"Creak—"
"Creak—"
Dust fell in a flurry, and the rickety wooden steps groaned endlessly in the darkness.
It cut at everyone's taut nerves like a saw.
The faint candlelight flickered like a leaping will-o'-the-wisp, as if it would be extinguished at any moment.
Clutching their candles tightly, everyone carefully and silently descended the steps.
Rusty iron rings encircled withered wrists, the other end of the chain was nailed into the wall, and the desiccated corpse showed a blurry outline in the candlelight.
The tattered clothes had faded with time, and even the bloodstains on them were blurred, their dark color concealing countless layers of dust and grime.
Everyone was startled when they first saw the skeletal corpse.
"This must be the ghost's corpse, the one locked in the basement." Qin Manwen's voice echoed in the cold basement.
No one answered, but the serious and wary expressions on everyone's faces said it all.
With utmost concentration and prepared to pull out their high heels at any moment, Xia Linyin and Qin Manwen slowly walked towards the corpse.
The candle was brought close to the corpse for examination. Although the corpse's head was dried out to almost become a skeleton, two intersecting marks could still be seen on the corpse's face, indicating that someone had disfigured the face by drawing an "X".
There was a deep wound on his neck that exposed the bone, and his throat had been cut.
Qin Manwen reached out and touched the mummified corpse's chest. "It's male—"
Her voice stopped abruptly, Qin Manwen's expression changed slightly, and she reached into the pocket on the corpse's chest and took out a piece of paper.
All eyes were focused on the note in Qin Manwen's hand.
What killed me?
"Find it, kill me again, and I will disappear."
"You only get one chance, are you sure?"
After Qin Manwen finished reading the words on the note, she began to examine the corpse. Lifting the corpse's shirt, she could see that the body was covered with wounds, and there was a red and black gash on the abdomen covered with hard scabs.
"There were whip marks and branding marks. The ghost was tortured before he died. He was also stabbed in the abdomen, but these were not fatal wounds. The wound on his neck that severed his carotid artery was the fatal one."
Qin Manwen pointed to the wounds on the corpse and said, "What we're looking for is the weapon that cut the ghost's throat."
After speaking, Qin Manwen looked at everyone and asked, "Does anyone have any objections?"
Xia Linyin shook her head. She agreed with Qin Manwen's opinion. What they needed to do now was to find the murder weapon that cut the ghost's neck and then use that weapon to kill the ghost again.
Yang Shuming shook his head as well. He looked at the table filled with instruments of torture: a whip covered in barbs, a dark branding iron, and a dagger inlaid with gemstones...
His gaze swept across the room, and Yang Shuming asked, "Could the murder weapon be in here?"
He picked up the jewel-encrusted dagger and brandished it a couple of times.
"Probably not." Qin Manwen shook her head. These notes were part of the game's setup. If the murder weapon were in such an obvious place, the note wouldn't have used the word "find".
"The murder weapon should be in the lady's room."
Qin Manwen analyzed that there was no doubt that the lady had killed the ghost, so the real murder weapon must be hidden in the lady's room!
Without wasting any more time, everyone rushed out of the basement and ran to the lady's room to search high and low for the murder weapon.
As everyone searched the room, Xia Linyin hesitated. Was the person who killed the ghost really the madam?
After reading the diary, their first reaction was that the person their father brought back was a woman, while the person locked in the basement was a man.
The first reaction they had after reading this passage was that the mother killed the person the father brought back.
However, the diary entry never explicitly states that the mother killed this person.
It's as if "she" and "he" weren't used at all.
It only mentions that the mother locked the person in the basement, and screams came from the basement every night.
So the whip marks and branding on the corpse were indeed the mother's doing, but the fatal wound on the neck was not necessarily left by the mother.
“My mother often hugs me and cries, and I don’t understand why she’s crying.”
“The screams coming from the basement every night terrified me. I couldn’t sleep at all, but there was no one to sit by my bedside and tell me stories to lull me to sleep anymore.”
The two sentences from the diary and the box hidden under the bed, filled with broken rabbit toys, flashed through Xia Linyin's mind.
Suddenly, as if she had just remembered something, she rushed towards the children's room. "Li Luo! I'm going to get something!"
She rushed into the children's room, grabbed the storybook next to her pillow, shook it, and flipped through it, but found neither the note nor anything else.
Xia Linyin opened the book, glanced at the table of contents, and then turned directly to the page for "The Tortoise and the Hare".
The storybook is richly illustrated, with vivid pictures of rabbits and turtles below the text.
When Xia Linyin saw the neat handwriting next to the rabbit, her pupils contracted, and she gripped the storybook in her hand tighter.
With a "snap," Xia Linyin slammed the storybook shut and rushed outside, only to be blocked at the doorway by Wei Xiaohua.
"Xia Linyin, why are you always walking with Li Luo?"
Wei Xiaohua asked with his head down, his voice sounding like a lifeless pool, "You're just like those girls, aren't you? You all like handsome men."
Xia Linyin couldn't figure out what was wrong with Wei Xiaohua, so she hid the storybook behind her back.
Wei Xiaohua raised his head and angrily questioned, "Do you also think I'm ugly, just like those girls, and that you feel disgusted even looking at me?"
Xia Linyin frowned. "Wei Xiaohua, why are you always targeting me?"
When playing Werewolf, they targeted her, arbitrarily accusing her of being a werewolf. When they suspected someone was a ghost, they also targeted her, going crazy and saying that she and Qin Manwen were ghosts.
Now they're saying all sorts of unreasonable and nonsensical things.
Wei Xiaohua, who had just been furious, suddenly became coy. He whispered, "I think you have a very artistic vibe, which is my type. I deliberately targeted you to attract your attention. I wanted you to look at me more."
"puff--"
Xia Linyin almost spat out a mouthful of blood!
She simply couldn't understand Wei Xiaohua's thought process. Xia Linyin's gaze turned cold, and she asked, "Are you a ghost?"
Seemingly startled by Xia Linyin's words, Wei Xiaohua stammered, "No...no."
"Since that's not the case, then move aside quickly. I have something very important to tell everyone."
Xia Linyin ran past Wei Xiaohua, but after only a few steps, a dull pain shot through her neck, her vision went black, and she collapsed to the ground, losing consciousness.
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