The way back was sealed shut, and
"The crying and laughter are still there—the ghosts haven't gone far—but I can't see them."
Returning to the room, Chen Ge spotted the corpse on the coffee table. "The medium-difficulty key is hidden inside the body. This is just a transitional scene. To clear the nightmare difficulty, we probably need to truly solve the room's puzzle."
Normally, solving a puzzle wouldn't be a problem. The issue was that the scenes were merging into each other now, and all kinds of projections and "paranormal events" could appear where they were never supposed to. That made cracking the puzzle far harder than it should have been.
While the visitors were wasting time by the door, the clock on the wall chimed again. The ugly cuckoo bird popped out from the box beneath the clock face. The heart strapped to its body had already been removed, but the bloodstains from inside the heart had dyed the bird red.
"If we assume the house owner killed himself, then to break the cycle, we need to stop him from killing himself."
"There are two ways to stop him from killing himself. One is to protect him so he can't kill himself. The other is for us to kill him instead—and that would break the loop."
Chen Ge picked up the axe beside the couch. Before the room could undergo any new change, he swung it down at the freshly reassembled corpse on the sofa.
The mannequin shattered into pieces once more, a fresh bloody gash left across its body.
"Is that useless? Do I have to try killing it with every different weapon? But wouldn't that just trap us in the same kind of loop?" Killing couldn't break the cycle—Chen Ge had already realized that. "This haunted house still has to operate normally. It can't possibly encourage killing. The right approach should be protection."
While Chen Ge was thinking, the living room curtains parted and half a human face peeked through. The house owner, clad in blood-soaked clothes, wore a ferocious expression. He stared in a certain direction, then suddenly drew a blade and charged out from behind the curtains.
Unlike the previous two times, this time projections also appeared simultaneously behind the bathroom door and under the bed.
In the darkness, three blood-covered human faces stared at the visitors from every angle, then rushed forward like madmen.
The projections couldn't cause real harm, but even knowing they were fake, visitors would still instinctively feel terrified when they got close.
Adrenaline spiked. Eyes squeezed shut. Piercing screams.
All the visitors huddled in the center of the living room. Only Chen Ge remained standing, watching the projections' retreating silhouettes.
"Something's wrong. Why do all the projections always charge into the living room? No matter where the visitors hide, the projections always end up rushing into the living room with weapons before disappearing. Is it really just a programming rule that most visitors will be gathered in the living room?"
Chen Ge extended his hand and traced out the trajectories of the projections' movements. To his surprise, he discovered that although each projection had hidden in a different spot, if he connected each hiding position to each disappearance point with a line, all of those trajectories converged at a single intersection inside the living room!
"Every projection's target isn't us—it's the sofa in the center of the living room!"
Chen Ge pulled the sofa aside and rapped lightly on the floor with his knuckles. "It's hollow underneath?"
His fingertips slid across the wooden floorboards. Soon he found a rough, uneven patch. He pried upward with force and lifted that section of the floor away.
A faint stench drifted into the air. Tucked into the hollow space beneath the floor was a female corpse, her body covered in wounds, both arms still clutching a black videotape.
"A second corpse?" Every visitor crowded over, eyes going wide.