The athletic guy grabbed the door handle and wrenched it open with every ounce of strength he had, forcing a narrow gap in the heavy wooden door.
A gale of wind instantly tore through the crack!
Ice crystals rode the blast, stinging their faces like needles, sending a violent shudder through everyone in the hall.
Beyond the door lay a world swallowed whole by white.
An endless blizzard raged without mercy; visibility was less than half a metre, and the sheer shriek of the wind was enough to chill a person to the bone without even stepping outside.
The athletic guy recoiled from the cold with a full-body shudder, let out a strangled cry, and instinctively released his grip.
The wooden door slammed shut on its own under the force of the wind.
“How… how can this be…”
He stumbled back several steps, face drained of colour, murmuring to himself: “A snow mountain?
Why are we on a snow mountain?”
“This can’t be real… I was just at the gym in Tokyo…”
The last avenue of escape was sealed.
With it went the final shred of wishful thinking.
The fashionable girl could hold it together no longer.
She sank to the floor and burst into helpless sobs.
The art girl’s eyes reddened too, tears falling in silence.
Shido Makoto stood with furrowed brows, deep in thought, his thumb drifting back to his mouth.
‘Snowbound Manor.
A classic sealed-space horror opening.’
‘The objective requires surviving seventy-two hours — which means the main threat comes from inside the manor.’
‘Anomalous entities…’
His gaze swept across the oil paintings lining the walls of the hall.
In the dim light, the eyes of the figures within seemed to follow them.
At that moment, Shirogane Kei stepped directly in front of him and met his eyes: “You don’t seem surprised at all.”
From the moment they had all woken up until now, this girl of roughly the same age had been watching him — and his composure had been too complete, too unbroken.
Shido Makoto found it a little odd that she had singled him out to speak to, but answered all the same: “Surprised?
A little, I suppose.
But since we’re already here, panicking won’t do any good.”
Shirogane Kei gave a small nod, pressed her lips together, and said nothing more.
She acknowledged that what he said was true — only the truth was too brutal, and most people preferred to flee from it, at least for a little while.
“All right.
This is no time for wallowing.” Shido Makoto swept his gaze around the room and raised his voice slightly.
“If you want to survive, pull yourselves together.
Wherever this place is, whoever is pulling the strings behind it — right now we are all in the same boat.
Hostility and suspicion toward each other will get us absolutely nowhere.”
His words brought the fashionable girl’s sobs down to a quieter whimper.
The others turned their eyes toward him one by one.
“I suggest we introduce ourselves — but not with our real names.
Use code names.”
“There’s no telling what kind of strange rules might apply here.
Name-based curses, for instance.” Shido Makoto laid out his reasoning.
“Fair point.” The suited man was the first to agree.
“I’ll go by Programmer, then.
Simple and to the point.”
“Then I’ll… I’ll be Wrench.” The athletic guy picked himself up off the floor, his voice still a little unsteady.
He had chosen something to do with gym equipment.
“I’m Artist,” the art girl said quietly.
She had actually wanted to say “Painter,” but “Artist” felt less pretentious.
Out of habit, she found herself studying the composition and light-work of the oil paintings on the hall walls — the occupational reflex of an art student.
“Just call me Xiao Hui,” the fashionable girl said, dabbing at her tears and hiccupping softly.
She hadn’t quite grasped the point of a code name, and had simply chosen something that sounded most like a nickname.
All eyes finally settled on Shirogane Kei and Shido Makoto.
Shirogane Kei spoke first, her tone unhurried: “Call me Shirogane.”
She had not concealed her surname — perhaps she did not consider it a real name in any meaningful sense.
Shido Makoto noticed that though her face was still pale, her breathing had already evened out.
She had steadied herself with remarkable speed.
“Just call me Student,” Shido Makoto said.
“Right then — since the task prompt tells us to search for clues, we should split up— no, actually, let’s stay together.” He corrected himself immediately.
“Splitting up is the classic death flag of every horror film.
Best not to tempt fate.”
No one had any objection to that.
After witnessing the blizzard beyond the door, not a single person wanted to be left alone.
“We start with this hall, then.” Shido Makoto gestured around them.
“The paintings on the walls, the furniture — check anything that looks the least bit suspicious.
But remember: caution first.”
Just then, Shirogane Kei suddenly pointed at a section of wall to one side of the hall.
“Wait — there’s a piece of paper over there.”
Everyone looked where she was pointing.
Sure enough, between two of the oil paintings, a sheet of paper had been fixed to the wall.
With the lighting so dim, no one had noticed it until now.
Shido Makoto walked over; the others followed.
The paper was covered in several lines of text rendered in an elaborate, classical calligraphic hand.
The ink was a deep, dark red — the colour of dried blood.
[Please maintain silence.
Avoid making unnecessary noise.]
[Dinner is served each evening at 19:00.
You must not miss it.]
[Do not touch personal belongings within the manor that do not belong to you.]
[After 22:00, do not leave your room.]
“Keep quiet… don’t touch things…” Xiao Hui murmured to herself, her complexion going a shade paler still.
“What is this — some kind of ruleset?”
“What happens if we break these rules?” Wrench asked.
“We die, most likely.” Shido Makoto’s answer was blunt.
Wrench’s throat bobbed.
He said nothing.
He had wanted to shoot back with ‘don’t be so dramatic,’ but the blizzard outside had stripped away most of his nerve for arguing.
“These paintings are beautiful,” Artist said suddenly, her voice soft.
Her attention had been caught by a large canvas on the wall depicting an aristocratic banquet.
The figures were rendered with striking life, their garments lavish, the handling of light and shadow superbly refined.
On reflex, she reached out toward the carved frame, wanting to touch it.
“Don’t!”
Shido Makoto moved fast — he caught her wrist in an instant.
Artist’s hand froze in mid-air, just centimetres from the frame.
She startled, and looked toward Shido Makoto with a confused expression.
“Rule Three.”
He released her wrist and pointed to the paper on the wall: “‘Do not touch personal belongings within the manor that do not belong to you.’ This painting clearly does not belong to us.”
“But — but it’s just a painting…” Artist protested under her breath, a little aggrieved.
“Until we know the price of breaking the rules, any wishful thinking is gambling with your own life.” Shido Makoto shook his head.
“We don’t know how broadly ‘personal belongings’ is defined.”
“It could mean a book, a vase — it could even mean a single brick on the wall.”
“Without more information, treating everything in this place that isn’t ours as strictly off-limits is the safest approach.”
His words sent a chill through the group.
Artist, who had privately thought he was making too much of things just a moment ago, now felt a cold wave of retrospective fear wash over her, and she quietly stepped back two paces.
Xiao Hui drew her neck down into her shoulders and hugged herself tightly, suddenly seeing everything around her as a monster poised to devour her.
“So what do we do now?” Programmer pushed his glasses up and did his best to look composed.
“Just stand here and wait?”
Shido Makoto glanced at the grandfather clock standing in the corner of the hall.
Its pendulum swung back and forth with methodical precision, ticking steadily, the hour hand pointing to six forty-five.
“Fifteen minutes until seven.” His gaze dropped to the second rule.
[Dinner is served each evening at 19:00.
You must not miss it.]
“Dinner…” Wrench swallowed.
“This place actually feeds us?”
He tried to ease the tension with a joke, but the tremor in his voice gave him away.
“The key phrase is ‘must not miss it,'” Shirogane said, cutting straight to the point.
“The consequences of not attending may be worse than attending.”
Her instincts were sharp.
“So we have no choice but to go to this dinner?” Xiao Hui was deeply reluctant.
“I just have this feeling something is very wrong with it.”
Obviously something was wrong — it had “Feast at Hongmen” written all over it.
Shido Makoto thought it to himself, but what he said aloud was: “Not going might mean breaking a rule, and breaking a rule might mean dying.”
“Going might mean running into danger — but at least we would have obeyed the rules.
Of two evils we choose the lesser.
We don’t have a choice.”
“But we don’t even know where the dining room is,” Programmer pointed out practically.
The words had barely left his mouth when a small door on one side of the hall — which had been firmly shut until now — gave a soft click and swung open a crack.
A waft of food fragrance drifted through the gap.
It was unmistakably an invitation.
Or rather — a prompt.
The group exchanged glances.
No one dared be the first to move.
The unknown dinner and the rules written plainly on the paper pressed down on all of them like two great weights.
“I don’t want to go…” Xiao Hui shook her head, her voice on the verge of tears.
“What if there’s something wrong with the food?”
“I’m more afraid of triggering some kind of instant-death rule for not showing up to the dining room.” With that, Shido Makoto was already moving, striding toward the half-open door.
His decisiveness left the others far behind.
While everyone else was still hesitating and shrinking back from fear, he had already made his choice.
Because he understood perfectly well that in a place like this, the worst thing you could do was hesitate.
When the rules pointed you down a path — even if that path led straight to ruin — moving forward was still better than standing still.
Standing still was usually how you died fastest.
Shirogane glanced once at Shido Makoto’s retreating figure, and with almost no hesitation, followed.
Her logic was identical to his: obeying the rules was the only viable path to survival for now.
Programmer and Wrench exchanged a look, steeled themselves, and fell into step behind them.
That left only Artist and Xiao Hui.
Artist tugged gently at Xiao Hui’s sleeve — she was still rooted to the spot, trembling: “Come on.
We’re all together.
That has to be better than staying here alone.”
Only then did Xiao Hui wipe her eyes and reluctantly join the tail of the group.