Jiang Nuan felt her way forward by the light that barely reached half a meter.
The light switch in a room was usually on the wall beside the entrance.
With her back pressed against the door, she tentatively reached one arm to the side.
The light projected by her terminal swayed with her movement, and the boundary of darkness rose and fell in her vision.
Beyond half a meter, she still couldn’t see a thing. The only sound was the faint rustling outside the door, sometimes near, sometimes far, muffled by the door panel.
Jiang Nuan held her breath and stretched both hands out in different directions.
The hand not holding the terminal touched something hard.
A wall?
No.
A wall wouldn’t be this smooth, and this thing had a curve to it.
Her fingers moved upward along the curve until they found a shallow indentation.
Its edges were rounded, but the inside sank deep.
Like an eye socket.
Jiang Nuan’s raised hand froze in place.
In the darkness, her hand was still pressed into that indentation.
The thing didn’t move.
Neither did the rustling outside the door stop.
All at once, she wasn’t sure whether the sound she heard was really coming from outside—or whether something was crouched deep inside the room, dragging its belly across the floor as it slowly crawled toward her.
Jiang Nuan steeled herself and moved the arm holding the terminal over.
First, the light revealed a pale chin.
Then tightly closed lips, a rigid bridge of a nose, and a pair of pupil-less eyes.
A human face.
It was far too close to her.
The face tilted slightly upward, its hollow eye sockets fixed directly on her.
Her finger was still pressed into its left eye socket, actively poking into its eye.
The hand holding the terminal trembled. She nearly brought the Moon Blade down on it.
At last, the light fully illuminated the face.
It was a plaster bust of the sort used by art clubs for sketching practice.
Jiang Nuan stood frozen, staring at those hollow plaster eye sockets. It took her a moment to force her heart back down from her throat.
…All right.
At least it wasn’t a real human face.
So this must be the art club’s activity room.
She withdrew her hand and rubbed her fingers hard against her clothes.
She had touched nothing but cold, dry plaster, yet she couldn’t shake the feeling that an inexplicable dampness lingered on her fingertips.
After catching her breath, she began sweeping the room with the terminal’s light.
The beam moved away from the bust in front of her.
Another face emerged beside it.
Then a third, and a fourth.
More pale faces appeared one after another as the light moved.
They were arranged at different heights on wooden shelves along the wall. Some were nothing more than heads, some were attached to half a shoulder, and a few were so damaged that it was impossible to tell whom they had originally been modeled after—their faces chipped away on one side.
Every plaster figure had its face turned slightly to the side.
Their empty eye sockets all pointed toward the door.
Toward where she stood.
Jiang Nuan’s scalp prickled.
The rustling outside suddenly drew near.
The faint, scattered scraping crept along the floor and finally stopped just outside the door.
Jiang Nuan held her breath.
There was a very narrow gap beneath the door. There was no light outside, and the gap was black as well. She couldn’t tell whether something was pressed against the floor, peering inside through the opening.
She didn’t dare remain by the door.
Holding up the terminal, Jiang Nuan avoided the picture frames and clutter scattered across the floor and felt her way slowly along the wall.
The light passed over a length of electrical wire.
Following it forward, Jiang Nuan saw the foot switch of a floor lamp lying on the ground.
She stepped on the switch.
A floor lamp lit up.
Yellowish light spilled from beneath the shade, illuminating only a small area in the center of the room. The edges remained hidden in shadow.
Still, it was far better than the ghastly white beam from the terminal, which couldn’t even reach half a meter.
Almost the instant the lamp came on, the rustling outside paused. Then it gradually receded down the corridor, growing fainter and fainter until it vanished completely.
She had entered the unlit room, and it had followed her all the way to the door.
Now that the light was on, it had left.
Was the thing afraid of light?
Thinking this, Jiang Nuan dragged the floor lamp closer to the entrance.
She began examining the room by its light.
The plaster figures were lined up along the walls. Near the window stood several easels, white cloths hanging from them, perfectly still in the dim light.
At the very back was another window.
Outside was pitch-black. The glass reflected the light in the room, as well as Jiang Nuan standing beside the lamp.
She glanced at it once, then looked away.
At a time like this, it was best not to stare at glass for too long.
The most classic sequence in a horror movie was to first confirm that there was only yourself in the reflection, then make the mistake of looking a little longer, and finally discover that the reflection had gained something that the real you didn’t have.
A person’s energy was limited. There was no need to give her imagination extra work before the monster officially made its move.
Jiang Nuan walked around the still-life table toward the easels.
One of the paintings was not covered by a white cloth.
It was a pencil sketch of a person.
The girl in the picture rested her chin on one hand, her profile turned toward the window, her long hair falling softly over her shoulders.
The lines were not particularly complex, but the artist was clearly very familiar with her. Her expression and bearing had been captured with remarkable realism.
Jiang Nuan stared at the face and sucked in a sharp breath.
…It was her.
More precisely, it was her from several years ago, when she had been younger.
The girl in the drawing still had a hint of youthful innocence in her features, and she was wearing a pale-colored dress.
Jiang Nuan didn’t remember ever wearing that dress.
And yet the expression on the girl’s face felt strangely familiar.
As if there really had once been an afternoon when she had sat by the window, allowing someone else to quietly watch her for a long time.
She instinctively took a step back.
Her calf bumped into the low stool behind her, and its legs scraped across the floor with a faint sound.
A thick stack of drawing paper lay piled on the tabletop beside the easel.
Jiang Nuan reached out and lifted the top sheet.
The person on the paper was still her.
She flipped to the next one.
Then the third…
Every single drawing was of her.
What could be more chilling than finding a portrait of yourself in a horror game?
Finding an entire stack of portraits of yourself.
An entire stack drawn at some unknown time, by someone unknown, while they watched you.
Jiang Nuan continued flipping through them. One of the drawings included a complete background.
A pond of koi filled a white fountain.
It was the Bai family’s main residence.
Jiang Nuan’s movements slowed.
A name surfaced in her mind without the need for thought.
Bai Siyuan.
Had Bai Siyuan drawn these for her back when she was still living with the Bai family?
But why had the drawings appeared in the restricted zone?
The Bai family’s east wing had been sealed off for years. Could it originally have been where Bai Siyuan stored these old belongings?
When the restricted zone had formed, had it swallowed them along with everything he had kept inside?
The guess was barely plausible.
…But how could the Bai family’s east wing have been exactly identical to the university campus she had attended before crossing over?
She continued flipping through the drawings.
Behind the last sheet of paper was the corner of a yellowed page, as if it had been torn from a notebook.
Jiang Nuan pulled it out.
[She said it was only a routine blood draw.]
[I was actually the last one to know.]
Jiang Nuan recognized Bai Siyuan’s handwriting.
And the page itself looked familiar too.
The color of the paper, the shape of its edges—both were exactly like the black diary she had seen in her memory dream.
This page had been torn from that diary.
So, before she lost her memory, had she secretly done something involving blood without Bai Siyuan’s knowledge?
But what kind of thing could have made him leave a line like that in his diary?
A few images suddenly flashed through her mind.
The hand Bai Siyuan had placed on her shoulder was trembling slightly, and the whites of his eyes were frighteningly red.
“A Nuan,” he said, his voice trembling as well. “Who told you to do this?”
The version of herself in those memories seemed to have said something.
Bai Siyuan’s lips moved, but his voice suddenly sounded very far away.
Before those fragments could come together, they were shattered by a sound from outside the door.
Scrape—
Something sharp was slowly dragging itself along the door.
Jiang Nuan abruptly tore her gaze from the page and looked toward the tightly closed door.
The floor lamp was clearly still on.
According to the pattern she had just figured out, that thing shouldn’t have come near a room with the lights on.
But the scraping outside the door didn’t stop. Instead, each pass grew clearer than the last.
Jiang Nuan stared at the tightly closed door as her heart slowly sank.
…Had the rules changed?
