The Hand of Confession – Chapter 223

Volume 7: Days of Stargazing at the Inn

Card Holder

Actually, everyone is a villain.

The voices of Xiaobao’s family faded away. Lou Jingmo pushed open the stall door, and Shen Maomao jumped down from the toilet tank.

The three of them cautiously walked to the entrance. Lou Jingmo pressed her face against the door to look for a while, then said, “They’re gone. Don’t be scared when I open the door.”

Shen Maomao immediately grew tense.

After speaking, Lou Jingmo yanked the main door open. A foul, bloody wind blew in their faces, making Shen Maomao want to gag.

The door to the women’s restroom was wedged open by a headless corpse. The body was face down, neck facing outward and legs inward, propped vertically against the doorway, preventing the door from closing.

The walls were covered in splattered bloodstains. The corpse’s head and both arms were missing, and fresh red blood was still trickling from the jagged, hollowed-out stumps of its torso, like a gently flowing stream that had dyed the nearby floor red.

Although she was mentally prepared, Shen Maomao was still startled by the situation. However, she quickly recovered and pointed out what she thought was a very important problem: “How… how do we get out?”

If they just stepped down… they would definitely step in blood. Then they’d leave a trail of bloody footprints. Never mind whether that would make them a target; just the thought of it was physiologically unacceptable.

Lou Jingmo also fell silent.

At that moment, Golden Retriever took out three small, spring-shaped props and said proudly, “It’s not that much trouble. I have an prop! Look! There’s a loose brick inside, we can take it out and use it as a starting point!”

Lou Jingmo was a little speechless. “Do you collect every type of prop you find?”

Most props in the Confession Game were quite useless. For example, this small spring allowed the user to jump three meters from a standing position—but only after swinging their arms back and forth three times.

In short, it couldn’t be used to escape, nor could it be used to find clues. Lou Jingmo used to think this kind of prop had no practical value…

Now it did.

Golden Retriever moved the brick out and placed it gently in the pool of blood without splashing a single drop.

The three of them held their props, stepped onto the stone brick in sequence, and jumped out into the hallway, looking like three happy little hopping frogs.

After leaving the pool of blood, Shen Maomao didn’t dare to look back, simply lowering her head and thinking about the plot.

After experiencing such an incident, Golden Retriever no longer dared to stay in the kitchen alone. The three of them simply decided to cook together. Golden Retriever washed the vegetables, Shen Maomao was the chef, and Lou Jingmo cooked the rice.

Scallions hit the wok, releasing a burst of fragrance. Oil splattered, and the range hood started up, sucking away all the white smoke.

Soon, one dish was cooked. Shen Maomao was too lazy to cook a second one. She directly plated the food and placed it on the counter.

Golden Retriever took it upon himself to scoop the rice. Then, holding his own bowl and the chopsticks for all three of them in one hand, and the plate of food in the other, he walked out in front.

Shen Maomao was suddenly filled with emotion. When Golden Retriever had first arrived, he complained that the food was bad and the table was greasy. Now, he had been tormented to the point where he could eat anything.

She patted Lou Jingmo’s shoulder and sighed emotionally, “The child has grown up…”

Lou Jingmo: “…” You psycho.

After eating her fill, Lou Jingmo felt that wasting time like this was a bit too disrespectful to the game, so she decided to go back and see how Sanmu and the others were doing with their investigation.

Since they couldn’t be sure which rooms on the second floor were occupied, Lou Jingmo guessed they would start their investigation from the third-floor rooms, and might even check their room.

The three of them took the elevator together. It stopped on the second floor. When the doors opened, Shen Maomao was the first to look out. The hallway was pitch black for some reason, looking particularly dangerous.

Lou Jingmo reached out and pressed the close-door button, but the elevator didn’t react at all.

Shen Maomao felt a little panicked. “Wh-what’s going on?” she asked. As she spoke, she cautiously poked her head out and glanced to the left, then Shua— she yanked her head back in.

“All the doors on the left are open!” She shivered and took a step back. “Aren’t the hotel doors supposed to open inward?! Why are the ones on the second floor opening outward??”

Where did all the people inside go?

Lou Jingmo forcefully jabbed the close-door button twice. The elevator doors finally reacted, closing at a slow pace. Shen Maomao and Golden Retriever stared intently as the gap between the two doors grew smaller and smaller. Just as the doors were about to close completely, a pair of hands suddenly appeared in the gap, grabbing the two door panels and prying them open.

“Ah—!” Shen Maomao let out a shriek and kicked at the hands. She lifted her leg incredibly high, her strength so great that the entire elevator trembled.

Golden Retriever didn’t dare to face her ferocity head-on and carefully shuffled into a corner, afraid that she might even hit him in her agitation.

With someone obstructing it, the elevator opened again. Standing outside was a woman. Shen Maomao recognized her; she was the second wolf the tycoon had identified, the human trafficker who had abducted a child.

The trafficker’s face was deathly pale. Her fingers were red, but she refused to let go, pleading with them tearfully, “Let me in… IT is coming… IT is coming!!”

Shen Maomao felt no pity for the trafficker. She regained her composure, braced her leg, and kicked the woman hard in the stomach, then stomped on her fingers three consecutive times.

The woman fell to the ground in pain, unable to make any other move. Lou Jingmo immediately closed the door, so the woman could only watch helplessly as the elevator slowly shut in front of her, with no hope of recourse. All she could do was let out a pained scream, and then her voice was abruptly cut off.

Shen Maomao let out a sigh of relief, her legs so weak that she plopped down onto the elevator floor.

Just now, she had seen it clearly through the gap. It looked like something had grabbed the woman’s foot and dragged her into the deeper part of the hallway.

Lou Jingmo grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and pulled her up. “Weren’t you being pretty brave just now?” she said.

Shen Maomao was like a limp noodle. “I… I just had a burst of adrenaline in a moment of tension,” she said weakly. “I used up all my strength, and now the aftereffects are kicking in…”

Before she could finish, Lou Jingmo suddenly bent her knees, crouched down, and patted her own back. Then she turned her head to look at her. “Get on.”

Shen Maomao was reluctant. “How can you run with me on your back? I can walk by myself.”

Lou Jingmo didn’t waste words with her. “Hurry up.”

Golden Retriever came over from the side and said earnestly, “How about I carry Sister Rabbit?”

Shen Maomao immediately scrambled onto Lou Jingmo’s back.

Golden Retriever: “???” Shen Maomao, are you even human?

They reached the third floor. The elevator stopped smoothly and the doors opened. The bright light flooding in was quite reassuring.

Just as Shen Maomao was about to ask Lou Jingmo how they would find the room Sanmu and Xia Tian were in, she keenly spotted something by the door of their own room.

Lou Jingmo had clearly seen it too. Without waiting for her to point it out, she turned and walked directly towards that spot.

She put Shen Maomao down, bent over to pick the thing up, and then naturally handed it to Shen Maomao. “Looks like they ran into a tough nut to crack,” she said.

This thing was, to their astonishment, the room card holder that had gone missing on the first floor!

Shen Maomao opened the card holder and looked inside. It was filled with a neat series of spare room cards. Not a single one was missing; they were all here.

She stroked the card holder’s leather exterior and said in a low voice, “I’m sorry for telling someone you were afraid of snakes. And… thank you…”

Lou Jingmo said, “Sanmu and the others are likely in grave danger. It seems we can only rely on ourselves.”

Currently, on the left side of the third floor, they knew that Hong-jie was in 301, Sanmu was in 302, 303 contained the deceased old TCM doctor and the person who let him in, 304 had Tang Song tied up like a cocoon, 307 to 309 were empty, and 310 was their room.

Only two households lived on the right side of the third floor: Xiaobao’s family in 318, and Xi Tian and Qu Jing diagonally opposite in 319.

To be safe, the group first knocked on the door of room 302, Sanmu and Xia Tian’s room.

The two’s belongings were still in the room, but the people themselves were nowhere to be found.

At a time like this, no one cared about privacy rights. They gave the room a rough search. It was Shen Maomao who discovered a large pile of snake-shaped props under their bed, though she had no idea how they had made them.

With these props, it was almost certain. These snake toys were what they had prepared to scare Xiao Fu.

Shen Maomao glanced back, only to find that there was nothing behind her.

Next was supposed to be 303, but because it was unknown who lived inside, the three of them unanimously agreed to skip this room for now and check 307 instead.

After a thorough search, they had gone through all the empty rooms except their own. In these rooms, they found nothing related to the exit.

They figured the game wouldn’t let them leave so easily. Perhaps the exit was left in the rooms of a few of the iron wolves¹.

After mentally preparing themselves, Shen Maomao proposed they try knocking on Qu Jing’s door first.

Qu Jing seemed easier to talk to than Xiaobao’s mom, and probably easier to deal with.

Lou Jingmo thought her idea made a lot of sense. “In that case, you go knock.”

Shen Maomao: “…I think Golden Retriever wants to knock.”

Golden Retriever shook his head frantically. “No, I don’t!”

Lou Jingmo gave her a push from behind. “Alright, just go. The sooner we find the exit, the sooner we’re free.”

Trembling, Shen Maomao stood at the door and raised her hand to knock twice.

There was no sound from the room, as if no one was inside.

Lou Jingmo said, “Knock again.”

Shen Maomao did as she was told and knocked two more times. There was still no reaction from inside. She turned to look at Lou Jingmo, made a gesture of holding a card, and mouthed silently: Open it?

Lou Jingmo nodded. “Open it.”

She opened it just like that. The moment the door opened, a swarm of unidentifiable small flying insects rushed at them. A disgusting stench, like food that had been rotting for three weeks, scrambled to invade their nostrils.

A corpse lay on the bed inside the room. A rope was tied around the corpse’s neck, with the other end connected to the bed’s railing, tethering him to the bed like a dog.

It was Xi Tian’s corpse.

His entire right leg was rotted beyond recognition, with small white worms squirming in the wound, as if he had been dead for over a month. In contrast to the gruesome state of his leg, his expression was very peaceful, as if he hadn’t suffered much when he died.

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