The Hand of Confession – Chapter 58

Volume 3: Days of Working at the Manor

The Shadow

This person has no shadow!

The servants in the courtyard had specifically lit the lamps, making everywhere brightly lit—except for the room where they were.

The room was very dim, with no one coming to light the lamps, and they didn’t dare to move carelessly. The lights from downstairs couldn’t reach the third floor. Only moonlight cast a cold shadow of the window frame on the carpet. Shen Maomao and Freckles both sat on the sofa, their bodies hidden in the house’s shadows.

Chris said she hoped they would all be there when she woke up, but Brendan had forbidden them from staying in the manor at night. No one expected Chris to sleep for so long, and now it was getting dark. Under these conflicting orders, whose command should they follow?

Shen Maomao didn’t have such concerns; she had already been chosen by Chris. Tonight she was supposed to sleep with the beautiful ghost sister, and she couldn’t leave no matter who else did.

At mealtime, the aroma of food permeated the manor, mixing with the flower fragrance and drifting in through the windows. Freckles, who had been sitting idle for half a day, couldn’t help but swallow, and his stomach made protesting sounds.

“Hey,” he called to Shen Maomao, “aren’t you hungry?”

Shen Maomao replied: “No.”

Chris’s status was definitely higher than Brendan’s, so when their orders conflicted, she chose to listen to the young mistress.

Moreover, the young mistress had a physical form! She wasn’t afraid!!

The situation from noon had reversed, and now it was Freckles’ turn to panic. He kept fanning himself with his hat, not because of heat, but because of anxiety.

He hadn’t received Chris’s invitation, and being a man, who knew what would happen staying in the manor.

Compared to Chris, he felt it was safer outside. There’s strength in numbers. Ghosts could easily kill two players, but they couldn’t kill too many people at once. These were the game’s rules—the game wouldn’t allow players with sins to die so quickly.

Thinking of this, he stood up directly: “We can’t sit here waiting for death! We must leave this place!”

“I want to sit here and wait for death. You can go by yourself, I’ll help hold Chris back!” Shen Maomao could see right through his intentions—he was just after her combat ability and wanted to find a scapegoat. But judging the difference between the two of them, it wasn’t clear who would die for whom.

Freckles tried to motivate her: “Better to live a dog’s life than die in glory! How do you know that woman won’t torture you before finishing you off?”

“Oh,” Shen Maomao said expressionlessly, “I’m an M.”

Freckles: “…”

Not sure if he could overpower Shen Maomao by strength alone, he finally gritted his teeth and chose to leave by himself.

Shen Maomao watched him walk to the door, saw him open the room’s large door, and just as he stepped one foot outside, he quickly retreated. Then he immediately closed the door tight, leaned against it breathing heavily, his face showing an expression of extreme terror.

What happened outside?!

She immediately stood up and walked to the window to look outside. Nothing seemed unusual outside, except that the vast courtyard was empty, looking somewhat too deserted.

After catching his breath, Freckles voluntarily said: “Don’t bother looking, it’s the corridor.”

What about the corridor?

“I admit, I was deliberately scaring you before,” he still had his arm against the door, as if afraid something from outside would rush in, “During the day those paintings weren’t really watching you, but now the paintings are blank.”

Shen Maomao’s expression didn’t change, but her mind was screaming “Holy crap!”

This was way scarier than watching them crawl out of the paintings!!

Where did they go?! What were they planning to do?! Was the castle still safe?!

Fortunately, there were no paintings in Chris’s room, otherwise she might have performed an act of dropping dead on the spot.

Freckles probably felt a bit embarrassed about his behavior, so he left the doorway and returned to sit on the sofa, saying: “You really have extraordinary courage.”

Shen Maomao nervously left the window, sat on the other end of the sofa, placed her hands on her knees very lady-like, and said: “Just average, third best in the world.”

The room fell silent again, while revelry began in the manor.

There was still no sign of dinner, but now neither of them dared to go out, and Freckles didn’t mention food again.

The two sat there for who knows how long, until Shen Maomao was nodding off and about to fall asleep. A long “creaking” sound startled her awake. Beside her, Freckles jumped up as if his foot had been scalded. Shen Maomao reflexively stood up too, eyes wide open looking forward.

It was Chris.

Yet not quite Chris.

“You’re still here, that’s wonderful!” The girl’s face still showed post-sleep drowsiness, she sleepily rubbed her eyes, but her shadow beneath made completely different movements from its owner.

In the cold moonlight, her shadow held a sharp knife, raising its hand toward the shadows of the two!!

“Run!” Shen Maomao shouted, kicked off her high heels, jumped over the sofa backrest, and barefoot, ran at lightning speed to the door, opening it and fleeing.

Freckles was a step slower but followed closely behind her. The two burst out the door, not caring where the corridor sisters had gone.

The crystal chandeliers in the corridor flickered with light, and because of the multiple light sources, they cast several shadows at their feet. The beautiful women’s oil paintings on the walls had become blank on one side, creating a pure white expanse as far as the eye could see, giving the illusion that the corridor had been infinitely extended.

The two ran quickly toward the staircase, while Chris’s shadow detached from its owner, silently pursuing them from behind the door.

One by one, they left the blank paintings behind them. Just as the stairs were getting closer, two people suddenly came up from the second floor, meeting them at the staircase landing.

These two wore matching guard and maid uniforms—they were the players who had been following that ice-cold young lady.

The one in the maid outfit shouted: “Run! There’s a shadow chasing us!”

Shen Maomao: “What a coincidence! We’ve got one behind us too!”

The two groups faced each other, dumbfounded, seeing despair in each other’s eyes.

One on the third floor, one on the second floor—they were now caught between a rock and a hard place.

Freckles cursed: “Why didn’t you run downstairs?!”

The maid cried: “We went in a circle and came back up! The manor doors are locked! We can’t get out!!”

The guard looked at a small bay window above the stairs and gritted his teeth: “If we have no choice, let’s jump down from up there!”

“Damn it,” Freckles immediately objected, “Who the hell can climb up there at this height?!”

While they were talking, the two black shadows had rapidly approached, about to collide with them.

In this critical moment, Shen Maomao remembered the small platform at the staircase—the third floor had the same platform as the second floor, from which you could directly see the carpet on the first floor. The distance between castle floors wasn’t close, but it was only three stories high, definitely not enough to kill someone, and there was a carpet below to cushion the fall…

“We can jump to the first floor from the platform!” With no time left to think through strategies, Shen Maomao shouted and took the lead running forward, with the others hurriedly following.

The small platform was right ahead. They passed candlestick after candlestick, their shadows beneath them crossing from front to back and back to front, creating an unsettling effect.

Shen Maomao pushed off the railing with her right hand, flipped over it facing inward, and without hesitation, swung down while holding the railing.

As her body rapidly descended, she quickly grabbed the second-floor railing. Her arms immediately made two crisp cracking sounds under her body weight, frightening her into letting go, falling straight to the first floor.

After landing, she tried to do a forward roll to absorb the impact like action movie protagonists—

She failed to roll and fell flat on her face.

Fortunately, she didn’t sprain her ankle.

Behind her, people landed one after another, making three dull thuds and two screams of agony, with the smell of blood spreading through the air.

Shen Maomao quickly got up, ignoring the pain, and turned to look at the situation behind her.

One glance nearly scared her soul out of her body. She couldn’t control her gagging, tears streaming down, and immediately turned her head away, not daring to look again.

—The maid had been smashed to pieces from falling from the third floor!

What kind of scene it is to have someone smashed to pieces behind you—people who haven’t experienced it absolutely cannot imagine. Shen Maomao closed her eyes, but that bloody scene and the maid’s eyes that died without closing still appeared before her.

Freckles, face pale and covered in cold sweat, said: “Those two shadows don’t seem to have followed us down.”

The guard was closest to the maid, with even his face splattered with several drops of blood. He scrambled away from that unspeakable mess on the floor, backed against the first-floor stair railing, and wiped his face with trembling hands.

The blood was instantly smeared across his face, making him look like a specter that had just crawled out of the abyss, but his expression showed extreme fear, his lips even turning purple, his body continuously shaking: “How… how did she die? It was only three floors…”

Indeed, it was only three floors high—jumping down should at most result in a sprained ankle, how could someone end up… like this?

In just a brief dozen seconds, a deep black stain spread and saturated the carpet, then overflowed beyond its boundaries, trickling in streams. Under the flickering candlelight, the blackened bloodstains reflected an eerie glow.

“Isn’t this just the first day?!” Freckles stepped over a pool of blood, walked to the door trying to open it, and as expected, the main door was tightly locked. “Who the hell told me people don’t usually die on the first day?!”

He angrily kicked the door, creating a huge bang as his foot met the door panel, but the pure wooden door didn’t budge at all, showing no sign of damage.

The smell of blood grew stronger and stronger, until even the air seemed to turn red with the stench.

Shen Maomao tried to break the floor-to-ceiling windows with a candlestick. The normally fragile glass now seemed like steel—even though her hands were numbed from the impact, she couldn’t break a single pane.

This was clearly meant to trap them inside to die.

She put down the candlestick, no longer wasting effort, but her anxiety and fear hadn’t lessened one bit.

“What about the others? What happened to the other two guards and maids?” she asked the guard. “Did you see the chef or anyone else when you went downstairs earlier?”

“No.” Being not a newcomer after all, the guard collected himself after a moment and stood up. He answered Shen Maomao’s question while walking over to join the two, “There’s no one in the castle except us, not even NPCs.”

As he gradually walked out of the shadows, Shen Maomao’s eyes widened, her pupils sharply contracting—

This person had no shadow!!

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