That Dropped Chinese Novel’s Useless Me Says No to the System

Chapter 113 A World in A Silver Box

After the darkness swallowed everything, I suddenly felt my body sink into something warm—like a pool of heated water.

The water rocked gently, buoying me up. My limbs felt completely weightless.

In the haze, a pair of warm, steady hands brushed along my back, from spine to the nape of my neck. The touch felt almost exactly like the embrace I used to lean into as a child.

“Mother…?” I whispered.

But my chest tightened, and I instantly realized something was wrong.

I never had a mother. The matriarch of the Nangong household treated me coldly; she was never my birth parent.

Then whose hands were these?

I couldn’t stop myself from lifting my gaze—yet the face above me was blank. Featureless. No eyes, no nose, no mouth. Only a single blood-red eye occupied the entire face. Crimson so deep it looked ready to leak tears of fresh blood as it stared straight at me.

A sharp, splitting pain pierced my skull—like thousands of iron nails driving into my head all at once.

The gaze of that eye hurled me into a tearing agony.

I jolted awake.

Darkness surrounded me.

Boundless darkness, stretching in every direction. No sign of Hua or Juan. No trace of the strange people from Spring-Come Inn. Only me, dropped alone into some bottomless, formless abyss.

Stumbling, I reached ahead blindly. There were no steps underfoot, no soil, no stone. I stepped on something unreal, as if the ground rippled faintly with each touch.

“Hua? Juan?” I called.

My voice dissolved instantly into the darkness. Not a hint of echo remained. It felt as if some invisible barrier swallowed every sound whole.

My chest tightened with growing panic, and I finally shouted, “Anyone there?!”

The moment the words left my mouth, a deep, thunderous voice exploded through the void—like the heavens cracking open above me.

“Who makes such noise here.”

The sound slammed into my skull like a blow. My ears rang violently; my knees buckled, and I dropped to the ground. Even with my hands over my ears, the vibration rattled my bones.

Struggling to steady my mind, I forced my head up toward the darkness and answered cautiously, “My humble name is Nangong Gong. I beg to know who you are, honored senior—and where this place is?”

I tried to continue, but the voice roared again, reverberating through the emptiness:

“Noise is forbidden here. Games are forbidden. All sound is forbidden.”

A chill swept through my chest.

“Ah—uh—?” I made two instinctive noises, but the moment they escaped, the darkness surged. It rolled toward me like a collapsing sea of ink, crushing, suffocating, splitting my skull open with pain.

I shut my mouth at once and forced myself into silence.

In that instant, the darkness eased, retreating slowly. A thin sliver of white light appeared far in the distance. At first it was as faint as a firefly, then it grew brighter and brighter, until it became blinding.

My vision spun.

When it cleared, the familiar ruined temple stood before my eyes. Crumbling walls, overgrown weeds. No torches, no crowd, no sound. Only me standing before the broken doorway.

My heart pounded as I scanned the surroundings.

A moment later, the air quivered—just slightly—and Hua and Juan emerged out of thin air, as though peeling themselves out of another layer of dream. Their faces were ashen, minds scattered, eyes empty for several breaths before they slowly regained awareness.

I rushed toward them. “You… you also went into that darkness?”

Juan trembled, voice shaking. “I… I saw an eye. It… it looked at me…”

Hua’s expression was heavy. He nodded. “I saw it too.

And when that voice spoke, I didn’t dare utter a word. Only when I stayed silent… did I wake.”

The three of us exchanged a look—none of us able to describe the dread.

That silent abyss felt like it would crush our souls into dust.

If we hadn’t obeyed that command not to speak, we might never have escaped.

We stood in a row before the ruined temple, all of us looking half-dead.

Wind whistled through the broken walls like a dozen people whispering under their breath, worsening the unease.

After a long moment, Hua murmured, “Did either of you see the people from Spring-Come Inn…?”

Juan and I both shook our heads.

Inside and outside the temple, not a single soul. The torch-bearing men who rushed us earlier might as well have never existed.

Everything had collapsed back into dead silence.

The night wind moaned, pushing the crooked temple door so it creaked on its hinge. We stood there for a long time, none of us wanting to speak first.

In the end, I couldn’t hold it in and whispered to Hua Shang, “So… what do we do now? I don’t know if anyone else will come to the temple again, and Lian still isn’t back. If something weird happens again, we’ll really die here.”

Amazingly, Hua still managed to smirk, tilting his head at me. “What’s wrong, little Gong? Worried I can’t protect you?”

“I—I’m not worried!” My eyes nearly popped out.

And right then, Juan huddled in the corner and muttered softly, “Actually… I… I’m scared too.”

I felt instantly, irrationally comforted—at least I wasn’t the only coward.

Hua s smile faded. His expression hardened. “We’d better go to Senior An’s house.”

Juan and I exchanged a glance and both nodded.

By the time we reached Senior An’s home, the night had grown even deeper. The small courtyard was quiet, only the lantern shadows swaying. When we pushed the door open, we saw Senior An in his usual wide-sleeved robe, calmly brewing tea, as if the world itself had no oddities tonight.

“Senior An!” I burst out. “Has Lian come by?”

He paused, then shook his head. “No.”

My stomach dropped. A cold dread crawled up my spine. Hua frowned. Juan’s face went chalk-white, as if he might cry at any moment.

We told him everything we’d encountered along the way: the silent crowd at Spring-Come Inn, the sealed wine jars, the sudden shriek, the blood-red eye, and that suffocating void.

Senior An simply lifted his teacup, took a slow sip, and said lightly, “Interesting.”

“I—interesting?!” I nearly jumped to my feet. “Senior An, we almost died!”

He looked at me, and for a fleeting moment, a strange depth flashed behind his eyes. Slowly, he said, “Perhaps the key is not the wine—but the eye you saw.”

When he spoke the word “eye,” his voice sank. Something unspoken vibrated in its undertone, and even the lamp flame trembled twice.

Then he set down the teacup and added casually, “By the way, I’ve deciphered about half of the silver box you left last time.”

I shot upright so fast the stool nearly fell. “Already?!”

Senior An glanced up at me, face still composed.

“What’s inside?” My breathing quickened.

He shook his head, unhurried. “No idea.”

“What?!” I nearly toppled over. “What do you mean?!”

He only smiled, tapping the table lightly with his finger. But his tone was peculiar. “I only know there’s something unusual within it. But I cannot see what it truly is.”

I stared at him blankly, thinking: Senior An, you really enjoy saying things that make me feel worse than hearing nothing.

Beside me, Hua stayed steady and cupped his hands. “We ask Senior An for guidance.”

Senior An laughed heartily, beard quivering. “What guidance can I give? Better you go see it for yourselves.”

He called over the same expressionless wooden-faced attendant from last time. The attendant brought over a blackened kettle filled with steaming liquid. A faint, impossible fragrance rose from it—bitter tinged with sweet, sweet tinged with sour, and beneath the sour… a strange trace of briny iron.

“Dare to try it?” Senior An’s eyes settled on Hua and me, gaze unreadable.

My mind was a mess of confusion.

Hua asked quietly, “you mean… for us to enter the silver box?”

“How do we go in?”

“Enter… the silver box?!” I yelled, nearly overturning the table. “What, is this thing going to shrink us down? Or is the box going to grow? Senior, you’re not trying to trick us, right?!”

Senior An ignored my panic. Instead, he gave a faint smile and retrieved three thin sticks of incense from a cabinet. Each incense stick glowed faintly red, as though burning from the inside.

“Drink the Sanqing Tea in this kettle,” he said, “then light these Three-Breath Incense sticks. That’s all.”

He handed them to us.

“But—” Senior An paused, his voice dropping lower.

“You will only have one stick’s length of time.”