Chapter Seventeen: Rose Manor (XVI) The Convergence of Clues
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In the guest room on the second floor, Yezi’s corpse stared ahead with eyes that refused to close, then slowly slid to the floor. Even at the moment of death, she could not understand how Zou Yan had killed her in a scenario where “only ghosts can kill humans.”
Zou Yan withdrew her right hand. Her once-fair arm was covered in ugly, vine-like patterns. From time to time, plant tendrils thrust through her flesh from within her veins, bloodied and sprouting tiny flower buds.
Yet the transformation into a monster had stopped at her arm. At the shoulder, an iron ring constricted the muscle, preventing the vines from spreading any farther.
[Name: Ring of Isolation]
[Type: Item]
[Effect: Slows the spread of the uncanny transformation]
[Note: In the face of an ending that was fated long ago, what use are fear and hesitation?]
Zou Yan’s purpose had been different from that of the other players from the very beginning. She had come here to find something.
Now that her objective had been achieved, it was time to end this scenario.
Two people were already dead. She only needed to kill one more...
Zou Yan pushed open the door and walked toward the room at the very end of the corridor.
She remembered that Lin Chen, who had been left behind inside, was a newcomer.
...
In a room on the third floor, threads of scarlet blood began spreading from the tips of Qi Si’s fingers. Within a few breaths, they had wrapped around him.
He opened his mouth, but upon discovering that no sound would come out, he decisively abandoned his struggle. With a listless expression, he allowed the bloody threads to cover his entire body, weaving a red spiderweb across his skin.
Outside the door, vines grew at a frenzied pace. They surged forward in waves, squeezing and jostling as they poured through the gap beneath the door, filling every inch of the room.
Objective time seemed to have halted at that moment. Chang Xu remained bent over beside the bed, frozen in place. Dust hung suspended in the air, casting tiny shadows across the floor.
A thin wash of pale pink veiled Qi Si’s vision. The light dimmed, and the surrounding scene yellowed and curled like an old photograph burning in a fire.
Within the murky interplay of light and shadow, one phantom scene after another emerged. Almost the instant he saw them, Qi Si understood their meaning.
Unfamiliar knowledge poured into his mind and became familiar in an instant, as though it had existed deep within his memories all along, merely waiting to be awakened at that precise moment...
...
Rain poured outside the ancient castle.
In an attic piled high with miscellaneous objects, a girl with a red birthmark on her face fell to the floor. The door slammed shut before her eyes. The last sliver of light narrowed to a line, then vanished into the darkness.
The girl neither cried nor made a fuss. As though accustomed to such treatment, she merely leaned against the corner of the wall and quietly listened as the footsteps outside receded into the distance.
No one knew how much time had passed before a faint glow appeared in the darkness. Like a shadow-creature startled awake, she timidly turned toward the light.
Among the dusty heaps of clutter stood a small statue of a deity, glowing faintly as if bathed in a hazy dawn.
Carved from stone, the statue possessed exquisite features and a beauty that seized the soul.
The deity held both hands together before the chest, lowered eyes gazing at the blood-red rose carved from a gemstone between them. The expression was sinister, tranquil, and compassionate.
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The girl, as if guided by some unseen force, picked up the statue and held it before her, staring at it with near-obsessive fascination.
In a daze, she heard the voice of the god.
The god asked, “I can feel your pain. Would you like to pray to me?”
The girl had long since despaired of the future. At that moment, she felt not the slightest fear of the unknown.
With a bitter smile, she asked in return, “What use is prayer? I was born ugly. They say I am the reincarnation of a demon. Perhaps my very existence was a mistake.”
The god said, “Beauty and ugliness, good and evil—all are part of the multitude. If you yearn for beauty, plant the attic full of roses, and from that point onward, everything shall be as you wish.”
The girl agreed to the god’s bargain.
Over countless days and nights that followed, she secretly slipped out of the castle, cut rose branches from the estate, and carried them up to the attic. She packed soil into the cracks between the floorboards and planted the cuttings there.
The thorns tore her hands until they were covered in wounds, but whenever she thought of how soon she would possess beauty, all weariness and pain faded from her mind.
She remembered the candies her elder sister had given her as a child, and the stories her sister had told her. Those memories formed her earliest understanding of familial affection, which gradually gave rise to other emotions she could not comprehend.
But now her sister spent every day rushing from one banquet to another, never sparing her even a glance. When she finally found her sister and, summoning all her courage, kissed her on the lips, their parents burst in, shouting and pointing at her before locking her in the attic.
She thought it must be because she was ugly. Everyone in the world loved beauty and hated ugliness.
If only she could become beautiful, her parents would no longer despise her, and she could continue following her sister’s side as she had in childhood, couldn’t she?
As the rose branches spread throughout the attic, the birthmark on the girl’s face gradually faded. Her features grew more and more like her sister’s. Yet she gradually noticed that the fear in her parents’ eyes deepened with every passing day.
One rainy night, the girl overheard her parents talking.
Her father said, “Anne’s behavior is becoming stranger and stranger. I’m afraid she’ll hurt Anna... Should we ask the priest to examine her?”
Her mother hesitated. “We can’t bring the priest here. Anne will be executed. If we keep a close watch on her, nothing will happen.”
Her father sighed. “Tomorrow, send Anna to the countryside. We should arrange a marriage for her as soon as possible and separate the two of them...”
The girl listened calmly, her face showing neither excessive anger nor sorrow. She knew exactly what she had to do, just as she had known when she planted roses night after night without pause.
Once again, she climbed into the attic, knelt before the statue, and bowed with reverence.
She said, “I want two people to die in a way that will arouse no suspicion. I am willing to pay any price.”
The god then taught her how to kill living creatures and inscribe spells with fresh blood.
The girl killed the family cat. The instant its warm blood stained her fingertips, there was no longer any turning back.
...
When Qi Si regained consciousness, he found himself leaning against the wall. The two skeletons that had occupied the bed before him were gone, leaving behind only a pile of splintered bones.
Nearby, Chang Xu was trying to grind the fragments into even smaller pieces.
Seeing that Qi Si had awakened, Chang Xu explained, “You were trapped in a nightmare just now. I guessed the key lay in the skeletons, so I smashed them apart.”
Qi Si: “...”
Was this the legendary principle of overwhelming every technique with sheer force?
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It seemed he needed to reevaluate the value of this human tool. Though the man was riddled with weaknesses, his combat ability was certainly a major advantage...
Qi Si calculated silently, then lowered his head to examine his hands.
The red dress in his arms had disappeared, evidently consumed as a plot item the moment the event was triggered.
The scrap of paper he had found beneath the pillow had vanished as well, leaving no trace, as though it had never existed.
Qi Si frowned slightly and asked, “Brother Chang, what happened to the paper beneath the pillow?”
Chang Xu was remarkably quick to act. The instant Qi Si finished speaking, he reached beneath the pillow and pulled out a sheet covered in writing—the very same one he had found earlier.
Qi Si leaned closer, his gaze passing over the words on the page:
[Anna and Anne were born at the same time...]
The contents were exactly the same as before.
What exactly was happening? Had time reversed again?
If the previous reversal of time had merely been a conclusion inferred indirectly from the movement of the hands on the pocket watch, then this time he had experienced it firsthand.
Qi Si felt as though he had dreamed an extraordinarily long dream. Within it, a thousand years passed in the blink of an eye, countless thoughts flowing through his consciousness and leaving behind only faint traces and impressions that might or might not have been real.
The sensation was deeply strange. It seemed to be the effect of the scenario’s mechanism, yet it also felt like an innate gift buried deep within his memories.
After finishing the writing on the page, Chang Xu handed it to Qi Si and asked, “How did you know there was a paper beneath the pillow?”
“I saw it,” Qi Si replied. “It seems another reversal of time occurred just now. Of course, it’s also possible that I hallucinated.”
He distorted the account of his experience and sensations, concealing the crucial details while adding plenty of misleading information.
Chang Xu raised his left hand and rested it against the back of his neck, his gaze narrowing slightly. “I have a feeling that time in Rose Manor has begun to fall into disorder. The reversal at one in the afternoon was probably like a switch. Once activated, its subsequent effects became impossible to control.”
Qi Si said nothing, making no attempt to correct Chang Xu’s speculation.
The more outrageous the others’ misjudgments, the better. In a mystery-solving game, the amount of information one possessed was often directly tied to one’s chances of survival.
Moreover, the guaranteed death quota linked everyone’s chances of survival together. When one rose, another fell. Qi Si had never possessed the kindness to sacrifice himself for others.
Suppressing the malice in his eyes, he raised a hand and tapped his temple, sweeping his gaze from beginning to end across the several rules displayed on the system interface.
The anomaly at one in the afternoon was undoubtedly the key to breaking the deadlock. The most urgent task was to determine what triggered the reversal of time.
But there were too few clues.
The only thing that could be confirmed was that the reversal of time had something to do with Zou Yan or Yezi.
One of them had used an item to obtain the clue of the four-line poem from Chang Xu’s room, then immediately conducted an experiment.
The experiment had succeeded.
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