Chapter 17: Rose Manor |
In a guest room on the second floor, Yezi’s body slid slowly to the ground, her eyes wide in a final, uncomprehending stare.
Even in death, she couldn’t fathom how Zou Yan had managed to kill her in an instance where “only monsters can kill humans.”
Zou Yan retracted her right hand. Ugly, vine-like patterns now crawled across her once-fair arm. Occasionally, plant-like tendrils would pierce through the skin from her veins, blossoming into tiny, blood-drenched buds.
But the monstrous transformation stopped at her arm. A metal ring was clamped around her shoulder, constricting the muscle and halting the vines' further spread.
[Name: Barrier Ring]
[Type: Item]
[Effect: Slows the spread of supernatural corruption]
[Description: In the face of a foregone conclusion, what use are fear and hesitation?]
Zou Yan’s goal was different from the other players from the very beginning—she had come here to find something.
Two people were already dead. She only needed to kill one more...
Zou Yan pushed the door open and walked toward the room at the far end of the hall.
She remembered that Lin Chen, the one staying inside, was a rookie.
...
In the third-floor room, wisps of crimson began to spread from Qi Si’s fingertips, entangling him in a matter of moments.
He opened his mouth, but upon finding he couldn't make a sound, he decisively gave up struggling. With a listless expression, he allowed the crimson threads to crawl all over him, weaving a red spiderweb across the surface of his skin.
Outside, vines grew wildly, surging through the crack under the door one after another, crowding in until they filled every inch of the room.
Objective time seemed to freeze. Chang Xu remained bent over by the bed, motionless. Specks of dust hung suspended in the air, casting tiny shadows on the floor.
A thin, pale pink film veiled his vision. The light dimmed, and the surrounding scene yellowed and curled like an old photograph in a fire.
In the dim, uncertain light, ephemeral scenes appeared. The instant he saw them, Qi Si understood their meaning.
Unfamiliar knowledge flooded his mind, instantly becoming familiar, as if it had long existed in the depths of his memory, only to be awakened at this very moment...
...
A fierce storm raged outside the old castle.
In an attic cluttered with junk, a girl with a red birthmark on her face fell to the floor. The door slammed shut before her, the last sliver of light narrowing to a line before vanishing into the darkness.
The girl didn’t cry or protest, as if she were already accustomed to such treatment. She simply sat against the corner of the wall, quietly listening as the footsteps outside faded away.
After an unknown amount of time, a faint glow appeared in the darkness. Like a creature of the shadows startled by light, she peered timidly toward the source.
There, nestled among the dusty junk, was a small, exquisite statue, glowing softly as if bathed in a hazy morning light.
The stone-carved statue had a delicate face, its beauty so captivating it could steal one's soul.
Its hands were cupped before its chest, its lowered gaze fixed on a blood-red rose carved from gemstone. The figure was unsettling, yet serene and compassionate.
As if guided by an unseen force, the girl picked up the statue and held it before her, her gaze verging on obsession.
In a trance, she heard the god’s voice.
The god asked, "I can feel your pain. Do you wish to pray to me?"
The girl, having long since despaired of the future, felt not a shred of fear for the unknown.
She countered with a bitter smile, "What good would praying do? I was born ugly. They say I’m a reincarnation of the devil. Perhaps my very existence is a mistake."
The god replied, "Beauty and ugliness, good and evil, are all part of existence. If you desire beauty, then plant this attic full of roses, and all your wishes shall come true."
The girl accepted the god's bargain. For countless days and nights that followed, she snuck out of the castle to cut rose stems from the manor gardens, bringing them back to the attic. She filled the cracks in the floorboards with soil and planted the cuttings within.
Her hands were covered in scratches from the thorns, but the thought of soon becoming beautiful made her forget all fatigue and pain.
She remembered the sweets her sister gave her as a child, the stories she told. That was her first understanding of familial love, an understanding that gradually blossomed into more complex, incomprehensible feelings.
But now, her sister was busy attending banquets every day and never spared her a single glance. When she finally found her sister and dared to kiss her on the lips, her parents had rushed in, pointing and screaming at her before locking her in the attic.
It must be because I'm ugly, she thought. People love beauty and hate ugliness.
If only I could become beautiful, my parents would stop despising me, and I could stay by my sister's side like when we were little, right?
As the rose vines climbed the attic walls, the birthmark on the girl’s face began to fade. Her features grew more and more like her sister's, but she soon noticed that her parents’ gazes were filled with mounting terror. One rainy night, the girl overheard her parents talking.
Her father said, "Annie’s behavior is getting stranger. I’m afraid she’ll hurt Anna... Should we call for the priest?"
Her mother hesitated. "We can't let the priest come. Annie will be put to death. If we watch her closely, nothing will happen."
Her father sighed. "Let's send Anna to the countryside tomorrow. We should arrange a marriage for her as soon as possible, just to keep them apart..."
The girl listened calmly, her face betraying no emotion, neither joy nor anger. She knew exactly what she had to do, just as she had known to plant the roses, night after night without fail.
She ascended to the attic once more, knelt before the statue, and bowed her head in devout worship.
"I want two people to die in a way that arouses no suspicion," she said. "I am willing to pay any price."
So the god taught her how to kill living things and use their fresh blood to draw a curse.
The girl killed the family cat. The moment the warm blood soaked her fingertips, she knew there was no turning back.
...
When Qi Si regained consciousness, he found himself leaning against a wall. The two skeletons on the large bed were gone, leaving only a pile of shattered bone fragments.
Nearby, Chang Xu was methodically trying to crush the fragments into even smaller pieces.
Seeing that Qi Si was awake, Chang Xu explained, "You were caught in a trance. I figured the skeletons were the key, so I smashed them."
"..."
Qi Si knew that everyone had different talents, and that in a fair game, if a crisis could be overcome with wit, there must also exist solutions where brute force could overcome any clever trick...
...But still, wasn't this a bit too absurd?
Qi Si fell silent and looked down at his hands.
The red dress he had been holding was gone, clearly consumed as a plot item when the event was triggered.
The slip of paper he had pulled from under the pillow had also vanished without a trace, as if it had never existed.
Qi Si looked at Chang Xu. "If I’m not mistaken, there was a piece of paper with a clue under the pillow."
Chang Xu, a man of action, had already reached under the pillow as Qi Si spoke and pulled out a slip of paper covered in text.
Qi Si leaned in, his eyes scanning the words:
[Anna and Annie were born at the same time...]
The contents of the paper were identical to the one he had seen before.
Was it another time reversal?
If the previous reversal was merely a conclusion inferred from the movement of the pocket watch's hands, this time, he had experienced it firsthand.
Qi Si felt as though he had been in a very long dream, where millennia passed in the blink of an eye. Countless thoughts had streamed through his consciousness, leaving behind faint imprints and impressions that felt both real and illusory.
The sensation was strange, seeming to stem from the instance's mechanics, yet also feeling like a deeply buried, innate ability of his own.
After reading the note, Chang Xu handed it to Qi Si. "How did you know there was a paper under the pillow?"
"I saw it," Qi Si replied. "It seems another time reversal just occurred. Of course, it’s also possible I was hallucinating."
He succinctly described his experience and what he had felt.
Chang Xu raised his left hand to the back of his neck, his gaze sharpening. "I have a feeling that time in Rose Manor is starting to become chaotic. The time reversal at one o'clock was probably like a switch. Once flipped, the subsequent effects became uncontrollable."
Qi Si didn't bother to correct Chang Xu's speculation.
He raised a hand and tapped his temple, his eyes scanning the rules on the system interface from top to bottom one more time.
The anomaly at one o'clock was undoubtedly the key to breaking the deadlock. The most urgent task now was to figure out the trigger mechanism for the time reversal.
But there were too few clues.
The only thing he could be certain of was that the time reversal was inextricably linked to either Zou Yan or Yezi.
One of them had used an item to obtain the four-line poem from Chang Xu’s room and had immediately experimented with it.
The experiment had succeeded.