Perpetrator, Witness, Silent One

"So what do we do now? The other side has the upper hand. Do we have no choice but to do as they say?"

The thought of someone else holding her fate in their hands sent a chill through Yukino, and she couldn't help thinking of her family situation.

"Give me a moment. I'll think it through."

Bai Yuze's mind raced. He couldn't shake the feeling that something was off.

Then he noticed the wound on his wrist, and his mind unconsciously returned to the bruises and burn scars Yukino had mentioned...

Suddenly, it all clicked. Bai Yuze hurriedly called out to the entity beyond the door.

"Hey, kid. Can you turn into someone else?"

"Sure. Why?"

Bai Yuze gave a mysterious smile.

"Do you want to get out of here?"

"Are you sure you can call the front desk by dialing any random string of numbers?"

Yukino knew Bai Yuze wouldn't do something without being sure, but dialing random numbers and claiming it was the front desk's phone number... How was that any different from winning the lottery?

"Absolutely. Remember, the rules said to call for help when the water from the ceiling fills the entire hallway. The only one in this house who can help us is the guy in Room 108. So no matter what number I enter, the call will end up going to the guy in Room 108."

"I remember it said the water on the first floor... Does that mean the note Yuigahama and I saw was half true and half false?"

"Exactly. But we only need to remember this one rule for now. The others are either false, or we won't have time to verify them."

"So you've figured out how to deal with that guy?"

Yukino glanced at the dog beside her... Right, this dog was the entity in disguise.

After spending time with Bai Yuze, Yukino's thinking had been forcibly elevated. She seriously suspected that Bai Yuze wanted the entity to sneak up on the guy and bite him in the gallbladder. Otherwise, why turn it into a dog for no reason? Was it just to gross her out?

"I have. I've prepared quite a show for him."

Bai Yuze said with a grin, then pressed the call button.

The phone rang for a while before someone picked up.

"Hello?"

Hearing the familiar voice, Bai Yuze cleared his throat, then solemnly said,

"True, false, true, false; false, true. Guess who I am?"

"Get to the point! You've even got the words wrong."

"Front desk, do me a favor— the water in this basement is almost up to our chests. Your dog and we are about to die down here."

"Up to your chest? Shouldn't you have died already?"

"Come on, play along. I'm fighting an entity right now. Hurry up and save me."

"What exactly do you need me to do?"

"Don't bring any useless tools. Just come down as fast as you can and haul us and your dog out."

"How am I supposed to save you without tools?"

"To keep the dog from getting scared and running around. It's for your own good, too."

"Okay, understood."

The call ended.

"What? Is he coming down?"

Yukino was worried, but Bai Yuze gave no definite answer. Instead, he prayed silently that his plea would be answered.

Upstairs, after hanging up, the front desk attendant first lit a candle, even though the lights in his room were on.

Even stranger, the candle's flame burned blue! As it burned, a natural barrier formed inside Room 108.

After that, the attendant took out a note, a marker, and a photograph.

He first wrote Bai Yuze's eight words, "True, false, true, false; false, true," at the top.

Then he began to recall what Bai Yuze had said.

"He paused after every sentence... Was that meant to divide them? If so..."

The attendant copied Bai Yuze's words onto the note without missing a single one, drew dividing lines where he'd paused, then used the pattern of true... false... true... false... false... false... true... true... to sort them. What he got was...

[Front desk, do me a favor; come on, play along; to keep the dog from getting scared and running around; it's for your own good, too.](True)

"My dog wouldn't be scared and run around. So is this referring to someone else?"

The attendant looked at the false statements again and interpreted them in reverse.

"Is the situation safe for now? If I'm not supposed to bring those so-called 'useless' tools... Does that mean I should bring 'cursed artifacts'? And I should slow things down as much as I can? This kid's pretty interesting."

The attendant laughed. He wasn't wearing any of those strange clothes now. As the view pulled back, it showed a muscular man holding a photograph. A familiar figure appeared in it...

"Yang Peng... I think I'm about to find you..."

Bai Yuze kept his eyes tightly shut, going over his plan in his mind again and again, checking for any flaws.

All along, Yang Peng had guided the three of them as an "old hand," giving them hints that had helped them overcome one obstacle after another.

That kindness had earned Yang Peng their trust. But now, that trust was about to collapse...

Bai Yuze had discovered a secret: one of Yang Peng's "hints" had been wrong.

If he looked only at the first half, "You must defy the front desk," there was nothing wrong with it. The problem lay in the second half: "You've got the wrong person."

At first, Bai Yuze hadn't caught on. But once he did, he broke out in a cold sweat.

How did Yang Peng know he'd got the wrong person? If Yang Peng had only said, "You must defy the front desk," that would at least mean the front desk was on the opposing side. But his words, "You've got the wrong person," implied something else: that there was a good front desk attendant and a bad one.

So how could Yang Peng, who had already left... or died, know that Bai Yuze had got the wrong person?

That meant Yang Peng was still in this house. If so, why wasn't he joining the three of them to look for a way out?

It wasn't until Bai Yuze saw the wound on his wrist and remembered the scars Yukino had mentioned that he understood why Yang Peng hadn't shown himself.

Yukino and Yuigahama Yui were both victims, while Bai Yuze was a suicide. For the script to be complete, three more roles were needed.

The perpetrator, the silent one, and the witness. Since there were two victims, there were also two witnesses, but one of them had become the silent one.

The silent one was the Male Corpse in Room 102. After all, only a corpse could remain silent forever.

The other witness was the front desk attendant who had been helping them all along. That naturally left Yang Peng as the "perpetrator."

That was why Yang Peng hadn't met them.

A witness and a suicide together became an exposer. Since he could enter the loop as a suicide, Yang Peng had carefully left behind all those notes, intending to earn the three of them's trust step by step. His ultimate goal was to make them trust him completely and help him kill the witness...