In the guest room on the second floor, Ye Zi's corpse stared with eyes that would never close, then slowly slid to the floor.
Even in death, she couldn't understand how Zou Yan had killed her in an instance where "only monsters could kill humans."
Zou Yan lowered her right hand. Ugly, vine-like patterns covered what had once been her fair-skinned arm. Plant tendrils occasionally poked through her skin from her veins, blooming into tiny, blood-soaked buds.
The process of turning into a monster had stopped at her arm. An iron ring clamped around the muscle at her shoulder, preventing the vines from spreading any further.
[Name: Barrier Ring] [Type: Item] [Effect: Slows the spread of the uncanny] [Note: When faced with an ending that has long been decided, what use is there in fear and hesitation?]
Zou Yan's goal had been different from the other players' from the very beginning. She had come looking for something.
Now that her task was complete, it was time to end this instance.
Two people were already dead. She only needed to kill one more...
Zou Yan pushed open the door and headed for the room at the very end of the hall.
She remembered that Lin Chen, the one left behind inside, was a newcomer.
In a room on the third floor, threads of blood began spreading from his fingertips. Within moments, they had wrapped around Qi Si.
He opened his mouth, but when he realized he couldn't make a sound, he gave up struggling. Listlessly, he let the blood threads crawl over his body and weave a red web across his skin.
Outside the door, vines grew wildly, surging forward and crowding through the crack until they filled every inch of the room.
Objective time seemed to stop. Chang Xu remained bent over beside the bed. Dust hung suspended in the air, casting tiny shadows on the floor.
A thin veil of pale pink clouded his vision. The light dimmed, and the surroundings yellowed and curled like an old photograph in a fire.
Shadowy scenes flickered in the murky light. Almost the instant he saw them, Qi Si understood what they meant.
Unfamiliar knowledge poured into his mind, then became familiar in the blink of an eye, as though it had always lain buried in the depths of his memory, only waiting to be awakened at this moment...
A torrential downpour raged outside the old castle.
In an attic crammed with clutter, a girl with a red birthmark on her face fell to the floor. The door closed in front of her. The last sliver of light narrowed to a line, then vanished into the darkness.
The girl neither cried nor made a fuss, as if she had long grown used to being treated this way. She simply sat against the wall, quietly listening to the footsteps outside fade away.
After an unknown amount of time, a faint light glimmered in the darkness. Like a shadow creature startled awake, she timidly turned toward it.
Among the dusty clutter stood a small idol, glowing softly as if bathed in a hazy dawn.
The stone idol's features were exquisitely carved, its beauty breathtaking.
It held its hands together before its chest, its lowered eyes gazing at the blood-red rose carved from a gemstone in its hands. It looked sinister, serene, and compassionate all at once.
As if in a trance, the girl picked up the idol and held it before her, staring at it almost obsessively.
In a daze, she heard the God's voice.
The God asked, "I can feel your pain. Do you wish to pray to me?"
The girl had long since despaired of the future. Now, she felt not the slightest fear of the unknown.
She gave a bitter smile and asked in return, "What good would praying do? I was born ugly. They say I'm the devil reborn. Perhaps my very existence is a mistake."
The God said, "Beauty and ugliness, good and evil—all are part of the many living things. If you yearn for beauty, then fill the attic with roses. From then on, everything will go as you wish."
The girl agreed to the God's bargain. For countless days and nights afterward, she secretly slipped out of the castle, snipped rose branches from the manor, and brought them to the attic. She filled the cracks between the floorboards with soil and planted the cuttings there.
The thorns tore her hands until they were covered in wounds. But whenever she thought of how soon she would be beautiful, she forgot all her exhaustion and pain.
She remembered the candy her older sister had given her as a child, and the stories she had told her. Those memories had shaped her first understanding of familial affection, and gradually gave rise to feelings she couldn't make sense of.
But now, her sister was busy attending one party after another every day, never sparing her a glance. When she finally found her sister and, working up her courage, kissed her on the lips, their parents rushed in in a panic, pointing at her and shouting before locking her in the attic.
She thought it must be because she was ugly. Everyone loved beauty and hated ugliness.
If only she could become beautiful, her parents wouldn't reject her anymore. Then she could stay by her sister's side like she had when they were little, couldn't she?
As the rose branches spread throughout the attic, the birthmark on the girl's face faded. She grew to look more and more like her sister, but she gradually realized that her parents looked at her with increasing fear.
One rainy night, the girl overheard her parents talking.
Her father said, "Annie's been acting stranger and stranger. I'm afraid she might hurt Anna... Should we ask a priest to take a look?"
Her mother hesitated. "We can't bring a priest here. Annie would be executed. We'll keep a close eye on her. Nothing will happen."
Her father sighed. "Let's send Anna to the countryside tomorrow. We should arrange a marriage for her as soon as possible, so the two of them can be separated..."
The girl listened calmly, showing neither joy nor anger. She knew exactly what she had to do, just as she had known to plant roses every night without fail.
She climbed up to the attic once more, knelt before the idol, and bowed in reverent prayer.
She said, "I want two people to die in a way that won't arouse suspicion. I'm willing to pay any price."
So the God taught her how to kill living things and carve spells with fresh blood.
The girl killed the family cat. The moment its warm blood stained her fingertips, there was no turning back.
When Qi Si regained consciousness, he found himself leaning against the wall. The two skeletons on the bed in front of him were gone, leaving only a pile of bone fragments.
Beside him, Chang Xu was trying to crush the fragments into even smaller pieces.
Seeing Qi Si come to, Chang Xu explained, "You were caught in a Nightmare just now. I figured the skeletons were the key, so I smashed them."
"..."
He knew everyone had different talents. In a fair game, if it was possible to get through a crisis with cleverness, then there had to be a solution that relied on sheer force...
...But wasn't this a little too ridiculous?
Qi Si fell silent and lowered his head to look at his hands.
The red dress in his arms had disappeared. Clearly, it had been consumed as a story item after the event was triggered.
The piece of paper he had taken from under the pillow was gone too, without a trace, as though it had never existed.
Qi Si looked at Chang Xu. "If I'm not mistaken, there was a piece of paper with clues written on it under the pillow."
Chang Xu was quick to act. As Qi Si spoke, he had already reached beneath the pillow and pulled out a paper covered in writing.
Qi Si leaned closer and scanned the words on it:
[Anna and Annie were born at the same time...]
The words on the paper were exactly the same as those on the previous one.
Had time turned back again?
Before, the time reversal had only been a conclusion he'd inferred indirectly from the movement of the Pocket Watch's hands. This time, he had experienced it firsthand.
Qi Si felt as if he'd had an incredibly long dream. In it, a thousand years passed in the blink of an eye. Countless currents of thought flowed through his consciousness, leaving faint impressions and memories that may or may not have been real.
It was a strange sensation, as if it came from the instance's mechanics, yet also as if it were a talent buried deep in his memory.
Chang Xu finished reading the paper and handed it to Qi Si. "How did you know there was a paper under the pillow?"
"I saw it," Qi Si replied. "It seems time turned back again just now. Of course, I might have been hallucinating."
He briefly recounted what he had experienced and felt.
Chang Xu raised his left hand to the back of his neck, his gaze sharpening. "I think time in Rose Manor is starting to become chaotic. That time reversal at one in the afternoon must have been something like a switch. Once it was activated, the effects that followed became uncontrollable."
Qi Si didn't bother correcting Chang Xu's theory.
He tapped his temple and looked over the rules on the system interface from beginning to end.
The anomaly at one in the afternoon was undoubtedly the key to solving the mystery. The most urgent thing was to figure out what triggered the time reversal.
But there were too few clues.
The only thing he could be sure of was that the time reversal had something to do with either Zou Yan or Ye Zi.
One of them had used an item to get the four-line poem clue from Chang Xu's room, then immediately conducted an experiment.
The experiment had succeeded.
What a melodramatic story. (It felt moving when I was thinking it up. Now that I've written it out, what even is this?)
Before you continue