Chapter 16: Rose Manor (15) 1:00 PM

“The highest level of gamesmanship is to stay behind the scenes, observing and prying, gathering the most information while everyone else remains oblivious.”

“Sister Zou, this isn’t your second time in an instance, is it? A newbie couldn’t produce an item like that. You’re a veteran who spent points to enter a specific instance, right?”

After time rewound, inside Guest Room 1, Zou Yan smiled at Ye Zi. “You’re not simple either, are you? I know that you and Shen Ming are both from ‘Sera’.”

The moment the word ‘Sera’ left her mouth, Ye Zi’s eyes widened. For the first time since entering the instance, she truly lost her composure.

She parted her lips and asked with a fake smile, “Sister Zou, how did you figure it out? Could you tell me?”

The smile on Zou Yan’s lips deepened, yet she let out a sigh. “He didn’t tell you, and you didn’t even take the initiative to find out. I’m afraid you still don’t know what ‘teaming up’ means in this game, do you?”

Ye Zi recalled that before entering the game, Shen Ming had repeatedly warned her not to reveal that they knew each other.

She had assumed it was just to play a double act, so after learning of Zou Yan’s intent to cooperate, she had immediately placed Shen Ming on the table as a chip.

Could it be that… “How interesting. Clearly the same kind of people, yet playing different roles in front of each other, both treating the other as some easily controlled, easily utilized fool.”

Zou Yan chuckled, then suddenly and gently took hold of Ye Zi’s right hand, lightly pressing down on her pinky finger.

A black ring slowly emerged on Ye Zi’s originally smooth and fair knuckle. Its surface featured a decorative butterfly in relief, which, upon closer inspection, also looked like the English letter’S’.

Zou Yan slid the ring off the girl’s finger. The latter was unable to move during the process, only able to let out a ‘he-he’ sound from her throat as her eyes nearly burst with rage.

A loud bell rang outside. It was one o’clock in the afternoon.

Zou Yan tilted her head to examine the fear in Ye Zi’s eyes and placed her hand over the girl’s neck.

“God does not bless you.”

…”Shen Ming is a member of the Sera Guild. Liu Qingye knows Shen Ming; I suspect she is one as well.” Chang Xu reached out to push aside the vines in front of him, his voice as calm as lake water.

On the castle’s Third Floor, dark green plant tendrils burst from the ground in the four corners of the floor, crawling along the grayish-black walls like reptiles.

The thick plants displayed vigorous vitality, growing to the ceiling at a speed visible to the naked eye and hanging down to the floor, sealing off the entire floor’s space layer by layer.

Qi Si tried to make a cut on a finger-thick vine with his blade. Green sap splashed onto his face, quickly congealing into fuzzy tendrils that tried to burrow into his flesh.

He raised his hand to tear them away, pulling off a thin layer of skin with them. The sensation of pain and itching was vivid, as if it bypassed the body to act directly on the spirit, peeling away his very essence.

“These vines are quite interesting. They couldn’t be like those boring slasher films where they can parasitize human bodies, could they?” Qi Si retracted his blade and, like Chang Xu, used his hands to push aside a path barely wide enough for a person. “…How do you know Shen Ming is from the Sera Guild?”

He didn’t know what the ‘Sera Guild’ was, but judging by Chang Xu’s matter-of-fact tone, this guild should be quite famous—the kind that veteran players would definitely know about.

Chang Xu stopped in his tracks, fished a ring-like object from his pocket, and handed it to Qi Si to see.

The black ring was simple in design, its surface set with a black butterfly twisted into the letter’S’, looking withered and near death.

“This is something I found on Shen Ming, their token,” Chang Xu said. “The Sera Guild’s research into the Eerie Game is very advanced; they can already manufacture some items that can be brought into the game. For example, this ring’s effect is to increase the probability of two people entering the same instance.”

They can manufacture items themselves?

Qi Si lowered his eyes, glancing at the silver bracelet on his right wrist.

Seeming to notice his temporary teammate’s curiosity, Chang Xu said indifferently, “If you’re interested in this information, you can check the Forum yourself. Basically all the information that can be made public is on there.”

He paused for a moment and added, “The Sera Guild has committed many atrocious acts and is now a target of public criticism. They are being hunted down by various factions in both the game and reality. It’s only a matter of time before they are uprooted.”

Qi Si raised an eyebrow at Chang Xu. “In that case, Shen Ming’s death couldn’t possibly be completely unrelated to you, Brother Chang?”

Chang Xu gave him a puzzled look. “What relation would there be?”

“…Boring.”

Behind the screen of vines, the door was tightly shut, its rusted keyhole filled with dust.

Qi Si stepped forward, pulled a thin iron wire from his bracelet, and inserted it into the keyhole to fiddle with it.

A few seconds later, there was a ‘click’, and the lock opened.

Witnessing all this, Chang Xu’s gaze was suspicious: You call this a Specimen Maker?

“My father was a locksmith. I’ve been learning from him since I was a child. I originally planned to take over his business, but I didn’t expect electronic locks to become so popular.”

Qi Si retracted the wire, stepped back, and smiled at Chang Xu. “Brother Chang, I’m a bit of a germaphobe, so please bear with me.”

Chang Xu looked at the door handle covered in a thick layer of dust and, agreeing completely, led the way in.

Qi Si waited leisurely for two seconds, and seeing no abnormalities, followed in unhurriedly.

The room before them seemed to have gone unvisited for a long time. As the guests stepped in, a cloud of dust billowed toward them, accompanied by a decaying scent known as ‘days of old’.

In the center of the room stood a large bed with a sturdy wooden frame. A faint scent of dark pine drifted through the smell of rot. On the headboard lay a bouquet of dried roses, their petals listlessly clumped together, their edges curled and blackened.

A quilt was spread over the bed, already covered in a thick layer of dust. From the unevenness of its surface, one could tell that two people were lying beneath it.

Qi Si stepped forward and lifted the quilt. Dust motes floated up and slowly settled, refracting the thin rays of light into brilliant white paths.

Two skeletons lay side by side on the bed. The exceptionally clean white bones were cold and grim, draped in the faint light leaking into the room from the window, shining as brightly as treasures carefully kept by a collector.

The boundary between reality and the game blurred for a moment before his eyes. Qi Si saw a dignified couple holding the hands of two girls—one in a black dress, the other in a red dress—standing eerily under a dark sky.

The figures of the couple grew fainter and fainter, scattering into pixelated spots of color at a certain moment. The sound of a mass in the Graveyard rang until late at night, and a long, thin black shadow dug up the grave and dragged the corpses out… first the red dress under the bedsheets, then the skeletons in the quilt… He had to say, Miss Anna’s aesthetic was surprisingly consistent with his own… “These two are Miss Anna’s parents,” Qi Si said softly. “After they died, Miss Anna was unwilling to be separated from them, so one late night she dug up their bodies and locked them in the master bedroom, as if they were still alive.”

Chang Xu looked at the skeletons, whose living appearance could no longer be discerned, and asked, “How do you know?”

Qi Si smiled. “If I said I guessed, would you believe me?”

Death is inevitable, and the dead vanish in silence. Only the living find it hard to accept, using various futile means to preserve the remains of the dead, deceiving themselves into letting them linger as they were in life, as a memorial.

—This is the value of taxidermy.

Qi Si straightened up and looked down at the skeletons lying quietly on the bed.

Two seconds later, he gently reached his hand under the pillow the skeletons were resting on, and sure enough, he felt several pieces of paper.

Pinching them with two fingers, he pulled out the papers. On them were written lines of text… 【Anna and Annie were born at the same time. In ancient legends, one of the twins is born bearing a curse. We do not believe this; they are both our most beloved daughters. We only want them to grow up happily.】

…【Anna is always so obedient, but Annie always has all sorts of strange ideas. It’s really a headache.】

…【Anna is getting more and more beautiful. she is so perfect, she will find happiness. Annie’s behavior is becoming more and more bizarre. We suspect she wants to do something to Anna. There is a banquet at home; let’s lock her in her room for a day first.】

…【The family cat is dead. We found the cat’s body in Annie’s room. She killed the cat and used its blood to draw all sorts of terrifying runes on the wall. She is cursing us!】

…【Our illness is getting worse. We are going to die… it must be Annie…】

…The notes ended abruptly. A tooth-aching ‘creak’ sounded from the wooden bed. A long, narrow shadow was cast over his face, and he caught a glimpse of white in his peripheral vision.

Qi Si looked up abruptly, only to see that the two skeletons on the bed had sat bolt upright at some point, turning their heads at the same angle to look in his direction.

His fingertips felt a bit of moisture. On the paper in his hand, the black text turned into a blood-like red inch by inch, seeping out of the paper in a wet, sticky mess and flowing down like a waterfall.

The hallucination of a bell rang in his ears, like a freezing spell issuing a ban on movement. His body was unable to move, as if a mad demon were bound by iron chains, or an insect were imprisoned in amber.

Qi Si’s pupils constricted slightly.