The second loop.
Jiang Mingran hid amongst the pile of miscellaneous items.
Before him were stacked dark-yellow paper bags. Now that he was close, he could finally make out what they were.
Traditional Chinese medicine.
These dark-yellow paper bags were filled with herbal medicine ingredients, marked with sloppily written labels: “Bupleurum,” “Chinese peony,” “Dodder seed,” “Common burreed,” “Spatholobus suberectus”…
The bitter, earthy scent of traditional Chinese medicine mingled with the faint stench of a corpse drifting from the kitchen, creating a bizarre odor that made Jiang Mingran feel somewhat nauseous.
Suddenly, something seemed to move inside the bag on his left hand.
Jiang Mingran was startled and abruptly turned his head.
The paper bag shifted a few times, and shortly after, a gray mouse scampered out from inside.
It was just a mouse… Jiang Mingran let out a sigh of relief, but the heart he had just put down immediately tightened again.
Ever since he was a child, he had been able to mimic the squeaking sounds of a mouse, and he had always done it with uncanny accuracy. Because of that, he had instinctively treated it as a customary signal to tip off Shao Lan just now.
However, there were real mice here. If the mouse made a noise, it would send the wrong signal to Shao Lan.
Lives were at stake. Jiang Mingran murmured an apology in his heart, then reached out and grabbed the mouse.
His movements were swift; before the mouse could even emit a squeak, its neck was snapped by his grip.
The dead mouse fell to the ground, a few drops of blood oozing from its mouth. Its paws, which had been curled together, loosened, and a small, round sphere rolled out.
Jiang Mingran looked closely and almost vomited on the spot.
It was an eyeball.
Cloudy and shriveled, matted with blackened flesh and blood, it looked as though it had detached from a corpse a long time ago.
Jiang Mingran turned his head aside, dry-heaving silently, forcing himself not to look at the dead mouse or the eyeball.
He raised his eyes and looked toward the kitchen, but suddenly froze.
The kitchen door had opened at some point.
It was pitch black inside, with no figure in sight, save for a bluish flame burning beneath a clay pot simmering on the stove.
The killer had come out!
Why had she suddenly come out??
Jiang Mingran instantly sensed that something was terribly wrong. He wanted to signal Shao Lan immediately, but suddenly sensed something else.
Jiang Mingran slowly raised his head.
Above him, the woman was hunched over, a bizarre smile plastered on her face, reaching out her hands.
That pair of hands felt for Jiang Mingran’s head, and then pressed down as if crushing an overripe orange.
The final scene in Jiang Mingran’s vision was red-and-white brain matter splashing out, completely soaking the withered eyeball on the ground.
…
Jiang Mingran finished writing.
He was trembling all over, and the fountain pen left a sprawling, blue-black ink blot on the paper.
Even now, he still didn’t understand how the woman had managed to pinpoint his exact location.
“I’m certain I didn’t make a single sound…” Jiang Mingran wrote weakly with the tip of his pen.
Shao Lan fell silent for a moment, took the pen, and wrote two words on the paper.
“Sense of smell.”
Jiang Mingran’s eyes widened.
He seemed to understand a little.
“The murderer lacks vision, and it’s not just her hearing that has been enhanced—her sense of smell has as well,” Shao Lan wrote. “But she isn’t sensitive to all odors, otherwise we would have been discovered long ago.”
“What she is sensitive to is the smell of fresh blood.”
Which meant that the mouse Jiang Mingran had killed was what exposed his position.
Jiang Mingran lowered his head, feeling quite vexed.
If not for him drawing out the woman, would Shao Lan have been killed?
Shao Lan seemed to see through what he was thinking and shook his head, “Don’t blame yourself. Our information wasn’t complete to begin with.”
“Also…” Shao Lan thought of a point he cared very much about, “Do you remember what those traditional Chinese medicines were?”
Jiang Mingran wrote down everything he could recall for the moment, and after racking his brain for a while, he added a few more items: “I really can’t remember the rest.”
Shao Lan looked at the medicinal herbs written on the paper: “Bupleurum, Chinese peony, dodder seed, common burreed, Spatholobus suberectus, raw pollen typhae, raspberry, glossy privet fruit.”
He had read a fair amount in his daily life and had a general impression of the functions of certain herbs; for example, Bupleurum soothes the liver and relieves stagnation, raw pollen typhae seemed to promote blood circulation and remove blood stasis, and Spatholobus suberectus nourishes and promotes blood circulation.
However, he wasn’t very clear about many of the remaining ones.
Just as Shao Lan was about to give up, Uncle Bing walked over.
“This looks like a formula for ovulation soup, something women drink when they want to have a baby.”
Jiang Mingran was pleasantly surprised: “Uncle Bing, you even understand traditional Chinese medicine?”
Uncle Bing waved his hand: “I don’t understand. It’s just a coincidence. A barefoot doctor lived next door to my house when I was a child, and the women in the village often went to him to see illnesses. There’s a mnemonic chant that all of us can sing—”
“Bupleurum, white peony, red peony, sparganium, leonurus; Spatholobus, achyranthes, typha, perilla, cattail pollen. Glossy privet, raspberry, dodder, medlar nourish; soothe liver, nourish kidney, promote ovulation.”
Shao Lan matched Uncle Bing’s mnemonic chant against the herbs Jiang Mingran had written down and found that indeed, most of them matched up.
“In other words, these herbs at the kitchen entrance are what the woman drinks because she wants to get pregnant?” Jiang Mingran said. “This clue doesn’t seem very useful either, except to say that Uncle Bing really wasn’t wrong—the monster in the kitchen turns out to be a pregnant woman after all.”
No, that was true, but it shouldn’t just end there.
Shao Lan looked at the paper, countless fragments of clues integrating in his mind.
A mountain-like pile of herbs—how long would it take to finish drinking them? Had she been drinking these bitter medicines year after year?
What did the person who wrote the diary say—“I don’t want to hurt her.”
Yes, how could they not feel conflicted and hesitant? After all, she was his wife, having endured so much hardship just to conceive their child.
Enduring hardship? Right, she would say “so bitter” when killing people…
Shao Lan closed his eyes, a severe headache almost overwhelming his nerves.
Something was wrong. A voice in his heart was saying. It seemed there was something very strange.
“Brother Lan,” Jiang Mingran patted Shao Lan beside him.
Shao Lan opened his eyes and saw that both Jiang Mingran and Uncle Bing had worried expressions on their faces.
Neither of them were people with initiative, and at this moment, Shao Lan was the only backbone in this room.
Shao Lan quickly wrote down his deduction on the paper: “Judging from the situation in the previous round, the woman in the kitchen can hear the sound of making a phone call. No matter who goes to call the police, they will be killed.”
Jiang Mingran’s face turned pale: “Then isn’t that a dead end…”
They couldn’t escape directly; they had to call the police. But only the landline in the living room could make a call, and making a call would be heard by the murderer in the kitchen.
Shao Lan closed his eyes. Viewed this way, it truly was a dead end.
Yet he always felt something had been overlooked.
Jiang Mingran looked anxiously at Shao Lan. Just as he reached out to pat Shao Lan, Shao Lan suddenly opened his eyes.
Snatching up the pen, he wrote two words on the paper: “Go out.”
“Go out?” A wave of despair washed over Jiang Mingran, making him wonder if Shao Lan had lost his memory. “Didn’t we try to go out the very first time? Going outside meant instant death!”
Shao Lan looked at Jiang Mingran: “Where did we die?”
“Stairwell…”
“Right, the stairwell—that is, when heading downstairs. But what if we don’t leave this floor?”
Jiang Mingran was slightly stunned.
“The opposite apartment.” Shao Lan heavily wrote two characters on the paper. “The neighbor across the hall is already dead; it’s an empty apartment.”
Uncle Bing was completely bewildered, but Jiang Mingran remembered.
In the previous loop, the diary they found had written—
“When I came home from work, I saw the door across the hall open and Brother Wang wasn’t home. I walked inside, opened the fridge, and saw Brother Wang. Brother Wang was inside my fridge.”
Brother Wang was the neighbor across the hall. He had previously offered to help the person who wrote the diary, but was killed before he could manage to help.
“I don’t know what this game actually is, but at least for now, every piece of information provided to us is useful,” Shao Lan said. “I suspect our game zone includes this opposite apartment.”
Jiang Mingran instantly reignited with hope: “Then I’ll go across and call the police!”
Seeing Jiang Mingran about to jump up, Shao Lan pulled him back.
“It’s just a guess,” Shao Lan emphasized. “If guessed wrong, you’ll die directly, just like the first time.”
Jiang Mingran trembled slightly.
“But there’s no other way left!” he said. “We have to go in to find out!”
Shao Lan pondered for a moment, his gaze roaming around the master bedroom until he spotted a red alarm clock on the bedside table.
A faint trace of a smile surfaced in Shao Lan’s eyes, and he calmly said: “No, the one who’s going in isn’t us.”
…
Jiang Mingran opened the security door, and the dim hallway came into view once more.
He cautiously sneaked out and headed toward the opposite apartment—that is, Brother Wang’s home.
Placing his hand on the doorknob and giving it a gentle pull, with a creak, the door opened.
The door wasn’t locked! Ever since the owner died, the door to this apartment had remained ajar!
Jiang Mingran quickly took out the alarm clock and tossed it inside the doorway.
With a thud, the alarm clock immediately let out a piercing ring.
“Ring, ring, ring—”
Jiang Mingran turned back around.
At the other end of the hallway, the security door he had just closed opened up.
Subsequently, a mop-shaped shadow appeared on the wall.
It was that woman.
She was terrifyingly tall; standing in the hallway, she even had to hunch her back so as not to hit the ceiling. Her slender body looked like the handle of a mop, atop which was long, disheveled hair covering her face. When she turned around, the shadow on the wall shifted to a side profile, revealing a huge bulge in the middle-lower section of the “mop”—it was her protruding belly.
The woman slowly walked down the corridor, heading toward the direction where the alarm clock was ringing.
One step, two steps.
Jiang Mingran was covered in cold sweat, not daring to even breathe heavily.
He pressed himself tightly against the wall, holding his breath, watching the woman walk right past him.
Suddenly, the woman stopped in her tracks.
She turned her head back, revealing a bloodshot eye from beneath her messy hair, locking gazes directly with Jiang Mingran.