Qiu Yunru's face paled. So, not only was he dealing with a crying girl--but one who'd lost someone close to them? This was beyond "crying girl", this was full-on heavy grief! What should he do?
He flailed, wondering whether it would be better or worse to pat her arm or just not do anything while she continued on, tears streaming down her glowing face:
"My shimei, my shimei...You remember her, don't you? Your shijie, Guo Mei!" She shook him with wide eyes, waiting for a response. Qiu Yunru nodded weakly. His ability to keep on going with this as it got worse and worse was getting lower and lower.
"Ah...yes...Guo-shijie...He...killed her...?"
"Yes! Yes! You have to get Shizun!" She wept, still holding his robes. "My shimei...She confronted him about something by the Sword Lake, and he killed her with his sword! I ran to help. Then that bastard grabbed me and pushed me into the water!"
This was not good. They were getting to the part of the story where she must have drowned, and yet the green quest marker was still hanging around in his vision. Qiu Yunru finally decided to pat her arm awkwardly, trying to take her attention away from her thoughts. He put on a steady voice:
"This shidi will get Shizun. Fu-shijie should wait here. But...does Fu-shijie remember anything after being pushed into the lake?" What he meant, was: if she had truly drowned down in the lake, how the hell had she gotten so deep into the Lan Bing caves after death?
Fu Qiuyue held her head, trembling. "I...I can't remember! He pushed me...He pushed me..."
Qiu Yunru suddenly got a bad feeling in his stomach. The air had changed. Subtly, he reached for his sword.
A moment later, Fu Qiuyue's head snapped up. Her eyes no longer had pupils or irises; they were milky-white again, even though she had maintained her glowing form. Her expression was both horrified and horrifying, her mouth hanging open in utter despair:
"And I drowned!" Her jaw cracked open wider with the sound of grinding bone. "And that b-bastard...dragged me here!" Qiu Yunru stepped backwards as the glow seeped out of her form into the air, flickering to reveal her ghostly corpse-like state. Her unhinged jaw twitched, her speech growing slow and warbled as she lost her hold on her mortal form: "And I never...saved...Ah Guo!"
The next sound out of her mouth was like the tearing of organs--a wet roar that screeched through the cavern. Like a light flickering out, the glow disappeared from her form all at once.
The cave went dark.
Qiu Yunru lost his eyesight from the sudden lack of light, and at that moment, in the darkness, she lunged at him.
"This one is sorry for troubling you," He said quickly. Silver flashed, and there was a wet, heavy thunk as something fell to the ground. It was Fu Qiuyue's rotted head, her milky eyes still opened wide, and her unhinged jaw hanging off to the side like it was connected by putty. Her body followed, slipping to the ground and squelching as bloated flesh connected with icy blue rock. Qiu Yunru winced and jumped back to avoid any splashing.
His heart pounded in his ears. There really wasn't any better way to describe it than the way those authors who wrote 10,000 words of fanfiction a day did--it sounded like a drum through his body, even pulsing in his fingertips! He felt suddenly sick.
Even though he technically hadn't killed a person, his hands shook. Did it count, to kill a corpse? Even if she hadn't been alive, she had still had a mortal form she could return to, still remembered the sect and her shimei, still had spoken to him...Qiu Yunru wiped his sword on his robe to rid it of gunk.
Thankfully, a distraction arrived to keep him from falling into classic despair over a first kill. Before him, that beheaded corpse began to glow brightly. With a flash, it disappeared, leaving only a slightly glowing crystal on the cavern floor. The game menu flashed open with a notification accompanied by a small burst of green confetti:
CONGRATULATIONS! Easy Level Quest complete! Fu Qiuyue's story learned. Please collect your prize!
Qiu Yunru couldn't help but be a little disgruntled. Did this really count as learning someone's story? Did only their death count in who they were? But he still scooped the crystal up and examined it. He already knew what it was.
When significant stories or memories were told to the player by NPCs in Spring Blossoms, Autumn Fruits, quest rewards would often come in the form of "memory shards".
These shards could be stored in one's inventory and viewed for reference. Sometimes they were necessary to complete other quests, sometimes they contained important information, and at other times they simply served as mementos for quests that players could look back on to remember their journey. Considering that this shard came from a drowned ghost who had told him the story of how someone had murdered her shimei and herself, this memory, Qiu Yunru thought, was likely what happened that night. What's more...he thought back.
He thought he had heard incorrectly at first, but the more he thought about it, the more the details lined up. Fu Qiuyue had called the man who killed her "Li Guiren" (along with a lot of other names). She had said that he led the Eight Purple Winds Sect. What a strange coincidence! Did that make this Li Guiren the father of that Abused Nephew he'd had to rescue back in Jin He City? That kid's name had indeed been Li Chenyuan!
So, it was that kid's father who'd been such a horrible person and murdered at least two people...
But hadn't he also heard that Li Chenyuan's father was dead? How else had his uncle, Li Fengguang, taken over the household and been able to abuse his poor nephew so?
He was murdered ruthlessly in front of his son by his own sworn brother!
Wasn't that what he had heard back in the market in Jin He City from those exposition-dropping NPCs? So Li Guiren was long dead, and had been killed by his own sworn brother...Hadn't this drowned corpse ghost told him that her 'Shizun' had cared about that man very much. The master of the Jade Clouds Sect had not changed for hundreds of years So, was it, then, that He Yongliang had been that sworn brother?
Qiu Yunru's head swam. Though he was a fan of xianxia fiction, this was getting to be a bit much! He felt like a madman pinning pictures to a board and connecting them with red string.
He wouldn't have cared so much, if not for the fact that this kind of information directly affected his livelihood here in this world. If it was some other sect leader, he wouldn't be thinking about it so much--but it was his own Shizun! Li Guiren seemed to have been a terrible person, but if He Yongliang had really killed him in front of his son, then did he have a ruthless streak? He was a mysterious man whose emotions were hard to decipher. Was he a tragic hero who had killed a rogue villain, or was there more to it? Qiu Yunru held his head...
He had always been one to avoid drama. However, drama was different when it concerned life and death!