Rose Manor (17): The Three Doors

"Lin Chen, are you in there? Ye Zi is dead. I'm so scared... Could you let me in?"

Lin Chen curled up on the bed, listening to the woman's voice outside the door. He couldn't help tightening his grip on the room key.

The voice was separated from his ears by a door, and it trembled, perhaps from fear. It sounded muffled and distorted, but he could still tell it was Zou Yan.

Lin Chen didn't know Zou Yan well. He only remembered that she was a psychologist who had said a few things about the importance of sticking together. She always wore a calm, gentle expression that made people feel as though they were basking in a spring breeze.

He'd never seen her so distraught before...

Lin Chen climbed out of bed without thinking and reached for the doorknob.

Just as he was about to turn it, he hesitated. A scene from his memory came rushing back.

An hour earlier, as Qi Si was leaving, he had placed the room key in Lin Chen's hand, his expression more serious than Lin Chen had ever seen it. "We're all adults, but I still want to remind you: don't open the door for anyone except me."

At the time, Lin Chen hadn't understood what he meant. He'd asked, "Why?"

Qi Si had looked at him and smiled coldly, his smile edged with sarcasm. "In this zero-sum game, you can't trust anyone but me, since we share the same interests. Just know that if you open the door, you won't be the only one in danger. I will be, too."

The scene was so vivid that the moment it came back to him, Lin Chen took a step back and stared warily at the door.

Outside, Zou Yan's voice grew more and more frantic. "Lin Chen, please, save me!... It's here! I'm going to die!"

The fear and despair in her voice sounded genuine, not feigned. Lin Chen listened, his heart filled with unease.

The other players couldn't be trusted, sure, but they were only under suspicion. There was no conclusive proof they were irredeemably evil. What if Qi Si was wrong?

If Lin Chen didn't open the door, Zou Yan might really die...

But whether he opened it affected more than just his own safety. Qi Si was at stake, too...

Sweat beaded on Lin Chen's forehead. He hesitated, clenching the key in his hand until it dug into his flesh.

On the third floor, Qi Si had just backed out of the room with the skeletons when he suddenly heard the rain.

The castle's corridors had no windows. Its thick, ancient stone walls cut it off from the outside world. With no visual evidence, even the sound seemed to fade into the silence. What he'd heard a moment ago might have been a trick of his imagination.

Qi Si, however, thought it really was about to rain.

After all, in a third-rate TV drama, when a tragic plot reached its climax, a downpour was bound to come along and set the mood, wasn't it?

He had nearly finished exploring the first room. There was no point wasting time there when he wouldn't find any more clues. Qi Si headed for Room 2 and took out a thin wire, picking the lock the same way as before.

As usual, he sent Chang Xu in first. Only after Chang Xu had made a circuit of the room and found no trouble did Qi Si stroll inside.

The first thing he saw was a huge floor-to-ceiling window that covered nearly the entire wall. The gray-purple sky showed through, casting a hazy gray tint over the floor and walls.

Through the glass, which was covered in spiderwebs, he could see curtains of rain weaving down from above. The crisscrossing strands overlapped, tangled together like spider silk, and were hard to make out.

A soft "plop" sounded behind him. Something had fallen to the floor.

Qi Si looked down and saw a worn-out rag doll lying beside his heel.

It was a little girl in a red dress with braids. Xs stood in place of her eyes, and her mouth, stretched into a straight line, opened and closed as she sang a strange nursery rhyme:

"She's coming, she's coming, in the storm..."

"Don't look at me, don't look at me, I'm in the wardrobe..."

The door slammed shut behind them, and the light around them quickly dimmed, taking on the murky yellow hue of a scene from the past.

[Side quest triggered]

[Side quest (mandatory): Play hide-and-seek with Anna and Annie]

Two lines of text refreshed on the system interface. Qi Si narrowed his eyes slightly.

There were side quests after all, and this one was specifically marked "mandatory." Could there be "optional" quests later on?

He studied the three identical wardrobes that had appeared out of nowhere by the wall. Each was waist-high and wide enough for two people, casting a ring of dusty shadows on the floor.

A little girl in a black dress slowly took shape in the shadows. In a sweet voice, she said, "My big sister is hiding in one of the wardrobes. Can you help me find her? Each of you can open one wardrobe. Whoever opens an empty one will die."

A blind-box puzzle, was it?

Qi Si remembered the example he'd given Lin Chen not long ago. Raising an eyebrow, he asked, "Can we tap the wardrobes or do anything else to help us figure it out?"

"No, you can only look. You can't touch anything before you make your choice."

Dust fibers floated and swirled through the air. A faint halo surrounded the girl, but her face was blank, making her seem like an apparition from a hallucination.

She folded her hands in front of her chest and urged them on with an innocent yet cruel cheerfulness. "Hurry up and choose. One of you has to go first."

Qi Si looked down at the girl's featureless face and abruptly asked, "Are you human?"

The girl tilted her face up. "Yes. I've always been human."

Qi Si smiled. "All right, then. I'll have my teammate choose a wardrobe, but not open it. You can choose one of the other two and open it. How does that sound? You said it yourself: 'Each of you can open one wardrobe.'"

In the yellow light of an old movie, Qi Si waited at his leisure. The little girl silently tilted her head, hesitating as she considered his proposal.

Behind him, the doll kept chanting the nursery rhyme in a flat, hollow voice.

"She's coming, she's coming, in the storm..."

"Don't look at me, don't look at me, I'm... eek!"

Without warning, the song cut off, replaced by the sound of a cricket being crushed.

The girl's apparition flickered twice, then vanished along with the two wardrobes beside her. Only the wardrobe in the middle remained, standing alone.

[Side quest completed]

A cold electronic voice rang out.

Qi Si turned at the sound and saw Chang Xu's expressionless face, and... the doll beneath his foot.

Chang Xu was silent for a moment, then lowered his eyes. "I didn't think it was so weak."

...Did you pay to win, or are you cheating?

What did you call that? If you couldn't solve the problem, you solved the person who raised it?

Qi Si suddenly remembered an answer he'd heard during a discussion of the trolley problem: "Blow up the trolley."

He was glad he hadn't picked a fight with Chang Xu earlier. With a teasing smile, he said, "You seem pretty good at dealing with the supernatural. I doubt your identity is as simple as you claim."

Chang Xu tugged at the brim of his hat and said three words. "Born this way."

"Very impressive."

Qi Si offered a few words of praise, then pointed at the flattened doll on the floor, signaling for Chang Xu to pick it up.

Chang Xu silently did as he was told. He turned the doll over in his hands and examined it, then finally lifted the hem of its dress to show Qi Si.

There, embroidered in red thread, was an English word: "Anna."

"Anna, the older sister, owned the doll. From the nursery rhyme, we can tell that Anna was very afraid of her little sister, Annie. It's highly likely that Annie's affection was all in her own head." Qi Si repeated the same basic guess he'd made earlier.

He scanned the room, confirming there was nowhere else to explore, then pointed to the wardrobe in front of him.

Chang Xu understood. He opened it, then bent down and picked up an old, yellowed photograph from the dusty interior.

The photograph was poorly composed. Nine people sat stiffly around a long table laden with food, all facing the camera with wooden, rigid expressions.

Four of their faces were clear. The other five were blurred beyond recognition.

Qi Si leaned over to examine them closely. One of the four clear faces belonged to someone he knew: Shen Ming!

Of the remaining three faces, he recognized one from earlier: it was the first victim Chang Xu had dug out of the pit in the garden.

A guess formed in his mind, and the next moment, it was confirmed.

Chang Xu pointed at the three less familiar faces with his long index finger. "All three bodies are in the garden. I dug them up myself."

Qi Si stared at the person closest to the seat of honor and said softly, "When a player dies, their face appears in the photograph. There are five empty places, corresponding exactly to the five players. Does that mean this instance never intended to let the players leave alive?"

All the strange things he'd noticed earlier now fit together. The feeling of being a hair's breadth from death was so fascinating that he had to force down the corners of his mouth to keep from laughing. "What if the time loop started at the beginning of the instance? Three days per loop, three deaths. We're on the second loop."

"Impossible." Chang Xu shook his head. "I wouldn't have left places like the garden and the third floor, with such obvious important clues, unexplored until the second loop."

Qi Si scoffed. "Maybe we already explored them all once in the first loop, but failed to solve the puzzle in the end. So everything reset."

The implication behind his words was chilling to the bone.

Exploring again and again, failing again and again, losing all their memories, and being thrown back into the loop.

The cycle repeated. One by one, their fellow players died, the people around them dwindled, and the hope of escaping grew dimmer...

They were trapped in despair without even knowing it, still believing they were struggling desperately to survive, until this eerie manor silently devoured them and turned them into nourishment for the roses...

Thoughts spread through Qi Si's mind like vines, and his breathing quickened at the tragic beauty of it all.

Ignoring the dirt, he took the photograph from Chang Xu.

He watched as the image on the front began to bleed ink, as though it had fallen into water. Within moments, the once-clear picture had blurred beyond recognition.

Red words written in blood seeped through from the back, already congealed:

[We will all die]

After her parents died, the girl got her wish and lived with her older sister. Then the man appeared.

The girl couldn't understand why a stranger who had suddenly entered their lives could take her sister's attention away from her.

He wasn't even good-looking. He was nothing compared to her sister. Why did her sister love him so humbly, so timidly?

The girl interfered, and at last the man left without taking her sister with him.

The girl watched her sister spend her days in tears. She couldn't understand why she was so sad.

Her sister grew more and more haggard. Her beautiful face grew dull, and she bloomed and withered with the seasons as the roses in the garden died.

The girl was powerless. She could only climb the tower again and pray to the idol.

The God said, "She is ill and will die. Only the heart of the person she loves most can bring her back to life."

The girl didn't want to admit it, but she knew all too well that her sister loved that man.

Fortunately, by then, she looked almost exactly like her sister. Even their parents might not have been able to tell them apart, had they still been alive.

When the man returned to the manor, she welcomed him in her sister's place and killed him.

Her sister's body opened its eyes in the coffin. It was a ghostly creature, infested by roses. It would never call her by name again, nor look at her with sorrowful eyes. With each passing moment, it grew older, rotted, and withered.

She was afraid, so she went to plead with the God.

The merciful God cut out three days of time for her, allowing her and her sister to eke out an existence in an endless loop.

She watched her sister repeat the process of rotting through an endless cycle of three days. Although her condition no longer worsened, her face had long since become utterly decayed.

She realized in terror that she couldn't accept her sister's ugliness.

Every time she saw that wrinkled, rotting face, with its gauzy skin revealing bone, she felt sick and wanted to vomit.

She even began to regret all the things she'd done in the past to win her sister's affection.

She asked the God, "Can you restore my sister's beauty?"

The God opened its blood-red eyes and smiled with bloodlust. "Keep the guests who come to the manor. Nourish the roses with their flesh and blood, and everything will be as you wish."