Chapter 100
Chapter 100
“How could this happen? Didn’t Xiaomeng say nothing would happen as long as we followed the rules?”
“It had to be an Eerie Entity! This is too cruel!”
The two girls from the Red Team were at a complete loss.
Huang Xinze carefully inspected the area, then stepped forward and dragged the bodies closer for a look. He said, “There are no signs of a struggle nearby. The bodies are still frozen in the posture of struggling before death, and the wounds on their faces are smooth and even. They were probably drowned first, then skinned afterward.”
Lin Xiaoxue thought it over and said, “But the water in the hot spring pool is too shallow to drown someone. Maybe some kind of force held them under until they drowned.”
Huang Xinze gave her a thumbs-up. “You’ve improved! I think so too. Sister Sen, what do you think?”
Wei Sen’s expression remained as calm as ever. “The hot spring pool must have a hidden Killing Rule.”
She had no particular feelings about the deaths of these two people, but the fact that their facial skin had been peeled off was very important.
Without their faces, they were faceless. Their deaths might have something to do with the “Faceless Woman” from the mountain song.
Wei Sen opened the group roster to check. The names of the two girls floating in the hot spring pool had already gone dim.
However, they were not the only names that had dimmed at that moment.
“Liu Shuang is dead. Two people from the Blue Team died too,” Wei Sen said flatly.
In an Instance of thirty people, only nineteen remained alive so far.
“What?! Brother Shuang… he… he…” Lin Xiaoxue was shocked. She lowered her eyes, and her voice carried a faint sob. “Was he killed by that Skeleton Monster in the forest just now…?”
She had been the one who asked Liu Shuang to enter the Instance with her. Now that Liu Shuang was dead, she could not help feeling somewhat upset.
Huang Xinze quickly checked as well. When he saw that the dead members of the Blue Team did not include Lao Wang, he secretly breathed a sigh of relief. Then he turned to comfort Xiaoxue. “Don’t blame yourself. People die for money, birds die for food. His death has nothing to do with you.”
“If an S-Rank Instance is already this terrifying, is there even any way to survive an SSS-Rank Instance?” the tall girl from the Red Team said worriedly.
For people who had been through many an Instance, life-and-death partings between teammates were not all that important.
Rather than grieve and mourn the dead, it was better to spend more time thinking about how to survive.
“Let’s deal with what’s in front of us first. What should we do with Xiaomeng’s body?” the other, shorter girl asked.
Wei Sen reminded them, “Leave the bodies alone. Staring at the surface of the pool for too long will violate the rules.”
///Ding~ Congratulations, Host, for kindly reminding others. Merit Points +10! Current Merit Points: 880!///
Wei Sen had not wanted to meddle, but considering that killing an Eerie Entity would deduct Merit Points, and she had far too few Merit Points right now, it was safer to gain a little whenever she had the chance.
“Everyone!” Meiya hurried over. When she saw the scene in the hot spring pool, she was not surprised at all. Instead, she was shockingly calm. “Everyone, please leave at once. Leave this to me!”
The tall girl frowned. “Someone died in your inn. Aren’t you going to give us an explanation?”
Meiya bowed. “I’m sorry! I’ll say it again. Please do not linger here!”
Meiya’s expression was extremely serious, and there was now a hint of warning in her eyes.
“Let’s go,” Wei Sen said.
Huang Xinze and Lin Xiaoxue followed Wei Sen away. Seeing this, the two girls from the Red Team had no choice but to leave as well.
When they reached the front hall, the two Red Team girls went straight back to their room, while Wei Sen and the other two sat down by the window.
“There are only two people at the inn: the innkeeper, Lili, and the employee, Meiya. Judging by Meiya’s attitude toward the bodies just now, she’s long since gotten used to it. My guess is that she was also the one who cleaned up the traces left after people died in the inn last night,” Wei Sen analyzed.
“Tsk. I don’t get it. What side is Meiya on, exactly?” Huang Xinze was completely baffled.
Just then, a message from Guo Lan came through on the watch. It was a picture.
“Holy shit!” Huang Xinze zoomed in on the image. “Is this that cave from earlier?!”
Lin Xiaoxue’s face went deathly pale. “They’re… they’re all corpses. And none of them have faces!”
Wei Sen looked at the pictures Guo Lan had sent back from inside the cave and said, “I originally suspected there was a ‘Faceless Woman’ in the inn, but there are even more flayed corpses in the cave.
“The wounds on the faces of the corpses in the cave aren’t clean. Their faces were violently torn off. But the bodies we saw in the hot spring pool had extremely clean wounds. It was clearly done by two different killers!”
“The one living in the cave is the Skeleton Monster. A skeleton can barely count as having no face. Could it be the Faceless Woman from the lyrics?” Lin Xiaoxue asked in return.
“If the Skeleton Monster is the Faceless Woman, then why did the people who died in the hot spring pool also have their faces peeled off?” Huang Xinze asked.
The three of them fell silent.
Wei Sen carefully examined the pictures Guo Lan had sent back. There were far too many bodies in that cave. At a rough guess, far more than the bodies buried around the hot spring pool!
Judging by the timing, the moment Mengsi and Xiaoxiao died was almost exactly when Huang Xinze and the others encountered the Skeleton Monster.
There was no way the Skeleton Monster could have traveled back and forth between the inn and the cave in such a short time.
On top of that, the completely different methods of flaying proved there had to be two “killers.”
Then which one was the Faceless Woman from the lyrics? The one hiding in the inn, or the Skeleton Monster?
Ask her how the word hatred is written, oh; red sleeves point afar to Thirteen Villages.
The clue in the lyrics indicated there had to be some deep, bitter feud between the Faceless Woman and the village.
And every household in the village kept its doors tightly shut and raised so many black dogs. Most likely, they were guarding against the Faceless Woman who held a grudge against them!
The group discussed it for a while but reached no conclusion. The clues they had so far were too scattered, lacking any connective evidence. There was no single main thread that could string them into a complete story.
At three in the afternoon, Lili got ready to come downstairs. Her deathly pale face was painted with bright red lipstick. She wore a khaki wool coat over a long black knit dress, with a black hat on her head.
Lili ignored Wei Sen and the others and left the inn directly.
Right now, they were short on manpower and couldn’t follow Lili. For the moment, they could only explore the fourth floor according to plan.
As for why Lili had dressed up so exquisitely, and what she was going to do, they could only look for another chance to investigate over the next few days.
Lin Xiaoxue was responsible for staying in her seat and keeping watch on the situation outside the inn. If she saw Lili return, she had to notify the group chat immediately.
Wei Sen and Huang Xinze seized the time and went up to the fourth floor.
The instant the two of them stepped over the final stair and arrived on the fourth floor, the surrounding temperature turned as cold as an ice cellar. A faint smell of blood rushed at them from the corridor.
The structure of the fourth floor was the same as the second and third floors, with separate rooms on both sides.
“There are so many rooms. You take the left, I’ll take the right. Search them one by one! If you run into danger, yell for me!” Huang Xinze said.
“Okay!”
Neither of them wasted words. They immediately got moving.
Wei Sen cautiously pushed open the first room on the left side of the corridor. Instead of the terrifying scene she had imagined, the walls were covered with photographs…
She slowly walked inside. The countless photographs before her were truly beyond anything she had expected.