Shao Lan suddenly wanted to turn around, but it was already too late.
In an instant, his field of vision was dyed a vast crimson. Blood sprayed from his chest, splashing against the old, yellowed walls of the living room. The massive loss of blood instantly drained Shao Lan of his vitality.
He weakly let his head hang.
His vision was completely blurred; he couldn’t even clearly see what it was that had pierced through his chest, catching only a glimpse of a vibrant red.
That object had pierced through his back and straight through his body.
While he was on the phone, the killer had bypassed the sofa and silently crept up behind him.
Yet… why?
He clearly hadn’t heard any sound.
Even if the killer had taken off their shoes like they did and made no noise at all, what about Jiang Mingran, who was watching the kitchen doorway?
At the very least, Jiang Mingran should have given a signal to warn him!
Shao Lan tried to look back, but a cold hand gripped his neck, holding him firmly in place.
Then, the object embedded in his chest was pulled out, and more blood spurted forth.
Shao Lan no longer had the strength to think. He collapsed to the ground, all his thoughts and consciousness drained out of his body along with his blood.
He felt someone dragging him toward the kitchen.
Shao Lan’s lifeless eyes stared straight ahead. The living room furniture slowly moved past him, and then the pile of miscellaneous items came into view.
Shao Lan saw Jiang Mingran.
He finally understood why the person in the kitchen had come out without Jiang Mingran giving him a warning.
A winding trail of blood flowed across the floor, and those dark-yellow paper bags were completely soaked through with blood.
Jiang Mingran’s bloodless face had collapsed into a gap between the clutter, his lifeless eyes wide open, staring back at Shao Lan, who had also collapsed on the floor.
Jiang Mingran was dead.
He had died before he even had a chance to signal Shao Lan.
There hadn’t been any sound, which meant that given Jiang Mingran’s martial skills and physical fitness, he hadn’t even possessed the slightest capacity to resist or fight back—he had been killed completely in an instant.
This definitely shouldn’t be happening.
This absolutely shouldn’t be happening…
Shao Lan had no way to keep thinking. He was dragged into the kitchen, and after a burst of static, 1980s golden oldies played melodiously from the radio.
A heavy, cold cleaver hacked down from the back of his neck, and blood sprayed into the bubbling clay pot.
That was Shao Lan’s final memory.
…
“Tick, tock.”
Shao Lan jolted awake.
Cold sweat soaked his clothes as if he had just taken a shower. His face was pale, and he gasped with his mouth wide open, just like a fish out of water.
Everything that followed was all too familiar.
The living room, the sofa, the mourning hall.
Of course, only two little red goldfish remained in the fishbowl.
At exactly four o’clock, the owl popped out once more, followed by the sound of the door opening as someone entered.
Relying on a survival instinct that had already become muscle memory, Shao Lan rolled over and hid beneath the sofa.
The carved writing this time was more complicated than before, and it took Shao Lan a long time of feeling around to make it out:
“Rule: The owl is a bird adept at camouflage. Do not trust the owl.”
An owl? The only thing in this room related to an owl was the grandfather clock in the corner.
It had only two functions: one was to announce the start of the game, and the other was to prompt the time.
Could the time be fake?
The headache seemed to intensify once more. A layer of cold sweat seeped onto Shao Lan’s back. He lay flat beneath the sofa, mechanically watching that pair of red embroidered shoes slowly walk across the living room and into the kitchen.
Taking a deep breath, Shao Lan braced his body and stood up from under the sofa.
The bedroom door opened once again, and the dark figure flashed out anew.
In the dim light, Jiang Mingran’s complexion looked frighteningly bad, as if he had just woken from some utterly terrifying nightmare.
He looked at Shao Lan, trembling all over.
Shao Lan pondered for a brief second, then suddenly dashed toward the other bedroom.
Pushing open the bedroom door, he violently yanked off the quilt, revealing an old man curled up and shrinking into a ball inside.
Before the old man could let out any scream, Shao Lan clamped a hand over his mouth.
“Bro…” Jiang Mingran followed him in, thoroughly startled. Not daring to make a sound, he could only rush to close the bedroom door, standing beside Shao Lan and gesturing frantically, “What are you doing?”
Shao Lan mouthed the question to the old man: “Which time is this?”
The old man couldn’t see clearly, shaking his head frantically and struggling.
Seeing this, Jiang Mingran, who had hurried to keep up, quickly grabbed some paper and a pen, writing down Shao Lan’s question.
He wrote the characters very large and handed them right in front of the old man’s eyes.
“Which time is this?”
This time, the old man saw clearly.
He trembled all over, tears filling his eyes, and with a trembling hand, he held up three fingers.
Shao Lan swept his peripheral vision in a quick circle around the bedroom.
This bedroom was slightly larger than Jiang Mingran’s, and judging by its layout, it should be the master bedroom.
Just like in Shao Lan’s and Jiang Mingran’s rooms, this bedroom also featured a mourning hall, a fishbowl, and an owl grandfather clock.
Shao Lan signaled to Jiang Mingran: “Keep him quiet.”
Having gone through two loops, Jiang Mingran had already developed a tacit understanding with Shao Lan.
He quickly wrote on the paper: “Uncle Bing, I’m Xiao Jiang, the one who used to buy egg pancakes at your stall. We were abducted and brought in here together, and making noise will let the killer find us. So we’re going to let go of you now, but don’t make any sound, understand?”
Uncle Bing nodded repeatedly.
Shao Lan tentatively let go of Uncle Bing, and true to his word, Uncle Bing didn’t make a sound.
He only shrank back and trembled, clearly terrified out of his wits.
Shao Lan rubbed his temples.
Although his body was completely uninjured right now, the feeling of being killed just moments ago remained deeply embedded in his mind like a persistent nightmare.
“Write down your experiences from last time and the time before last.” Shao Lan shoved the pen into Uncle Bing’s hand. “What you saw, what you heard, what you did—write it all down.”
“Bro, you…” Jiang Mingran wanted to say something, but a single look from Shao Lan stopped him in his tracks.
Uncle Bing picked up the pen with trembling hands.
“Got killed,” he wrote crookedly.
“Which time?” Shao Lan’s expression was stern and cold.
Uncle Bing looked blankly at Shao Lan.
“How many times have you been killed?” Shao Lan rephrased the question.
Uncle Bing wrote a “2”.
“Then let’s go through it one by one,” Shao Lan said. “How were you killed the first time? Write the details.”
Uncle Bing looked on the verge of tears; recalling the process of being killed clearly plunged him once more into extreme terror.
“I was tending the shop, dozed off for a bit, and when I woke up, I was right here.”
The words Uncle Bing wrote were intermittent and extremely scrawled, requiring careful scrutiny to understand.
He ran a small snack stand selling egg pancakes. He had been dozing off behind the counter in the evening and, similarly in an unconscious state, had been transferred into this room.
“Someone was talking outside, a man. I went out and saw a woman, and when I wanted to ask her something, she suddenly killed me.”
This describes what happened during the first time loop, where the old man was the first to die, and Shao Lan and Jiang Mingran witnessed the process from hiding in the bedroom.
The contents written by the old man basically matched what they had seen; he was not lying.
The “man speaking” referred to Jiang Mingran, who was holding up his student ID and apologizing to Shao Lan. The old man had gone out to the living room upon hearing Jiang Mingran speak, and as a result, he happened to run into the woman who had also rushed out from the kitchen upon hearing the noise, getting killed on the spot.
Shao Lan tapped his finger on the words “the woman” and asked, “What did she look like?”
The old man’s hand trembled:
“Black padded jacket, red shoes, hair covering her face, tall.”
The old man put down the pen and gestured. He raised his hand up next to Jiang Mingran, and then lifted it a bit higher.
Shao Lan understood his gesture, his pupils constricting in shock: “Taller than him?”
Jiang Mingran was at least 1.85 meters tall, which meant the woman in the kitchen was over 1.9 meters?
Seeing that Shao Lan understood his meaning, the old man nodded repeatedly, then remembering something, he wrote three characters down on the paper.
“Big belly.”
Shao Lan and Jiang Mingran’s eyes widened once again.
A pregnant woman?