Chapter 65: Those Who Wish for Death
"The butler is a fake? And he can see the blood-scrawled words?"
Xie Lin's brow furrowed, processing the information Wu Wenwen had just relayed. He'd already harbored suspicions that the butler was an imposter, but the revelation that the man could perceive the ghostly script was an entirely unexpected variable.
'As expected,'he thought, a flicker of grim satisfaction in his eyes.'Sending Wenwen to trade intel was the right call.' They had gained far more than they'd given away; it was a resounding success.
"I didn't touch any of those books," Xie Lin stated, his voice low and steady. "And I warned the others not to take anything from the master bedroom. Whether they listened... I can't say."
Since it had only been a hunch at the time, he hadn't offered a detailed explanation, just a curt warning. He could only hope it had been enough.
"That's sufficient," Yotsuya Miko nodded, her expression serious. She rapped her knuckles against the inner wall of the room, producing a dull, solid thud. "Lao Lao, can you hear anything?"
All eyes—Miko's, Xie Lin's, and Wu Wenwen's—turned to Lin Xuelao.
"I'll try."
Lin Xuelao pressed her ear flush against the cool plaster, her breath held in absolute stillness. She began to tap gently on the wall, varying the force of each knock, her head tilted as she listened for the faintest inconsistency. Gradually, a small crease appeared between her brows.
After a long moment, Wu Wenwen couldn't contain her anxiety. "Sister Xuelao, can you not hear it?"
Lin Xuelao didn't answer. Instead, she shifted her position, her fingers trailing along the wall as she continued her methodical tapping. Suddenly, her movements ceased. Her head snapped up as if she'd caught a fleeting whisper on the wind.
"It's right here!"
The others stared, stunned. They hadn't truly expected to find a hidden room so easily.
At that moment, Lin Xuelao walked into the room directly opposite the section of wall she had identified. Under the confused gazes of her teammates, she reached out, her fingers finding the wall-mounted light switch and the small power knob on a nearby desk lamp.
Click.
Rumble…
First came the crisp, mechanical sound of a hidden trigger engaging, followed immediately by the low, grinding groan of a heavy stone door. Before their astonished eyes, a secret passage slowly yawned open in the wall.
"Lao Lao, how did you know the switch was that lamp?" Wu Wenwen asked, her voice filled with awe.
"Half listening, half guessing," Lin Xuelao explained calmly. "Besides the space for the passage itself, there was no room left inside that wall to install a mechanism. Since there happened to be a room directly opposite, I deduced the trigger would be connected to the nearest electrical fixture."
"Amazing," Miko praised, a rare, genuine smile touching her lips.
Xie Lin and Wu Wenwen looked at the blind girl with undisguised admiration. Even if they had confirmed the passage's existence, they might have eventually found the switch through trial and error, but it would have taken ages.
Perhaps it was true what they said—when one door closes, a window is opened elsewhere.
The secret passage was a maw of pitch-black darkness. The four of them fumbled along the edges but found no light switch. Fortunately, they all had their phones. The faint, ghostly glow from the screens was just enough to illuminate the path at their feet.
The passage was a winding, vertical artery within the castle's stone body. The small door they had entered through was merely one of its many access points.
They decided to head up first. Their pace was swift, but their bodies were coiled springs of tension, every muscle ready to react to the slightest hint of danger.
"Do you smell that?" Miko asked, her nose wrinkling.
"Stale incense," Lin Xuelao answered, her nostrils flaring slightly. "Mixed with a rank, fishy stench." Since losing her sight, her other senses, particularly hearing and smell, had become preternaturally sharp.
"This is the smell from that… thing yesterday," Miko murmured, her voice tight. "If I'm not mistaken, this passage connects to the very top of the castle. It's how she crawls in from above."
Xie Lin said nothing, his grim silence a form of agreement.
The realization spurred them on. They quickened their pace, soon reaching the uppermost point of the passage. It opened into a small, cramped lookout room dominated by a single window nearly two meters wide.
Here, the foul odor was suffocating. Before, only Lin Xuelao had been able to clearly distinguish the cloying scent of old incense, but now the fishy reek was so thick in the air that it was impossible to ignore. It was the smell of rotten pork ground together with fish guts, left to steep for days in a vat of decaying potpourri. The two scents tangled into an unholy, unbearable miasma.
A wave of nausea washed over them. Fighting the urge to vomit, they scanned the small room for anything of note before quickly retreating back into the passage.
They didn't stop until they reached the level of the third floor. Only then did they pause, taking deep, shuddering breaths to suppress the churning in their stomachs before continuing their descent.
But the further down they went, the more intense that familiar, disgusting odor became.
"Can you still hold on?" Xie Lin asked, turning to glance at Lin Xuelao. He knew her sense of smell was far more acute than an ordinary person's; this had to be torture for her.
Lin Xuelao didn't speak. She simply gritted her teeth and gave a sharp, determined nod.
The stench continued to grow, now mingling with a host of other strange, unidentifiable smells.
The coppery tang of blood? No, it was more than that.
Rotten apples, grapes, strawberries… a bizarrely sweet and cloying perfume now saturated the air, a sickly fruit cocktail layered over the decay.
Everyone frowned. The smell of blood, they could understand. But the scent of fruit was utterly, unnervingly out of place.
When they finally reached the very bottom, the first thing they saw were baskets overflowing with fruit. But the produce was perfectly intact, clearly not the source of the rotten aroma.
"It's on the floor," Lin Xuelao said, her voice strained. "The floor is covered in fruit juice, candle wax, rainwater, flesh, and…" She trailed off, her brow furrowed in concentration. After a moment, she shook her head. "I'm not sure what the last substance is."
"That's already incredible," Miko remarked, genuinely impressed that Lao Lao could identify the components of the filth on the ground by scent alone.
Rainwater and flesh made a grim sort of sense. Even the fruit could be rationalized as something the butler intended to give the Lady of the Castle as a post-dinner treat. But what on earth was the candle wax for?
'Could it be some kind of cult ritual?' Miko wondered. It was the only explanation she, or any of the others, could think of.
The four of them pressed forward.
The floor was disgustingly sticky. Every step they took made a sickening squelch, pulling up long, viscous threads of filthy mucus that clung to their shoes.
They had entered an underground secret chamber. A straight, main path stretched out before them, flanked on both sides by a series of small, dark rooms.
The first three rooms they passed were piled high with skeletons. Judging by the tattered remnants of modern clothing clinging to the bones, they likely belonged to players from previous games.
In a room near the center of the hall, they finally saw the first "living" person—if he could still be called that.
His scalp and skin were horribly corroded, peeling away in wet, discolored patches. His limbs were twisted backwards at grotesque, impossible angles, and his joints had taken on a deathly, greenish-gray pallor. A thick, coarse rope was tied around his neck, tethering him to the far wall like an animal. He showed no reaction to their approach, his head lolling on his chest.
If not for the faint, shallow rise and fall of his ribcage, they would have mistaken him for just another corpse.
Even after surviving the horrors of the mermaid-skinning instance, Miko couldn't bear to look directly at the cruel sight. She averted her gaze, a hand instinctively flying to her mouth.
Xie Lin took a deep, steadying breath and crouched down, cautiously approaching the man.
"Tell me, you…"
He stopped mid-sentence. A shadow passed over his face as he slowly, deliberately, rose back to his feet.
"B-Brother Xie Lin… what is it?" Wu Wenwen's voice trembled.
"No need to ask," Xie Lin said, his own voice a low, heavy rumble. "His tongue has been cut out."
A dead, suffocating silence fell over the group.
They stared at the broken player before them, and a chilling sense of shared sorrow, of a fate narrowly avoided, settled in the air. If they failed to clear this instance, this would be their end. And even if they were lucky enough to pass this time, what about the next? And the time after that?
"Don't get lost in those thoughts," Xie Lin's voice cut through the despair, sharp and commanding. He saw the shift in their morale and moved to stop it. "We will win. And we will keep winning. The most important thing right now is to find more clues and do everything in our power to survive."
"Sha… ooh… ooh…"
A rasping sound drew their attention back to the prisoner. He seemed to realize they weren't his tormentor, but new players. A faint flicker of light, a ghost of lucidity, reignited in his dead eyes. He began to desperately force garbled syllables from his throat.
They all frowned, unable to understand the mangled sounds. The veteran player summoned every last ounce of his strength, using the scarred root of his tongue to push out three blurred, yet horrifyingly clear, words.
"Kill… me…"
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