Chapter 3.18 Eleven Rooms (Extra)

Tang Song immediately stopped me.

“I have it here!” She shouted, “I have that thing.”

I stopped and looked back at her, finding that she was staring at me with something in her hand.

“My grandfather found it in that corpse’s backpack. He left it to me with the information just now.” I went up and saw that the thing in her hand was very small. But just as I was about to take it from her, she suddenly put it in her mouth and swallowed.

I frowned and tried to catch her, but she ran back and jumped as the thing got stuck in her throat. By the time I grabbed her hair and slammed her against the wall, she had already swallowed it.

“Are you crazy?”

She kept gagging and knocking on her chest. “Well, now you’ll just have to think of me as that thing.” She was blue in the face, but this girl’s throat was apparently big enough. Xiuxiu would have choked to death.

“Who would want to treat you like that thing?” I was furious.

“In this way, no matter what you do, you have to include me. If you want to protect yourself, you’ll have to protect me. If you want to kill me, you’ll have to kill yourself,” she said.

“You’re fucking sick!” I grabbed my hair, resisting the urge to bang my head against the wall.

“My grandfather said that people have to find their own value. Don’t give others any reason to give up on you.” She stared at me. “You should understand. I told you everything. What would I do if you leave me here?”

I had lost control of my emotions, so I tried to suppress my anger. I took dozens of deep breaths and said to her, “Go to the bathroom.”

“No.”

“You’ll have to go sometime. It’s out of your control.”

“I’m constipated, you’ll have to wait.” She was a little proud.

Calm down, calm down. I could feel my blood pressure rising and my gums hurt from clenching my teeth so hard. When I saw my wound start bleeding again, I tore my T-shirt up and bandaged it, and then said to her, “At least tell me what you swallowed.”

“It’s a ring.” She said, “My grandfather said that it was taken from Lu Sha’s body. Lu Sha must have found it here. It’s very important, so I had to keep it close.”

I stared into Tang Song’s eyes. “Lu Sha died here. His body would definitely start to rot first, and then dry a little bit at a time. There must be a lot of blue spots on that ring. Those are called “corpse seepage”. It happens when the body fluids seep out from the corpse. Do you know what a corpse’s body fluids look like?”

Tang Song covered her mouth, and I continued, “Have you ever seen slop? If you pour milk and butter into the slop, it’s exactly what the corpse’s fat looks like before it’s completely rotted. It’s sour and smelly.”

Tang Song turned pale.

“Well, please give me a detailed explanation of what this ring looks like.” I said.

“There’s a ghost head on it.” She tried to recall it, but started gagging once she thought of it.

Ghost head. I took a deep breath and an old image suddenly popped into my head.

I still didn’t know whether this ring had practical functions, but based on the hints on the relief back in those days, it had a very strong connection with the Ghost Seal’s earliest totem. All the materials related to the Ghost Seal recorded that it had three grooves, which happened to be the heads of three ghosts. I had guessed at that time that it was probably related to the ring worn by the one holding the seal. (1)

Was it just as I expected, and Uncle Three found one of the rings?

When I had been analyzing it carefully back then, I was fascinated by the numbers two and three, because Poker-Face had two special fingers, and the ghost seal had three grooves. But I didn’t know what the connection was.

There was the sound of cables being pulled again, and although I had confidence in Seven Fingers, the sound was getting louder and louder. The other party wasn’t a pushover, after all. There may have been some unexpected situations where this kind of pressure often existed, which caused me to feel very uncomfortable.

Tang Song puked some mushy things up, and there was the familiar smell of bile. It appeared she hadn’t eaten anything serious during this period of time.

“Regret it?” I asked her.

She looked dejected as she nodded with tear-filled eyes. I picked her up. Things were already like this, so I could make her spit it out or leave it to chance, but time was running out, and we needed to get some other things done.

Xiao Hua had been keeping in touch with us using his phone, but it was already late at night, so he must have been taking a nap. I was nervous, but I was also a little tired at the moment.

When Tang Song and I reached the building’s structural diagram that Lu Sha had deduced, the fluorescent light had already started to dim, and my eyes were really going blind.

At first glance, I could tell that this structural diagram had been drawn by a layman, because it was clear, but had many unprofessional aspects. Compared with the diagram drawn after he went crazy, this one was much simpler, and the logic was also that of ordinary people.

I had majored in architecture, so I understood the simple structure with just a quick glance. This place actually wasn’t mysterious, so Lu Sha must have felt a kind of despair when he had to give up leaving here and started desperately drawing the pictures in his mind.

He had used up the lighting equipment when he was here, so even if he had figured out the layout in complete darkness, he still wouldn’t have been able to leave here.

There were many numbers on the design drawing—like “twenty-three eleven” and “eleven twelve”— written in each room, but there wasn’t any logical order.

“Explain it.” I asked.

“Do you remember the room full of light bulbs? All the rooms here have a lot of objects piled up in them. These numbers are coordinates. In all the rooms, only one thing is a switch, and all the others may start traps. These traps are deadly.” She said. “Take for example, the coordinates written on the piano. If you go to the antiques on the surrounding bookshelves and compare them according to the coordinates, you can find the mechanism that made the piano appear. But the coordinates aren’t static. They’re reset in every room every hour. If you have that radio, the coordinates after the reset will be reported to you by time.”

“So.” I looked at this design.

“So, the coordinates on this picture are all wrong now. When he finished drawing it, he must have also understood it.”

“Wasn’t it dangerous for me to be in the light bulb room just now?” I asked.

Tang Song shook her head: “I already removed the trap in that room. Didn’t you see the big hole in the wall? I often use that room to make preparations, so I wanted to avoid a mishap.”

You worked hard, I said to myself. This girl showed a lot of qualities that many men didn’t have.

“It’s easy to get out from here. From the piano room, you have to go through eleven rooms and find the mechanisms in each one. Once all the mechanisms are turned on, the piano room will return to the house.”

<Extra 3.17> <Table of Contents><Extra 3.19>

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TN Notes:

(1) He’s referring to Chapter 20 of Vol 7 if you need refresher like I did. FYI, he’s a liar liar pants on fire. Fatty is the one that said it.