In the sitting room, everyone’s eyes converged on the unfolded letter spread across the surface.
The letter stock was of fine quality, its edges bordered with floral designs.
The handwriting was beautiful English script, delicate and elegant, revealing the writer’s refined upbringing.
Shirogane Kei’s English was quite good.
She stepped closer and softly translated the contents of the letter:
“My dear sister, please forgive me for taking so long to reply to your letter.
Recently, some unsettling things have been happening at the manor.”
“Viktor, the butler I mentioned to you before—he has grown increasingly strange.”
“I can sense that the way he looks at us is peculiar.
It’s some kind of…
emotion I cannot describe.
He always locks himself away in his room, and I’ve heard strange sounds coming from his room several times in the dead of night…”
The letter’s contents broke off here, as though the mistress had been interrupted mid-sentence and never found the chance to continue.
“Viktor…”
Programmer’s eyes lit up and he slapped his thigh hard: “Case solved!
This butler is absolutely the key NPC!”
Wrench stroked his chin, trying to keep his brain on pace: “Based on what the letter says, this butler’s a real schemer—he’s got designs on the master, right?
Could he have actually…
done in the master and mistress?”
He felt confident in his deduction and raised his voice a few notches: “So the ghost in this instance is the master and mistress that he killed?”
“Or…
if there’s only one ghost, it would be the mistress who wrote this letter?”
This logical chain gave the group some relief.
The hearts they had been holding tightly loosened just a bit.
It was the unknown that was truly terrifying—once you had a health bar visible, even a ghost didn’t feel quite so spine-chilling.
“But…
why though?” Artist raised her hand hesitantly to ask.
Her delicate little face crinkled in confusion: “Doesn’t the letter say the master took him in?
Why would he bite the hand that feeds him?”
“The human heart is the most complex thing,” Shido Makoto said.
“What appears as kindness to others might look to him like condescending charity from on high.”
Shirogane Kei silently nodded at his words.
She could understand that kind of twisted psychology that arose from wounded pride.
Programmer expressed his agreement: “Exactly right.
Extreme inferiority breeds extreme resentment—a classic antisocial personality.”
“Psycho,” Wrench muttered quietly, rubbing his arms.
Just then, Shido Makoto’s gaze fell upon a framed photograph on the desk.
The background was the garden of the Western-style manor.
Standing in the center was a perfect couple—the man handsome and upright, the woman gentle and lovely, both wearing blissful smiles on their faces.
Undoubtedly, they were the manor’s owners.
Beside the mistress stood a young girl dressed as a maid.
By her appearance, she was the expressionless maid from the dining room last night.
In the photograph, her mouth carried a bashful smile, and she looked far more vibrant than she did now.
Standing behind the master and mistress was a man in butler’s formal wear.
He should be Viktor.
But what was grotesque was that the area where his face should have been in the photograph had been repeatedly scraped away with some kind of sharp implement, utterly destroying his visage.
This malicious vandalism sent a chill through everyone simultaneously.
“You think Viktor did that to his own photo?
How much is this guy trying to hide?” Wrench clicked his tongue.
“This guy definitely has problems!”
Programmer summed it up: “Now we can basically confirm—the source of the anomaly is the butler Viktor.”
“He very likely murdered the master and mistress.
What Xiao Hui encountered last night was probably the ghost of one of that couple.”
“Or…
it could also be Viktor himself.”
Though they had identified the key figure, a new problem arose.
Regardless of who the anomaly was, what were its killing rules?
That was what mattered most.
For a moment, no one spoke in the room.
Everyone was processing the information they had just obtained.
Programmer habitually glanced around, trying to find more clues.
His gaze inadvertently swept across the corner of the desk, where a small handheld mirror sat on display, its surface polished clean and clearly reflecting the bookshelf and wall behind him.
He had only meant to take a casual glance, but the next second, his eyes snapped wide open like copper coins.
In the mirror, the scene behind him had changed at some unknown point.
On the previously bare wall, a face was slowly seeping out!
The skin looked as though it had been burned by fire, or corroded by concentrated sulfuric acid—pitted and furrowed, covered entirely in dark red, rotten flesh.
The features were grotesquely squeezed together, with only two black holes where the nose and mouth should have been.
Most terrifying were those eyes.
No whites, no pupils—only two blood-red vortices, churning with endless madness.
That rotten face grinned silently in the mirror, its eyes staring directly and unblinkingly at Programmer.
Time seemed to slow to half-speed in that instant.
Programmer’s mind crashed on the spot.
Rationality crumbled in the face of terror.
“AAHHHHH!!!”
He jolted backward violently, then scrambled and crawled, not even managing to warn his companions as he flailed toward the door with every limb, fleeing in a frenzy.
This sudden eruption of madness startled the other four to their cores.
They hadn’t seen anything!
Yet Programmer’s appearance—like his very soul had fled his body, like he wished his mother had given him two extra legs—was absolutely genuine, not an act.
“Damn!
What did he see?” Wrench cursed, and his survival instinct made him not even think twice before bolting after him.
Artist, pale as death, stumbled and rushed toward the exit as well.
Shirogane Kei reacted quickly too.
She grabbed Shido Makoto, who had been standing motionless, and shouted: “Let’s go!”
Shido Makoto’s brow furrowed deeply.
He cast a long look at the mirror, wasted no breath, and decisively followed Shirogane Kei out of the room.
Shirogane Kei quickly pulled the sitting room door shut.
All five fled as though a beast were chasing them at their heels, racing through the sitting room and down the corridor at breakneck speed until they reached the ground floor entrance hall, where they finally skidded to a terrified halt.
Only Programmer remained, bent over and gripping the wall, breathing in huge, ragged gasps.
“What…
what exactly did you see?” Wrench caught up, equally out of breath, and asked.
“The mirror…
the mirror…”
Programmer’s voice shook uncontrollably.
He pointed back toward the sitting room, gasping out: “There was a face in the mirror!
A ghost face!”
He gave a halting description of the horrifying visage he had seen in the mirror.
Just hearing his account made them all feel a chill run down their spines.
“In the mirror?” Shirogane Kei’s brow furrowed tightly.
“But when we looked, there was nothing at all.”
“I swear!
I absolutely did not see things!” Programmer cried out agitatedly.
“That face, those blood-red eyes were staring right at me from the mirror!”
Shido Makoto stood with his hands thrust in his pockets, brow creased in thought.
He had only caught a glimpse of the mirror earlier and hadn’t seen the reflection, so he couldn’t corroborate Programmer’s account.
However, Programmer’s reaction couldn’t possibly be feigned.
So the new precaution for this instance was…
to keep away from mirrors?
“Regardless, from now on we should all avoid mirrors,” Shirogane Kei said calmly.
Shido Makoto added: “Not just mirrors.
It’s best not to stare at anything reflective for extended periods.”
Everyone nodded, their hearts still racing.
The nerves they had only just begun to relax after finding a clue were wound tight again.