Something felt off.
But then I thought—once I escape this place, Quinn's business had nothing to do with me.
Dwelling on it wouldn't help.
I dropped the roster and reached for the door.
Quinn suddenly sat up. All traces of his usual playfulness vanished, replaced by a cold seriousness. "You won't make it out."
His tone made me uncomfortable—almost like a warning.
Was he planning to report me?
I couldn't take that risk.
Without betraying my thoughts, I walked back to Quinn's bedside. "What do you mean by that—"
He looked up at me.
In that split second, I brought my hand down in a blade-strike against the back of his neck.
Quinn hadn't anticipated an attack—he had no time to defend himself.
He took the hit full force. His eyes rolled back and he crumpled onto the bed, unconscious.
I checked his breathing—steady and even.
Once I was certain he was out and couldn't stab me in the back, I turned and headed for the door.
The moment I pulled it open, a wave of cold air hit me.
The corridor was pitch black. Utterly silent.
I eased the door shut and felt my way along the wall, inching forward.
Based on my observations over the past few days, once lights went out, rabbit instructors patrolled every zone.
In the beginning, with so many contestants, the patrols had been substantial—at least ten per group, judging by the footsteps I'd heard through the walls.
Since the player count had plummeted, the patrols had thinned out accordingly.
Right now, standing in the corridor, I couldn't hear a single sound.
I had to navigate by touch, following the baseboard lighting, relying on memory to edge my way forward.
After a few turns, I finally exited the dormitory area.
The air was cleaner here, carrying more moisture—I was outside.
This was the same area where Harrison and I had found the Greek goddess statue.
Streetlights still burned, and the outlines of flower beds were visible in the dark.
The game base was vast, but its zones were clearly delineated.
After days of running around and competing, I'd memorized the layout.
If I took the road opposite the indoor basketball arena, I'd reach the outer perimeter.
All the base's entry and exit points converged at a single location.
It was heavily guarded. Getting out that way would be near impossible.
So I needed to find another route.
I stayed in the shadows, carefully skirting around the statue.
Permanently installed mission points like this almost certainly had cameras.
I had to stay hyper-alert.
5
By the time I made it past the statue, my back was soaked with sweat.
I pressed on, not allowing myself a moment's relief.
I reached the same fork in the road.
Right led to the indoor basketball arena I'd visited before.
Left was the path Harrison and I had mistakenly taken on our first day.
This time, I chose left without hesitation.
It seemed no one had been here since that day.
Chaotic footprints still marked the muddy ground.
I made sure each step landed in an existing footprint, leaving no new traces.
Crossing the mud ate up time, but I made it through without incident.
Finally, I reached the outer edge of the game base.
The perimeter was enclosed by four- or five-meter-tall iron barriers, their pointed tops gleaming.
Between every bar, dense high-voltage electrified fencing crackled audibly.
Even from this distance, I could hear the fierce buzzing of the electric current.
No wonder Quinn said escape was impossible.
Despair washed over me. Maybe I should sneak back to the dormitory before anyone noticed I was gone.
Pretend nothing had ever happened.
I crouched in the flower bed, slowly backing up.
Then I spotted it—tied to a branch, a strip of white cloth.
On it, words had been scrawled in black marker, along with an arrow.
In the streetlight's glow, I read it:
"Emergency exit—this way."
My heart skipped.
Someone had escaped from here before.
And they'd left a message for whoever came after?
I had no other options. The path behind me led only to death. Might as well press forward.
I followed the arrows, crawling on my belly through the flower bed.
After covering some ground, another white cloth strip appeared.
Same message, same black arrow.
I kept following the trail.
Eventually, I emerged from the flower bed into a narrow, triangular corner formed by two walls.
Based on the layout, this had to be the absolute edge of the base.
In the corner stood a brownish-red door.
What lay beyond it, where it led—I had no idea.
But tied to the door handle was another cloth strip.
No arrow this time. Just two words: "EXIT."
I didn't hesitate. I pulled the door open and stepped through.
Inside was a triangular bedroom.
There were two doors.
The brownish-red one I'd just entered through.
And directly opposite it, a lime-green wooden door.
The lime-green door had a transparent glass panel near the top.
I approached, rose onto my toes, and peered through.
My heart lurched.
I saw a winding mountain road. Streetlights. A truck rumbling by with its headlights cutting through the night.
Beyond the glass, there were no iron barriers. No electric fencing.
If I could open this door, I could actually leave this place.
I tried the handle—it wouldn't budge.
I crouched down and found tiny words written in black marker beside the handle.
"Please search the room for the key. Once found, this door will unlock."
Following the instructions, I began searching the bedroom thoroughly.
On the surface, it looked like an ordinary bedroom.
American-style decor. A single bed.
On the left, a freestanding coat rack. On the right, a bookshelf with a few scattered volumes.
Beside the bookshelf, against the wall, stood a desk.
On it sat an old-school, bulky computer monitor.
The screen was black, with bouncing red text in the center:
"Do you want to escape? Click OK to begin the challenge."
I sat down at the desk, put on the headphones, grabbed the mouse, and clicked OK.
The red text vanished. The screen went silent for a moment.
Then a piercing female scream erupted from the headphones.
Simultaneously, a streak of red blood began dripping down from the top of the screen.
It didn't scare me—if anything, I found the horror cliché dated and unoriginal.
Just as I was about to mock their design sensibilities, an animation began playing on the screen.
It showed a van driving slowly along a mountain road.
After traveling some distance, the van stopped in front of what looked like a hunter's cabin in the woods.
Five people got out—four men and one woman.
Laughing and chatting, they carried their bags inside.
When the door opened, the interior shown on screen was identical to the room I was standing in.
Same decor. Same furniture. Same patterns—down to every last detail.
That's when fear began to claw at me.
When a game stays a game, you can keep your distance. But once horror bleeds into reality, everything changes.
On screen, after the five entered, the animation paused.
A dialogue box popped up: "Premise: You are Max. These four are your friends. You've entered a real-life murder mystery game. However, your friends may not know that you intend to poison them tonight for a cash prize."
I clicked "I Understand."
6
Four screams erupted simultaneously. The scene shifted—instantly, day turned to night.
The four people in the room vanished from the frame.
From Max's perspective, I stood in the center of the room, looking left and right.
Another pop-up appeared: "You poisoned the cups, but only three people drank the water. One person didn't, yet they all died. Please find their bodies in the room and investigate."
No further prompts appeared.
I sat at the desk for a while, thinking about what the computer game wanted.
Was I supposed to find bodies in the real room?
I'd already searched the whole place—no bodies were visible.
The only spots I hadn't checked were the ventilation ducts in the ceiling and the wooden floor beneath my feet.
Then I remembered—the sound the floorboards made near the head of the bed...
...was different from the sound near the foot of the bed.
I'd assumed it was just dampness, but now the acoustics seemed deliberately wrong.
I dragged a toolbox from under the bed and found a shovel inside.
Prying up the floorboards near the head of the bed, I found several skin-colored shapes buried underneath.
On closer inspection, they were human-shaped fabric dolls—not real bodies.
But every one of them was smeared with dark red paint.
What skin showed through was mottled, pockmarked, and scarred.
I frowned.
The puzzle said they'd died from poison—so why did they have external wounds?
To examine them more closely, I dragged all four dolls out of the floor.
The first, the second... and then the last one.
With a mechanical click, pulling the final doll triggered a hidden mechanism.
Lights flickered overhead. An automated voice boomed from the ceiling: "Warning, warning. Fire detected in the room. Please remain calm and evacuate immediately."
The voice finished. With a hiss, the fire sprinklers overhead activated.
I stood directly beneath them—cold water soaked me to the skin.
Panicking, I waved frantically at the camera. "There's no fire! False alarm! Disengage the system!"
I repeated myself several times. The system didn't respond.
Then it hit me—fire?
I rushed back to the four dolls and lifted their arms, examining them closely.
That's it—the dark red mottling wasn't from poison. It was burn damage!
"They were burned to death, not poisoned!"
The realization burst out of me before I could stop it.
On the monitor, the pop-up text changed.
"Congratulations, player—you've found the first clue. Continue searching based on the previous prompt to find the second clue. Collect all four pieces of evidence proving Max's innocence, and you'll earn Max's thank-you gift... Rumor has it Max possesses a key that opens the cabin door!"
I reread the prompt several times, finally grasping the game's core objective.
Max had been framed. He wasn't the real killer.
The real murderer was among the four dead.
The sprinklers kept raining down. To protect the laptop, I moved it to higher ground.
Glancing at the battery—I had 5% left.
I was running critically low on time.
I set the computer aside, jumped off the stool, and placed the four doll bodies on the bed.
The pit where they'd been buried was already filling with water.
The water level in the room had risen past my ankles and was creeping up my calves.
Watching the water climb steadily, I grew more frantic. I couldn't calm down enough to think.
Just as I was losing all hope, the sprinklers suddenly stopped.
I looked up.
That's when I noticed a sticky note beside the sprinkler, written in small print.
"Fire system malfunction—not yet repaired. When the sum of the minute digits is odd, the sprinklers activate. When even, they shut off."
I checked the computer clock: 3:06.
Zero plus six equals six—even.
That meant I had a window of calm to search.
Reacting instantly, I began rifling through the four doll bodies.
In the female doll's pocket, I found a wallet with a photo of two people in an intimate embrace.
The angle only showed the woman's face—the man's was obscured.
As I pulled the photo free, a second one slipped out with it.
The second photo showed the same woman with a buzz-cut man wearing an earring, his arm draped around her shoulder.
An arm-around-the-shoulder pose could just be friendly—nothing overtly romantic.
I couldn't immediately determine the nature of their relationship.
7
I studied the second photo more carefully, noting the man's appearance.
Buzz cut with an earring—that was distinctive enough to remember.
In the earlier game footage, this man had been Max's roommate.
Having his arm around his roommate's girlfriend in a photo—no matter how you looked at it, that was suspicious.
I flipped both photos over and read the inscriptions on the back.
The first read: "Yuna and Max—forever and always."
The second read: "To my dear Potemkin."
Potemkin... the name rang a bell.
It was a foreign name, but the man in the photo was Asian.
I held both photos, thinking hard.
Then I remembered a TV drama I'd watched.
It was about Catherine the Great.
And Potemkin had been one of Catherine II's most famous lovers.
From the photo inscriptions, I pieced together the relationships.
"Yuna was Max's girlfriend, and the man nicknamed Potemkin was Max's roommate—and also Yuna's lover."
A chime sounded. The screen displayed: "Congratulations—you've found an indirect clue. Keep going."
I continued searching.
The four doll bodies yielded nothing else beyond the wallet.
I shifted my focus to the rest of the room.
First stop: the bookshelf.
I'd barely reached it when the safe window ended—the sprinklers roared back to life.
I refused to waste a single second. Even drenched, I kept searching the shelves.
The moment the water stopped again, I found an opened envelope wedged between two books.
Inside were numerous IOUs—all in the same name: a man called Tyson, borrowing money from Max. The total sum came to roughly 100,000.
At the bottom of the stack was a court summons—Tyson had failed to repay, and Max had sued him.
I compared the dates on the summons and the notebook.
The lawsuit had been filed before the trip to the cabin.
Why would Tyson come to a cabin in the woods with Max if there was bad blood between them?
Had Max lured him here specifically to kill him?
This line of reasoning was a hindrance to solving the puzzle.
But I couldn't afford to ignore any potentially crucial information.
I set the envelope down and prepared to continue searching.
Overhead, the sprinklers hissed back to life.
I glanced at the clock—another minute had passed. Odd-numbered time again.
Two cycles of spraying had brought the water up to my waist.
Most of the room's props were now submerged.
Three main clues remained unfound. I had to move faster.
But I combed every inch and found nothing new.
Just as the sprinklers cut off for the third time, the wall phone shrilled to life.
I jumped, frozen in place.
On the fourth ring, I snapped out of it.
The next clue might be delivered by voice!
If I missed this call, who knew how long the next one would take.
I half-ran, half-fell across the room and grabbed the receiver.
A man's voice—sounding like an automated AI system—spoke in perfect broad-botcaster tones:
"Player hello, you recently registered for a murder mystery game on our website. Our records show two different IP addresses logged into the same account. We'd like to remind you not to share your password with others, to prevent bonus theft. Good luck with your game, and have a pleasant day. Goodbye."
The line went dead.
I parsed the message: two different IP addresses had accessed the same account.
Meaning Max's password had been compromised.
And someone else knew Max was coming to this murder mystery game.
In the room, Max's roommates were Potter and a man named Felix.
Potter had already provided a clue. Tyson had one too.
That left one clue—most likely about Felix.
Based on my deduction, I submitted this information on the computer.
A pop-up appeared: "Congratulations—two indirect clues can be exchanged for one main-plot hint. Would you like to make the exchange?"
I clicked "Yes" without a second thought.
The text changed: "Yuna was pregnant with Potter's child and wanted to break up with Max to marry Potter. Potter, unwilling to be exposed and vilified, demanded Yuna abort it. She refused, and they fought."
I read quickly, then plunged my hand into the water and hauled up Yuna's body.
I parted her hair—and there, hidden beneath the dark strands at the nape of her neck, was a faint bruised handprint, partially concealed by burn scarring.
It was exactly what I'd missed because her hair had covered it.
Based on the hint, Yuna had likely been killed accidentally by Potter.
I set Yuna's body aside and picked up Potter's.
I pressed his hand against her neck—the size matched perfectly.
Having confirmed Yuna's cause of death, I immediately submitted the finding to the computer.
The system displayed: "Congratulations, player—you've found the second clue. Keep going."