Chopping came from the kitchen, the knife striking the cutting board in steady thuds.
Shao Lan and Jiang Mingran hid in the bedroom.
This was where Jiang Mingran began each loop. With the door shut, an entire living room separated them from the kitchen, muffling some of the noise.
Even so, Shao Lan had cautiously retrieved a ballpoint pen and a kraft-paper notebook from a table in the living room. They communicated mostly through gestures and writing, avoiding speech whenever possible.
Shao Lan noticed that the goldfish in Jiang Mingran's bedroom had also dwindled to three.
"What just happened?" Jiang Mingran still felt dazed. "We made it onto the stairs. Why are we back here...?"
Shao Lan lowered his eyes. "Because we died."
"Died?" Jiang Mingran shuddered.
Shao Lan pointed at the objects arranged around them. He'd already had a vague suspicion about what they signified. Only now was he certain.
"Every object here serves a purpose."
"The owl clock gives us two kinds of information. First, it tells us the time."
Every loop began at 3:58 a.m. Two minutes later, at exactly four, the owl emerged to announce the hour.
"Second, it tells us this is a game. We're the players. We only have a chance of surviving if we follow the rules."
He searched the bedroom and found the same carving on the floor beside the wall as beneath the couch.
[Rule: Those who have not ventured deep into the mist cannot leave it.]
"We broke the rules," Shao Lan said. "The play area probably only covers this floor. When we took the stairs to the floor below, we effectively left the play area and were automatically ruled dead."
Jiang Mingran clenched his fists. "What kind of bullshit game is that? How is trying to escape wrong?"
"Think of an escape room. The players have to solve the puzzles to get out," Shao Lan reasoned. "We tried to leave without clearing up any of the mystery. The game doesn't allow that."
Without entering the mist, they couldn't leave it.
So they'd failed the last loop. Everyone had died.
Shao Lan looked at the three small goldfish swimming in the tank.
"The tank is a counter. We have four chances to loop. Now we have three left."
After a moment of silence, Jiang Mingran looked toward the little funeral altar. "Then this..."
"It's a funeral altar for us." Shao Lan sighed. "If I'm right, once we die all four times, the fish tank will disappear. Our memorial portraits will take its place."
Jiang Mingran shivered.
"Man, what do we do now?"
"Start gathering clues," Shao Lan said. "Move carefully. Try not to make any noise."
The bedroom was small, presumably a spare room, although in practice it seemed to serve more as a study. It contained only a simple folding cot, a desk, and a chair.
The desk drawer held a thick stack of newspapers and a kraft-paper notebook.
Shao Lan had Jiang Mingran read the papers while he opened the notebook.
It was full of mundane accounts, written with painstaking neatness in blue-black fountain-pen ink:
"Dried noodles: 2 yuan. Cabbage: 0.8 yuan. Tomatoes: 1 yuan. Apples: 2 yuan."
"Sleeping mat: 4 yuan. Basin: 2 yuan. Bowl: 2.4 yuan. Soap: 0.9 yuan."
"March wages: 286 yuan."
Jiang Mingran leaned over to look at the figures.
"How long ago was this?" He scratched his head. "Prices and wages were both way lower than they are now."
Shao Lan stared at the notebook, narrowing his eyes and leaning closer as though examining something intently.
"What are you looking at?" Jiang Mingran couldn't figure it out. "Are those tiny amounts hiding a code that'll get us out?"
Shao Lan shook his head. After studying it for a moment, he reached for the stitching along the spine.
It was difficult to see in the dark, but his fingers could feel it clearly.
"The thread's loose. Like someone's pulled at it."
Jiang Mingran looked puzzled. "What does that tell us?"
"That some pages were torn out."
Jiang Mingran blinked.
Right. Notebooks like this were made by stacking sheets of paper and sewing them together at the spine.
If someone carelessly tore out pages they'd written on, they could easily damage the stitching as well.
He just hadn't expected Shao Lan to be that observant.
While Jiang Mingran was still processing this, Shao Lan had crawled beneath the desk and found a trash can.
It contained leftover fruit peels and cores. Their sticky juices smelled like fermenting alcohol. Shao Lan picked them out and set them aside, revealing what lay underneath.
Crumpled balls of paper.
Judging by the ruling, they'd been torn from the account book.
He unfolded them one by one. The instant they saw the writing, both men were startled.
Unlike the meticulous accounts, these large letters were scrawled wildly in red ink, slashing roughly across each sheet.
"I'm so scared. What should I do?"
"The music woke me again tonight. It was coming from the radio. She was playing music while chopping pork on the cutting board. I know it wasn't pork. She smiled and asked if I wanted a taste."
"Brother Wang across the hall says he can help. He knows a spirit medium who can perform an exorcism. I asked if she might get hurt during it. Brother Wang said nobody could guarantee that. I hesitated. I don't want to hurt her."
"Music again in the middle of the night... I've decided. I'll go see Brother Wang tomorrow."
"When I got home from work, I saw that the door across the hall was open. Brother Wang wasn't home. I went into my apartment and opened the refrigerator. I saw Brother Wang. Brother Wang was in my refrigerator."
...
That was all they could read.
There were other crumpled pages, but the juice from the fruit cores had soaked them. The blue-black ink had blurred into illegible smears.
Jiang Mingran stared blankly at the pages and shuddered.
After a brief silence, Shao Lan turned to him.
"Bring me the newspapers."
Jiang Mingran snapped out of his daze and hurried to set them in front of him. "Man, look at these. These could all be [her] doing..."
The papers all carried reports of the same kind of case.
Unidentified human remains had been discovered in remote parks and waterways around the city. Only some of the bones remained, making identification impossible for now. There were numerous victims, both men and women, and the cases had caused widespread alarm.
The city police had formed a special task force. Anyone with information was urged to call its number immediately.
A string of digits followed. Someone had circled it in red pen and written "Police number" beside it.
Shao Lan looked at those words, then back at the torn pages.
"The same handwriting..."
"Man." Jiang Mingran trembled. "What does this mean? Where's the person who wrote all this?"
"I don't know." Shao Lan shook his head. "All we know is that [the diarist] lived with [her], the woman in the kitchen. They must once have been very close. Most likely, they were married."
"While [she] kept killing people, [the diarist] considered stopping her but didn't succeed."
"This study was probably where [the diarist] slept. He collected news reports about [her] murders here, including the task force's contact number."
"But for some reason, as far as we can tell, [the diarist] never made that call."
"Maybe his feelings for the killer made him unable to do it. Maybe he was killed before he got the chance... Either way, the killer is still free. The task force hasn't identified her."
He gently ran his finger over the phone number circled in red. "Looks like our job is to make that call to the task force in [the diarist's] place."
"But we can't leave this floor, and we don't have our phones," Jiang Mingran said anxiously. "We have no way to call anyone..."
"We do." Shao Lan looked toward the living room.
Beside the couch, on the coffee table, stood that old red landline phone.