The Hand of Confession – Chapter 362

Volume 11: The Days of Traversing Through the Mirror

Building 18

Where did that mirror come from?!

The next day’s classes passed in the blink of an eye. As soon as class ended, the original students of the class scattered hula-la¹. Shen Maomao, with sharp eyes and quick hands², grabbed Zhang Xiao, the only person she knew. “Class Monitor, can I ask you something?”

Zhang Xiao paused in the middle of picking up her bag and tilted her head to look at her. “What’s wrong? Is something the matter?”

Shen Maomao said, “I have some private questions I’d like to ask you.”

Zhang Xiao looked at her friend and said, “You go back first; I’ll take care of lunch myself.”

The other players also dispersed to look for clues. Shen Maomao led Lou Jingmo and Zhang Xiao outside, offering to treat Zhang Xiao to a meal, but she refused. “No need. Let’s just find a quiet place to talk directly. I have some things to do this afternoon.”

Seeing her firm attitude, Shen Maomao didn’t insist. Once they reached a secluded spot where human tracks were rare³, she got straight to the point. “Do you know about Wu Huiling and Zhan Xin?”

Zhang Xiao’s expression didn’t change, only revealing a perfectly measured amount of curiosity. “How do you know about that?” Then, as if remembering something, she asked, “Did Bai Lu tell you?”

Shen Maomao quickly denied it. “No, no, I was just browsing the forum…”

Zhang Xiao looked puzzled. “There shouldn’t be any posts about them on the forum anymore, right? That incident had a huge impact back then. The school ordered strict deletion of posts, and they track IPs if discovered. How could anyone still dare to discuss it on the forum?”

Then what was that forum she had entered?

Shen Maomao’s scalp went numb, and a chill rose in her heart. She sucked in a breath of cold air before saying, “Maybe… I remembered it wrong. Maybe I saw it somewhere else. So, what happened with them?”

Zhang Xiao seemed to understand. “Did you hear some rumors? Those supernatural stories are just used to scare the underclassmen. The internet won’t let us talk about it, but people discuss it plenty in private. I heard the two of them were in love, but their families didn’t approve, so they agreed to commit suicide together for love. Thinking about it from that angle, it’s actually quite romantic. They were really brave.”

Two people died, yet in her mouth, it turned into a kind of courage filled with romanticism. Shen Maomao pursed her lips, unable to agree with her view—not to mention, what she was saying might not even be the truth.

Lou Jingmo stood leaning against a tree with her arms crossed, staring at the willow catkins dancing in the air, lost in thought. Shen Maomao knew that when Lou Jingmo said she wouldn’t get involved, she really wouldn’t. So, she had to find a way to get information out of Zhang Xiao herself. She revealed what happened that morning. “If they died willingly… why are they coming back to harm us now?”

Zhang Xiao opened her mouth, taking a moment to organize her words, before asking uncertainly, “What… do you mean?”

Shen Maomao said, “One of us died. Something happened, that’s why I came to ask you. Class Monitor, can you tell us the truth? What exactly is the situation with them?”

Zhang Xiao was still in shock, as if her worldview had been impacted. “What the hell? Someone died? When did this happen?”

“Just last night. Someone fell from the top bunk. We found her this morning, bled out and dead. The state of the death was tragic; it looked like she was smashed to death…”

Zhang Xiao was skeptical. “No way, right? Did she have some kind of illness? Ah… I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead, but I heard about someone who had a tumor in their brain and didn’t know it. Then one day they accidentally fell, started bleeding heavily, and it turned out the fall ruptured the tumor, and they were just gone… Did you contact the counselor? How can we handle such a big issue? That’s too… you guys just arrived and something like this happens. It makes our Jiang University look so dangerous.”

Seeing that she spoke logically and her expression didn’t seem faked, Shen Maomao couldn’t be sure if there was something wrong with her or not. She could only grab her for a few more words, expressing her fear and simultaneously submitting a request to change dorm rooms.

Zhang Xiao brushed it off with a few perfunctory sentences, stating she didn’t have that kind of authority and needed to report the matter to the counselor. She even turned around to advise Shen Maomao not to scare herself, then said she had things to do and left first.

Shen Maomao and Lou Jingmo stood together, watching her retreating figure. Shen Maomao asked Lou Jingmo in a low voice, “What role do you think… she plays in this story?”

Actually, she already had a vague guess in her heart, she just wasn’t sure.

Lou Jingmo replied, “NPCs with names are generally not that simple.”

Even someone like their counselor only had a surname. Zhang Xiao, however, had a full name from the very beginning. Compared to Teacher Xiao, she was their true guide.

Shen Maomao glanced at her sideways. “Didn’t you say you wouldn’t help?”

Lou Jingmo: “You already figured it out anyway; I just threw in a reminder.”

Shen Maomao sighed. “Sigh, bringing you along is like bringing a waste.”

Lou Jingmo lifted her leg and kicked her right in the butt.

Shen Maomao stumbled. “No more kicking my butt in the future! You’re going to kick it flat!”

Lou Jingmo frowned, falling into deep thought.

It seems that way. It didn’t feel as round when I touched it earlier. Did I really kick it flat?

Shen Maomao didn’t know she was being judged for having a less-than-round butt; she thought Lou Jingmo was thinking about the plot.

This dungeon is probably a bit tricky. Didn’t you see Lou Jingmo’s expression change?

…

The way back inevitably passed by those bronze statues. Shen Maomao had a bit of psychological shadow⁴—although it didn’t hinder her walking, the scar on her foot was still reminding her of what had happened, so she tried to walk around the statues as much as possible.

They arrived safely at the cafeteria. Since there were many people inside, she felt no psychological burden about eating again so soon after her last meal—food in the game world wouldn’t make her fat in reality anyway.

While eating, she kept thinking about the plot.

The background of this dungeon is Jiang University. Does that mean there are parallel events in reality? In their previous dungeons, there wasn’t much point in looking for real-world counterparts, but if they survived this time, they would probably be busy.

But the busy ones would be Golden Retriever and Lou Jingmo; she was just a waste who would muddle along, eating and waiting for death⁵.

Shen Maomao wiped away a non-existent tear from the corner of her eye, as if mourning her lost face skin⁶.

After lunch, they didn’t rush back. Instead, they wandered around the school, trying to find any spider traces and horse tracks⁷.

Unfortunately, she failed to collect any useful information.

She felt that perhaps her efforts were in the wrong direction. Maybe once she found that key point, clues would gush out, and the main plot would become clear.

As the sky rubbed black⁸, Shen Maomao, having walked for most of the day, chose to give up and prepared to return to the dormitory with Lou Jingmo.

In this season, the sky always darkened exceptionally fast. Before they even reached the dorm buildings, the streetlights lining the red brick road lit up.

The Jiang University in the game wasn’t exactly a proper university. At this hour, nightlife should have just been starting, yet the human smoke⁹ on campus was scarce. The few people there were walked hurriedly, heads down and shoulders hunched, passing quickly by them.

The crickets in the grass began to chirp, their noise exceptionally grating. The weather was still a bit cool, and combined with the sky full of willow catkins, everyone was wearing masks and hats, their whole bodies¹⁰ wrapped in heavy coats, making it impossible to see the colors inside them—just like those anonymous users on the forum.

Building 16 was right in front of them. The building was brightly lit, with dark silhouettes moving before the windows. Getting a little closer, one could hear the voices coming from inside, mixing with the crickets in the grass. It was annoying, yet it exuded a living “energy.”

Once they walked past Building 16 and arrived at the rear, at Building 18, that vitality vanished completely.

The moment they stood at the entrance of Building 18, all sounds in their ears came to an abrupt halt. Even the constant sound of the wind stopped, as if they had crossed into an alternate dimension. Shen Maomao looked up at the corridors of Building 18. They were equally brightly lit, yet there wasn’t a single human shadow in the hundreds of windows across the seven floors. Some hadn’t even turned on their lights, as if no one lived there¹¹ at all.

Her gaze traveled from the first floor all the way up, finally looking at the pitch-black curtain overhead. The sky and stars seemed pulled exceptionally far away, constantly rising higher—or perhaps they were constantly falling… falling… until they completely sank into the abyss.

The visual vertigo made Shen Maomao dizzy. She stumbled and almost fell, hurriedly reaching out to grab Lou Jingmo beside her.

Lou Jingmo supported her, asking with considerable concern, “You okay? Kidney overdraft¹²?”

“Get lost.” Shen Maomao’s vision was still spinning, but telling Lou Jingmo to get lost came out automatically, bypassing her brain entirely.

When her vision finally stopped swaying, she discovered that at some point, she had already walked into the lobby. Right now, she was standing with Lou Jingmo directly between two mirrors, staring at the layers upon layers of herself in the mirror world.

Directly in front of her, on the square support pillar of the dormitory, a rectangular mirror had been pasted there at some unknown time. The reflection of herself in the mirror wore a compassionate smile, quietly staring back at her across the air. Then, the corners of the mouth grinned wider and wider, revealing a hollow interior, stretching until they were level with the ears, and then ripped open.

Beside her, Lou Jingmo’s body was still facing forward, but her head rotated one hundred and eighty degrees in front of Shen Maomao. She could even hear the crack-crack sound of the neck snapping. By the end of the turn, only a pitch-black back of the head remained in the mirror. The skin on the neck was twisted into a knot like a fried dough twist¹³—terrifying and disgusting.

The scene was too horrifying. Shen Maomao felt her hair was about to explode¹⁴ and violently turned to look at her side.

Fortunately, the situation in the mirror did not appear in reality. The normal, living Lou Jingmo was frowning, looking at her with a grave expression, gripping her wrist. “Maomao? What did you see?”

The warm body temperature transmitted from the wrist made her breathe a sigh of relief, but she couldn’t be sure this was the real Lou Jingmo yet. So, she cautiously didn’t answer, only turning her head back to look straight ahead—

There was only a wall standing quietly in front of them. Where the hell did that mirror come from?!

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The author has something to say:

Updates will be a bit late recently. I’m busy during the day and don’t have much time, so I can only rush to write at night. You guys can read it the next morning when you wake up, don’t stay up too late!

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