Chapter 7 – Rose Manor (Part 6) Pre-Night Review

Inside Room 2 the curtains, once parted by the wind, never closed again; through the gauzy window the garden outside the castle could be seen in full.

Beneath a starless night, purple rot spread beneath the tangled plants, the borders of branch and stem and leaf dissolved into clusters of ghostly gloom.

Dressed in black, Miss Anna stood in the heart of the sea of roses, lone and still as a tombstone under the sickly moonlight.

The light was too dim for Qi Si to tell which way she faced or whether she was looking toward him.

What he could be sure of was that if she caught a player still awake, the outcome would be gruesome.

A host discovering her guest feigning sleep would rightfully feel angry; together with the key’s description it was clear the door would no longer bar Miss Anna.

As for what she would do once inside… Qi Si suddenly felt curious. The rule said “Only Ghosts can kill humans”; as a living person, what could Miss Anna do to him, and how would she treat him?

Still, dying in the very first instance after entering the Eerie Game was simply a loss too great; surviving to the second instance was the minimum needed to break even.

Letting some other player test the death method would be wiser.

On the bed’s far side Lin Chen slept soundly, mumbling fragments of dreams, oblivious to everything that had happened.

He rolled over, dragging most of the quilt beneath him, and a few seconds later resumed his steady snores.

Qi Si lay motionless on his side; heart-rate and pulse gradually calmed, and with Lin Chen’s rhythmic breathing beside him drowsiness soon overtook his mind.

He closed his eyes and slipped into deep sleep; when he opened them again it was already dawn.

In the garden facing the French doors Miss Anna’s ghostly figure had vanished, leaving only blazing roses.

Outside, the mechanical clock solemnly struck five heavy chimes—five in the morning.

The brief sleep helped little; Qi Si yawned, listless.

He lingered another two minutes before pushing himself upright and looking toward the door.

Shrivelled, rotting rose petals littered the floor in front of the door, a small patch of evidence of the night’s crisis.

“Q-Qi, why’s the chair overturned?” Lin Chen had finally woken, spotting the open curtains, the toppled chair and the red dress strewn across it.

His face paled. “Did something happen last night?”

“Mmm.” Qi Si got out of bed calmly, drew the curtains shut, set the chair upright and wedged it against them again.

He picked up the red dress and tossed it into the corner. “Miss Anna paid a visit at three.”

“Ah? What for?”

“You’ll have to ask her. I’m no god; I can only reconstruct the likeliest truth from the clues we have, not know everything.”

Qi Si sat on the chair and recounted everything from the night, including his deductions about death points.

Lin Chen digested it blankly, relieved. “Good thing I went to bed early.”

…or rather, was knocked out early.

After thinking for a moment he asked, “Brother Qi, how did you know we’d be safe as long as she didn’t catch us awake?”

“A guess,” Qi Si said flatly. “Since wakefulness and sleep are governed by the game’s mechanics, I wasn’t the only one awake at night.

A sustainable game wouldn’t be ten-to-zero death; Miss Anna can’t possibly kill every player who wakes. So she must have a condition for killing.

Coupled with her repeated asking whether I was asleep, I surmise her condition is ‘discovering a player remains conscious at night’.”

Lin Chen, awed, said, “As expected of Brother Qi. If it were me, when she bluffed that she knew I was awake I’d have panicked and opened the door.”

“It’s just logic.” Qi Si chuckled. “Remember: through a wooden door she can’t be a hundred percent sure whether the player inside is awake, otherwise she wouldn’t keep asking—she’d simply break in. By the same token, I believe she too is bound by rules forbidding her to disturb sleeping players.

After breaking in she faces two outcomes. Either her gamble is right: someone inside is awake and she claims a life; or her gamble is wrong: no one is awake, she violates a rule and suffers some unknown penalty. Balancing risk and reward, she must choose more cautiously.”

Lin Chen squinted. “But either way she can’t be absolutely sure someone is awake, right? As long as we don’t open the door, any noise can be blamed on tossing in sleep or talking in dreams.”

Qi Si nodded. “So she either abandons the kill or compares the probabilities across rooms and gambles on the highest one.”

He paused. “Lin Chen, ever opened a blind box?”

“…Huh?”

“Three boxes, each holding a cat that may be alive or dead; some already dead, some dying. But one box is rigged: open it and it releases poison, killing any cat inside, alive or dead.

If you draw a live cat you get its weight in gold; draw a dead one and you’re killed. Yet you can tap, weigh and guess whether a box is rigged and whether the cat is alive.

After studying the first two boxes you think the cat in the second might be alive. Do you test the third box first or open the one in your hand?”

Lin Chen caught on. “I’d check both; otherwise I can’t confirm whether the second box is rigged and will poison the cat.”

Qi Si sighed. “Then you find the third box is made of different material—clearly rigged. You’re delighted, thinking you’ll get gold by opening the second box. But you realize you don’t know whether the cat inside is still alive after all this time.”

“C-can I just not open any box?”

“Of course.” Qi Si smiled. “By the same logic, after Miss Anna visited Brother Shen’s room and came back, she couldn’t be sure whether I’d fallen asleep in the meantime. Her safest move, then, was to choose neither room.

“—Which means, if everyone’s smart enough, last night should have been a silent night.”

Lin Chen listened to Qi Si’s chain of reasoning with blank eyes; he felt he’d grasped something, yet nothing at all.

Qi Si had no intention of explaining further.

Had the tool-man not still been useful, Qi Si wouldn’t have batted an eye even if Miss Anna dragged Lin Chen outside and buried him in a pit—he might even stand by and cheer.

It was still early; Qi Si walked to the desk, tore a sheet of papyrus from the pad, and began to write and sketch.

Lin Chen crept over cautiously and looked down to see:

>2. Exact time can be obtained by silently counting seconds, etc.

>3. Who exactly is Miss Anna, the one who ‘likes guests’, remains in doubt.

>4. You may avoid carrying out Miss Anna’s demands by pretending ignorance, provided she doesn’t notice.

>5. There may be two Miss Annas.

It was clearly an annotation of the rules shown on the system interface—fulfilling the main quest’s requirement to ‘crack the rules’.

After reading it all, Lin Chen blinked. “Brother Qi, what do you mean by two Miss Annas?”

Qi Si set down his pen and lifted his eyes. “I told you: the Miss Anna in black was watching me through the window while knocking sounded at Shen Ming’s door.

Given what we know, Miss Anna shouldn’t be able to be in two places at once; if she could, she’d knock on both doors simultaneously for efficiency. I’m inclined to believe there are two of her—or that in this instance there’s another key NPC equal to her.

That would explain many contradictions: why Miss Anna is both the instance’s main NPC and yet ‘harbors no malice toward guests’; trustworthy one moment, dangerous the next; sometimes dressed in black, sometimes in red.

Earlier I couldn’t understand why, in an instance where only Ghosts can kill humans, we had anything to fear from a living Miss Anna. If the main NPCs can’t kill players, were we supposed to eliminate ourselves through infighting?

Now the answer is clear: an unseen Ghost main NPC exists—another Miss Anna. For some reason, the two have never appeared in the same space.

Lin Chen’s eyes lit up. “So next can we try to ally with the living Miss Anna against that Ghost NPC?”

As soon as he said it, Qi Si looked at him with the kindly gaze one gives a small child.

“Who told you the living must be good and Ghosts must be evil? Only yesterday you were scared stiff of the living Miss Anna.”

Qi Si picked up his pen again and drew three circles on the paper, labeling them “Miss Anna”, “Ghost NPC”, and “Players”, then linked every pair with double-headed arrows.

“There are three scenarios. One is what you imagine: Miss Anna is benevolent—i.e., friendly to players—and the Ghost NPC is malevolent. The opposite is also possible. Worst case, the two NPCs collude and both want us dead.

So first we need to find out what exactly that Ghost NPC—heard but never seen—is like. That depends on exploring the third floor.”

Lin Chen nodded solemnly and fell into thought.

Qi Si walked to the wall and lifted the red dress once more. “But as for this instance’s backstory, I’ve some new ideas.”

He slipped into an emotive first-person: “The girl and I loved each other, but many obstacles kept us apart; she couldn’t meet me openly and could only knock on my door at night…”

Lin Chen: “…” Is this the big shot’s twisted sense of humor?

He swallowed and objected in a small voice, “B-Brother Qi, why are you so sure love is the theme? Couldn’t Miss Anna be killing to preserve her beauty? I heard of a Marie something who bathed in maidens’ blood…”

Qi Si countered, “Do you remember what fruit was on yesterday’s dinner table?”

Fruit?

Lin Chen was stunned; then Qi Si went on, “Ever since Albrecht Dürer painted The Fall of Man in 1507 and depicted the forbidden fruit as an apple, the mistranslation that ‘the forbidden fruit is an apple’ spread and became convention.

Judging by Miss Anna’s clothing, this instance is set after the seventeenth century. By then the apple had become the emblem of Adam and Eve’s forbidden fruit, symbolizing erotic love.

Apples rarely appeared in European aristocratic dinners; if they did, it was as sugared apple desserts, never whole fruit guests had to grab and bite.

Putting all this together, the apples at dinner were clearly metaphorical. Why Miss Anna placed such an obvious symbol on the table is probably the same reason serial killers like to revisit the crime scene.”

Lin Chen listened with vacant eyes, feeling life was no longer worth living.

Not only did you need logical deduction, you also had to know obscure trivia—was the liberal-arts-challenged supposed to just die?

This was only his first instance… Qi Si loved spinning tall tales to scare people. After a convoluted lecture that left the tool-man dazed, he comforted him with a smile, “If all you want is to survive, it’s not so hard. You could hide in your room and pretend you know nothing.

Theoretically, if you’re calm enough to sleep for three straight days, you might clear this instance safely.”

Lin Chen’s eyes lit up; he almost asked Qi Si to knock him out again.

Qi Si lowered his eyes and sighed, “Of course, everything I’ve said is speculation based on the first night and could be completely wrong. After all, the rules might be misleading us…”

Just as he finished, a shrill scream tore through the door, sharp enough to pierce the room like a sword.

—Something had gone wrong.