Xin Xin leaned in to listen carefully. Then her expression changed drastically, and she staggered backward.
Zhou Yang caught her from behind and reassured her, "Don't be scared. We're all here."
"There's a sound inside. I don't know how to describe it." Xin Xin felt as though that deeply unsettling sound still echoed in her ears. Struggling to describe it, she said, "Like a really shrill scraping noise."
That description was too vague. The others were baffled, and even after thinking it over, they couldn't make sense of it.
Tang Cha simply pressed his ear closer to listen, too, and felt every hair on his body stand on end. Rubbing his arms, he pouted and said, "I know... it's fingernails scratching a blackboard!"
Xin Xin immediately nodded. "Yes, yes! That's exactly it."
Who hadn't felt their scalp crawl at school when a girl's fingertips scraped across the blackboard as she wiped it clean?
Ji Xun, escape-game boss and one who had slipped through the net of nine-year compulsory education: How embarrassing.
His first thought had been an axe dragging across the floor.
Fang Rui summed it up. "So there's someone inside scratching the wall?"
Tang Cha: How terrifying!
Fang Rui continued, "Or he wants to get out, so he's desperately trying to pry away the bricks blocking his way?"
Tang Cha: Even more terrifying!
"One piece of good news and one piece of bad news." Lu Jiancheng walked to the window and stole a glance outside. "The good news is that those monsters don't seem to dare approach this house. We're safe for now. The bad news is that we're surrounded."
Zhao Fu first let out a sigh of relief, then was so shocked by the bad news that he stopped breathing. It made his expression look rather comical. "Th-then what do we do? Should we go into another room and lock this one up?"
"We can't just keep hiding. Don't forget we still have the main quest."
Ji Xun pushed open the door and walked into the living room, telling the others, "He won't be getting out anytime soon like this. Wait here. I'll check the other rooms for anything unusual."
Fang Rui said, "Be careful."
Ji Xun nodded, then opened the door and left.
Tang Cha asked in confusion, "Doesn't Ji Xun need a flashlight?"
Fang Rui adjusted her glasses and said softly, almost to herself, "Everyone has their secrets."
The darkness had no effect on Ji Xun. He could clearly see the furnishings around him.
The owners of this house must have been fairly well-off. A decorative vase stood beside the television in the living room.
Ji Xun didn't understand human aesthetics. The reason he noticed the vase was the large pool of blood beneath it.
The blood had already dried, leaving a dark red trail that snaked across the floor.
On closer inspection, there were also what looked like drag marks on the dust-covered floor.
In Ji Xun's experience, if an ordinary human lost this much blood, they wouldn't be far from death.
It wasn't just the living room. The walls and ceiling of another bedroom were covered in blood spatter.
The mat spread over the heated brick bed in that bedroom, in particular, was almost soaked through with blood.
It was a murder scene through and through.
"A murder house, too," Ji Xun muttered as he headed toward the kitchen.
There was a large water vat in the kitchen, with several farming tools scattered beside it, including a hoe and a shovel.
The tools also bore scattered reddish-brown marks. Whether they were ordinary stains or blood was unclear.
A large pot and a sack of grain sat on the stove.
The grain had spoiled and was covered in mold. An overpowering stench filled the air.
Ji Xun hesitated for a moment, then lifted the pot's lid with a conflicted expression. His face changed slightly.
He pressed his lips together. Had any other escape-game bosses been present, they would have immediately recognized this as a sign that murderous intent was stirring within him.
Ding-dong-
[Main quest: Find at least four villagers (1/4)]
Inside the pot was an infant's leg, rotted green and crawling with maggots. This was the source of the stench.
Hearing the mechanical female voice in his ears, Ji Xun silently studied the severed human limb.
He had once heard a colleague say that humans had lived through a period of terrible hardship.
When they couldn't get enough to eat, some had chosen to exchange their children and eat them.
But judging by the state of this house, its owners didn't seem poor enough to resort to eating a child.
Besides, as Xin Xin had said, the owners had been thoughtful enough to pad the furniture's corners and edges. There were also little handmade clothes in the wardrobe of that blood-soaked bedroom. All of it showed how dearly the owners loved their child.
Ji Xun's heart felt heavy. Everything he had seen since entering the house told him that something appallingly cruel had happened here.
But only when he actually saw the infant's severed limb did he realize that the truth might be even more horrifying than he had imagined.
Ji Xun brought Fang Rui and the others into the kitchen. When they saw what was in the pot, everyone's expression turned grim.
Xin Xin and Zhao Fu were especially affected.
Xin Xin was a kindergarten teacher in the real world. The gruesome sight reminded her of the children in her class, and her eyes reddened as she began to sob quietly.
Zhao Fu, meanwhile, had a six-year-old daughter. His own child was the first person he thought of.
"So this is what counts as a villager." Tang Cha was downcast, too. "It's so cruel. He was only a baby."
"Following that logic, there should be another villager inside the heated bed." Ji Xun distributed the tools beside the water vat among the men present. "Maybe once we find the villagers, we can figure out what really happened in this village."
Perhaps spurred on by the infant's terrible death, everyone threw themselves into the work.
The men joined Ji Xun in digging from the opening beneath the heated bed, while Xin Xin sat off to one side with Fang Rui. By flashlight, they wrote and sketched on paper, organizing the clues and unanswered questions they had gathered so far.
Question one: Why was the village called the deserted village?
Question two: Why did the villagers turn into snakes at night?
Question three: Who committed the murders in this house?
Question four: To be added.
Fang Rui thought for a moment, then continued writing.
Clue one: The quest required them to find villagers, which meant the daytime villagers weren't the real villagers.
Clue two: The "villagers" might not have turned into snakes willingly.
Clue three: The snakes didn't dare approach the house where the murders had happened.
Xin Xin said, "Fang Rui, I understand the others, but I don't get clue two."
"When the snakes were chasing us, I noticed their movements were stiff, as though they weren't used to those bodies. They might also have been restricted by some rule." Fang Rui carefully recalled what had happened. Snakes should have moved quickly, yet they had easily shaken off the ones chasing them.
Realization dawned on Xin Xin, and she said admiringly, "You're amazing. Even in a situation like this, you managed to piece together so many clues."
Fang Rui said, "We lose our composure because we're caught up in it. But if you review this instance from an omniscient perspective, you'll have a different experience."
Xin Xin: Is this an author's logic at work?
"Found it." Lu Jiancheng tossed aside his shovel and shone his flashlight into the opening beneath the heated bed.
What the light revealed gave him a fright.
A skeleton lay curled up inside. The flashlight's stark white beam fell directly into his black, hollow eye sockets. His mouth gaped wide, as though he were screaming soundlessly in agony.
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