APP: Chapter 155

Xie Chi coughed. “I will correct you. It isn’t trembling. It is excited.”

Ren Ze, “……”

Xie Chi continued to type: [It isn’t necessarily the old woman. It could be anyone in the room except the actors. Of course, the old woman is indeed the most suspicious one. In addition, knowing this isn’t much help to us when playing the tarot game at the moment.]

Xie Chi was well aware that this time, the priority of knowing the truth was significantly lower than understanding all the rules of the game. He had to ensure his own safety before solving the puzzle. This movie was different from the past. They couldn’t leave after exploring the plot. They had to stay for seven nights. Therefore, the sooner they understood the rules of the game, the more advantageous it was.

Ren Ze couldn’t keep up physically but his mind was very bright. He could easily understand the meaning of Xie Chi’s words. He thought about it and sent: [My floor didn’t have any locked rooms. What about the three rooms beside us? Can you get in?]

As he came up, he noticed that three rooms with locked doors were on the right side of the room.

Xie Chi: [Let’s talk about it later.]

Ren Ze’s eyes lit up. [Are you afraid the servants are saying the opposite? They warned us not to go in but in fact, there are clues inside?]

Xie Chi: [Yes because at present, we haven’t determined if the servants are good or evil.]

Ren Ze thought the same. The rules were made by others so it was hard to say if these people weren’t deliberately misleading them for a certain benefit. The app never said that this was a fair game. The specific situation had to be looked at. Still, it was right to occupy a favorable position.

However, benefits were accompanied by risks. If there was something in the room that came out unexpectedly, they were so close they would bear the brunt of the danger.

Even so, Ren Ze knew that Xie Chi wasn’t a conservative person. The situation didn’t allow him to be conservative. Ren Ze saw Jiang Shuo living in the room on the right. Jiang Shuo might be confident in his strength but Xie Chi had made the decision after much deliberation.

As the two of them talked, Ye Xiaoxiao arrived. Ren Ze closed the door and Xie Chi put down his phone to ask Ye Xiaoxiao, “Did you find any other locked rooms?”

Ye Xiaoxiao shook her head.

In other words, only these three rooms in the entire castle were locked.

Ye Xiaoxiao remembered something. “By the way, I might’ve found something!”

Xie Chi and Ren Ze looked at her. Ye Xiaoxiao wasn’t sure if the information was useful and hesitated to say it. “Some rooms on the floor I checked seemed to have experienced a fire. The rooms were full of black traces that can’t be washed away.”

Xie Chi’s eyes brightened. Ren Ze was reminded of something and exclaimed, “I had it on my floor as well!”

Xie Chi suddenly remembered the charred marks on the castle’s spire that he saw outside the castle.

Ye Xiaoxiao was about to say something when Xie Chi placed an index finger to his lips and motioned for her to be quiet. He followed the strange premonition in his heart and slowly touched it. He abruptly realized something and his expression changed.

“What’s the matter?” Ren Ze had been with Xie Chi for a while and knew that this expression meant something wasn’t good.

Xie Chi didn’t explain and simply stood up. “Come with me.”

Ren Ze and Ye Xiaoxiao glanced at each other and immediately left the room with him. They had already selected a room first and weren’t afraid of competition from others. In addition, the other actors probably weren’t willing to live around rooms most likely to be dangerous.

The two of them followed Xie Chi all the way out of the castle. The app stipulated they couldn’t leave the castle but they could get out of the castle and walk around the grounds within the perimeter of the gates.

Xie Chi’s group of three stared at the old castle in front of them. Xie Chi kept stepping back until he was leaning against the gate. In such a position, he raised his head and could barely see the entire castle.

“What’s wrong?” Ye Xiaoxiao wondered.

Xie Chi didn’t speak. He just pointed at the old castle in front of him. Ye Xiaoxiao followed the finger and found nothing unusual. She glanced at Xie Chi in a puzzled manner and Xie Chi spoke indifferently, “Connect it to the tarot and look.”

“Tarot?” Ye Xiaoxiao looked up again. Once she saw the burnt black marks on the top of the old castle, her expression abruptly changed. “The Tower?!”

Ren Ze heard these words and his expression became ugly in an instant.

Xie Chi retracted his gaze and looked down. It was unknown what he was thinking but after a moment, he laughed abnormally. “That isn’t quite right. It might not be just the Tower.”

“What else?” Ren Ze became nervous.

Xie Chi pointed to the stars above their heads and spoke in a meaningful manner. “Perhaps it is the Tower and the Moon.”

“The Tower and the Moon…” Ye Xiaoxiao’s expression changed and her voice became choked up in her throat.

She was proficient with tarot cards. Xie Chi just had to mention a little bit and she could understand the meaning. Ren Ze was baffled.

Xie Chi told him, “The old castle is the Tower card itself.”

Although the conclusion was already known, Ren Ze was still shocked when he heard Xie Chi say it.

The Tower card, like its name, was a card with a stone tower erected on an unstable foundation. This made people frightened and they could only guess when it would fall.

On the Tower card, the sky behind the tower was dark and gloomy, with ominous thick clouds. Lightning also flashed around it. Then unstoppable lightning descended from the void and struck the top of the tower. The top of the tower was on fire and the crown at the top of the tower was cut down mercilessly by lightning. The king and queen living in the tower fell from the tower and headed toward the endless abyss. What greeted them was… death.

Xie Chi seemed to see something clearly and chuckled. “The Tower is on an unstable foundation and the old castle is on a cliff. The tower is made of stone and the old castle is made of stone. The tower is thin and tall while the Gothic castle is sharp and narrow. The top of the tower was hit by lightning and the ball on the top of the castle was scorched.”

Ren Ze’s mouth dropped open.

Once these details were compared, Xie Chi’s guess wasn’t just a guess. The castle was clearly a replica of the Tower card. Then the rooms with traces of fire…

Ye Xiaoxiao’s mouth was bitter. She knew the meaning of each tarot card. The more she understood, the more ominous it became.

Among the 22 major arcana cards, there weren’t many cards with ominous meanings. The Tower was one of them.

Tarot cards were divided into positive and negative positions. The fortuneteller would shuffle the questioner’s cards during the divination and ask the questioner to place some cards upside down. Then the fortuneteller continued to shuffle and the final shuffled cards were upright. An upright or upside down card had different meanings.

Among the major arcana cards, most of the cards had a good meaning when upright. Only a few had bad meanings when upright and the Tower was a typical example. For the Tower card, the meaning was better when it was upside down than when it was upright.

Now it was clear that the one in front of them was an upright ‘tower’. The castle was standing upright on a cliff. The Tower card meant destruction and sudden disaster. People couldn’t resist and could only choose to accept it.

Ye Xiaoxiao thought about what would happen next, connected it with Xie Chi’s words and paled. “You mean, when the sky is dominated by the moon, we might have someone randomly struck by lightning in the castle?”

She connected it to the meaning of the Tower card and her mood became more and more serious. “It is… completely irresistible and we can only accept it.”

Xie Chi nodded as usual. Facts were facts and there was no need to connect them with emotions. He had no time to let emotions ferment. After all, emotions could affect normal thinking.

“Why is it when the moon appears? Why not when the stars?” Ren Ze only remembered the face of each tarot card and couldn’t derive meaning from it. Once two cards were connected, he couldn’t understand the meaning.

Xie Chi silently pulled out the tarot deck he had previously bought with points from his backpack. He was very familiar with them and in less than 10 seconds, he pulled out the Tower, the Moon and the Star cards from the 22 major arcana cards, giving them to Ren Ze.

“Look clearly at what is on the Star and the Moon cards and what is missing.”

Ren Ze took it and stared. Then his expression sank and his hands holding the tarot cards tightened.

On the Moon card, in the vast moonlight, two towers stood opposite each other, standing separately beside a small path where the lobster was going to walk. The moon was astonishingly bright, like the sun, and sprinkled radiance like petals. This time when Ren Ze saw it, he felt that the yellow petals were like fire that wanted to fall on top of the towers to ignite a tragic fire.

His heart was strangled and jumped. As for the Star card, it was a flat land with fertile soil. There were no tower buildings. There was a potential connection between the ‘Moon’ and the ‘Tower’ cards. So when the moon dominated the sky, the tower might be struck by lightning. Someone would be hit and fall from the tower to death. This was the answer.

Ren Ze immediately thought of something else and his expression darkened. “Xie Chi! This game has been played before! We aren’t the first batch to come here and play!”

“Yes.” Xie Chi nodded and acknowledged it.

The rooms with traces of fire were ones that had been struck by lightning during previous games. The fire burned and the people inside might’ve died and fallen from the castle as the Tower card suggested.

Xie Chi glanced at his watch. In a bit over three hours, they would have to send someone to spin the Wheel of Fortune. Based on the nature of the app, how could it make actors feel good? So there wasn’t much time left.

Ren Ze was a bit angry. “How many rules are they hiding?”

Ye Xiaoxiao was worried. “In fact, it is useless if we know it. The disaster implied by the Tower card is inevitable. Lightning is a natural disaster, not a man-made one. People can only choose to accept it.”

Xie Chi glanced at her with appreciation. “This is where I am puzzled.”

“If the information can’t actually help us, what is the point of knowing it?”

Xie Chi was a pragmatist. He didn’t believe the information they were given was useless so they must’ve missed an important link. They might be able to learn something to avoid the natural disaster-like death caused by the Tower card. It was just that they obviously didn’t know it yet.

Xie Chi remembered something. “Maybe we can ask the Wheel of Fortune.”

Ren Ze’s eyes lit up. Previously when the maid gave the rules of the game, she said the Wheel of Fortune might give some guidance but asked the actors to explore it on their own. Right now, they had nothing. They should try everything in a desperate situation, even if there was no result.

Xie Chi’s thinking became clearer.

They had already inferred that the way in which the tarot elements were applied in this game was through reproduction of the tarot cards. Currently, there was the Star, the Moon, the Tower and the Wheel of Fortune. It was hard to guarantee that there would be no others. The content represented by these cards might’ve already appeared in the castle but just hadn’t been noticed by them.

He had to pay special attention later.

***

[Oh fu*k, it’s so hard.]

[Jiang Shuo guessed it as well! How do the brains of the bigshots grow?]

[It turned out to be the Tower… Fu*k, then will there be the Devil and Death?]

[This second-tier actor doesn’t lose to the movie emperor and is even faster than the movie emperor. Awesome.]

[So what? The app’s movie emperor is the movie emperor. His strength is there.]

[The person above is sour.]

***

Xie Chi’s group walked toward the Wheel of Fortune only to find that the couple in the actors was surrounding the beautiful maid. The beautiful maid was sitting on the single seat chair near the dining room. The chair was old with a deep butt mark on it. It seemed that someone often sat here.

Ren Ze questioned Xie Chi with his eyes. Xie Chi nodded lightly and the three of them changed directions to walk over. They were so close that they could see the beautiful maid wiping a frame.

The photo frame’s style was retro. It was a thick gold frame and the protective glass above the photo was also very thick. This photo frame looked very heavy and the maid couldn’t stop her arms from dropping when holding it. She was obviously unable to hold this stupid thing.

The long table in front of the maid was full of such photo frames. Xie Chi roughly counted and there were more than 10.

The picture frames were full of photos of people but the people had different appearances. The only thing in common was that they were all women. These women had completely different styles. Some were ugly and some were beautiful.

Xie Chi walked to the side of the mute maid, saw the photo frame in her hand and was stunned.

This was a woman with an exquisite appearance. Compared with her, the women in the frames on the table were nothing but mud. Even the beautiful maid in front of him was eclipsed by the woman in the frame. Xie Chi wondered if people could really grow like this naturally.

Ren Ze also looked over and his eyes showed surprise.

The woman in the photo was around 20 years old. She had white skin, black hair and beautiful eyes. Her eyes seemed to have a thousand words hidden in them, making the viewer naturally want to explore it. Even in the photo frame, she could quietly make people’s souls fly away.

Xie Chi leaned against the wall and watched the mute maid wipe the frame. She seemed to be partial to the photo frame with the gorgeous woman. She wiped it again and again in a tireless manner while looking proud. The other frames were ignored by her and stood on the table in an awkward manner.

“What does she have to do with the person in the photo?” The couple to the side whispered.

“I don’t know. She feels very close to it.”

“The one in the photo is a bit weird.”

The beautiful maid seemed to have heard the last sentence. She slammed down the frame and stared at them.

Her eyes were dark and cold like a poisonous snake. The couple was horrified, knowing they might have offended her. They were experienced and knew that one might pay a painful price when offending NPCs. They were just about to apologize when the maid took out a piece of paper and wrote on it.

After dozens of seconds, she raised the piece of paper and the couple who saw it clearly got the creeps.

The words on the paper were big and a dazzling bright red. It said: She is the greatest tarot witch! Talk nonsense again and be careful of her cutting out your tongue!

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Proofreader: Purichan