[Rule-based horror + infinite flow + Chinese folk customs + mystery + imaginative premise + high-IQ cast + ensemble cast]
Other people clear a dungeon, and once they leave, it's over.
Qi Zhaoye is different. Even after he leaves, the dungeon keeps on living.
The first time he left Huaiyin Village, he saved a girl, repaired the eye of a battered paper beast, and left behind a few old debts he hadn't had time to settle.
Only three months passed in the real world.
But in Huaiyin, sixty-seven years had gone by before he returned.
The village had become a town.
The girl from back then had been entered into the family genealogy.
The palm-sized paper beast had become a hundred-year-old taboo that no one dared provoke.
There was even a new shrine at the village entrance, dedicated to "Mr. Qi."
His companions stared at the taboos written on the wall, faces pale.
"What exactly is this Mr. Qi?"
Qi Zhaoye didn't answer.
Because the shrine held a statue of his face.
And things got worse.
Half the events recorded on the stele were things he had never done.
Only after returning this time did Qi Zhaoye truly understand:
People leave, but history doesn't stop.
People grow old. Ghosts grow up.
A promise can become an ancestral precept, a lie can turn into a folk custom, and even an unremarkable old object can accrue interest that no one can calculate decades later.
From then on, while everyone else busied themselves clearing dungeons,
Qi Zhaoye began leaving one unsettled debt after another for his future self, decades later.
Some interest has to wait a hundred years before it can be collected.
