Rose Manor (6): Eve of Reckoning

In Room 2, the curtains never closed again after the wind blew them open.

Through the translucent window, the garden outside the castle lay fully in view.

Under the starless night sky, purple blight spread beneath tangled vegetation. The boundaries between branches, stems, and leaves had blurred, piling into clusters of shadowy, ghost-like gloom.

Miss Anna, dressed in black, stood amid the sea of roses like a tombstone beneath the bleak, solitary moonlight.

The light was too dim for Qi Si to tell which way she was facing, or whether she was looking at him.

But one thing was certain: if she discovered he was still awake, the Player's fate would be grim.

It was perfectly reasonable for a host to be angry after learning that her guests had pretended to sleep and deceived her. Combined with the key's description, it could be inferred that, by then, the door would no longer be able to stop Miss Anna.

As for what she would do after entering the room...

With a sense of humor only he himself could understand, Qi Si silently thought, It can't possibly be about discussing relationship problems, can it?

He suddenly became a little curious. The Rules stated that "only ghosts can kill humans." What could Miss Anna, as a living person, do to him? How would she treat him?

Still, the Eerie Game had plenty of instances to choose from. Dying in the very first one would be far too much of a loss. He had to at least survive until the second instance to break even.

As for methods of death, it would be better to test them on other Players.

Several rose petals had somehow fallen onto the bedsheet before him.

Qi Si gently blew on them, watching as they trembled in the airflow, fluttered down, and landed on the floor.

Lin Chen, on the other side of the bed, was sleeping soundly. He mumbled incoherently in his sleep, completely unaware of everything that had just happened.

He even turned over, dragged most of the blanket beneath himself, and resumed his steady snoring a few seconds later.

Qi Si's eye twitched slightly, but he relaxed as well.

He remained motionless in his prone position. His instinctive heartbeat and pulse gradually slowed with time, and accompanied by Lin Chen's rhythmic snores nearby, drowsiness soon seeped into his mind.

Qi Si yawned and fell into a deep sleep. When he opened his eyes again, it was already dawn.

Miss Anna's ghostly figure had vanished from the garden beyond the French windows, leaving behind only roses blooming in blazing profusion.

The Mechanical Clock outside solemnly struck five heavy chimes.

It was five in the morning.

The brief sleep had done little good. Qi Si yawned several times, then propped himself up with an arm and sat up listlessly, looking toward the door.

Withered petals lay scattered over the floor, gathered into a small patch before the door, bearing witness to everything that had happened last night.

"Qi... Brother Qi, why is the chair overturned?" Lin Chen finally woke up. At a glance, he noticed the wide-open curtains, the chair lying on the floor, and the scattered red dress.

His face turned pale. "Did something happen last night?"

"Mm." Qi Si calmly got out of bed, drew the curtains shut, righted the chair and pressed it against them again. Then he picked up the red dress and tossed it into the corner. "Miss Anna came by."

Lin Chen sprang out of bed. "What did she come for?"

"You should ask her that. I'm not The God. How would I know so clearly?"

Sitting on the chair, Qi Si recounted everything that had happened the previous night from beginning to end, including some of his speculations about death triggers.

Lin Chen blankly processed the information and said with relief, "Good thing I went to sleep early last night."

...More precisely, he had been knocked unconscious early.

After running through Qi Si's words in his head again, Lin Chen asked when he did not understand. "Brother Qi, how did you know that nothing would happen as long as Miss Anna didn't find out we were awake?"

"A guess." Qi Si gave a muffled chuckle. "Since wakefulness and sleep are determined by the game's mechanics, I definitely wasn't the only one awake at night."

"A sustainable game won't leave everyone dead with no chance of survival. Miss Anna went knocking from room to room, but she couldn't possibly kill every Player who was awake. So I inferred that she has conditions for killing people."

"Considering how she kept asking whether I was asleep, I guessed that her condition for killing was 'discovering that a Player remained awake at night.'"

Lin Chen was impressed despite not fully understanding. "As expected of you, Brother Qi. If it were me, when she bluffed that she knew I was awake, I'd definitely have been scared into opening the door."

"It's only a matter of logic," Qi Si said. "You need to understand this: separated by a door, Miss Anna can't be one hundred percent certain whether the Player inside is awake. Otherwise, she would never have needed to ask so many times. She could have simply broken in. By the same logic, I infer that she is also constrained by the Rules and cannot disturb Players who are asleep."

"After breaking in, she would face two possible outcomes. Either she guessed right, found an awake Player in the room, and successfully claimed a life; or she guessed wrong, found no awake Player, violated the Rules, and received some unknown punishment. Weighing risk against reward, she would have to make a more cautious choice."

Lin Chen narrowed his eyes. "But no matter what, she can't guarantee that the person in the room is awake, right? As long as we don't open the door, even if we make a sound, we can say we sleep badly or talk in our sleep."

Qi Si nodded. "So, she either gives up on killing, or tests the likelihood that the people in each room are awake and chooses the room with the highest probability to gamble on."

He paused, then abruptly changed the subject. "Lin Chen, have you ever opened a blind box?"

"...Huh?"

"There are three blind boxes, each containing a cat whose state—dead or alive—is unknown. Some are already dead, while some are barely alive and about to die. But one box is specially made. Once opened, it releases poisonous gas, and the cat inside will die regardless of whether it was dead or alive."

"If you open a box with a live cat, you get its weight in gold. If you open one with a dead cat, you'll be killed. But through knocking, weighing, and other methods, you can guess whether a box is specially made and whether the cat inside is dead or alive."

"After examining the first two blind boxes, you think the cat in the second one might be alive. Would you first weigh the third box, or directly open the box in your hands?"

Lin Chen understood and followed the logic. "You'd definitely test them all. Otherwise, you can't be sure whether the second blind box is specially made and whether it'll poison the cat to death."

Qi Si shook his head with a sigh. "Then you discover that the third box is made from a different material than the other two and is clearly the special one. You're delighted, thinking that as long as you open the second box, you'll receive its weight in gold. But then you realize you don't know whether the cat in the second box is still alive after all this time."

Lin Chen scratched his head in distress. "Can I just not open any of them?"

"Of course." Qi Si rested his index finger on his knee, tapping it now and then. "By the same reasoning, after Miss Anna visited Brother Shen's room and returned, she couldn't be sure whether I had fallen asleep during that interval. So her safest choice was not to choose any room at all."

"—In other words, if everyone was smart enough, last night would have been a peaceful night."

Lin Chen listened to Qi Si's logical analysis with blank eyes, feeling as though he understood something, yet also understood absolutely nothing.

Qi Si had no intention of explaining further.

If he did not still have use for this tool, Qi Si would not have objected even if Miss Anna immediately dragged Lin Chen outside and buried him in a pit. He might even have watched from the side and cheered her on.

There was still plenty of time. Qi Si walked to the desk, tore off a sheet of Papyrus, picked up a pen, and began writing and drawing on it.

Lin Chen cautiously leaned closer. Lowering his head, he saw the following written on the paper:

[2. The exact time can be determined by silently counting seconds and similar methods.]

[3. Which Miss Anna is the one who "likes guests" remains uncertain.]

[4. Miss Anna's demands can be avoided by pretending not to know, but she must not discover it.]

[5. There may be two Miss Annas.]

This was clearly an interpretation of the Rules on the system interface—the "crack the Rules" requirement of the main quest.

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

Qi Si set down his pen and raised his eyes to look at him. "I told you. Miss Anna in black was watching me from outside the window while knocking sounded from Shen Ming's room."

"Based on the current situation, Miss Anna is still limited to physical attacks. Otherwise, she would not have been stopped by a door or been unable to determine a Player's condition through one. Since she cannot split herself in two, there can only be two of her—or, in this instance, another main NPC on the same level as her."

"That explains many contradictions. Why can Miss Anna be both the main NPC of the instance and 'have no ill intent toward guests'? Why can she be trustworthy one moment and dangerous the next? Why does she sometimes wear black and sometimes red?"

"Earlier, I couldn't understand what there was to fear from Miss Anna, a living person, in an instance where only ghosts can kill humans. If even the main NPC can't kill Players, are we supposed to expect the Players to fight among themselves until they get themselves killed?"

"I originally thought the danger would come from The Butler, but that was too far-fetched. That Butler did not seem capable of acting independently at all. Now the answer is clear: this instance has a ghostly main NPC we have not yet seen—or, rather, another Miss Anna."

Listening to Qi Si's analysis, Lin Chen felt his scalp itch. "Then can we try joining forces with the living Miss Anna to deal with that ghost NPC?"

As soon as he finished speaking, Qi Si looked at him with the fond gaze one might give a child.

"Who told you living people must be good and ghosts must be evil? Yesterday, you were terrified of that 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." He then linked every pair of circles with double-headed arrows.

"There are three possibilities. One is what you said: Miss Anna is kind, meaning she is friendly toward Players, while the ghost NPC is evil. The second is exactly the opposite. And of course, there is the worst possibility: the two NPCs are in cahoots and both want the Players dead."

"So, what we need to do first is figure out what kind of existence this ghost NPC is—the one we can hear but have never seen. That will depend on our exploration of the third floor next."

Lin Chen nodded solemnly, once again directly experiencing just how formidable an "old Player" was.

Qi Si walked to the wall and picked up the long red dress once more. "But I've had some new thoughts about this instance's backstory."

He switched to an expressive first-person voice. "That girl and I were deeply in love, but countless obstacles stood between us. She could not meet me openly, so she could only knock on my door at night..."

Lin Chen: "..." You might be amazing, but do you really have to be this morbidly amusing?

He swallowed and quietly raised an objection. "B-Brother Qi, why are you so sure the theme of this instance is love? Could Miss Anna be constantly killing people to preserve her beauty? I heard there was a Queen Mary in history who bathed in the blood of young girls..."

Qi Si countered, "Do you remember what fruit was on the dinner table yesterday?"

Fruit?

Lin Chen froze, then heard Qi Si continue, "Ever since Albrecht Durer painted Adam and Eve in 1507 and depicted the forbidden fruit as an apple, the mistranslation that 'the forbidden fruit is an apple' has spread widely and gradually become conventional wisdom."

"Judging from Miss Anna's clothing, the era of this instance should be after the seventeenth century. At that point in time, the image of the 'apple' was the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve stole and ate, symbolizing love."

"Apples rarely appear on the menu of a European Noble dinner. Even when they do, they would be served as desserts such as apples in syrup, not whole ones for guests to hold and bite into."

"Putting all those factors together, it can basically be concluded that the apples at dinner carried symbolic meaning. As for why Miss Anna put such an obvious symbol on the table, it was probably the same mentality that makes serial killers like to revisit the scene after committing murder."

Lin Chen listened with unfocused eyes, finding it absurd.

Logic and deduction alone were not enough—he even needed to know this kind of obscure trivia. Did students with uneven strengths not deserve to live?

This was only his first instance...

Qi Si had always enjoyed making up nonsense to frighten people. After spinning a string of far-fetched deductions and seeing that he had intimidated his tool, he smiled and reassured him, "If you only want to survive, it's actually not this complicated. You can simply hide in your room and refer to the fourth rule whenever something unusual happens—that is, pretend you know nothing."

"In theory, if you're calm enough to sleep for three straight days, you might really make it safely through this instance."

Lin Chen's eyes lit up. He was just short of asking Qi Si to knock him out again.

Qi Si lowered his eyes and sighed. "Of course, everything I've said is only speculation based on the first night. It could all be wrong. After all, the Rules may not necessarily be trying to guide us..."

No sooner had he finished speaking than a shrill scream came from outside the door, as though it were about to turn into a blade and pierce the room.

—Something had happened.

I have an announcement: from now on, there will only be one chapter a day. There was no site message today, so clearly the 6,000-word review threshold is a lost cause. I can only wait for someone to pick it up from the public pool ten days from now. I heard too many words are bad, so I'll cut down the word count. Of course, if no one picks it up after ten days, I'll return to two updates a day, just as a labor of love.