Yue Xingwen agreed with Jiang Pingce’s approach to draw the building, but they did not have a ruler, and it was difficult to draw an accurate drawing, so Yue Xingwen leaned over to Jiang Pingce’s ear and asked, “Can your coordinate system calculate the distance?”
Jiang Pingce said, “Yes, but Gao Yongqiang is majoring in construction, so he should have another way.”
Sure enough, Gao Yongqiang suddenly pulled out a pen and paper, and there was a tool that looked like a calculator. He made a mark at the position where he stood, then stepped back quickly to the other end of the inn and pressed a button on his tool, a red laser shot out in front of him and a number accurate to two decimals immediately appeared on his tool’s screen.
Seeing Gao Yongqiang writing and drawing the building, Yue Xingwen walked over and said, “Is this the measuring tool you were given by the Architecture Department?”
Gao Yongqiang nodded, “En, it’s a theodolite. All architecture students will be issued this tool after they pass the entrance exam, and it can accurately measure the distance between two points.”
Just like the Computer Department giving laptops to all of their students, the Architecture Department gave measurement tools and drawings to all students, which provided a lot of convenience for students.
Yue Xingwen and Jiang Pingce glanced at each other and stepped forward to help.
Gao Yongqiang quickly measured the data of the inn’s perimeter and drew a three-dimensional figure of the building, marking the precise values of each of the inn’s length, width and height. Then, the three people entered the house and measured all the spaces, corridors, and interior rooms on the first and second floors of the inn in turn, and Gao Yongqiang drew the precise architectural drawings.
Everyone joined on the first floor.
Qin Miao handed the set of keys to Yue Xingwen and said, “Eleven keys, eight of which correspond to the eight guest rooms on the second floor, have all been marked. 1 of them can open the hidden door we just found, and I don’t know the usage for the remaining keys at this time.”
Yue Xingwen took the keys and said, “Thanks for your hard work. Let’s go see what’s inside the hidden door first.”
He walked with Jiang Pingce to the door at the corner on the first floor, and inserted the key marked by Qin Miao into the lock hole, with a ‘click’, the iron lock was indeed opened, and Yue Xingwen pushed the door to see—— Inside the room, there was an oversized solid wood round table with eight wooden chairs placed around it, with eight numbers from ‘one’ to ‘eight’ carved on the back of the chairs, in line with the room numbers on the second floor.
Both of them glanced at each other, and Yue Xingwen said, “The eight seats were numbered to correspond to the eight rooms upstairs?”
Jiang Pingce frowned. “Why is there a place like the ‘round table’ in the inn?”
Upon hearing this, Liu Zhaoqing simply turned his head and looked at Qin Miao, “Junior sister, you’re studying history, can you give an explanation?”
Qin Miao replied. “The ancients were very concerned about status, and it’s rare for a group of people to sit down around a round table for a meeting. They usually held meetings in the hall, the noble sat at the top, the other sat on both sides, and there would be tea cups next to the table. This room is certainly not a meeting room, but instead looks like a dining room.”
However, did the dining room need to be locked up with a separate lock?
Gao Yongqiang walked in and quickly measured data in this room to supplement his drawings.
Yue Xingwen and Jiang Pingce carefully inspected the room.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
It was a large room, somewhat empty with only a round table and seats. In the middle of the round table stood two candlesticks with half-burned red candled on them, with visible melted candle wax dripping onto the table, solidifying into red fingernail-sized patches.
Tef Wlcukfc jcv Aljcu Ulcumf rlifcais rfqjgjafv bc flatfg rlvf, jcv ajqqfv ilutais jibcu atf lcafglbg kjiir bo atf gbbw yfobgf olcvlcu jcbatfg tlvvfc vbbg lc atf mbgcfg. Ktf vbbg kjr ecibmxfv, jcv joafg qertlcu jcv fcafglcu atf gbbw, atfs xcfk la kjr jmaejiis j xlamtfc.
Ktf xlamtfc jgfj kjr jirb nfgs ijguf, klat j gbk bo mijs rabnfr, cfza ab atf mtbqqlcu ybjgv jcv xlamtfc xclof.
There was obvious blood on the kitchen knife, and they did not know if it was blood left from killing pigs or slaughtering the sheep, or from a murder?
Yue Xingwen glanced at Gao Yongqiang, who immediately stepped forward to measure the data. Jiang Pingce continued his search inside the kitchen and did not find any other hidden door.
The exterior structure of the inn was a regular rectangular structure, 20 meters long, 12 meters wide, and 7.5 meters high.
Since the height of each floor of modern residential buildings was between 2.5 meters and 3 meters, when everyone first saw this inn, they subconsciously thought that it was a three-story building—— Because it was similar to the three-story buildings that everyone saw in reality.
When they walked into the inn, they found that it was only two floors, with a visual estimation of over 3 meters in height, just like a villa living room with a high ceiling, which was very spacious and expansive.
Now, after carefully comparing the drawings, Jiang Pingce soon discovered something was wrong. “The total height of the building’s exterior measurement is 7.5 meters, but the interior measurement shows a difference of 1 meter, the first floor hall has 3.5 meters in height, and the guest rooms on the second floor have a height of 3 meters.”
Everyone turned their gaze to Gao Yongqiang, who scratched his head and said, “The data I measured with the theodolite will certainly not be wrong. The wooden structure used between the two floors, and the thickness of the floor can’t be 1 meter.” He thought for a moment and said with certainty, “There’s only one explanation for an error that large—— there’s a mezzanine in this building that we can’t see visually.”
Mezzanine? The height of the building from the outside was 7,5 meters, and the heights of the interior was 6,5 meters, with a height of about 1 meter disappeared out of thin air, indicating that there was a hidden space of 1 meter high inside the inn that they had not found.
Jiang Pingce’s suggestion to speak with data was indeed effective, and now they coils see the difference quite visually.
Yue Xingwen said, “The height difference is 1 meter, maybe there’s a mezzanine or attic. Continue to look to match the width and length.”
Gao Yongqiang did some quick calculations and said, “The total length of the inn is 20 meters, the hall on the first floor and the hidden room plus the kitchen all add up to a length of 20 meters; The second floor has 4 rooms on each side, each room faces 4 meters from east to west, 5 meters from north to south, plus the staircase space and corridor, the total length of the second floor is 18 meters, the total width is 12 meters—— the width is matched, but the length is missing by 2 meters.”
Jiang Pingce looked carefully at the drawing he had made.
As the second floor corridor was located between the rooms, there were no windows and they could not see outside. When a person walked into such a semi-enclosed space without any reference for comparison and came to the end of the corridor, they would subconsciously think that they had come to the end, and of course did not notice the difference between the length of the second floor and the length measured outside the inn was as much as 2 meters.
The missing length of the second floor was naturally due to the existence of a hidden room they had not discovered.
Jiang Pingce said, “Go to the innermost room on the second floor to find out.”
Everyone quickly went upstairs. Yue Xingwen and Jiang Pingce walked in the front, and led everyone into room no. 1 and no. 2 at the end of the corridor, knocking on the wall for a while. Suddenly, everyone heard the voices of two people at the same time. “Found it.”
Yue Xingwen asked, “Is it behind the bed?”
Jiang Pingce’s voice came from the other side, “That’s right, go in and take a look.”
The door of the hidden room was blocked just by the wooden bed placed against the wall.
Since the wooden bed was surrounded by a bed curtain, they could not see anything usual at all if they just looked at it with their eyes. Yue Xingwen asked Liu Zhaoqing and Ke Shaobin to work together to move away the wooden bed, and he walked across the room, where Jiang Pingce had indeed found a door in the same location.
The two of them moved the bed out of the way. The stone bricks on the wall were hollow, and when they knocked, it would make an echo of ‘dong dong’. Yue Xingwen took the bricks down one by one, and sure enough, he found a wooden door embedded in the wall, and there was an iron lock hanging on it.
The keys Qin Miao found just now had two keys with unknown usage. He tried to insert one of them into the keyhole, and a ‘click’ sound was indeed heard. The iron lock opened and Yue Xingwen pulled open the wooden door warily——
The wooden door was so narrow that only one person could pass through it. Yue Xingwen bent his waist to walk in, a large amount of dust came to his face, causing him to cough uncontrollably. Jiang Pingce said worriedly from behind him, “Is everything alright?”
Yue Xingwen coughed a few times, waved away the dust in front of him with his hand, and said, “It’s okay, give me a candle.”
Jiang Pingce lit the candle and handed it to him. Yue Xingwen raised the candle carefully to take a closer look, his face could not help but change slightly. He said, “You all come in and take a look, there’s quite a lot of space in here.”
Jiang Pingce was the first to walk in, the others followed in turn, and Liu Zhaoqing and the others on the opposite side also came over when they heard this.
Yue Xingwen stood in the middle of the chamber holding a candle, it was a narrow space of 2×6 meters. The empty room was made with three-wall wardrobe, which was hung with a large number of clothes of different colors, including men and women, all ancient costumes, and even golden emperor’s dragon robes, noble consort’s costumes, matching jewelry, as well as male and female warrior costumes and swords in Jianghu style.
Liu Zhaoqing was stunned. “Does the inn owner have a habit of collecting clothes? The inn owner actually set up a cloakroom in a hidden room?”
It did look a lot like a cloakroom, with quite a lot of color and variety.
Yue Xingwen looked back at Qin Miao, “The Ming Dynasty’s Emperor’s clothes don’t look like this, right?”
Qin Miao replied, “Not all the styles of these clothes are from the Ming Dynasty. You see, these sets of imperial guards clothing, as well as the women’s dress belong to the Ming Dynasty; The style of this dragon robe and noble consort is more like the Tang Dynasty. I can’t tell which dynasty these swords, longswords and other weapons are from.”
Jiang Pingce suddenly took out a hat from the innermost part of the wardrobe. “Why are there still clothes from the Qing Dynasty?”
As a science student, he was not sure about the clothes of other dynasties, but the women of the Qing Dynasty, especially the princess, wore that big haton their heads that was really unique. The hats and long braids of the men of the Qing Dynasty were also completely different from other dynasties.
Yue Xingwen walked to Jiang Pingce’s side, and then pulled out a hat from the wardrobe in front of him, followed by a long black braid. Yue Xingwen gave Jiang Pingce a look. “And a wig?”
The men’s braid hair of the Qing Dynasty could not be more distinctive.
Everyone was a little confused, and Ke Shaobin was even more full of question marks. “If this inn owner collected clothes, how could he still collect clothes from the Qing Dynasty? Didn’t Qin Miao say that the architectural style of this inn is from the Ming Dynasty…”
Yue Xingwen analyzed, “There are two possibilities. First, this building was left over during the Ming Dynasty, the era we are in is actually the Qing Dynasty, and the inn owner is a Qing Dynasty man who loves collecting ancient costumes from all eras.” He looked back at the other students. “Did you see the men in your dreams last night? Did they have braided hair?”
Liu Zhaoqing immediately replied, “The doctor I dreamt of didn’t have braids. His long hair was tied a little bit in the back of his head and tied with a hairband, the kind of hairstyle commonly seen in ancient costume dramas.”
Yue Xingwen said firmly, “Then it is not the Qing Dynasty, but the second possibility.”
He looked back to his teammates. “Have you guys ever been to that kind of photo studio that specializes in shooting costume photos?”
Upon hearing this, everyone seemed to be enlightened.
The place with the various dynasty costumes did look a lot like a photo studio. If they were in the Ming Dynasty, the inn owner of the Ming Dynasty could not have predicted that a hundred years later there would be a Qing army entering the customs, let alone collect the costumes of the Qing Dynasty. If it was the Qing Dynasty, it was completely incompatible with the costumes of the characters in the dream. The Ming style architecture and furniture was unlikely to be Tang and Song dynasty before the Ming dynasty.
Therefore, they did not, in fact, travel to ancient times, but were in modern times!
The inn owner built the place in imitation of the Ming style architecture, but the clothes in the hidden room leaked out the secret.
Ke Shaobin still did not understand, and scratched his head in confusion. “If this is a modern studio, how would they work without switches, light bulbs, sockets, and internet cables? Even if you dedicate an ancient location and use it for photography, won’t they still leave a trace of modernity?”
Yue Xingwen said, “Go check out the hidden room at the opposite.”
Everyone came to room no. 1, Liu Zhaoqing had just removed the brick behind the bed. Yue Xingwen opened the door with the remaining key, took the candle and walked in first, followed by Jiang Pingce.
After the two of them entered the room, they were suddenly silent.
The suffocating silence made the other students a little worried, and Gao Xiaoxin could not help but said with a trembling voice, “Why— why aren’t you talking ah? Is there something terrible found in the hidden room?”
Jiang Pingce said in a deep voice, “Come in and see for yourself.”
He gave way to the side, and the other students lined up to enter the room. As soon as Liu Zhaoqing entered, he gave a ‘fuck’, followed by Ke Shaobin’s short word, “Ah… this?”, Qin Miao and Qin Lu did not say anything after entering. Gao Xiaoxin became even more puzzled, she walked in with trepidation, then her whole body fell into the ice cellar and instantly froze into a statue.
In the narrow hidden room of 2×6 meters, there were seven wooden chairs placed side by side. The middle one was empty, and the remaining six chairs were seated by six people——
No, it was six corpses, which had decayed to the point where only gnarly white bones remained!
The white bones were all dressed in bright red wedding dresses, and the waist was fixed to the seat by red satin.
The strange scene made everyone’s scalp tingle. Jiang Pingce frowned and looked at the neat skeleton bride in front of him and said in a low voice, “It seems, this is the inn owner’s storage room—— specially used to hide corpses.”
Thanks for the chapter!!!
Very interesting, but nothing is clear
Thank you very much for the translation 🤍🤍🤍
That’s quite creepy. What kind of a strange hobby the innkeeper/owner had aside from a collection of ancient clothings and an ancient architecture design, the owner is also into collecting bride corpses?😱