Early morning.
I woke up in the hotel bed.
The conversations and events from the dream all flooded into my mind at once.
I broke out in a cold sweat as I remembered the Ninth Concubine being bound and dragged away by an iron chain.
That red phantom... I had vaguely made out a human shape, but I couldn't see it clearly. Could that red phantom... have been the Red Lotus Patriarch?
The Ninth Concubine had been taken away by the Red Lotus Patriarch. The odds were probably against her.
I carefully recalled every conversation in the dream. After spending a long time working through them and sorting out all the clues, I had a rough understanding of everything that had happened back then.
This was still a story of revenge, but it also carried a measure of helplessness and tragedy.
Some details were clear now, too. The only thing that remained unclear was that monster, the one even the Ninth Concubine hadn't known anything about.
I wondered whether that monster could also have been responsible for harming people afterward.
Before this, the Seventh Master and I had kept suspecting the Seventh Concubine, because after the incident at the Luo Residence, everyone who met with trouble had been male. There had been no women.
Looking at it that way, the Seventh Concubine was certainly the prime suspect.
But the truth was that a Daoist priest had already helped the Seventh Concubine pass on long ago, so it couldn't have been her.
And the Ninth Concubine had lived to a hundred, so it couldn't have been her either.
That left only Master Luo. But if it was Master Luo, why did he only harm men? Given the reason for his murder and how it had happened, he should only have harmed