Translator: Atlas Studios
Editor: Atlas Studios
In the hotel.
Zhou Zhenguo closed his eyes and leaned against the chair, his expression one of fatigue.
On the wall in front of him was a small hole from which he could see Li Liang and Tang Luo’s room through it.
This was something that he had secretly created after reaching a mutual understanding with Tang Luo for the convenience of keeping an eye on Li Liang.
Tang Luo and Little Chu were out ‘fishing’ tonight.
The others kept the established law of horror films, where splitting up and moving about solo equated to death firmly in mind. Thus, both men and both women were all gathered in Tang Luo’s room.
Originally, the two pairs could have returned to their own rooms to sleep, but there just had to be a problem with Li Liang’s body.
The high school student wasn’t willing to stay with him alone, either. Being alone similarly felt rather eerie too. As for being thick-skinned and shamelessly going over to join the two young ladies, for the majority of braggart high school students, this was something impossible.
Thus, everyone decided to just stay there together and wait. Should anything unexpected happen, at least, there was strength in numbers, probably.
And so, on that night, the four of them stared at each other in silence, the atmosphere somewhat awkward.
In the other room, Zhou Zhenguo’s eyes were rather tired and close to tearing up from keeping watch as well.
‘This doesn’t make sense. Why do I feel like I’ve become a spy on surveillance duty?’
Zhou Zhenguo felt like this situation wasn’t quite right. He was clearly the only experienced player—pseudo—there. But in the end, with the way how things developed, he had ended up following Tang Luo’s instructions instead.
The other party was completely in charge now.
‘How did things turn out like this?’ Zhou Zhenguo thought about it long and hard. He felt that this wasn’t his fault.
The problem lay with that ‘Master Xuanzang’.
‘That man isn’t a warrior monk or an enlightened one. He’s a demonic monk.’
The moment he thought of it that way, Zhou Zhenguo felt a lot better.
‘It isn’t so much myself that didn’t work hard enough, but rather, it’s because the enemy ‘has Gundams1′.’
“Ah~”
Next door, Li Liang let out a huge yawn. He ignored the rest of them and went straight to sleep. He had already completely given up on himself by now. He didn’t care even if the mission failed. After all, he felt like his body had been hollowed out.
It wasn’t as if there were Shenbao1 tablets there to nourish his health and replenish what he had lost.
Moreover, everyone was even suspicious of him.
In any case, that damned Old Zhou had already said that they wouldn’t receive any penalty for just one failed mission.
His wife had told him once, “Escaping may be shameful, but it’s useful!”
Bi Wanhui asked her friend, “Do you want to go to the restroom?”
“Yes.” Her friend nodded.
Carrying on the basic bosom buddy principle of ‘friends must go to the toilet together’, the two of them went out of the room.
Next door, after thinking for a moment, Zhou Zhenguo chose not to follow after them.
The rooms in this hotel didn’t have their own private restrooms.
There was one at the end of the corridor.
The only guests staying in the hotel now were Tang Luo and the rest of them. The place went through daily cleaning too. Thus, it was rather clean.
With her friend standing guard outside the door, Bi Wanhui walked in and half-shut the door, looking as if she was in urgent need to relieve herself.
She wasn’t really in urgent need. Rather, it was because she had thought of how Li Liang had precisely gotten into danger in the toilet (alleged).
In addition, places such as toilets were ‘regulars’ in horror films.
Like Hanako-san1 and Moaning Myrtle’s Bathroom2—the latter seemed to be comic relief material, though.
In any case, even if she had a friend standing guard outside and the door wasn’t fully closed. She was still rather nervous going to the toilet in the middle of the night and hoped that it would be over sooner rather than later, especially when there was only an extremely dim kerosene lamp in the toilet corner.
By being nervous, she instead found it rather hard to let it out smoothly.
Right at that point, a cold and sinister breeze suddenly blew into the small and cramped space, scaring Bi Wanhui so badly that she jumped to her feet.
She looked over to find out that the little window next to her wasn’t shut tight.
Bi Wanhui let out a small sigh of relief. It was pitch-black outside the little window. One could only squeeze a large watermelon through the gap at best.
The chilly wind caused the slightly ajar door to open slightly.
Bi Wanhui heard a series of clear footsteps.
“Cheng Cheng, are you still there?” shouted Bi Wanhui, afraid that her friend had already lost her patience and left.
“Yes, I am.”
Her friend’s voice drifted in from outside. What she said next wasn’t directed at Bi Wanhui, however. “There’s someone inside. Come over and clean the place later instead.”
Bi Wanhui assumed that the footsteps she heard were probably the hotel’s cleaners walking over.
Thinking back a little, the footsteps earlier had been coming closer rather than going away.
With people outside, Bi Wanhui felt a lot more at ease.
From the crack that was about two fingers’ width apart between the door and the frame, she could vaguely see the shadows of people moving.
They weren’t very distinct.
After a while, after she was done with her business, Bi Wanhui washed her hands and pushed the door. The door, which opened outwards, collided with the back of the person outside.
“Hey, don’t block the entrance,” said Bi Wanhui. At the same time, she applied slightly more force.
Bam!
The sound of something heavy crashing onto the wooden flooring rang out.
Bi Wanhui stopped pushing the door at once.
The sound had come from right outside the door.
The dim light that had originally been blocked by the form of a person streamed into the toilet.
Bi Wanhui’s eyes widened.
At some point, black liquid had trickled through the gap under the door into the toilet. It was dark red blood that was spreading all over the floor.
“Ah!”
Her frightened scream turned into a dry and hoarse cry that was practically suppressed in her throat due to extreme fear.
Fortunately, even though she had cried out involuntarily, her strength didn’t leave her.
Bi Wanhui pushed at the door desperately. She forcefully squeezed through the expanded gap between the door and the frame and got out of the toilet.
In her panic, she tripped over the ‘object’ on the floor and landed heavily onto the floor.
A pair of blank eyes that were wide open and looked as though their owner didn’t die in peace entered her sight, glaring at her. As if they were accusing her of something.
Half of her friend’s face was dyed a dark red by the blood on the floor. Blood also covered Bi Wanhui, who had tripped and fallen on the floor.
It was only now that the pungent stench of blood began to assault her senses. It was as if her sense of smell that had suddenly gone into hibernation at some unknown point had suddenly returned at this moment.
Even Bi Wanhui herself didn’t know how she managed to get up from the floor. The only thing that stayed in her memory was that when she rushed over to the room, the door happened to open at the same time as well.
Little Zhou, the high school student, got a shock when he saw the blood all over her face and body. He almost slammed the door shut in Bi Wanhui’s face, almost letting the door come into intimate contact with her nose.
“She’s dead…” Bi Wanhui only managed to utter these three words.
Whether from being overly worked up or other reasons, the world in front of her turned black, and she passed out completely.
————
In a little alley not too far from the hotel, a couple of shadows were approaching. They were dressed like a man and a woman. One of them was a cross-dressing man.
Little Chu, the cross-dresser, was still in a rather excited state.
When Tang Luo and Little Chu had been searching the man’s house earlier, they had indeed discovered an interesting clue—a letter.
A straightforward letter.
The letter was notifying the man named Hodge—in other words, the man whom Tang Luo had mistaken as Jack the Ripper and was subsequently turned into a headless corpse—that if he wanted to join them, he needed to show his sincerity.
‘Showing his sincerity’ was, of course, not the original wording. The original wording was that ‘they’ needed to be presented an offering.
Who were ‘they’?
Tang Luo and Little Chu had no way of knowing.
The letter was signed off with a symbol that probably represented a certain organization.
As for what ‘presenting an offering’ meant, no further explanation was necessary.
What the man, Hodge, had done was on the spur of the moment rather than having developed lustful thoughts after seeing Little Chu, or at least, it hadn’t purely just been the lustful thoughts at work.
Other than that, Tang Luo and Little Chu had also found out Hodge’s identity. He was a doctor, or to be more specific, he used to be one. As for concrete details, further investigation was needed. This man might just be an important breakthrough point!
“Master, I have a bold guess,” said Little Chu as he walked behind Tang Luo.
“What is it?” Tang Luo didn’t stop in his tracks either, asking as he walked on.
“Jack the Ripper might not be a person!” Little Chu was as joyful as someone who had just discovered a new land. “Do you think there’s a possibility that Jack the Ripper is actually an organization!?
“Perhaps Jack the Ripper was just a person in the beginning. But later on, when people saw that there were profits to be had from this, they formed an organization and operated using the name of Jack of Ripper for their benefit.
“Hodge is probably non-core personnel who wanted to join. In addition, I feel that this is no simple organization. There must be influential figures inside, just that we have no way of knowing whether there are people who possess supernatural powers in there.”
In the beginning, everyone had felt that Jack the Ripper must definitely possess special abilities. This was something that was pretty much beyond any doubt. Now, Little Chu was deducing that Jack the Ripper wasn’t just a person but more likely an organization.
In that case, whether or not Jack the Ripper possessed special abilities was disputable now.
An organization and special abilities, wasn’t this mission a little too difficult?
“Very possible.” Tang Luo nodded. However, his expression was serene and free of excitement.
He wasn’t a detective. He thought of himself as a normal person with average intelligence and very ordinary, rather than a character with extraordinary intelligence. Deducing the truth through clues and various traces and hints wasn’t his forte.
To Tang Luo, it would do as long as there was a broad direction they could go in. Whether or not Jack the Ripper was an organization or a person wasn’t actually very important.
“There aren’t any prompts to say that we have completed the mission. Looks like we either need actual evidence or to find and destroy that organization.”
Little Chu was relatively confident in his deduction.
As a matter of fact, setups such as “the murderer isn’t just one person but a group of people” weren’t especially uncommon.
It was nothing more than just one’s thoughts being restricted by some inherent precepts. Once those precepts were broken, one would suddenly see the light.
“In that case, let’s go in that direction and investigate,” replied Tang Luo. He grabbed hold of Little Chu, flipped over the wall again, and returned to the hotel.
“I really saw it!”
They had only just reached the door when Bi Wanhui’s voice from inside the room, whose soundproofing wasn’t very good, reached them. Her voice was hoarse and anxious, giving people who heard her the impression that she was yelling.
“Did something happen?”
A stunned Little Chu knocked on the door immediately.
The room turned silent at once.
“It’s us, we’re back!” said Little Chu as he pressed against the door.
The door opened to reveal Zhou Zhenguo’s exhausted face.
Without waiting for Little Chu to respond, he was pulled inside at once.
Tang Luo followed after him and closed the door along the way.
There were a total of four people in the room. The same number of people as before Tang Luo and Little Chu left.
However, the ‘deployment’ had changed. What used to be a female university student was now a middle-aged man with a beer belly and an awful expression on his face.
It didn’t make anyone happy at all.
“What happened?”
The room’s solemn atmosphere was such that Little Chu couldn’t even spare the time to change back into his own clothes.
“Why don’t you change out first? Something’s gone wrong, Master Xuanzang,” said Zhou Zhenguo.
Obviously, to him, Tang Luo was the only one who was reliable and capable of solving problems.
The belittled Little Chu was rather displeased. However, he didn’t say anything and stepped aside to change instead.
“Cheng Cheng is dead.”
Bi Wanhui still had a look of shock and fear on her face.
However, the bloodstains on her had already vanished.