The room Ke Xun entered seemed to be a small living room, with only a sofa set and a wardrobe covered in thick dust.
Walking to the side of the sofa, Ke Xun carefully examined it with his phone’s flashlight. He saw that the sofa cover, which had lost its color due to age, still had wrinkles from being sat and laid on. On the coffee table in front of the sofa were a teapot and several teacups, the bottoms of which were covered in dust and dead insects, and the sides of the cups were stained with tea marks.
Ke Xun opened the wardrobe and searched inside and out, only finding various bottles and jars. He even moved the sofa and checked the floor underneath, and finally used his phone’s flashlight to inspect the ceiling and walls inch by inch.
Coming out of the room, he saw that Zhu Haowen and Mu Yiran had also finished their inspections and returned to the hall. The three of them exchanged their findings.
“If we don’t consider the bloodstain at the door and this trail of bloody footprints, the feeling this room gives me is just an ordinary living scene.” Ke Xun said.
“I wonder what happened to bring this scene to an abrupt end,” Mu Yiran added, “As if all processes were suspended in an instant, leaving everything frozen in this moment.”
“What’s bizarre is,” Zhu Haowen said, “In these living scenes, there’s no discovery of any person, or rather human body. It feels like they have been erased from the picture. Of course, if we find something on the second floor, forget what I just said.”
“So, shall we go upstairs?” Ke Xun looked at the two, asking if they were ready.
The terrifying trail of blood footprints came from the second floor.
“Let’s go up,” the two men said.
So Ke Xun, as usual, walked at the front, Mu Yiran in the middle, and Zhu Haowen at the back. They maintained a distance of two to three steps between each other, neither too close nor too far, ready to lend a hand at any time or retreat as needed, and ascended the wooden staircase leading to the second floor.
“Creak…Creak…”
Even with the three of them being extremely cautious and trying to step lightly, the old stairs still made crumbling sounds, and the echoes were long-lasting. Whenever their footsteps left the stairs, the echoes dragged out a long string of “clucking clucking” dull sounds.
Like the dying moans of someone’s throat filled with sawdust, desperately trying to speak but unable to say anything.
The bloody footprints on the stairs looked very precarious, with blood smears on the nearby walls. These blood marks included handprints, splattered blood drops, and imprints of faces rubbed on.
“How much blood did this person lose?” Ke Xun exclaimed once again, stopping in front of a relatively complete human-shaped bloodstain on the wall, pointing it out to Mu Yiran and Zhu Haowen, “Look at this mark, this person was almost covered in blood from head to toe.”
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.
“C wjc, jybea 1.85 wfafgr ajii, kfii-yelia, jcv ragbcu,” Ze Tlgjc fzjwlcfv atf yibbvrajlc, “Po kf fzmievf atf qbrrlylilas bo j rcfjx jaajmx, la’r cba fjrs obg jc bgvlcjgs qfgrbc ab lcoilma remt rfnfgf lcpeglfr bc j wjc klat atlr qtsrlmji mbcvlalbc.”
“Qlat remt j ijguf gjcuf bo yiffvlcu, la’r cba jc fzjuufgjalbc ab rjs atja tf kjr rilmfv ys j atberjcv mear,” Ite Ljbkfc rjlv.
“Don’t scare me like that,” Ke Xun turned his head and continued upstairs.
Zhu Haowen: “…” At least pretend to be scared.
The second floor also had four rooms, their doors all tightly closed. The hall’s two windows were covered in dust, making everything dim.
Ke Xun stood at the top of the stairs, used his phone to check the surroundings for a while, and then said to the two behind him, “Cover your heads with your clothes, there are spider webs and dust everywhere.”
The three of them covered their heads and faces with the clothes they had taken off earlier, leaving only their eyes exposed. Ke Xun looked at the bloody footprints on the floor and saw that they led to a room that was presumably the master bedroom. “Let’s go straight into this room.”
The other two had no objections. Ke Xun carefully used his cloth-covered hands to push aside the interwoven cobwebs covered in dust in front of him. He slowly moved forward and stopped in front of the door to the master bedroom.
Using the light from his phone, Ke Xun saw that the thick black bloodstains spread out from below the door. It was thicker and more abundant than the pool of blood downstairs near the main door.
Ke Xun reached out and grabbed the doorknob. Before even pushing it, the door suddenly creaked and opened.
A large bunch of black and chaotic things rushed towards them. Ke Xun reacted extremely quickly, taking a step back and pulling Mu Yiran and Zhu Haowen away from the door.
Buzzing sounds accompanied the chaotic flying mass of black things bursting out of the door. They exploded and scattered mid-air, hitting the spider webs and stirring up dust throughout the room.
“Flies,” Zhu Haowen frowned, tugging at the clothes covering his face and wrapping himself even more tightly.
“Holy, there must be over ten thousand flies.” Ke Xun waved his hand to drive away the flies flying chaotically in front of him, while his other hand pinched his nose to block the extremely nauseating and foul-smelling odor emanating from the room along with the flies.
“Wait for me outside, I’ll go in first?” Ke Xun said.
The terrifying flies and smell indicated that the situation in the room was bound to be very unpleasant.
“No need, since we’re here, let’s go in together.” Zhu Haowen said, stepping out from beside the door to enter the room, but was pulled back by Ke Xun.
“Why are you so honest?” Ke Xun said, while opening the camera on his phone. His arm reached into the room and started filming around.
Zhu Haowen: “…this guy’s brain is getting more and more agile.”
Ke Xun retracted his hand, opened the video he had just taken, and showed it to the other two for a closer look. However, even just watching the video made his hand tremble. If Mu Yiran hadn’t quickly held his hand that was holding the phone, he might have dropped it.
In the video, there was a double bed in the room, with thick curtains drawn, and a set of wardrobes against the wall.
There was no one, or rather, no corpse in the room. But on the bed, curtains, wardrobe, floor, all four walls, and even the ceiling, they were all soaked or splattered with thick black blood.
It was like…a hell on earth.
Zhu Haowen had never seen so much blood, not even in “Pure Land” where Qi Qiang committed suicide by cutting his throat.
The thick, black, sticky stains filled every corner of the room, as if sprayed from a high-pressure water gun. The floor was even pooled with blood, covered with dense and large black flies.
Zhu Haowen turned around, suppressing a dry heave.
Ke Xun closed the video and looked at Mu Yiran. “What do you think, do you still want to go in?”
“You two wait here, I’ll go in and take a look,” Mu Yiran said, taking a step into the room.
“Haowen Er, you wait here, I’ll go in with Yiran,” Ke Xun followed Mu Yiran into the room.
The nauseating rotten smell in the room almost made it impossible to breathe. They evaporated into pungent gas in this sweltering heat and filled the room. Flies continuously flew around, occasionally bumping into them.
Ke Xun and Mu Yiran, one opened the wardrobe to check, and the other lifted the bedding on the bed.
Despite their very careful movements, the choking dust, chaotic flies, intense rotting smell, and suffocating dim light had turned into a pot of rotten and foul-smelling porridge.
After turning everything inside out, they didn’t find any useful clues or items. Ke Xun pointed to the walls and ceiling, “Could these bloodstains be covering up some clues?” If so, what they had to do next was too disgusting.
“I think clues might not just be left here so easily,” After thinking through, Mu Yiran shook his head slightly, “but we won’t rule out this possibility and can consider it as a last resort.”
As he said this, he called on Ke Xun to leave the room. When Ke Xun was about to walk out, he carefully stared at the stains on the wall. Seeing that these stains hung unevenly on the wall, he felt that there were some other things there more than just blood. But Ke Xun didn’t want to inspect it by bare hand. He just felt that it wasn’t something good.
After coming out of this room, the three thoroughly checked the other rooms on the second floor. The only room with bloodstains was the master bedroom just now, while the other rooms, like those downstairs, remained in their usual state of daily life.
And the three didn’t find any clues.
Coming out of this residence, Ke Xun took off the clothes covering his face, took a few deep breaths of the not-so-fresh air outside. The weather seemed to be getting hotter as time passed. While the others hadn’t returned yet, Ke Xun took off his clothes underneath as well, leaving only a pair of pants.
“What exactly happened in this house?” Ke Xun discussed with Mu Yiran and Zhu Haowen, “Especially in that master bedroom, what kind of situation would make someone’s blood splatter to such an extent?”
“The blood might not just be from one person,” Zhu Haowen said, “it could be from two people, or even the whole family.”
“The more you speak, the worse it gets,” Ke Xun said, “regardless of how many people it is, this kind of death is definitely a homicide. But what kind of killing method would make blood splatter all over the place, even on the ceiling? I see that the blood is either splattered up or thrown up, but it shouldn’t have been smeared on by someone. And the key question is, where did the deceased go?”
“Perhaps before the deceased died, only he lived in this house. After the homicide, the body was removed, and this house also became uninhabited, naturally no one would come to clean or tidy up,” Zhu Haowen said.
“No, a family of at least three lived there,” Mu Yiran said, “I checked the closets in each room. There are clothes for adult men and women, as well as children’s clothes. Regardless of who survived in this accident, or if the whole family perished, this house shouldn’t have remained in this state.”
“So now it seems that there are three questions to be answered,” Zhu Haowen said, “First, what happened in this house; Second, why was the murder scene preserved; Third, what is the relationship between this scene and finding the signature, or rather, the ‘restart’ theme.”
“I think, we need to check more houses to get more clues,” Ke Xun said.
Just as they were talking, they saw the other companions returning one by one, each sweating profusely, and had already taken off their clothes, leaving only their undershirts and single pairs of pants.
“Any discoveries?” Ke Xun asked everyone.
Thanks for the chapter 😊
Why is it heating?
Thank you for your translation 💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙