At those words, not only did the blustering man freeze, but the other players were also shocked by what Bo Yi had implied. The corridor fell deathly silent.
A moment later, Zhao Yi was the first to recover. Looking at the man before him, whose clothes were perfectly neat and undisturbed, he found it hard to reconcile his appearance with what he had said. "You mean you encountered a monster last night too?"
A monster? It took Bo Yi a second to realize that this was what the game called "anomalies," and he nodded.
"What did you encounter?!" Zhao Wen Shan asked eagerly.
Before Bo Yi could speak, the blustering man finally caught on. He glared at Bo Yi through gritted teeth, making one last desperate attempt to argue. "Just because you say something happened, does that make it true? What proof do you have?"
"The rooms are so well soundproofed that you can claim whatever you like about what happened!"
When the other players heard this, they actually-actually thought the blustering man had a point.
The blustering man keenly caught the change in their expressions. Immediately regaining his arrogant air, he pressed his advantage. "Besides, even if you're telling the truth, who knows whether you ran into danger and diverted it onto her to save yourself!" As he spoke, he pointed at the room that reeked of blood, his voice ringing with conviction, the very picture of righteous indignation.
Clap, clap, clap...
Even when the blustering man practically pointed a finger in his face and slandered him, Bo Yi's expression did not change in the slightest. He even had the leisure to applaud the man's accomplished performance.
Seeing that the atmosphere was about to grow tense again, Zhao Yi, one of the veteran players present, had no choice but to steel himself and smooth things over. "All right, all right... You say he has no proof, but aren't your claims just baseless guesses too?"
The blustering man snorted but said nothing more. After all, his only aim had been to sling some mud and divert everyone's attention.
Yet just as he decided to quit while he was ahead, the person he had so magnanimously "let off" refused to let the matter drop. "Who said... I have no proof?"
Everyone froze.
Ignoring the varied expressions on their faces, Bo Yi turned to Zhao Yi. "Have you checked that room?"
Although Zhao Yi did not understand what he meant, he nodded anyway.
"Did you check every part of it carefully?"
"Well..." Zhao Yi hesitated, then shook his head honestly. Since the room's layout was much the same as the others, they had not seen any need to search it and had focused only on examining the body on the bed. But now that Bo Yi had asked... could there still be a clue in the room?
He led the veteran players back into the room. The new players, who had yet to recover from the gruesome sight they had witnessed, all obediently waited outside rather than get in the way.
"What are we looking for?" Zhao Wen Shan asked, frowning and covering her nose.
Zhao Yi pulled back the curtains to check, while still remembering to reassure his younger sister. "I don't know, but there must be a clue we missed..."
Zhao Wen Shan was a little unhappy. "There's nowhere to hide anything in this room... What's there to search..." Muttering to herself, she pinched the quilt between two fingers and lifted it. The draft stirred up by the quilt raised the bedsheet, and Zhao Wen Shan suddenly gave a small exclamation. "Under this bed..."
She bent down, grabbed the bedsheet, and lifted it. Sure enough, "There's an open space under the bed!" Because the sheet hung all the way to the floor, concealing the lower half of the bed, they had all unconsciously assumed it was boxed in underneath.
She called out her discovery happily, then eagerly bent down, knelt on the floor, and held up her candle to peer beneath the bed.
"Have you found anything?"
The passage beside the bed was too narrow for Zhao Yi and the other middle-aged male player to do what Zhao Wen Shan had done, so they could only pin their hopes on her and another female player dressed in black.
"There's something underneath." It was the female player, who had remained quiet all this time, who answered Zhao Yi.
"Where, where?!" Zhao Wen Shan immediately leaned over.
The female player moved aside and pointed out the spot beneath the bed. "In the middle, under the head of the bed."
Squinting, Zhao Wen Shan stretched her candle toward it and indeed saw a dark lump.
"There really is something." She set the candle aside and, no longer caring about the blood on the floor, promptly lay down and reached toward the lump.
"Can you reach it?" When Zhao Wen Shan remained silent, Zhao Yi grew nervous. "What is it?"
"It's..." Zhao Wen Shan felt the texture beneath her hand. At first, it was icy cold and very smooth to the touch. A little farther up, there seemed to be some wet fabric. She simply dragged the thing over in front of her.
"This is..." Her expression turned strange.
"What's wrong?" Seeing her reaction, the others gathered around. Then their expressions turned strange as well.
The new players outside were desperately curious. The blustering man in particular looked even more upset when he saw that the veteran players really had found something in the room.
He even forgot his fear of the corpse. In a rash impulse, he rushed into the room. "Let me see!"
Zhao Wen Shan, who was holding the object, did not even wait for him to snatch it. With great "generosity," she shoved it straight into his arms.
The blustering man lowered his head as she did so:
It was a humanoid doll. The part that felt icy cold was its skin, while the wet part was the red clothing it wore, from which blood was still slowly dripping. Whether Zhao Wen Shan had done it deliberately or not, the doll's head happened to be tilted upward when she shoved it into his arms. The instant he looked down, he came face-to-face with the doll's face, exposed beneath its tangled wig-
On its contorted face, its mouth gaping wide, a thick, reddish-black liquid had congealed around its eye sockets, leaving two broad, bloody "tear tracks" down its cheeks. A pair of dull eyes that had already lost their luster had been crudely stuffed into the empty sockets and were wobbling as they stared at him.
The next second, "Aaaaaah-!" An incredibly shrill, piercing scream rang through the room.
"What the hell is this thing!" The blustering man reflexively flung the thing in his arms to the floor.
Clack.
Two eyeballs fell out of the sockets, their still-wet blood tracing winding, twisted streaks across the floor.
Rumble, rumble...
One lifeless eyeball rolled to the blustering man's feet and slowly came to a stop, its unfocused pupil staring straight into his eyes.
Before you continue