The Hand of Confession – Chapter 225

Volume 7: Days of Stargazing at the Inn

Abnormality

A new Seer?

The shredded flesh from the stump of the arm was smeared on her face, looking exceptionally disgusting. Shen Maomao desperately wanted to slap her a couple of times to wake her up.

What gold bars? Hong-jie must have gone crazy thinking about money!

Golden Retriever thought for a moment, then took out his phone, aimed it at Hong-jie, and took a picture with a kacha. Her crazed and bizarre expression was frozen on the screen.

In the photo, the arm was still an arm. It was now certain that the problem was with Hong-jie, not them.

Golden Retriever wanted to pass the phone to Hong-jie, but he had only taken two steps forward when she reacted like a lioness whose territory had been invaded, swiping a claw at him.

Lou Jingmo quickly reached out, grabbed Golden Retriever by the collar, and yanked her back.

Still shaken, Golden Retriever didn’t dare to approach her rashly again.

Just then, Lou Jingmo said, “Throw it over for her to see.”

Shen Maomao also called out Hong-jie’s name, saying, “We’ll toss the phone to you. Take a look at the picture on it. Nobody is stealing your gold, okay?”

Hong-jie froze, her reaction a beat too slow as she lowered her arm and reached for Golden Retriever’s phone.

She looked at the screen, her pupils contracting violently. She turned to look at the suitcase, then back at the screen. Finally, she snapped her head up, her eyes bloodshot as she glared at them. With a flick of her hand, she hurled the phone into the corner of the room, instantly smashing the perfectly good device to pieces. “You photoshopped¹ this to trick me!”

“My phone!” Golden Retriever wailed, but it was too late to save it. He could only say furiously, “If you don’t believe us, use your own phone to check! In our eyes, that thing is a severed arm, and it’s rotten, with worms on it.”

Hong-jie scrambled to pull out her own phone, fumbling to open the camera app. She aimed it at the suitcase, her hands trembling uncontrollably.

On the phone screen, four arms, already tinged with a bluish-green hue, appeared. White worms were still squirming slowly on them. Everything looked so real; there was absolutely no sign of it being photoshopped.

Refusing to believe it, she exited the camera app and opened it again. To her dismay, the screen still showed the same image, leaving her with no excuse to even lie to herself.

Hong-jie let out a sharp scream and kicked the suitcase far away. The plastic screeched against the floor, making a piercing sound. Two streams of tears fell from the corners of her eyes as she muttered like a madwoman, “This isn’t real… it’s not real… my gold bars… my gold bars…”

Seeing her in this possessed state, Shen Maomao felt a chill in her heart and couldn’t help but murmur, “Just how desperate is she for money…”

At that moment, Golden Retriever suddenly said, “I don’t think it’s just that she’s desperate for money. She’s just terrified of being deceived. Because she had no money, her family threw her into a dumpster when she was a child. After growing up, she lost her job because she couldn’t afford to give gifts. Because she had no job, she broke up with her partner. Later, she found work as a tour guide, specifically taking tourists to unfamiliar places to rip them off, and she made a lot of money from it. But she could never get rid of her habit of loving money…”

Shen Maomao stared at him in shock. “How do you know that?!”

Lou Jingmo also wore a half-smiling expression, her hand already gripping a dagger, looking as if she was ready to give him a quick end if his answer wasn’t clear.

Golden Retriever’s mind went blank. “Right… how do I know that?”

Lou Jingmo asked, “What about Xi Tian? Do you know what happened to them?”

Golden Retriever said, “When they encountered danger, Xi Tian immediately abandoned Qu Jing and ran. Qu Jing tried to grab his hand, but he pushed her away, causing her to fall to the ground. She missed the best opportunity to escape, so she couldn’t get away…”

He slapped himself hard on the head. “How do I know this again?! And I even know that Qu Jing was just subconsciously trying to get her boyfriend to run with her and had no intention of dragging him down… What the hell, f#ck!”

Lou Jingmo put away her dagger. “Is there more?”

Golden Retriever, on the verge of a breakdown, decided to just spill everything.² “What kind of story do you want to hear? The woman who trafficked children? The man who raped the campus belle? Or the old traditional Chinese doctor who sold fake medicine?”

Shen Maomao: “…A direct hit from the Seer?”

Golden Retriever continued, “There are others. For example, Xiao Fu. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to leave the counter, but that she couldn’t. While working at the inn, she saw several men carry in a woman who had clearly been drugged to get a room. She was too scared to call the police or her boss. She just sat numbly at the front desk all night. The next morning, the men left, and right after they were gone, the girl jumped from the building. From then on, she was so consumed by guilt that she could never take a single step away from that place.”

“And then there’s Xiaobao’s family. Xiaobao’s mom was actually a very timid person. She was powerless, enduring domestic abuse along with Xiaobao, never daring to fight back. It wasn’t until Xiaobao was accidentally beaten to death by his father that she finally snapped. After Xiaobao’s dad was tired from the beating and fell asleep, she first stabbed him in the temple with a fruit knife, then stabbed him over a hundred more times. Finally, she chopped off his head with an axe and then killed herself.”

“Besides the player NPCs, almost everyone who came here was not a good person. Oh, I guess we aren’t exactly good people either, right? The only exception was that Seer, who was completely innocent, as if she was just here to witness these bad people die one by one in fear.”

After thinking for a moment, Golden Retriever added, “I don’t know why these things are appearing in my mind. They don’t feel like they came out of nowhere; it’s more like they were my memories all along. And when I was saying all that, I felt incredibly sad and angry, like I wanted to kill this bunch of people myself.”

Shen Maomao: “?? What’s going on? Have you become a Seer too?”

Lou Jingmo, seeming to have figured something out, directed him to touch the arms in Hong-jie’s suitcase. “Go and try.”

With a mournful look on his face, Golden Retriever walked over reluctantly. “Are you really just using me as a tool? Is there any boss with less status than me?”

Shen Maomao: “Yes, aren’t you one?”

Ever since confirming the gold bars were fake, Hong-jie had become like a salted fish³ that had lost its dream. She just sat on the edge of the bed, staring blankly at the floor, her eyes dim and lifeless. She probably couldn’t even hear what they were saying.

Golden Retriever glanced at her a few times before finally mustering the courage to touch the arms. He then retracted his hand as if he’d been electrocuted.

In the next second, the arms all collectively flopped and turned to dust, just like before, leaving a small, slightly raised area in the middle.

Lou Jingmo tilted her chin. “Go on.”

Golden Retriever: “…Can I not…”

Lou Jingmo pulled out two tissues. “Go on.”

Golden Retriever went, filled with grief and indignation, and pulled out another key card from the dust.

Neither of the two key cards had a room number on them. The first one was entirely black on the front. This new one had a single character written on its front: An⁴.

“Safety exit?” The four words tumbled out of Shen Maomao’s mouth. She added uncertainly, “Is that what it means?”

Lou Jingmo: “It might be. Looks like we need to keep collecting.”

There was clearly no reason to linger with Hong-jie any longer. Shen Maomao loudly reminded her to lock her door and not run around. Hong-jie slowly raised her head and gave her a strange look. Then, her head suddenly glitched and broke apart into cubes, like a stuck cassette tape, startling Shen Maomao into taking a sharp step back. When she came to her senses, everything was normal again.

“I know…” Hong-jie stood up, tidied her suitcase, and then pushed it to see them off. She then pushed the suitcase into the hallway and slammed the door shut.

Shen Maomao immediately said, “Just now!”

Lou Jingmo: “I saw it too.”

Golden Retriever: “This world seems to be on the verge of collapsing…”

Lou Jingmo said, “Perhaps the author has fallen into a deeper collapse, or perhaps their illness has been cured. Either way, for us, it’s a dead end.”

Shen Maomao: “So where do we search next?”

Lou Jingmo looked at the room next to Hong-jie’s. “303.”

Room 303 was really close, just a few steps away. When they got to the door, Shen Maomao had a sudden impulse to try the two key cards, but as expected, neither of them worked.

She had no choice but to grip the real key card for 303, nervously pressing it against the door’s electronic lock. With a beep, the door opened. A sliver of light seeped into the dark room. Shen Maomao shivered. “It’s broad daylight… why is it so dark inside?”

Lou Jingmo: “Not all rooms in a inn have windows.”

Shen Maomao still felt something was wrong. “But based on the layout here, the rooms in the front and back should all have windows…”

Golden Retriever offered a suggestion, “Could someone have boarded up the window?”

Whatever the reason, it would all become clear once they opened the door. Shen Maomao was responsible for opening it, so naturally, she planned to be the first one in. She gripped the doorknob and asked, “I’m going in?”

The moment she finished speaking, a hand grabbed her arm and yanked her back. Lou Jingmo then moved to stand in front of her and said decisively, “I’ll go first.” With that, she kicked open the door to Room 303.

Not only were the lights off in 303, but it was also exceptionally cold. A blast of chilly air rushed out at them the moment the door opened, as if the air conditioner was broken, or as if some unclean thing was watching them from the darkness.

Lou Jingmo switched on the light directly. The non-glaring light illuminated the entire room, allowing them to easily see the window, which had been completely blocked by a large wooden plank.

The walls on either side of the window were covered in messy red marks, looking like the scene of some evil ritual. The bed in 303 had been deliberately destroyed; it was obvious where the plank blocking the window had come from. The remaining parts were scattered where the bed should have been, and the mattress was thrown on the floor. Lying on top of it was a cold corpse—it was the old traditional Chinese doctor’s body.

Apart from that, there was another person sitting in the corner facing the wall, writing something on it with his finger while muttering deliriously, “It’s almost complete… This is the most perfect work of art… I will become the greatest artist…”

It was Van Gogh…

So the footsteps they had heard that day were his.

Lou Jingmo didn’t deliberately quiet her footsteps, walking across the wooden floor just like that, but she didn’t draw his attention at all. Van Gogh seemed completely unaware of their existence, single-mindedly focused on completing his work on the wall.

Shen Maomao also walked over, only to discover that he wasn’t holding a paintbrush, but a severed finger.

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The author has something to say:

My next book will be Taking Up the Sword!! The other ideas are just plot bunnies; the passion might fade after a while, and I might change them to something else, so everyone please check out Taking Up the Sword! Big brothers and sisters-in-law, Happy New Year, how about we get 500 collections?!

Continuing with rewards for the first fifty [comments] today!

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