The sound of vegetables being chopped came from the kitchen, with the knife rhythmically thumping against the cutting board.
Shao Lan and Jiang Mingran hid in the bedroom.
This was the starting location of Jiang Mingran’s loop. After closing the door, a living room stood between this room and the kitchen, which could dampen some of the noise.
Even so, Shao Lan cautiously took a ballpoint pen and a kraft paper notebook from the table in the living room. The two of them communicated as much as possible through gestures and writing, avoiding making any sound unless absolutely necessary.
Shao Lan noticed that the small goldfish in Jiang Mingran’s bedroom had also become three.
“What on earth just happened?” Jiang Mingran felt his mind spinning a bit. “Didn’t we already run to the stairs? Why are we back again…”
Shao Lan lowered his eyelids. “Because we died.”
“Died?” Jiang Mingran gave a start.
Shao Lan pointed to the various arranged items. He had vaguely guessed their instructions before, but now he was truly certain.
“Every single decoration has a corresponding function.”
“The owl grandfather clock has two hint functions. The first is to indicate time.”
Each loop starts at 03:58. Two minutes later, upon reaching the exact hour of four in the morning, the owl pops out to announce the time.
“The second is to tell us this is a game, and we are players in this game. Only by following the rules do we have a chance at survival.”
Searching inside the bedroom, Shao Lan found the exact same carvings on the floor against the wall as the ones under the sofa.
“Rule: Those who have not ventured into the depths of the mist cannot leave the mist.”
“We violated the game rules,” Shao Lan said. “The game area should be limited to this floor. When we reached the next floor via the stairs, it was equivalent to directly leaving the game area, and we were forcibly judged dead.”
Jiang Mingran clenched his fists. “What kind of crappy game is this! Is there something wrong with wanting to escape?”
“Just like an escape room, players need to solve puzzles to crack it,” Shao Lan analyzed. “Wanting to leave directly without solving any of the mystery is not allowed by the game.”
If you don’t walk into the mist, you cannot leave the mist.
Therefore, in that last loop, they failed, and everyone died.
Shao Lan looked at the three small goldfish swimming in the fish tank.
“The function of the fish tank is to count. We have a total of four loop chances, and now we have three left.”
Jiang Mingran was silent for a moment, then looked at the small mourning hall: “Then this…”
“This is a mourning hall set up for us,” Shao Lan sighed. “If I’m not mistaken, if we die across all four chances, this fish tank will disappear and be replaced by our portraits.”
Jiang Mingran shivered.
“Bro, what should we do now?”
“Let’s gather some clues first,” Shao Lan said. “Be careful to keep your movements light and try not to make any sound.”
This bedroom wasn’t large. Its layout suggested a second bedroom, but in actual use, it seemed more like a study. It only contained a simple folding cot, alongside a desk and a chair.
The desk drawer was piled with a thick stack of newspapers, plus a kraft paper notebook.
Shao Lan told Jiang Mingran to look at the contents of the newspapers, while he himself opened the kraft paper notebook.
The contents inside were entirely trivial bookkeeping entries, the blue-black fountain pen handwriting looking meticulous:
“Handmade noodles 2 yuan, Chinese cabbage 0.8 yuan, tomatoes 1 yuan, apples 2 yuan”
“Straw mat 4 yuan, basin 2 yuan, bowl 2.4 yuan, soap 9 yuan”
“March salary: 286 yuan”
Jiang Mingran leaned over, looking at the numbers in the ledger.
“How many years ago is this?” Jiang Mingran scratched his head. “Both prices and wages are way lower than they are now.”
Shao Lan stared at the notebook, narrowing his eyes as he leaned closer, seemingly concentrating intently on something.
“What are you looking at?” Jiang Mingran was a bit puzzled. “Could these numbers of a few yuan and jiao hide the code that lets us get out?”
Shao Lan shook his head. He squinted and sized it up for a moment, then reached out to touch the binding of the book.
It wasn’t very clear in the dark, but a touch with his fingers told him—
“The thread is very loose, like it’s been pulled.”
Jiang Mingran looked blank. “What does that mean?”
“It means some pages were torn out.”
Jiang Mingran was stunned.
Indeed, this kind of notebook consisted of stacked sheets of paper bound together with thread at the spine.
If someone wasn’t careful when tearing out ruined pages from the notebook, it was very easy to tear the binding thread along with them.
He just hadn’t expected Shao Lan to be observant to this extent.
While Jiang Mingran was dazed, Shao Lan had already crawled underneath the desk and found a trash can.
The trash can contained some leftover fruit peels and cores, their sticky juices emitting a nearly rotting, fermented odor. Shao Lan picked them out and tossed them aside, revealing what lay beneath.
It was a bunch of crumpled paper balls.
Judging by the grid lines, they had been torn right out of this ledger.
Shao Lan unfolded the paper balls one by one. When his gaze landed on the handwriting, both Shao Lan and Jiang Mingran were startled.
Completely different from the meticulous bookkeeping, large words written in red ink were scribbled messily, slashing aggressively across every sheet.
“So scared. What should I do?”
“Tonight I was woken up by music again, coming from the radio. She played music while chopping pork on the cutting board. I knew it wasn’t pork. She smiled at me and asked if I wanted to try some.”
“Brother Wang next door said he could help me; he knows a shaman who can exorcise evil spirits. I asked Brother Wang if she would get hurt during the exorcism, and Brother Wang said nobody can say for sure. I hesitated; I didn’t want to hurt her.”
“The music is playing in the middle of the night again… I’ve decided, I’ll go find Brother Wang tomorrow.”
“When I came home from work, I saw the door next door open. Brother Wang wasn’t home. I walked into my place and opened the refrigerator. I saw Brother Wang. Brother Wang was inside my refrigerator.”
……
There were no more.
These weren’t all the paper balls; there were a few others left, but they had been stained by juices leaking from fruit cores, blurring the blue-black ink into an unreadable smudge.
Jiang Mingran stared blankly at the paper balls, shivering.
Shao Lan remained silent for a moment, then turned to look at Jiang Mingran:
“Bring the newspapers over.”
Jiang Mingran snapped back to reality and hurriedly handed the newspapers to Shao Lan. “Brother, look at these. These might all be things done by her…”
These newspapers all reported on the same type of cases.
Unidentified bodies had been found in remote parks and river channels around the city, consisting only of partial bones. Their identities couldn’t yet be determined, but there were both men and women, the numbers were numerous, and the social impact was extremely severe.
The municipal bureau had already established a special task force for this; if anyone had clues, they were asked to call the task force hotline immediately.
Following that was a string of numbers, circled in red ink by whoever was reading the paper, with the label “Police Hotline” written beside it.
Shao Lan looked at those four words, then looked back at the torn pages of the ledger.
“It’s the same person’s handwriting…”
“Brother,” Jiang Mingran trembled slightly, “What does this even mean? Where did the person who wrote these go?”
“I don’t know,” Shao Lan shook his head. “We only know that the person who kept the diary lived with the woman in the kitchen. They must have had a very close relationship at one point, most likely husband and wife.”
“When she kept killing, the person who kept the diary thought about stopping her, but failed.”
“This study should be where the person who kept the diary lived himself. Here, he collected relevant reports about woman crimes as a serial killer, including the contact number of the special task force.”
“But for some reason, judging by the current situation, the person who kept the diary ultimately never dialed this number.”
“Perhaps it was because of emotional attachment to the serial killer, or perhaps he was killed before he had time to make the call… In any case, the serial killer remains free, and the task force has no information on her.”
Shao Lan lightly traced his finger across the phone number circled in red ink: “It seems what we need to do is take the place of the person who kept the diary and make this emergency call to the task force.”
“But we can’t leave this floor, and we don’t have phones,” Jiang Mingran said anxiously. “There’s no way we can make a call…”
“There is,” Shao Lan looked toward the living room.
On the coffee table beside the sofa sat that red old-fashioned landline telephone.