Turn left at the end of the third-floor corridor, pass Gray's study, pass the spare office, pass a storage room piled with old nautical charts, and at the very back is a narrow door.
The door handle is made of brass and is the same style as the other doors. Behind the door is a storage room.
This storage room was originally designed to store bedding and seasonal clothing, but Gwen later converted it into a document archive, piled with old chamber of commerce contracts and expired nautical charts from several years ago.
A row of metal filing cabinets stood in the corner, with cardboard boxes stacked on top of them, their labels faded.
The only light source was a 40-centimeter square skylight in the roof, through which moonlight slanted in, drawing a gray-blue square on the floor.
Roy pushed open the narrow door, squeezed in sideways, and Mila followed closely behind. The door creaked as it closed, and Roy immediately pressed down on the door panel, only letting go when the creaking had completely disappeared.
"Be gentle," Mila whispered.
"The door made the sound by itself."
"The door won't open by itself; you pushed it too fast."
"It makes a sound even if you push it."
Mila didn't continue arguing with him; her attention had already been drawn to the ventilation opening on the north wall of the room.
The vent was a sheet metal louver, with four screws nailed to the wooden frame, positioned at waist height.
She squatted down, touched the edge of the screw with her fingers, dug her nails into the Phillips head and turned it twice, but the screw didn't budge.
"The screws are rusty," she said.
Roy pulled a dagger from his waist, wedged the tip into the Phillips head of the screw, and with a flick of his wrist, the screw loosened with a sharp metallic scraping sound.
He removed the four screws one by one, took off the louvers and leaned them against the wall. The ventilation duct opening was a square hole in sheet metal about 40 centimeters in size. A thin layer of dust had accumulated on the inner wall of the duct, and a dry metallic smell wafted out of the opening.
Mila crouched down and peered into the pipe. The pipe was straight, extending about three meters north. A faint light shone in from the end, which must have been from the louvered opening of the ceiling vent in the master bedroom.
The pipe wall is made of sheet metal, and pressing it with your hand will produce a dull thud; that's the only problem.
"I'll go first," Mila said.
Before Roy could answer, she had already braced herself with both hands on the edge of the tube and slid in like a snake.
Her shoulders were just wide enough to fit through the pipe, her shirt rustling against the metal. She climbed the three meters in less than twenty seconds, stopping at the end of the pipe, her face close to the louvered opening at the exit.
The master bedroom light was on, and through the gaps in the blinds, one could see the area between the foot of the bed and the window.
Damian sat on a soft stool at the foot of the bed, having changed into a dark gray cotton loungewear shirt, holding a glass of water, and talking to Gwen.
Gwen sat in front of the dressing table, her hair down, her blonde hair draped over her shoulders, taking off her earrings.
The two people's voices came through the blinds and pipes, and the specific words were not very clear, but the tone was very calm, like a couple chatting before bed.
Mila retreated to the middle of the pipe, making room for Roy. Roy's shoulders were much wider than Mila's, and he clearly struggled to squeeze himself into the pipe opening. The fabric on both sides of his shoulders clung tightly to the pipe wall, and he had to push off the ground with his toes to move forward an inch.
The belt buckle scraped against the metal, making a very faint metallic clanging sound. Mila turned around and glared at him.
The two lay side by side at the end of the pipe, their four eyes peering down through the gaps in the blinds.
The pipe was just wide enough for two people to lean against each other, their breathing muffled by the metal pipe, and their exhaled hot air condensed into a very thin mist on the pipe wall.
"We'll make a sound when they turn off the lights," Mila said, almost touching Roy's ear with her lips.
What's that noise?
"Anything will do—ghostly screams, cat meows, the sound of the wind—any sound will do, as long as they stop."
Roy frowned in the darkness. He spent about ten seconds mentally rehearsing the plan's execution, then noticed a logical flaw. "If the screams are coming from the ceiling, will Big Brother believe it?"
That's why I said meowing is fine too.
"Where did the cat come from in the master bedroom? The stray cats on White Wax Island are all over the dock; they never come to the main house. Big brother knows that."
Mila was silent for two seconds.
Roy understood the meaning behind those two seconds of silence. She hadn't considered that aspect at all; she was now trying to fix the logical flaws after the fact, and she hadn't even managed to do so yet.
Mila's IQ would plummet during such an action.
Once she enters the "mischief mode" of impromptu adventure, without a plan, and purely driven by impulse, her judgment drops sharply.
What's worse, Roy was never very bright to begin with.
When this brother-sister duo is placed on the battlefield, Roy is in charge of fighting, Mila is in charge of strategizing. Their complementary roles make them invincible.
In a mischievous situation, one person was responsible for lowering the lower limit of intelligence, and the other was responsible for raising the upper limit of impulsiveness. The two attributes overlapped, and the result was that they lay in the ventilation duct for nearly two minutes without figuring out what sound to make.
"Meow like a cat." Mila finally made the decision.
"Meowing is not allowed, I just said no."
"Then bark like a dog."
"Is the dog barking from the ceiling?"
"Garp's dog, just say Garp's dog ran up here."
"Do you think the older brother wouldn't know whether Garp owns a dog or not?"
As they argued inside the pipes, their voices escalated from whispers close to each other's ears to shouting at each other in hushed tones.
Speaking in a low voice sounds very soft to the speaker because the vibrations of the vocal cords are transmitted directly to the inner ear through the skull, making it sound like a murmur.
But for the person at the other end of the pipe, the sheet metal ventilation pipe is a natural amplifier and megaphone.
Every syllable, uttered with suppressed emotion, is captured and amplified by the metal pipe walls, leaking out through the louvers in the master bedroom ceiling, as if someone had pressed a button on the ceiling for a Den Den Mushi) with a slightly unclear but just audible sound.
In the master bedroom.
Gwen had just taken off her earrings and was unfastening her necklace when Damian sat on a soft stool at the foot of the bed, holding a glass of water to his lips but not drinking it.
A dull grating sound came from the ceiling, followed by the crisp clang of a belt buckle hitting sheet metal, and then a low, indistinct murmur, which the sheet metal pipes amplified some of the sharper syllables.
Damian heard the words "cat," "no," "dog," and "Garp" in fragments.
He placed the water glass on the bedside table without making a sound.
Gwen's hand stopped on the necklace clasp; she heard it too.
She looked up at the ceiling. A very faint light peeked through the gaps in the blinds; it was the intermittent shadows caused by two heads jostling in front of the blinds in the ventilation duct.
Roy's head was a size larger Mila's, so the changes in light and shadow were intermittent.
Gwen tilted her head to look at Damian, and the corners of her mouth began to turn upwards.
She knew Roy and Mila wouldn't be quiet tonight, ever since she'd played a trick on them in the side hall that afternoon. She just wasn't sure what kind of revenge they'd choose, but it seemed they'd picked the stupidest one.
"See?" Gwen's voice was tinged with amusement, and she spoke very softly, so that only Damian could hear it.
"Those two are definitely not going to stop."
Damian did not laugh.
He looked up at the louvers on the ceiling vents, his eyebrows furrowed.
Roy and Mila can do whatever they want. He doesn't care if they wrestle in the Water 7 underground space, argue at the dinner table, or expose each other's shortcomings in the living room.
But this is the master bedroom, Gwen's room, his room, the only private space between the couple that no outsiders ever set foot in.
Roy and Mila now use this territory as a shooting range for pranks. Three years ago, they were caught spying, and he thought they would know their limits after that incident. But three years later, the same thing happened again.
I was somewhat angry, but more than that, I had a complex mix of emotions.
He discovered that he also failed to set rules for his younger siblings, and failed utterly.
Then that helpless smile just popped into my head; the corners of my mouth involuntarily twitched upwards.
He saw two heads frantically backing away through the blinds, the movements so large that the entire pipe echoed with a dull thud. One of them had probably hit his elbow, letting out a muffled groan.
They clearly knew they had been exposed and were trying to evacuate, but the two of them were squeezed side by side at the end of the pipe. To turn around, one of them would have to get out first, but both of them wanted to get out first, so they ended up both stuck in place and unable to move.
He took two steps to the left and stood directly under the ventilation vent.
He picked up the sword lying on the table, its blade flashing through the air and striking the louvered vent in the ceiling. The wooden planks and metal louvers were cleanly sliced open, the cut precisely along the inside of the vent's four-sided frame, without even scraping off a single piece of wallpaper.
The blinds fell down in one piece, bounced off the metal inner wall of the pipe, and landed with a clatter next to Gwen's dressing table.
Two people fell from the ceiling.
Mila tried to brace herself against the inner wall of the pipe with her hands to stop her fall, but the metal pipe was still buzzing from Damian's sword energy. Her hands slipped, and she lost her support, falling straight down through the hole in the ceiling.
Her body instinctively adjusted to a landing position mid-air, knees slightly bent, arms outstretched, and her feet made a dull thud on the wooden floor when she landed. She staggered slightly after landing but did not fall.
Roy wasn't so dignified.
He was a big guy, and the ventilation ducts weren't exactly friendly to him to begin with. Plus, after Mila fell in, the duct opening suddenly disappeared, and the fulcrum he used to support his body vanished instantly. He slid out of the hole, landing on his buttocks first, followed by his back hitting the floor with a thud that was almost twice as loud as when Mila landed.
His head hit the floor, his teeth clashed together and he bit his tongue, letting out a muffled groan of pain.
Both of them were wearing the clothes they wore for dinner; Roy's clothes were covered in dust, and his shoulders and back were stained with rust.
Mila's shirt sleeve rubbed against her left elbow in the pipe, revealing a small patch of skin.
They looked up at the same time.
Damian stood there, looking down at them.
His face showed no anger, his expression was almost calm, and the Three-Tomoe Sharingan in his eyes had not faded. It was possible that his Sharingan his sword to adjust the precision of the cut, or it could simply be that he was angry.
Gwen sat on a soft stool at the foot of the bed, one leg elegantly crossed over the other, elbows resting on her knees, and her hand supporting her chin.
She had taken off her necklace and earrings, her blonde hair was draped over her shoulders, the corners of her mouth were curved upwards, and her eyes were narrowed into crescent shapes. The warmth of that smile was somewhere between "watching a good show" and "genuinely finding her cute."
She was clearly the least surprised person in this incident.