The night passed without incident.
When Shido Makoto opened his eyes, he reached for the black phone on his pillow and checked the screen.
It lit up, displaying the remaining survival time as [58:36:17].
The time was a little past seven in the morning.
Roughly two and a half days left.
They had entered the manor at around six in the afternoon, which meant they needed to survive until six o’clock on the evening of the day after tomorrow.
Just then, Shido Makoto heard a stifled cry from the corridor, followed by the sound of sobbing and several voices in conversation.
As he had done the previous night, he first moved to the back of the door and pressed his eye to the peephole.
Out in the corridor, Wrench, Artist, Programmer, and Shirogane Kei — all four of them had emerged from their respective rooms and were gathered around the doorway of Room 102.
Xiao Hui’s door was shut tight.
Artist had collapsed onto the floor, and the others appeared to be trying to comfort her.
Shido Makoto waited another five minutes.
Only once he had confirmed there was nothing unusual in the corridor did he slowly open his door.
Creak——
Everyone turned toward the sound.
Shido Makoto took stock of the group.
Wrench’s lips had gone white.
Shirogane Kei’s hair was dishevelled, her small face drained of colour, dark circles already forming beneath her eyes.
Only Programmer seemed relatively composed — though even he had his brow knitted tight.
“You…”
Programmer opened his mouth when he saw Shido Makoto, as if he wanted to say something, but in the end it came out as nothing more than a sigh.
He stepped forward, his expression deeply troubled, and gestured toward the doorway of Room 102: “Xiao Hui… she’s dead.”
Shido Makoto’s gaze moved past him to the area just outside the door of Room 102.
There was a large dark stain of dried, blackened blood.
Scattered across the floor were fragments of white bone, and a small tuft of chestnut-coloured hair.
Nothing else.
No body.
No severed limbs.
As though she had simply been erased from the world.
Shido Makoto gave a single nod — an acknowledgement of what Programmer had told him.
The screaming last night had been loud enough for anyone short of a deaf man to hear.
Seeing that utterly unruffled reaction, Programmer was taken aback.
He had considered himself calm enough, rational enough — but compared to this high schooler standing in front of him, it seemed he still had some way to go.
Shido Makoto paid no attention to Programmer’s complicated expression.
He walked straight over to Artist and crouched down beside her.
“Stop crying for now,” he said.
“This isn’t the time for grief.”
Artist lifted her head and looked at him through tear-blurred eyes, choking out the words: “It… it was all my fault…”
“I heard her calling for help… but I didn’t dare open the door… I…”
She couldn’t finish.
The quiet sobbing started again.
Standing to one side, Wrench heard this and an expression of acute discomfort crossed his face.
The truth was, he had heard it too — and he had made exactly the same choice, burrowing into his room and staying there.
And if he was being honest with himself, Xiao Hui’s pretty face and shapely figure had caught his eye from the start.
Early on, he had even entertained thoughts about it — once they got out of here, he would find a way to get her contact details.
But the moment that scream had ripped through the night, those idle fantasies had been frightened straight out of him.
He had yanked the duvet over his head and started praying to every god he could think of, begging only that whatever was prowling that corridor would not come through his door.
As for Xiao Hui — all he could say was: don’t get him tangled up in this.
His skin was worth a great deal more than his pride.
Programmer stepped forward now, making his own attempt to console Artist: “This isn’t your fault.
We all heard it, and none of us dared open the door.”
“In that situation, if you had actually gone out there, you would have only added one more death to the count.”
As he said it, he instinctively glanced toward Shido Makoto, as if looking for his endorsement to lend the words more weight.
After years of grinding it out in the workforce, Programmer had long since left behind the age of hot-blooded impulse.
Toward women like Xiao Hui — the type who clearly put great effort into their appearance and were accustomed to leveraging their looks to their advantage — he had always kept a careful distance.
He had lived through an era when men’s standing in the court of public opinion and the pressures of real life had plummeted in tandem. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
He had long since made his peace with lying flat.
No initiative, no refusals, no responsibility — that was his creed.
In his eyes, Xiao Hui’s death was not even entirely a bad thing.
A member who was clearly going to become a liability had been eliminated early, which reduced the unknowns for everyone still standing.
Shido Makoto, however, did not so much as lift an eyelid.
It was Shirogane Kei who picked up the thread instead.
Her voice was slightly hoarse from the sleepless night: “Programmer is right.
Artist, you don’t need to blame yourself.”
“There was something moving in the corridor last night — the maid warned us about it too.
Xiao Hui was most likely lured out by that thing through some means or other.
She broke the rules, and that’s why she…”
She did not say the word “died,” but the meaning was plain enough.
“No.”
Shido Makoto shook his head, cutting her off.
Everyone blinked.
Slowly, he laid out his hypothesis: “She wasn’t lured outside.”
“She fled from her room.”
“You… what did you say?” Programmer’s glasses nearly slid off his nose.
“She encountered danger inside the room?”
“Impossible!” Wrench shot back immediately, his voice pitching upward with alarm.
“Aren’t the rooms safe?
The maid clearly said——”
“Then… then last night, we…” Artist’s sobbing cut off abruptly.
She stared at Shido Makoto in disbelief.
If the rooms were not safe either, then where in this entire manor was there anywhere safe to be?
Did that mean any one of them could drop dead at any moment, just like Xiao Hui?
“If there’s something in the rooms…”
Wrench went ashen.
The mere thought that he had spent last night sharing a room with some invisible thing made his scalp crawl.
Shido Makoto shook his head.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I still believe that staying in your own room and following the rules is the correct approach — and the safest one.”
“Then what did you mean just now?” Programmer adjusted his glasses and pressed him quickly.
Shido Makoto’s gaze moved to the closed door of Room 102.
He turned it over in his mind, then decided to share what he had been thinking through the night: “I have two hypotheses.”
“The first: the danger inside the room is not an indiscriminate attack — it has a specific trigger condition.”
“Perhaps at some point during the day, without any of us knowing, Xiao Hui inadvertently violated some hidden prohibition.
That is why the thing came for her at night.”
Shido Makoto paused, then continued: “The second: the rooms themselves remain absolutely safe — but that thing used some method to make Xiao Hui convince herself that her room was dangerous and that she had to escape.
It planted a false judgement in her mind.”
“So she was not killed inside the room.
She scared herself into it.
She opened the door and ran into the corridor of her own accord — and died there because she broke the rules.”
This was something Shido Makoto had arrived at during the night, drawing on his own experience: before a [Rollback], he too had once been manipulated by the mannequin into nearly breaking the rules.
He suspected Xiao Hui had likely encountered something very similar.
But [Rollback] was his most valuable card.
It could not be exposed carelessly — so for now, he had framed his reasoning as two deliberately vague hypotheses.
“An illusion… manipulation?” Shirogane Kei murmured.
“I lean toward the second.” Shido Makoto settled on his conclusion.
His analysis was lucid and well-reasoned, and it swept away in an instant the suffocating sense of despair that had gripped everyone — the feeling that there was nowhere left to run.
It was still terrifying, of course.
But “being manipulated into breaking a rule and dying for it” and “being killed at random inside a supposedly safe zone” were two entirely different propositions. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
The former meant there was still a chance — if they kept their heads, they might yet avoid it.
The latter meant nothing but waiting to die.
“I see…” Wrench let out a long breath, as if he had come back to life.
Artist stopped trembling too.
Her complexion was still pale, but at least a faint spark had returned to her eyes.
Programmer rubbed his temple, the eyes behind his lenses fixed on Shido Makoto with a complicated look.
This boy’s mind was unnervingly clear.
While everyone else had their heads clouded with fear, he had been standing apart from it all — detached, methodical, calmly mapping out every possibility.
After a moment, Programmer spoke: “As for Xiao Hui’s death — we’re all shaken by it.
But as Student said, now is not the time to sink into grief.”
“At the very least, we’ve gained valuable information about the night-time rules — through her… sacrifice.”
At those words, Shido Makoto glanced at him and said nothing.
“We need to think about what comes next.
We can’t just stand here.” Shido Makoto steered the conversation back on track.
“The mission prompt on our phones tells us to search for clues.
It’s daytime now — whatever those things are, their movements are likely restricted.
This is our best window to explore.”
“Explore?
Where?” Wrench asked reflexively.
“The ground floor first — the kitchen, the study, the sitting room, places like that,” said Shido Makoto.
“We didn’t have the time to look properly last night.
But remember: don’t touch anything that seems off.”
Shido Makoto suggested splitting up to cover more ground.
It was daytime — the odds of a vengeful spirit launching a direct attack were low — and the ground floor was, relatively speaking, far safer than the mysterious second floor.
But the proposal was rejected on the spot.
“Let’s stick together!” Wrench was the first to object, his voice urgent.
“I… I can’t do it alone.”
Artist nodded emphatically, a rapid little bobbing of the head.
Programmer considered it briefly and sided with the others: “More people means we can look out for each other if something sudden happens.”
Shido Makoto looked them over, and his gaze finally settled on Shirogane Kei.
She met his eyes and gave a small, quiet shake of her head.
“Together.”
Shido Makoto let out a silent sigh inwardly.
But he did not push the point.
He understood perfectly well that forcing these people to split up would only backfire — and if someone’s nerves cracked entirely, it could bring them all down at once.
“All right.” He gave a nod.
“Then we’ll go to the dining room first for breakfast, and explore after that.”
When the five of them returned to the dining room, they found that the long table had already been laid with a generous breakfast.
Fried eggs, bacon, toast, and steaming hot milk.
The room around them was empty.
The guests from the night before — who had moved like marionettes on strings — were nowhere to be seen.
But the oppressive weight of the place had not lifted one bit.
Everyone stared at the food on the table.
No one dared be the first to reach for anything.
“Is this… safe to eat?” Wrench swallowed audibly and asked under his breath.
“The rules only mentioned dinner — nothing about breakfast,” Programmer observed.
“Without food, there’s no way we’ll last seventy-two hours.” Shido Makoto pulled out a chair, sat down without ceremony, picked up a slice of toast, and bit into it.
Seeing that, the others hesitated a moment longer, then one by one took their seats.
Xiao Hui’s death sat heavily on all of them.
No one had any appetite for tasting the food — they ate only because they had to.
Shido Makoto alone ate with genuine relish, and even muttered under his breath that it “didn’t compare to youtiao and soy milk.”
After breakfast, the five of them began a systematic sweep of the ground floor.
They made their way carefully through the corridor hung with oil paintings, checked the sitting room, the servants’ quarters, and the storeroom — and finally, at the far end of the ground-floor corridor, they found a small room that appeared to be a private lounge.
The room had a cosy feel to it: a fireplace, a sofa, and a writing desk.
On the writing desk, a sheet of paper lay open — and it drew every pair of eyes in the room at once.