The Hand of Confession – Chapter 396

Volume 11: The Days of Traveling on a Train

Liao Shi

I’m sorry, I lied to you all

It was a perfectly ordinary summer evening. Lou Jingmo had gone downstairs to buy groceries, leaving Shen Maomao on the sofa with Puck, watching Peppa Pig¹.

After one episode, Puck suddenly turned to Shen Maomao, his expression dead serious. “I want to change my name.”

Shen Maomao blinked. “?”

“I want to be called Peppa,” Puck announced.

Shen Maomao froze for a second before bursting into hysterical laughter. She laughed so hard she couldn’t straighten up, clutching her stomach as she explained that Peppa was a girl pig.

Puck thought about it, then made a decision. “Then I’ll be George (Peppa Pig’s little brother) from now on!”

Fine. At least he got the gender right this time.

“You hit me last time!” Puck protested. “And I can’t even change my name?!”

“That was your punishment for prank-calling me and pretending to be Zhan Zhi, wasn’t it?”

She’d only found out later when Puck let it slip. The call that had driven her crazy with worry had been a practical joke. She’d been so furious she’d given the little spirit a good beating.

Puck wasn’t having it. “I’m not listening, not listening, not listening! I want to be called George! I want to play with Peppa!”

Golden Retriever’s call came just as Shen Maomao was about to kick him.

Golden Retriever had flown abroad for the summer to see his parents. He’d said something about taking a luxury cruise and sailing the seas. Since he wasn’t in Nan City², Shen Maomao didn’t think much of it and casually answered the phone. “Hello?”

The line was silent.

She clutched the phone, a sudden realization dawning on her. Her lips trembled as she called out his name, her voice barely a whisper. “Liao Shi?”

A laugh came from the other end. “Sister Rabbit, I can’t believe you actually remember my name.”

Shen Maomao pushed away a whining Puck who was trying to ask who it was. She took the phone over to the bay window.

With one hand, she slid the window open. She looked down at the cars streaming along the distant road, at the brilliant lights of the amusement park’s Ferris wheel painting the night. A sudden, sharp pain lanced through her heart. “I remember… I’ve always remembered.”

“I’m sorry,” Golden Retriever said again.

“What’s with the sudden apology?”

“I lied to you all.”

“How?” Shen Maomao asked.

Golden Retriever was quiet for a second. “For the past two years, I’ve been driving without a license.”

Shen Maomao was speechless. “…?”

He started laughing, as if he’d just told the funniest joke in the world. The sound crackled through the phone and into her ear. He laughed for a while, then stopped abruptly. His voice was serious when he spoke again. “I was the one who hit that person, driving drunk. This whole new image was just an act. And that confession back then? I never liked you. I was never a good person. I’m sorry for deceiving you for so long.”

Shen Maomao was completely stunned. She stared at a fixed point in the empty air, the words both registering and not registering at all.

Golden Retriever didn’t wait for a response. “I’m sorry,” he continued. “It was nice knowing you.” Then he hung up.

The dial tone buzzed in her ear. Shen Maomao stood frozen by the window, her thoughts a tangled mess.

She heard a key slide into the lock and turn. Shen Maomao looked back in a daze as Lou Jingmo opened the door, shut it behind her, set down her things, and bent over to change her shoes. “The green beans were on sale today,” she said. “I bought some to make with stewed ribs… Why are you crying?”

Shen Maomao raised a hand to her face. Sometime during her stupor, tears had started to stream uncontrollably from the corners of her eyes.

Lou Jingmo walked over in her slippers and pulled her into a hug. “What is it?” she asked softly. “Why are you crying?”

Shen Maomao sniffled. “Golden Retriever… I think something’s happened to Golden Retriever.”

Lou Jingmo raised an eyebrow in surprise. “Him?”

She had guessed Golden Retriever would die in the game eventually, but she hadn’t expected it to be so soon. With his family’s wealth, Lou Jingmo figured he could have scraped by for another year or two. She never thought it would end this quickly.

Lou Jingmo didn’t have much affection for Liao Shi. She’d always been rather indifferent to others, so his death didn’t particularly sadden her.

But she knew Shen Maomao was different.

For Shen Maomao, Golden Retriever was a friend she had met right after entering the game. They had spent over two years together. It was only natural that she’d have a hard time accepting that this friend was suddenly gone.

Shen Maomao couldn’t stop the tears. “He… he also said he’s a liar,” she sobbed. “That he’d been lying to us the whole time, that he was the one who hit someone while driving drunk… He apologized to me…”

Lou Jingmo gently patted her back. “Didn’t I tell you a long time ago that he wasn’t that simple?”

But over the past two years, they had seen Golden Retriever change. They had seen him try to atone for the mistakes he’d made… Did someone like that deserve to be forgiven?

Humans were multifaceted creatures. They showed different sides of themselves to different people. You could never simply label someone as good or bad.

Shen Maomao wasn’t the victim, so she couldn’t pass judgment. But putting that aside, Golden Retriever had been a good friend. That much was undeniable.

“Try calling him back,” Lou Jingmo said. “Maybe he was just trying to scare you.”

“Okay…” Shen Maomao picked up her phone from the floor and opened her call history, only to find that the record of Golden Retriever’s call was gone.

She quickly opened her contacts and scrolled down to ‘G’. The name ‘Golden Retriever’ wasn’t there.

Golden Retriever… had vanished.

In the past two years, Shang Zhou had figured out the game’s major update. Cases like Peng Xiaorui’s, where some social traces were left behind, were likely due to the system’s instability right after the upgrade. Those instances became rarer over time. After June of this year, the game system was fully upgraded. Anyone who died was wiped clean, all traces erased.

And just like that, Golden Retriever had been erased. From now on, he would exist only in their memories.

Shen Maomao buried her face in Lou Jingmo’s embrace and began to wail.

She thought of Golden Retriever’s infuriating personality when he first entered the instances. She thought of the idiotic way he’d stood outside their door for over an hour on the day he moved in, just to give them a scare. And she thought of his smiling face before he got on the plane, telling her he’d earned a scholarship for the first time and was going to frame the certificate as a family heirloom…

Shen Maomao cried until her face was red and she could barely breathe.

A furious energy churned inside her, directed at herself, at Golden Retriever, at the game’s creators—at everyone.

She was angry at her own powerlessness, angry that Golden Retriever had to be a silk-pants son³, angry that the creators treated human lives like they were nothing…

But all she could do, it seemed, was unleash her own incompetent rage⁴.

“For him, maybe death is a kind of release,” Lou Jingmo comforted her softly. “He doesn’t have to bear all that fear anymore. He doesn’t have to live in constant terror…”

Shen Maomao didn’t speak. She just kept crying.

They ended up ordering takeout for dinner. After crying her fill, Shen Maomao was a little dazed. She sat quietly, hugging her bowl and eating numbly.

Puck had been startled by her sudden emotional breakdown. He waited until she had stopped crying before daring to approach. “So, can I be called George now?” he asked.

Shen Maomao wiped away her tears and shot him a glare. “Call yourself whatever you want… Waaaah… Golden Retriever’s dead…”

Puck quickly ducked behind Lou Jingmo. “Was Golden Retriever a dog you guys raised?” he asked.

The corner of Lou Jingmo’s mouth twitched. She grabbed him and stuffed him back into his own little house. “Don’t make trouble.”

Puck didn’t dare peek out again.

…

It took Shen Maomao more than ten days to recover. Though she no longer broke down in tears, the thought of Golden Retriever still hurt.

She wanted to find someone to draw a portrait of him while her memory was still fresh, but she quickly realized she couldn’t describe what he looked like at all. The only thing she could picture clearly was his wild, golden hair, always blowing in the wind.

Later, she heard that the cruise ship Golden Retriever had been on caught fire and exploded in the Pacific Ocean. Miraculously, there were no casualties.

But no one knew that a young man named Liao Shi had sunk to the bottom of the sea in that accident, falling into an eternal, undisturbed sleep.

Before entering an instance, Shen Maomao was organizing her props when she found a pile of extra items. She checked and realized they had all been transferred from Golden Retriever. He had given her everything he had left, including his last three cards. She cried as she looked at the props, worth millions, a sharp, piercing pain stabbing at her heart.

Sometime later, by chance, the two of them traveled to the city where Golden Retriever’s family lived. There, on the street, they saw Xixi being led by a woman who looked very much like Golden Retriever.

But when Xixi passed them, she looked at them like they were complete strangers.

Of course. The only reason they knew Xixi was because of Golden Retriever. Now that Golden Retriever’s existence had been erased, it was only natural that Xixi wouldn’t recognize them.

Shen Maomao cried again after they got back to the hotel. But life had to go on. Instances still had to be cleared. Life without Golden Retriever wasn’t all that different from before. In this world, anyone could keep on living without anyone else. Besides, Golden Retriever was only a friend.

…

By the time winter arrived again, Lou Jingmo had acquired John from the game. They now had eleven cards. Only the most mysterious one, Judas, remained elusive.

Shen Maomao’s thoughts turned to Ren Yue’s card, but it was now in the hands of her Master, who was as mysterious as a divine dragon that shows its head but hides its tail⁵. She didn’t know the Master’s name or where she lived.

If the Confession Game hadn’t been updated, Shen Maomao could have tried something with the other game Ren Yue played. She still remembered Ren Yue playing while on the phone with her Master. That meant this Master wasn’t just a master in the Confession Game. If she logged into Ren Yue’s account and sent her Master a private message, she’d probably scare the woman half to death.

But now, everything related to Ren Yue had been wiped away by an invisible eraser.

For the next few days at home, Shen Maomao wracked her brain, trying to remember Ren Yue’s Master’s game id⁶.

She vaguely recalled that the id had the character for “sea” in it, and that the person was quite famous on their server—a pay-to-win big boss⁷ on the combat power leaderboard.

Hoping for a lucky break, Shen Maomao spent half a day downloading the game on her computer and tried to enter Ren Yue’s account and password.

It wasn’t that she was so hung up on Ren Yue that she remembered her password. It was just that all of Ren Yue’s game accounts were her name spelled out followed by 1998, and all her passwords were her birthday plus a period.

Lou Jingmo, watching from the side, was practically drowning in jealousy. But she was a mature woman. She would keep her jealousy to herself for now and get even later that night.

Shen Maomao tapped a few keys, but the result was expected—the system displayed: Account does not exist.

Ren Yue’s game account had died along with her.

Shen Maomao sighed, at a complete loss.

But this outcome pleased Lou Jingmo immensely. She’s just a dead person. What does she have on me? Lou Jingmo patted Shen Maomao’s shoulder. “It’s okay if you can’t find her. The game can’t be unbeatable forever. It’s only a matter of time before we get out.”

The problem was, they might not have that much time. At Lou Jingmo’s level, no one could guarantee they would make it out of an instance alive.

“Wait a second…” Shen Maomao said. “I’ll try creating an account on her server! Maybe I’ll remember when I see the leaderboard.”

Lou Jingmo didn’t want to crush her hopes, so she let her be. “You go ahead and play. I’m going to go start moving bricks⁸.”

Shen Maomao waved a hand. “Go get ’em, Shukuan-jiang⁹!”

Lou Jingmo leaned down and nipped her on the chin.

“Ow!” Shen Maomao cried out. “Are you a dog?!”

Lou Jingmo wiped the saliva from the bite mark with the back of her hand and grinned. “Just leaving my mark.”

Shen Maomao shot her a glare and turned back to registering her account.

Puck perched beside her, his big eyes glued to the screen. “Is this fun? Can you make one for me, too?”

“It’s not fun,” Shen Maomao said. “It’s super hard. Not as good as Peppa Pig. Go watch TV in the living room.”

Puck refused. He climbed onto Shen Maomao’s shoulder and craned his neck to watch her play.

Shen Maomao ignored him, focusing on her task.

After skipping the intro, she found she didn’t have a button for the combat power leaderboard. A quick search on Baidu¹⁰ told her she had to reach level thirty to unlock it. So, she started following the main questline to level up.

This is for clues, she told herself. I’m definitely not just playing for fun.

Two hours later, her character was bathed in a flash of golden light, successfully leveling up from 29 to 30.

The leaderboard button appeared. Shen Maomao eagerly clicked it and scrolled down the list. Finally, she saw a familiar name: Ge Jiang Ting Hai¹¹. Fifth on the combat power leaderboard. A very beautiful female character.

Ge Jiang Ting Hai… She remembered Ren Yue calling her Master “Ting Hai”!

What’s this person’s deal? Clearing deadly instances while also grinding out game stats?

She then found the game’s Tieba forum¹² and searched for the id. Sure enough, she found something new: this Ge Jiang Ting Hai was a popular streamer who showed her face on a major streaming platform every night.

Following the trail from the forum, she found the streaming app. Ge Jiang Ting Hai had over three million followers—a huge number for this game. There were probably quite a few face fans¹³ mixed in.

Ge Jiang Ting Hai wasn’t live at the moment, so Shen Maomao searched for recordings of her past streams.

The moment she saw her, Shen Maomao shot to her feet, startling Puck off her shoulder. “What are you doing?!”

Shen Maomao grabbed Puck and set him on the desk. “George, you play by yourself. Daddy’s going to go talk things over with your mommy.”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I’m two hundred and three years old! You’re not old enough to be my daddy!”

Shen Maomao shoved a grape into his arms. “Here, go chew on this. I’m leaving!”

With that, she stormed upstairs.

Puck held the grape, hesitating for two seconds between satisfying his curiosity and eating. In the end, he sat cross-legged on the desk and chose to stuff his face. Anyone would have believed he was Shen Maomao’s biological child.

Shen Maomao hadn’t expected it to be so easy. She burst into the study, phone in hand, and shouted at Lou Jingmo, “Lou-jie!! I found her!”

Lou Jingmo raised an eyebrow. “So quickly?”

Shen Maomao handed her the phone. “I know what she looks like, and she’s a streamer herself. Of course it was quick.”

Lou Jingmo took the phone and glanced at the screen. “This person…”

“What?”

“I’ve never seen her.”

“So you’re saying she’s not a famous player in the game?”

“My social circle is rather small,” Lou Jingmo said. “To find that out, we need to ask a professional.”

“Shang Zhou?”

“Why not use a tool that’s readily available?”

In the last two years, Shang Zhou’s guild had grown exponentially. Last year, they had even started encroaching on the forum’s territory, running a business trading props and selling information. They dominated all the other game guilds, the true top dog of the Confession Game.

While Lou Jingmo contacted Shang Zhou, Shen Maomao, just to see what would happen, started searching for all kinds of information on Ge Jiang Ting Hai. She successfully found her Weibo account.

Ge Jiang Ting Hai frequently shared details of her daily life. Shen Maomao scrolled through her entire feed, from beginning to end, and confirmed that she currently lived in W City. She could even map out her general living area based on the selfies she took when she went out.

The way the internet exposed a person’s information was sometimes terrifying. If you were determined enough, you could always find traces of a stranger’s private life online.

But after doing all this, Shen Maomao felt her actions were meaningless.

What’s the use of knowing all this? Are we supposed to rush over there and kill her to get the card? Or kidnap her and threaten her into handing it over?

This was a society governed by law.

If they killed someone today, they’d be singing iron window tears¹⁴ tomorrow, and probably become the subject of the next episode of a true-crime show.

After buying the information from Shang Zhou, Lou Jingmo looked up to see Shen Maomao slumped over, dejectedly swiping at her phone screen. Her gloomy aura was so thick it was almost tangible. If she had actual bunny ears, they would have been drooping pathetically.

Lou Jingmo couldn’t help but find it a little funny. She rolled her chair over next to Shen Tutu¹⁵. “What’s wrong? Why so glum?”

“I just feel like… there’s nothing we can do to her.”

Ever since she learned that Ren Yue’s Master was also a player in the Confession Game, Shen Maomao had wondered what role she played in all of this.

Could she have been involved in Ren Yue’s sudden decision to attack her?

But regardless of whether she was involved or not, Ren Yue was still a damn white-eyed wolf¹⁶. No question about it.

Lou Jingmo put an arm around her. “I sold the information to Shang Zhou.”

Shen Maomao blinked. “Oh… wait. What???”

“Like us, Shang Zhou has eleven cards and is missing Judas. And he’s been having a harder and harder time clearing instances lately. He’s much more desperate than we are.”

Shen Maomao wanted to applaud. “Brilliant! A perfect play to sit on the mountain and watch the tigers fight¹⁷! Truly, nothing is more venomous than a woman’s heart¹⁸…”

Lou Jingmo kicked her, chair and all, sending them toppling over.

Shen Maomao nimbly leaped up and landed steadily on her feet. She nonchalantly righted the chair, sat back down, and continued, “But have you considered this: what if there’s only one Judas card in the entire game?”

Lou Jingmo wasn’t worried in the slightest. “Then we’ll have to cold toss it¹⁹.”

Shen Maomao stared. “??”

“My gut tells me that when someone collects all the cards, the game is going to start something,” Lou Jingmo explained. “So we need someone to test the waters first.”

And Shang Zhou, with his eleven cards, was the perfect candidate for the job.

Shen Maomao didn’t follow the subsequent events; Lou Jingmo handled everything. She chose to be a useless freeloader²⁰, continuing her work as a game booster to train herself.

Later, she heard that Yun Shengjin had also died. Apparently, he had realized the Thomas card couldn’t resurrect his wife after all, so he chose to die in the game.

Hearing the news, Shen Maomao felt a wave of emotion. Yun Shengjin wasn’t a good person, but perhaps he had been a good husband.

Sometimes she wondered what she would do if something happened to Lou Jingmo in the game.

She imagined she would do the same as Lou Jingmo: fight with all her might to clear the instances, even resorting to any means necessary to obtain all the cards, just to resurrect the one she loved.

Choosing death was just the most cowardly form of escape.

…

This year, the two of them decided to celebrate the New Year by themselves. Before the holiday, Mother Shen called once to urge them to come home. When she heard Shen Maomao wasn’t coming, she hung up, too angry to speak to her.

They had been dating for several years, and her mother had long since started treating Lou Jingmo as a second daughter. Lately, she’d been pushing them to get married and even wanted them to adopt a child.

When Puck found out, he threw a massive tantrum, refusing to allow any other children in the house. He spent three days playing pranks on Lou Jingmo. He didn’t dare mess with Shen Maomao, because pranking Lou Jingmo would at most earn him a glare—Lou Jingmo couldn’t be bothered with him. But the last time he’d pranked Shen Maomao, Lou Jingmo had nearly tossed him into a pot to be boiled alive.

Shen Maomao had to coax the two-hundred-year-old baby and tell her mother firmly that she had no time to raise a child. Besides, she and Lou Jingmo weren’t even married yet; there was no need to think so far ahead.

Her mother’s mention of adoption made her think of Yaya. They had gone to see her a few times over the years, but Yaya’s adoptive parents weren’t very fond of them. After confirming that Yaya was doing well, she had kept her distance to avoid making things difficult for the girl.

Sometimes she would also think of Gong Lian, that dodder flower²¹ of a woman. She wondered how she was doing in the instances now. Had she disappeared along with an instance? Or was she living happily somewhere they didn’t know about?

Shen Maomao sincerely hoped it was the latter.

She wished Golden Retriever could have lived on in the game world, too. But Golden Retriever wasn’t very brave. It was better not to subject him to such terror.

The house across from theirs remained empty. Eventually, the flowers she’d been growing by the door withered. As Shen Maomao was digging them up, she found a key in the soil. On a whim, she took the key to the neighboring apartment, inserted it into the lock, and was stunned when the door actually opened.

The apartment had been uninhabited for half a year and was covered in dust.

Standing in the doorway, she looked at the familiar furnishings, unable to stop the tears from welling up.

There used to be a messy pile of art supplies by the bay window where Golden Retriever loved to curl up and draw. Now, it was completely empty. Even the paint they had splashed on the wall while goofing around was gone.

The apartment was the same, but it lacked any trace of human life.

Shen Maomao didn’t know who owned the place now, but she called a cleaning service anyway and had the apartment cleaned from top to bottom. Then she locked the door and reburied the key in the flowerpot, as if she were hiding Golden Retriever’s last connection to this world.

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The author has something to say:

Golden Retriever’s ending was decided the moment I created his character _(:3」∠)_ There’s more I want to say, but I’m afraid of spoilers, so I’ll stop here.

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LP: BRUH I NEVER EVEN FOR A SECOND THINK THE AUTHOR WOULD KILL GOLDEN RETRIEVER

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