The Hand of Confession – Chapter 144

Volume 5: Days of Applying Makeup to Corpses

Head

Are we already dead?

“That San Huang’s hand is quite mischievous, hahahaha…” Shen Maomao gave a dry laugh.

“But it only knocked on the door for a while, then who knows where it ran off to.” As Lou Jingmo spoke, she turned sideways to let her into the room. The temperature inside was normal, completely lacking the icy chill of the previous two nights.

Shen Maomao asked curiously, “Besides San Huang, you didn’t encounter anything else?”

Lou Jingmo gave an ambiguous smile, “What else did you want me to encounter?”

Shen Maomao said seriously, “I’m just concerned about you. Don’t arbitrarily distort other people’s meaning.”

Lou Jingmo said indifferently, “It might be because I pulled the main power switch after I came downstairs in the middle of the night.”

It took Shen Maomao half a day to understand the twists and turns within this——the room being too cold was nothing more than the air conditioner and refrigerator malfunctioning. To prevent this situation, cutting off the power supply would do the trick.

Physical ghost expulsion, most fatal.

Lou Jingmo folded the security guard room’s blanket and led Shen Maomao through the rain to the canteen. Today’s canteen was different from usual. At the entrance, numerous black umbrellas had sprouted from the ground, and inside, there were many strangers dressed in black clothes with white flowers pinned to their chests.

Shen Maomao couldn’t determine if these people were the extra players, so she tried to stay away from them, sitting in the corner of the canteen.

The people in black were tasting food that smelled odorless but tasted exceptionally delicious. Their movements were uniform, like replicas copied from the same mold, looking particularly eerie.

After a few minutes, no one else came to eat. Shen Maomao grew restless, widening her eyes at Lou Jingmo, waiting for her instructions.

Lou Jingmo stood up: “Let’s go see.”

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During the time they were gone, the first-floor lobby had completely changed. Upon entering, the most eye-catching things were the two large wreaths standing next to the platform in the center. The wreaths were enormous, entirely white, with a large character “奠” [diàn | meaning “condolence” or “offer condolences”] in the middle, particularly conspicuous.

Shen Maomao walked over cautiously and discovered that the two wreaths seemed to be covered with a thin layer of ash, as if they had been placed there for a long time.

A burst of rapid footsteps came, followed by an older woman’s voice: “Move aside! Do you have any sense? I’m in a hurry here! Don’t block my way!”

It was the voice of the middle-aged woman.

Shen Maomao quickly moved aside and saw the woman carrying an urn, which she heavily placed on the platform. The sight made Shen Maomao’s heart jump, fearing the urn would shatter.

The woman wiped the rainwater from her face with the back of her rough hand and hurried out again, as if looking for something.

Looking at the small urn, Shen Maomao said uncertainly, “Is this… an urn for ashes?”

Lou Jingmo nodded: “Just don’t know whose ashes are inside.”

Just like they didn’t know who the relatives of those people outside were.

There were two people in the furnace at the same time. When they were cremated, no one considered the subsequent funeral arrangements, so naturally, no one bothered to cremate the two separately. The bones after cremation were also mixed together.

Shen Maomao felt uneasy: “Lou-jie, I have a feeling that those people are here to attend Huang Hongxing’s funeral.”

Where would they, the players, have relatives in the game?

Thinking this way, she became even more certain of her idea——those people were there to attend Huang Hongxing’s funeral!

Last night when San Huang called, she was still thinking, it’s just a funeral, even if you nitpick, what else could you find wrong? Now it’s good, the ashes in the urn aren’t even the right person’s. How could the family be satisfied?

Shen Maomao’s right eyelid twitched wildly. She quickly said to Lou Jingmo, “Lou-jie, should we look for Huang Hongxing’s body?”

Lou Jingmo nodded.

But the funeral home was so large, where could they find a body that had hidden itself?

In order to find clues, they had searched all the rooms in the building. Given Huang Hongxing’s size, if he had hidden in those rooms, the players would definitely have noticed, and wouldn’t be unaware of his whereabouts until now.

The heavy rain pounded the ground, washing away the accumulated dust, creating one clean little circle after another. The black fog outside the funeral parlor had turned pure white at some point, actually looking like rain mist caused by the heavy rain, and the Yaksha in the fog had also disappeared without a trace.

As soon as they came out, they were drenched. Shen Maomao wiped her face, looked around, and said with some bewilderment, “Where should we look?”

Lou Jingmo’s gaze was deep as she looked at the thick white fog and made a bold decision: “We go in!”

Shen Maomao: “Huh?”

Lou Jingmo analyzed clearly: “You entered the fog in the last world, right? Entering the fog isn’t necessarily fatal.”

Shen Maomao nodded: “Although that’s true…”

Lou Jingmo grabbed her hand and said to her earnestly, “Rules are meant to be broken, Shen Maomao, do you trust me?”

Asking this, she gripped Shen Maomao’s hand tightly.

Shen Maomao helplessly shook their clasped hands: “You haven’t given me a choice here…”

Lou Jingmo laughed: “No matter what you choose, you…” A clap of thunder suddenly boomed, burying the latter half of her sentence. Shen Maomao didn’t hear it clearly.

But she could probably guess what Lou Jingmo wanted to say——probably something like “you will always support me”… right?

Wasn’t Lou Jingmo just taking advantage of her being her “licking dog” to do whatever she wanted to her!

Shen Maomao snorted coldly and took the initiative to pull her, running in the rain, heading straight for the main entrance.

A surge of emotion welled up in her heart, and she even felt that she could run to the end of the world with Lou Jingmo like this.

There wasn’t an end of the world, but there was an exit to the funeral parlor.

Lou Jingmo pushed open the door, and Shen Maomao slipped out like a nimble fish. The two went straight into the white fog, as if they had returned to the back mountain of Lingyuan Village, yet it was fundamentally different from the fog of the back mountain.

This fog looked thick, but it didn’t reach the level of the back mountain of Lingyuan Village where one couldn’t see their own hand in front of their face.

Based on her memory from when they first arrived, Shen Maomao remembered that the main gate connected to the main road, and the back gate connected to a small forest.

Guan Qiwen had left with Huang Hongxing, Dao Ba, and Wang Liang by car. Guan Qiwen also said there was a normal world order outside…

They stopped, standing under the eaves. Shen Maomao asked: “Which way?”

Lou Jingmo: “Front.”

So the two ran forward, rushing towards the main road.

Shen Maomao’s heart was pounding in her throat, half from the exertion of running, and half from the Yaksha, whose whereabouts were unknown.

This feeling was too stimulating. She didn’t know where the Yaksha was, so she didn’t know where it would suddenly appear from, nor did she know when she would be chopped in half by its axe.

After running not too far, Lou Jingmo suddenly slowed down and pointed ahead, saying to her: “Look, what’s that over there?”

Shen Maomao followed the direction of her arm and saw a scene that shocked her.

Not far away, a mutilated body lay on the ground. The protruding belly seemed to have been cut off by something, leaving only a smooth cut on the abdomen, with internal organs scattered to the side. Both arms were also detached from the body, one by the roadside, the other in the middle of the road.

The arm in the middle of the road might have been stained with mud and water, so it was somewhat dark, and it looked somewhat similar to San Huang’s charred arm. Shen Maomao picked up a wooden stick, cautiously bypassed the meandering bloodstains on the ground, walked to the side of the body, and nudged the body’s head.

A somewhat decomposed face appeared before her eyes. The owner of this face was San Huang, who had long been burned to ashes in the incinerator.

Judging by the degree of decomposition of the body, it had been dead for several days. If it weren’t for this heavy rain, they might still be able to smell the stench of the decaying corpse.

Shen Maomao was deeply shaken and almost fell into the rainwater. She stood up and asked in a daze, “So was it because he was already dead that the body that came out of the incinerator was like that; or was it because he was burned like that in the incinerator that led to the state of the body outside… is that it?”

Lou Jingmo: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”

Shen Maomao: “Actually, I’m inclined to think that San Huang was already dead.”

San Huang might have died on the first day of the game, and what returned was a ghost who didn’t know it was already dead.

The two bypassed San Huang and continued forward, seeing another corpse not far away.

This corpse had been vertically cut in two, the two halves scattered in different places. Shen Maomao adjusted for a moment, then she and Lou Jingmo pushed the body together, piecing it into a complete individual.

This should be Wang Liang’s real body.

After putting him together, Shen Maomao squatted next to him and looked at him for a while, then suddenly said, “Why do I feel like his face is familiar…”

Lou Jingmo said: “He’s Xiao Kong.”

Shen Maomao: “!!”

These two words were like a spell, instantly dispelling the fog over the face in Shen Maomao’s mind. She almost instantly remembered that Xiao Kong was the man who refused to share a room with her. Like Guan Qiwen, he was also a mortuary cosmetologist.

Shen Maomao hadn’t asked him why he didn’t want to live with her, and it seemed this question would never be answered.

“So his name was Wang Liang…” She began to doubt her previous reasoning. “But he was following us at the beginning, how could he have died here? So did he die inside the funeral home first, and then his body appeared outside?”

Lou Jingmo said: “It’s also possible that he explored the world in the fog alone, but couldn’t come back.”

The two continued walking forward and saw the stiff Gong Lian and the charred Xiao Qiao beside her.

At this point, all the people they had personally witnessed dying in the instance were accounted for. Further ahead were the people who were “not yet dead,” and some people she didn’t recognize.

She saw the wounds on the middle-aged woman’s body, as if she had been mauled by a wild beast, and the bloodstains fanning out in the rainwater under the waist-severed man, along with several headless bodies rolled off to the side.

The scene was extremely bloody. The further out they went, the more it became a sea of blood.

The rain stopped at some unknown time. Shen Maomao looked into the distance and suddenly found the three heads at the very front a little familiar, so familiar that it made her whole body cold and drenched in sweat.

“Lou-jie…” Her eyes fixed on that spot, her voice trembling, “Are we already dead?”

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