The Hand of Confession – Chapter 199

Volume 7: Days of Stargazing at the Inn

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You can not love, but don’t hurt

Hong-jie was taken aback: “What’s wrong?”

Lou Jingmo smiled gently: “Hong-jie, Xiaobao’s mom just finished arguing with someone. Maybe when she comes out, she’ll suspect you took the ball and, in turn, blame you.”

Hong-jie, holding the ball, looked hesitant: “This… it wouldn’t go that far, would it? I think she has a pretty good personality…”

Shen Maomao didn’t know what Lou Jingmo was up to, but she could guess Lou Jingmo didn’t want her to take the ball. She quickly said: “Xiaobao’s mom does have a good personality, but she just finished an argument. A woman who has just argued is like an ignited firecracker; whoever touches her will get blown up.”

“If I return the ball to her later, she’ll hit me? She can’t be that unreasonable, can she?”

Shen Maomao was at a loss for words and looked at Lou Jingmo.

Lou Jingmo continued to coax: “More trouble is worse than less trouble. How about this: we’ll accompany you to put the ball at the front desk. We can all be witnesses for each other, so the matter of the ball isn’t blamed on us.”

Hong-jie’s gaze hardened. She stared fixedly at Lou Jingmo, making Shen Maomao and Golden Retriever get goosebumps all over. After a long while, she averted her gaze and compromised: “Alright then, let’s go together. Ai—if I had known it would be this much trouble, I wouldn’t have picked it up. Really good at finding trouble for myself…”

Shen Maomao grinned and tried to get on her good side: “We weren’t planning on picking it up in the first place. What if we damaged it for them? In this desolate wilderness, where would we find another ball for him? It’s still Hong-jie who is warm-hearted. We’ll definitely have to learn from you in the future.”

A few words coaxed Hong-jie into beaming with smiles, making Lou Jingmo and Golden Retriever want to cover their faces.

The four of them walked into the elevator together. Hong-jie was wearing pajamas, while Shen Maomao and the other two were still holding their toiletries.

Shen Maomao couldn’t help but let her gaze fall on that huge mirror again. She suddenly remembered she hadn’t told Lou Jingmo about this yet.

I must tell her when we get back. What on earth did I see to make me show such a terrified expression?

Thinking this, she turned sideways to glance into the mirror again. This look instantly scared her out of her wits¹, and she stumbled back a large step: “Holy sh#t!”

In the mirror, Hong-jie’s head was clearly a large ball, and what she held in her arms was her real head! That head was facing outwards, its pitch-black eyeballs darting left and right, then suddenly looked straight at her.

Lou Jingmo quickly put an arm around her: “What’s wrong?!”

Golden Retriever also asked anxiously: “What happened?!”

The image only flashed for two seconds. By the time Shen Maomao looked again, there was nothing there. She was panting from fright, her hands trembling uncontrollably. It took a long while for her to recover: “Nothing… my eyes were playing tricks on me.”

Beside her, Hong-jie said with apparent concern: “Aiya, look how scared you are, a forehead full of sweat!”

She averted her eyes, not daring to look at Hong-jie or the ball, and said calmly: “I’m fine…”

The elevator stopped again on the second floor. Hong-jie’s attention was diverted. Looking at the empty doorway, she complained: “Why does this elevator stop on every floor? I don’t know what the designer was thinking. What a waste of time.”

Lou Jingmo pressed the close-door button, her expression unchanged. The elevator continued its descent, finally reaching the first floor.

The four of them walked out of the elevator one after another and headed straight for the counter.

Behind the counter was still the same indifferent receptionist. Because there weren’t many people, only a small lamp in front of the counter was left on downstairs. She was slumped over the desk, drowsy. Shen Maomao noticed that her entire person was in shadow; if one didn’t think in that direction, one wouldn’t notice whether she had a shadow or not. Bazihu’s² observation was quite meticulous.

Hong-jie tucked the ball under one arm and knocked on the table with her other hand: “Hei, wake up!”

The receptionist twitched, looked up, and gave her a huge eye-roll: “It’s the middle of the night, are you trying to scare someone to death by not sleeping?”

Hong-jie said good-naturedly: “We found a ball upstairs, seems to belong to that family of three. We thought we’d leave it with you, and you can tell them in the morning.”

The receptionist said irritably: “They’re in 318. Since you’re already helping, why not see it through to the end³ and deliver it to their room directly?”

Golden Retriever glanced at his watch but didn’t say the specific time: “It’s already so late, they might have fallen asleep long ago.”

Receptionist: “Don’t I need to sleep?”

Hong-jie, afraid they would argue, quickly said: “Alright, alright! Don’t they have a child! If the child gets woken up and starts fussing, none of us will probably get any sleep.”

The receptionist leaned back in her chair and said: “Fine, leave it there. I’ll tell them in the morning.”

Hong-jie: “Hao lei⁴! Thank you, Da-meizi⁵!”

The four went upstairs. The elevator, as usual, took a detour to the second floor before returning to the third.

Hong-jie walked straight towards the bathroom. Shen Maomao and the other two returned to their room.

Golden Retriever lay down on his small bed and let out a long sigh: “Ai… it’s really cold on the first floor. It must be hard on that receptionist. Sleeping like that, she’ll definitely catch a cold, right?”

Shen Maomao put away her toiletries and said: “There’s definitely something wrong with Hong-jie! And that mirror in the elevator is very strange. Just now, I saw Hong-jie in it, her head and the ball had switched places! The ball was on her head, and her head was in her arms!!”

“Holy cow?!” Golden Retriever shot up into a sitting position, imagined the scene, and couldn’t help but shiver. “F#ck… is she a ghost then?”

Shen Maomao shook her head: “I don’t know. Besides her, I also saw myself staring terrified at something diagonally behind me, but I don’t know what I saw…”

After talking about her own experience, she asked Lou Jingmo: “Lou-jie, why did you stop her from taking the ball into the toilet?”

“Hong-jie wanted to throw the ball away,” Lou Jingmo replied faintly. “You saw Xiaobao. He placed the ball at the entrance of the toilet; it was probably meant for you.”

Golden Retriever was astonished: “Xiao Lou-jie, how did you figure that out??”

“The way she looked at the ball,” Lou Jingmo said. “She really hates that ball… I was afraid if she lost it, Xiaobao would blame it on Rabbit.”

Shen Maomao said, bewildered: “Why is everyone targeting me??”

Lou Jingmo drew the curtains, leaned back against the table, and said thoughtfully: “Why do I feel like you’re particularly unlucky in this instance?”

Shen Maomao nodded repeatedly: “I think so too!! The mirror, the moon, Xiaobao kicking the ball—why did only I see them? I feel like I’m being targeted!!”

Lou Jingmo: “Not necessarily. Maybe you’re just purely unlucky.”

Shen Maomao wouldn’t listen: “It must be, it must be that I’m naturally beautiful and brilliantly intelligent, so the game developers are wary of me, afraid that if I grow strong, I’ll threaten their position, so they sent people to mess with me!”

Lou Jingmo didn’t expose the final shred of dignity of this black ghost⁶. She lay down on the bed with her clothes on, pulling the covers over herself, opting for out of sight, out of mind: “Go turn off the lights, prepare for bed.”

“Heng⁷!” Shen Maomao huffily went to turn off the lights.

The room instantly darkened. Shen Maomao immediately rushed back to the bed, in a few swift moves⁸ flipped open the other side of the quilt, and like a nimble little fish, dived into the covers, simultaneously snuggling into Lou Jingmo’s embrace, placing her cold little feet on Lou Jingmo’s legs.

Lou Jingmo shivered from the cold: “Get off, it’s cold.”

Shen Maomao giggled foolishly, Heihei, her eyes shining astonishingly bright in the darkness: “Warm them up for me.”

Lou Jingmo rolled her eyes and clamped Shen Maomao’s small feet between her legs.

Golden Retriever: “…Keke.”

Shen Maomao: “What are you coughing for? Haven’t you seen socialist sisters warming each other up?”

Golden Retriever silently turned over, for the first time feeling that the nickname Shen Maomao had given him had sealed his fate—you can not love, please don’t hurt.

The first night passed peacefully. Early the next morning, sunlight shone on the bed. Shen Maomao opened her eyes to find herself entirely squeezed into Lou Jingmo’s embrace, pushing Lou Jingmo to the edge of the bed. The two of them occupied only one person’s space; her original side was completely cold, indicating she had probably been clinging to Lou Jingmo like this for some time.

She smacked her lips, silently rolled back to her own side, preparing to sleep in a bit more, but just as she closed her eyes, a ringing sound suddenly filled the room.

Golden Retriever covered his head with the quilt and turned over to continue sleeping. Lou Jingmo sat up immediately, reaching for the phone on the bedside table.

Shen Maomao also sat up, frowning as she watched Lou Jingmo’s actions.

There was no signal in this place, how did a call get through?

Lou Jingmo swiped the screen and unlocked the phone directly with her fingerprint: “It’s an alarm.”

The alarm was turned off, but the ringing continued.

Shen Maomao cocked her ear, tracing the sound to another location: “Wait a minute… the one you’re holding seems to be Golden Retriever’s phone. Ours are in the bag…”

She got out of bed barefoot, pulled out two more phones that were vibrating and ringing from the bag, turned off their alarms first, then looked at Lou Jingmo and questioned: “What’s going on with you?! Why can your fingerprint unlock Golden Retriever’s phone?! Speak! What deal do you two have behind my back?!”

Golden Retriever, suddenly called out: “?? What’s wrong? Is there a ghost??!”

Lou Jingmo looked at them as if they were two idiots.

She had always been aloof, looking down on other game players, dedicated to being a lone wolf⁹. She never expected to end up with two such stupid teammates…

Could this be retribution¹⁰?

She walked over to Shen Maomao, took a phone from her hand, and at the same time threw Golden Retriever’s phone to her, saying: “Unlock it.”

Shen Maomao, bewildered, did as she was told and found that her fingerprint could also unlock Golden Retriever’s phone.

Next, the three of them tried it one by one, confirming that each of them could unlock all three phones with their own fingerprints. Moreover, when they opened the phone’s security settings, they saw that only one fingerprint was registered inside.

Three phones, identical from the inside out, were placed in front of the three of them. Lou Jingmo said: “Find them. Which ones are yours.”

Shen Maomao: “…”

Golden Retriever: “…You’re making things difficult for us, Xiao Lou-jie!”

Lou Jingmo picked up the one on the very end: “Just take any. No idea who set this alarm, but it’s just about time for breakfast. Hurry up, wash up, and go downstairs.”

The three of them, holding their toiletries, opened the door and saw a blue and yellow ball placed at their doorstep.

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