Chapter 7: Rose Manor (Six) |
Inside Room 2, the curtains billowed where the wind had swept them open, and they remained that way.
The translucent window offered an unobstructed view of the castle gardens below.
Beneath a starless sky, a violet sickness crept through the tangled flora, blurring the lines between branch, stem, and leaf, until the garden was a mass of spectral, looming shadows.
Anna, clad in black, stood amidst a sea of roses. She was a silhouette in the pale, lonely moonlight, still as a gravestone.
The light was too faint for Qi Si to tell which way she was facing, or if her gaze was fixed upon him.
Of one thing he was certain: if she found any player still awake, the consequences would be dire.
It was only natural for a hostess to be angered by a guest feigning sleep. And considering the properties of the room key, Qi Si suspected the door would offer little protection once her anger was roused.
As for what she would do after entering the room...
A flicker of dark humor, one perhaps only he could appreciate, crossed Qi Si’s mind. *She’s hardly coming in for a heart-to-heart,* he thought.
Still, the Weird Game offered a vast selection of instances. To die in the very first one would be a colossal waste. He had to make it to the second, at the very least, just to feel like he'd broken even.
As for the various ways one could die... it was far better to let the other players serve as test subjects.
He noticed a few rose petals had settled on the sheets, though he couldn't recall when they had appeared.
Qi Si blew on them softly, watching them tremble in the current of his breath before fluttering to the floor.
On the other side of the bed, Lin Chen slept soundly, mumbling incoherently. He remained oblivious to everything that had just transpired.
He rolled over, hogging most of the blanket and pinning it beneath him. A few seconds later, his steady snores resumed.
Qi Si’s eye twitched, but the mundane annoyance also helped him relax.
He remained perfectly still, face down on the mattress. As time passed, the rhythmic sound of Lin Chen’s snoring lulled him, and the frantic pounding of his own heart slowed to a steady beat. Sleep began to claim him.
Qi Si yawned, and then he was asleep. The next time he opened his eyes, daylight was streaming into the room.
The ghostly figure of Anna was gone from the garden beyond the French doors, leaving only a sea of roses, their color as vibrant as a wildfire.
Outside, a mechanical clock chimed five solemn, heavy notes.
Five in the morning.
The brief sleep had done little to restore him. Qi Si yawned again and again, pushing himself into a sitting position with a weary groan. His gaze drifted toward the door.
A small drift of withered petals lay scattered on the floor by the door, a silent testament to the previous night’s events.
“Qi... Qi Si, why is the stool knocked over?” Lin Chen finally woke up. His eyes immediately landed on the wide-open curtains, the toppled stool, and the red dress crumpled on the floor.
The color drained from his face. “Did something happen last night?”
“Yes,” Qi Si replied calmly. He got out of bed, drew the curtains shut, and set the stool upright, pushing it back against the fabric. After picking up the red dress, he tossed it into a corner. “Anna paid us a visit.”
Lin Chen shot up from the bed. “What did she want?”
“You’d have to ask her. I’m not a mind reader, how would I know every detail?”
Sitting on the stool, Qi Si recounted the night's events from beginning to end, including his theories on what might get a player killed.
Lin Chen stared blankly as he processed the information. “Good thing I fell asleep so early,” he said, a wave of relief washing over him.
...More accurately, he’d been knocked out early.
He replayed Qi Si's words in his head, then asked, “Qi Si, how did you know nothing would happen as long as Anna didn't catch you awake?”
“A guess,” Qi Si replied with a stifled laugh. “Waking up or staying asleep is part of the game’s mechanics, which means I couldn’t have been the only one who woke up last night.”
“A well-designed game isn't meant to be a total death trap. Anna went from door to door. It's impossible that she could kill every single player who happened to be awake. Therefore, I figured there had to be a specific condition for her to kill someone.”
“Considering how she kept asking if I was asleep, I guessed her kill condition is ‘discovering a player is consciously awake during the night.’”
Lin Chen was in awe, even if he didn't fully grasp the logic. “You’re incredible, Qi Si. If it had been me, I would've been so scared when she bluffed about knowing I was awake that I would've opened the door for sure.”
“It’s just a matter of logic,” Qi Si explained. “You have to realize one thing: she's on the other side of a solid door. She can't be one hundred percent certain whether a player is awake or not. If she could, she wouldn't have bothered asking so many times—she would have just broken in. By that same logic, I'm guessing she's also bound by a rule that prevents her from disturbing sleeping players.”
“If she breaks down the door, she's faced with two possibilities. One, she gambles correctly, finds a player awake, and successfully claims a life. Two, she gambles incorrectly, finds no one awake, and violates the rules, leading to some unknown punishment. When you weigh the risks against the rewards, it forces her to be more cautious.”
Lin Chen squinted. “But either way, she can never be one hundred percent sure, can she? As long as you don't open the door, even if you make some noise, you could just blame it on tossing and turning or talking in your sleep.”
Qi Si nodded. “Exactly. So she has two choices: either give up on killing for the night, or probe each room to compare the probabilities and gamble on the one most likely to be awake.”
He paused, then changed tack. “Lin Chen, have you ever opened a loot box?”
“...Huh?”
“Imagine three loot boxes. Each one has a cat inside, and you don't know if it's dead or alive. Some might already be dead, others barely hanging on. But one of the boxes is booby-trapped. When it's opened, it releases a poison gas that will kill the cat inside, regardless of its state.”
“If you open a box and find a living cat, you get its weight in gold. Open one with a dead cat, and you die. You're allowed to tap the boxes, weigh them in your hands, anything to guess which one is trapped and whether the cat inside is alive or dead.”
“You've examined the first two boxes and have a hunch the cat in the second one might still be alive. Do you check the third box, or do you open the second one right away?”
Lin Chen caught on. “You'd check them all, obviously. You can't be sure the second box isn't the trapped one that'll just poison the cat.”
Qi Si shook his head with a soft sigh. “And then you find it. The third box feels different from the others—it's obviously the trapped one. You're ecstatic, certain that if you open the second box, you'll get your gold. But then it hits you: with all the time that's passed, you have no way of knowing if the cat in that second box is still alive.”
Lin Chen ran a frustrated hand through his hair. “Can I just... not open any of them?”
“Of course,” Qi Si said, tapping his index finger idly against his knee. “The same logic applies. After Anna went to Shen Ming's room and returned, she had no way of knowing if I'd fallen asleep in the interim. So, her safest move was to pick no room at all.”
“—Which means,” Qi Si concluded, “if every player had been clever enough, last night would have been completely peaceful.”
Lin Chen listened to Qi Si's breakdown with a vacant expression, feeling as if he'd grasped some essential truth while simultaneously understanding nothing at all.
Qi Si had no intention of explaining further.
If it weren't for the fact that a pawn could still be useful, Qi Si wouldn't have batted an eye if Anna had dragged Lin Chen out to be buried in a ditch. He might have even watched from the window and cheered her on.
With time to spare, Qi Si went to the desk, tore a sheet of paper from a notepad, and began to write.
Lin Chen crept closer, peering over his shoulder at the paper:
2. Exact time can be determined by counting seconds.
3. The identity of the “Anna who likes guests” is questionable.
4. Anna's requests can be ignored by feigning ignorance, but she must not find out.
5. There may be two Annas.
These were clearly his interpretations of the rules displayed on the system interface—the very “deciphering” required by the main quest.
After reading the list, Lin Chen blinked. “Qi Si, what do you mean, two Annas?”
Qi Si set down his pen and glanced up. “I told you. Anna in the black dress was outside my window at the same time there was a knock on Shen Ming's door.”
“As far as we know, Anna is bound by the physical world. Otherwise, a simple door wouldn't have stopped her, and she could have sensed our condition through it. Assuming she can't clone herself, there can only be two of her. Or rather, another main NPC in this instance with equal standing.”
“That explains a lot of the contradictions. How Anna can be the main NPC and yet supposedly ‘harbors no ill will towards guests.’ Why she seems trustworthy one moment and dangerous the next. Why she sometimes wears a black dress, and other times a red one.”
“I didn't get it at first. In an instance where ‘only monsters can kill humans,’ what was there to fear from a living person like Anna? If the main NPC can't kill players, is the game just expecting us to kill ourselves off through infighting?”
“I initially thought the butler was the source of the danger, but that felt like a stretch. He barely seems capable of independent action. Now it's obvious. There's a primary monster NPC in this instance we haven't met yet. The *other* Anna.”
“So,” Lin Chen said, his scalp prickling as he listened to Qi Si's analysis, “does that mean we should try to ally ourselves with the human Anna to fight the monster NPC?”
The moment he finished speaking, Qi Si gave him a look one might reserve for a particularly slow child.
“Who ever told you that humans are inherently good and monsters are inherently evil? Yesterday, you were scared to death of the *human* Anna.”
Qi Si picked up his pen again. He drew three circles on the page, labeling them “Anna,” “Monster NPC,” and “Players.” Then he connected all three with double-headed arrows.
“There are three possibilities. One is what you're thinking: Anna is good, meaning she's on the players' side, and the monster NPC is evil. The second possibility is the exact opposite. Of course, there's also the worst-case scenario, where the two NPCs are in cahoots and both want the players dead.”
“So, right now, our priority is to figure out exactly what this monster NPC—the one we've only heard but not seen—is. And that depends on what we find when we explore the third floor.”
Lin Chen nodded grimly, feeling once again the stark difference in competence between himself and a veteran player.
Qi Si walked to the corner and picked up the red dress again. “But I have a few new thoughts on this instance's backstory.”
He adopted a melodramatic, first-person tone. “She and I were madly in love, but alas, our union was forbidden! Unable to meet me in the light of day, she could only come knocking at my door in the dead of night...”
Lin Chen was speechless. *You're a genius, sure, but do you have to be so damn weird about it?*
He swallowed hard and ventured a timid objection. “Qi... Qi Si, why are you so sure this instance is about love? Couldn't it be that Anna is killing people to preserve her beauty? I heard about some Countess Báthory or someone, who used to bathe in the blood of virgins...”
“Do you remember what fruit was on the dinner table last night?” Qi Si countered.
Fruit?
Lin Chen froze. Then Qi Si continued, “Ever since Albrecht Dürer painted the forbidden fruit as an apple in his 1507 *Adam and Eve*, that particular image—a mistranslation, really—has become the accepted convention.”
“And judging by Anna's dress, this instance is set sometime after the seventeenth century. By that period, the apple was firmly established as a symbol of the forbidden fruit from the story of Adam and Eve, which is to say, a symbol of love.”
“Whole apples are rarely served at a formal European dinner. If they appeared at all, it would be as part of a dessert, like candied apples, not something you'd be expected to just pick up and gnaw on.”
“Putting all these factors together, it's almost certain the apples at dinner were a metaphor. As for why Anna would display such an obvious clue? It’s likely the same psychological tic that makes a serial killer revisit the scene of their crime.”
Lin Chen listened, his eyes glazed over. It all sounded completely absurd.
So it wasn't enough to be logical; you also needed to be a walking encyclopedia of obscure trivia? Was there no place in this game for anyone who wasn't a polymath?
And this was only his first instance...
Qi Si had always enjoyed spinning tales to spook people. Having successfully intimidated his pawn with a web of tenuous logic, he offered a reassuring smile. “If you only want to survive, it doesn't have to be this complicated. You could just hide in your room. If anything unusual happens, just follow my fourth note: play dumb.”
“Theoretically, if you have the nerve to just sleep through the next three days, you might actually make it out of here unscathed.”
Lin Chen's eyes lit up. He was one step away from asking Qi Si to knock him out again.
Qi Si's gaze dropped, and he sighed. “Of course, everything I've said is just speculation based on our first night here. I could be completely wrong. After all, there's no guarantee the rules themselves aren't meant to mislead us...”
The words had barely left his lips when a piercing scream tore through the hallway outside, sharp enough to slice through the door.
—Trouble.
Comments 1