The upheaval at the Rose Hotel began with the ghost cavern.
Hanging upside down, Hou Guisheng caught sight of that distinct, isolated space. Like a river flowing backward, it began surging upstream, merging with the space of the Rose Hotel.
This was the tangible manifestation of an eerie rule beyond human imagination. The merger of the ghost cavern and the hotel meant that the two opposing sides, Ruru and Ruru's Mother, had fully overlapped and become one.
It meant that from then on, there would be only one Rose Hotel, and only one Root Ghost.
The second upheaval occurred within certain people. Taking Hou Guisheng's perspective again, the moment the ghost cavern merged with the hotel, he sensed an indescribable change inside him.
An eerie sense of "fullness" actually emerged... The word was not quite right, but there was no better way to describe it.
That fullness felt as though he had not been hungry at all, yet after unexpectedly eating, he belatedly realized that he had actually been starving all along.
Simply put, at that instant, something suddenly returned to Hou Guisheng's body, making him whole and revealing that his former self had been incomplete.
As for what that something was, it was most likely the versions of himself buried in the graves within the ghost cavern's plane, ruled by Ruru's Mother.
There had previously been an unverified conjecture: long ago, Ruru's Mother might have been the sole Root Cause Ghost of the Rose Hotel, and even the ghost cavern.
This sole ruler had controlled everyone's true self except for Mei Sheng, Xue Tingtao, and Fang Shenyan, and buried their real bodies in the ghost cavern's graves.
In a sense, she was the absolute ruler, holding complete control over the guests' fates.
But Ruru's sudden rise had crushed her