CH 17.2

The skeleton had some bloody bandages wrapped around its frame, and it was planning to crawl out from under the bed to attack Bai Lixin.

Just when it was about to continue climbing out, a head suddenly appeared from above the bed and slammed straight into the skeleton’s line of sight.

Then the head pulled out a smile.

The hand that the skeleton was extending suddenly froze: “.…”

Fuck, there was no sound at all; that was scary!

After a couple of seconds, the skeleton seemed to remember what it was here for.

It suddenly opened its mouth wide and was about to lunge towards Bai Lixin.

Bai Lixin’s eyes were quick and his hands were fast. His slender arm reached under the bed and grasped the skeleton’s chin, while his other hand went to his mouth in a “shush” motion.

Shh, don’t make any noise, they’re all sleeping.

The skeleton looked at Bai Lixin in shock. It tried to break free but found that its opponent’s strength was so great that it could not break free. As it struggled to get out of Bai Lixin’s clutches, something even more terrifying happened to it.

Bai Lixin was holding its head and trying to pull it out of the ground!

The skeleton panicked.

It tried with all its might to retract its body back into the ground, its bony palm frame slapping heavily against the concrete floor, making a clapping sound.

Someone around turned over, and Bai Lixin released his hand. The skeleton immediately slithered away like a loach when it got a gap.

Bai Lixin gave a regretful glance at the empty bottom of the bed.

A slight sigh that only Dijia could hear echoed in the air, “You’ve come, don’t rush to leave.”

Dijia, “.…”

—

[It’s here! Bai Lixin is giving out another remark that scares monsters!]

[Bai Lixin is still the same Bai Lixin. The ghost was really scared off. Looking at the damage the curse received instead, it really provides psychological relief.]

[Other players encounter ghosts: Players run! Bai Lixin encounters a ghost: Ghosts run!]

[Strange, isn’t it said that curses are the things that appear to scare players the most? Why was it hair the first time and a skeleton the second?]

[That’s because there’s nothing Bai Lixin is afraid of, right? The curse also doesn’t know what Bai Lixin is afraid of, so it just sends things that people are generally afraid of to try him out, like it’s trying a lottery.]

[Fuck, there’s nothing he’s afraid of? Is he the devil?]

[It’s not good luck to run into Bai Lixin.]

—

The next day, Bai Lixin awoke to the sun shining in, along with Huo Yunjun, the watch man, who had discussed collaborating.

The others were all still asleep, even Wen Ziqing was not yet up.

The two looked at each other across several beds, and Bai Lixin heard his friends’ bars notification.

[Ding! Huo Yunjun has requested to add you as a friend.]

[Accept / Decline]

Bai Lixin clicked ‘Accept’, and Huo Yunjun’s private chat quickly came through.

Huo Yunjun: [What are your thoughts?]

Bai Lixin: [I accept your cooperation. When will you move?]

Huo Yunjun: [I knew you were smart, dealing with smart people is convenient. Let’s go now. There are fewer Bloods during the day, so the chances of us being discovered are lower.]

Bai Lixin had initially envisaged either moving on his own or with Xia Chi.

After all, he had drawn the ancestor of the Blood clan. Some things would be difficult to explain in case he was acting with other unfamiliar people.

But because of the curse, both options had to be put on hold.

Acting on his own, the curse would engage in a sneak attack, and if the curse conjured something that disturbed the Bloods, it would interfere with his investigation.

Acting with Xia Chi meant double the curse and double the excitement.

Xia Chi was so timid that he would be scared to death.

Half an hour later, Bai Lixin finished washing up, but most of the other players were still resting.

Wen Ziqing opened his eyes in a daze. He smiled gently at Bai Lixin after seeing him and said in a low voice, “You’re going out?”

Bai Lixin nodded, “Yes, to investigate some more.”

Wen Ziqing, “Well, go for it.”

The steps that were about to go stopped, and Bai Lixin looked at the sleepy-eyed Wen Ziqing: “You’re not going to investigate?”

Wen Ziqing, “I’ll wait for everyone to first wake up.”

Bai Lixin pondered for a few seconds, “You are really considerate.”

A smile tugged at the corners of Wen Ziqing’s mouth, “It’s what I should do.”

There were significantly fewer Bloods in the corridor. The bright sunlight shone through the windows into the ancient and stately castle, dispelling all the gloom.

Huo Yunjun walked ahead, and Bai Lixin whispered to Dijia behind him, “You said that a player was under domination last night. Who was it? Wen Ziqing?”

Dijia, “I don’t know, domination works directly on the soul. I only noticed it because of the slight power that spilled out when they were emotionally disturbed.”

“But the power was too inconspicuous in the crowd.”

Huo Yunjun led Bai Lixin around the corridors, and they soon came to the lobby of the ancient castle. This was where they had been when they first entered the copy yesterday. Unlike last night, when the Bloods had clustered together, the hall was now empty and vacant. The magnificent throne still stood sturdily atop the steps, looking down on the place like an emperor.

The two walked on for a while longer, passing an underground staircase.

Huo Yunjun stopped here and pointed to that underground staircase, “This is where the fifth group went in yesterday. I walked from here just in time to bump into them going in.”

Bai Lixin stood on the stairs and looked down. It was clearly daytime, but there was no light cast onto it.

Only the stairway going down had some light, and then it descended into pitch black.

Huo Yunjun, “Don’t do anything stupid like going in. Although I don’t like Wen Ziqing, he’s right. Don’t play with your life since someone has already scouted the bottom for us. You may not know it after going through only one copy, but some of these copies actually have bug spaces.”

“Those places have nothing to do with clearing the copy, yet they are extremely dangerous. This staircase should lead to one of those bug spaces, so don’t go there.”

“I don’t know what’s going on with this game. To say it’s not great is an understatement. It can easily create such realistic copies. To say it’s awesome is also wrong because it comes out with a bunch of bugs at every turn and is too lazy to fix them.”

“Like your previous trial copy [River God’s Bride], it’s actually a bug-ridden copy. It was once blocked when it came out because it was too difficult, but for some reason, it suddenly opened up and pulled you guys in.”

Bai Lixin withdrew his gaze from the bottom of the deep staircase, “Are there many bugs in the game?”

Huo Yunjun gestured for Bai Lixin to leave quickly, “The probability is not high, but it can’t cover the large number of copies. But if you count the number, it adds up to a lot.”

The two spoke as they turned into a small corridor.

The gallery was open-air, with a stone roof over it and lush violets hanging down from it.

After another short walk, they came into the small side hall of the old castle before stopping at the end of one of the corridors.

Just as Huo Yunjun said, there was a room at the end of the corridor with two elaborate serpentine totems inlaid in gold on the door.

It was a large room, but it was not locked. Huo Yunjun carefully pushed open the door of the room and walked in with Bai Lixin.

It was surprisingly a painting studio with a huge floor-to-ceiling window in the wall. The brilliant and dazzling sunlight penetrated through the window and fell onto the oil painting in the very middle. The woman in the painting was immediately bathed in sunlight, her whole face dripping with a divine aura.

The woman in the painting had beautiful blonde curls, and she was wearing a bright red, large skirt with aristocratic pleated ruffles. She had a beautiful rose pot in her hand, but the soil beside her was a little loose, and a white skeleton could be vaguely seen coming out of the dirt.

The woman’s expression was also very intriguing.

Her face was smiling, and her gentle, watery gaze was on the roses in the pot. However, the corner of her eyes seemed to be looking at the skeleton in the dirt path.

The four walls were covered with paintings, and there were many strands of panels on the floor. They all show the same woman, Lady Rose.

The different forms of the roses in the portraits show how much care the painter had taken in painting them.

Bai Lixin looked around the painting studio and noticed that the Lady Rose in these paintings was not of the same age. The youngest Lady Rose in the painting looked only seven or eight years old and was holding a beautiful bouquet of roses and smiling. At the back, there were other figures of twelve or thirteen, fifteen or sixteen, and twenty-something years old.

Bai Lixin stopped in front of a painting.

The Lady Rose in this painting looked to be the age he had seen her at the time of her death.

The frivolous sunshine of her face had faded, replaced by calm and nobility.

Bags had appeared below her eyes and even her neck had developed faint fine lines.

Huo Yunjun walked over and sighed, “Did Mr. Mo draw all these? It seems that Mr. Mo really loves Lady Rose. Not only did he draw her childhood and youth, but he even drew her at middle age.”

Bai Lixin, “Come and look at this.”

Bai Lixin had walked over to the very first picture of the seven-year-old and stopped.

Huo Yunjun looked over and exclaimed, “It’s quite a nice painting. What’s wrong?”

Bai Lixin, “Look at her eyes.”

Huo Yunjun obediently looked at the little girl’s eyes, “The eyes are quite nice, what…”

Huo Yunjun’s words stopped in their tracks and his eyes widened, “Brown eyes? Lady Rose wasn’t a Blood at this point?! You mean Lady Rose was a human who was embraced as a Blood?!”

Bai Lixin continued on again, mumbling as he went, “They were brown even at eleven or twelve, and still brown at fifteen or sixteen.”

Just before a painting, he suddenly paused, “Here are the red eyes now.”

In the picture, the girl’s original cheerful smile faded, replaced by nobility and gentleness. The girl’s once amber-like brown eyes were now replaced with ruby eyes.

The painting was inscribed in the lower right-hand corner with a line that read: ‘Rite of Passage’, painted by Henry.

Originally an ordinary human woman, Lady Rose completed her first embrace and joined the world of the Bloods in the year of her eighteenth birthday.

Bai Lixin took a few steps back, pulling him from a single painting to a position where he could take all the paintings at once.

One leaf obstructs the eye, and one cannot see Mount Tai.

When all the portraits were in full view, Bai Lixin noticed a distinct difference in the paintings. Half of them were of the delicate and lovely Lady Rose, while the other half were of the gentle and noble Lady Rose.

One-half innocent, one-half elegant.

It was as if one person had been split hard into two.

Huo Yunjun also seemed to have noticed the problem, “Did Lady Rose’s temperament change drastically because of her first embrace? How come the portraits changed all of a sudden?”

Huo Yunjun lowered his head and thought seriously, “Bai Lixin, do you think it’s possible that it’s two people?!”

“That noble woman is Mr. Mo’s true love, his white moonlight, while the current Lady Rose is, in fact, her substitute!”

Bai Lixin pondered. He could not say yes or no, for there was no absolute proof that his true love existed.

But what did this have to do with Lady Rose’s death?

Lady Rose had died with her entire body drained of blood, and according to what Xia Chi heard from the Bloods, she had never gone outdoors during her life, and it was almost impossible for her to have made enemies with anyone.

Why did someone want to curse her?

Was the person who wanted to curse Lady Rose the one that killed her? Or was it someone else?

One question after another spread out in his mind, and each was placed in one small box after another.

And the key to opening the boxes required them to find out for themselves.

Huo Yunjun, “There shouldn’t be any more clues here. Let’s leave. Time is running out, so let’s go somewhere else.”

Bai Lixin swept his gaze around the painting room again. He was about to leave when he suddenly thought of something and turned back to the painting studio.

He stood in front of the two images, carefully comparing the differences between the two paintings.

Huo Yunjun, “What have you found again?”

Bai Lixin’s eyes carefully swept over all the lines, not missing a single trace.

Finally, he pointed to the two paintings and said, “Maybe there aren’t two Lady Roses. The reason why Lady Rose’s expressions change so much in the paintings is because there are two painters.”

“Look at the way the brush moves in these two paintings; they are different. Painters have distinct painting habits, and something like this should have been painted by two different people.”

Huo Yunjun looked in the direction of Bai Lixin’s finger, and he could indeed see that the brush tips were not quite the same. The left side was painted in a gentle style, with colors laid on bit by bit, while the right side was painted in a wild style, with large clouds of paint underlining and roughly retouching the canvas.

The handwriting on the two paintings was also different. The signature on the left was elegant. In contrast, the inscription on the right was very wild, like a wind-swept scroll.

Huo Yunjun: “.…”

I understand the deduction, but why are there two painters? And who were the two painters anyway?

Bai Lixin, “Have you noticed Mr. Mo’s cane? His cane has his family crest on it. That is a mark that only the family can use, and the door to this painting room has such a mark on it.”

“It means that this room is only accessible to the most noble of orthodox status, which is Mr. Mo and his son.”

“It’s all inscribed by Henry. Henry exists as a family name, so the two painters could be Mr. Mo and his son.”

Huo Yunjun’s jaw dropped, “No way, is this a dog-blood love triangle where a father and son both have their eyes on the same woman at the same time, only for the son to fail in snatching the woman, and the old man takes his lover’s first embrace for himself?!”

Bai Lixin who remembered Mr. Mo’s energetic movements in Lady Rose’s room: “….”

The idea was bold, but he couldn’t even refute it for now.

It’s quite possible that love this morbid might be possible.

—

The Live broadcast room

[Uh, this Huo Yunjun guy and I have the same idea.]

[Ah, two men and a woman… the first thing that comes to mind is a love triangle.]

[I’ve watched this copy of [The Blood Clan] twice. The last players from the previous round also found this painting room, but they didn’t notice that there were two painters, which is a bit of a shame.]

[I’ve seen that version too. The Bloods are so oppressive to the players. We humans pride ourselves on being at the top of the food chain, but when we enter this copy, we become someone else’s food. The disparity is extreme.]

[This Huo Yunjun seems okay, he’s not a *pig teammate.]

[ Wen Ziqing seems to be pretty good too; he gave the players an enlightenment class last night. He even woke up early in the morning but waited for the other players so that they could act together. He is very responsible.]

[People from the third-ranked guild are really different.]

—

The two men came out early in the morning to investigate and hadn’t eaten since last night. Bai Lixin was fine, but Huo Yunjun was starving.

Just as Huo Yunjun was considering going somewhere to eat something, the system prompt rang out.

System: [Ding! Good morning, all players. Please proceed to the Food’s dining hall to eat.]

System: [Friendly reminder: Please pay attention to dining etiquette when eating and do not make a single sound. If you make a sound, you will be branded as rude and barbaric by the Bloods, then arrested and feasted on.]

Ten minutes later, all the players appeared in the gourmet restaurant.

The so-called Food’s dining hall was just a huge room with a long table in the middle. Many seats were placed at the ends of the table, and in front of each seat was a silver dinner plate with food on it.

Around the table were the guards of the Bloods, who were watching intently.

Everyone carefully pulled their chairs away when suddenly, a player accidentally bumped into the player next to him.

There was a “squeak”, as the chair scraped against the floor.