanded that they must return to the village after graduating, otherwise, they’ll disown them.
Fei finds the xenophobia difficult to comprehend, but she is treating this as a dream, as somewhere fictional, so she would not think too much about the essence of how this thought came to be.
She is more focused on how to resolve her current predicament.
She is supposed to be a fellow university undergraduate student of those children that went to school outside the village; the remaining children applied to the same university during the Gaokao, and kept close to each other during their studies.
A student of theirs was curious about their rural upbringing, so after she graduated with them, she asked to join them as they returned to the village, as a sort of graduation trip, to experience life here a little.
The children, now adults already, are also keeping their promise of returning to the village to live out their lives with their relatives and parents.
With that, the elder was happy, and also approved of Fei, and some other students that were curious, to come visit.
They rented a whole minivan to all arrive at this isolated village.
While the village is xenophobic to what they perceive as toxic outside influences, the villagers, especially the parents of the children, warmly welcomed these fellow university undergraduates of their children who were here to experience their way of life.
The trip went smoothly as well. They tried their hands at farming, hunting, looking for edibles in the forest, tending to farm animals, etc.
They were quite happy with what was basically a village-sized farming trip. They would have had a great time just hanging out with their friends who were familiar with life in the village, not to mention they were also receiving warm hospitality from the others in the village.
The trip is supposed to be for a week. The first five days came and went without incident. However, it was the sixth day when something changed.
Or rather, many idiosyncrasies of the trip and the village were already changing.
The students visiting from the outside world simply failed to take notice.
Well, more accurately, they themselves, were also changing, becoming part of the danger.
——They have, supposedly, brought madness to this isolated village.
Just as it was the last few times, Fei finds herself standing alone on the evening of the sixth day. She knows that, a short while later, her identity’s ‘fellow student’ would be here to call on her, to partake in a parting meal.
The meal is, unfortunately, a Banquet at Hongmen.
In the first cycle, Fei didn’t know the danger, and went directly to the feast, and died.
The second, she chose to leave the village directly, but the villagers caught up to her and immediately killed her.
The third, she hunkered down and asked what she could, to finally understand what was going on——
Some form of madness is currently spreading through this little village. The remaining sane villagers then concluded that it must be the arrival of these outsiders that made such a madness spread.
With the approval of the elder, then, they chose to kill their purported ‘perpetrators,’ to see if the madness would be resolved.
Even if Fei now knows the reason for her death, she still has no way out.
Because her ‘fellow undergraduates,’ the ones who came along to experience the rural life with her, also seem to be affected by the paranoia of the villagers.
There were seven children of the village who went to the university outside and came back, bringing along twelve of their acquaintances at university with them, eight of whom are now already on the side of the villagers, looking and acting as mad as the villagers are.
As mad as the villagers are… How mad, exactly?
Fei realises all of a sudden, that after three cycles, she still hasn’t investigated what the madness that was spreading through this small, sleepy village, was.
Thinking about it, a man suddenly walks downstairs from the second floor. She doesn’t look at him, and simply asks monotonously, “finished resting?”
This man is part of the students that are not on the villagers’ side, but Fei is too tired to talk about how to resolve this predicament with him, because she knows it is fruitless after three cycles, and she’s anxious and irriated.
But then, she hears the man greeting her, “um… hello? Do you know what’s going on here?”
Fei immediately turns her head towards the man, and looks him over, to see that his appearance is completely different – even if her mind is telling her, that this man is exactly who she knows, the man who is killed alongside her by the crazy villagers the last three cycles.
Even if… his appearance is completely changed, into one that is vaguely familiar to her.
The familiarity gets put aside quickly, as Fei continues to think about the current predicament.
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