APP: Chapter 163

[Xie Chi is in danger!!]

[Cool hahahaha.]

[Xie Chi has no time.]

Less than 10 minutes after You Jie died, the third night arrived. Everyone simply followed Jiang Shuo down to the first floor and stopped in front of the Wheel of Fortune. Jiang Shuo was full of thoughts and absent-mindedly turned the wheel.

The pointer slowly stopped. Everyone was stunned and then looked very happy. The pointer unexpectedly stopped on the side of Anubis. This meant that in the next few hours, the stars would dominate the sky and they were relatively safe. It was exciting news.

The actors dispersed and Gu Yu stood beside Jiang Shuo, waiting for his signal. Jiang Shuo leaned against the wall. He took out a black mechanical crossbow from his app backpack and tied it to his left hand little by little.

His movements were light and meticulous. He seemed to be full of love for this item. It was this item that aimed at the enemy, piercing through the foggy gravestone forest and directly piercing into Shen Yi’s heart from the back, badly injuring him.

Gu Yu recalled it and couldn’t help feeling a bit frightened. This was the top red item that was as famous as the Blood Demon Sword, the Void Crossbow. Since the crossbow was as fast as lightning and shapeless, it seemed to be shot directly from the boundless void. This was why it was called this name.

The Void Crossbow had two types of arrows. One was an ordinary arrow that was produced continuously and never ran out. The other was only produced once in a horror movie and could accumulate two soul chasing arrows at most.

An ordinary arrow was black while the soul chasing arrow was red. Previously, the one that hit Shen Yi was the soul chasing arrow. As long as the soul chasing arrow had the flesh or tissue of the person or ghost being chased smeared on it, e.g. blood or hair, it would work. The soul chasing arrow would follow the breath of the person or ghost until they were hit.

It was often one hit, one kill.

Jiang Shuo loaded an ordinary black arrow and sneered. “Come upstairs with me and kill the crows.”

***

Xie Chi sat on the thickly carpeted stairs. Ye Xiaoxiao and Ren Ze were leaning against the railing looking at him. They had already learnt well and wouldn’t interfere with Xie Chi’s thoughts. Xie Chi pulled out the tarot cards again and examined them one by one. The cards slipped from his fingers and scattered on the stairs. Then he threw the remaining cards on the stairs beside him.

Xie Chi murmured in his mind, “Brother, I always think I am missing something.”

“There is no rush. Think about it again,” Xie Xinglan comforted warmly.

Usually when Xie Chi concentrated on thinking, Xie Xinglan would fall into a deep sleep so as to not cause unnecessary interference with his logical reasoning. This instance was really compact and dangerous so there was no spare time for them to communicate.

He was just always there.

Xie Chi suddenly felt that his head no longer hurt so much. He was about to pick up the tarot cards to continue looking at them when he thought of something. He looked around and suddenly frowned. After that, he asked Ren Ze next to him. “Have you seen those servants?”

Ren Ze was stunned. Yes, he hadn’t seen those servants for a long time. He had been thinking about the plot and hadn’t paid attention to the servants. Now that Xie Chi mentioned it, he remembered that those people hadn’t been seen for a long time.

Xie Chi’s expression changed slightly. Suddenly, there was a bang from upstairs, followed by a crow’s eerie cry. Then there was a click as something outside the window hit the ground.

Ren Ze was taken aback for a moment. Then he ran to the window to see. There was a dying crow on the ground, bleeding and its wings twitching. He looked up and saw a pale hand protruding from the upper window. A black crossbow was tied to that pale hand. The owner of the crossbow was firing an arrow and preparing to shoot the next crow. In the dark and gloomy sky, the remaining 10 crows seemed greatly frightened and started to run around. The flapping of their wings was constantly heard.

The black crow’s feathers were flying and black spots covered their eyes. This scene was ominous and the strange cries in their ears were chilling. Ren Ze stared at the blood vomited up by the crows on the ground and felt weird in his heart.

“Xie Chi, Jiang Shuo is shooting at the crows! Come and see!” Ren Ze called out as he turned back.

Xie Chi had already jumped down the stairs two or three steps at a time. He rushed to the window and just happened to meet a crow’s eyes.

The crows were originally fed very well. Their eyes were originally dark and energetic but the eyeballs in front of him were empty and gray. The dark eyes were covered with a strange gloom.  There was Xie Chi’s reflection in it which seemed like a vast ocean. Hot tears mixed with blood flowed down from the dirty corners of its eyes.

Xie Chi stared for a while before his expression changed dramatically. “It’s bad!”

“What is it?”

Xie Chi’s expression was like facing the enemy and Ren Ze tensed up. Xie Chi called out Xie Xinglan to take over. Then he quickly headed upstairs, talking as he walked. “The feather of the ibis, Thoth the supervisor of the Akashic Records, the crow is our watcher!”

Ren Ze immediately recalled that Jiang Shuo had picked up a red feather when they first entered the instance. Xie Chi said it was a feather from the ibis on the Star card. The ibis was the symbol of Thoth, the Egyptian god of time. Thoth was the ‘supervisor’ of the book of the universe, the Akashic Records. So the feather was meant to imply… the crows were their watchers?!

Ye Xiaoxiao’s breath was stuck in her throat. The feather actually had such a meaning.

The two of them saw Xie Chi’s urgent expression and immediately caught up. Ren Ze anxiously asked, “Xie Chi, where are you going?”

He and Ye Xiaoxiao looked at each other with doubts in their eyes. Even if the crows were the watchers, why did Xie Chi react so strongly? After all, the crows weren’t really harming them at the moment.

Xie Chi had no time to answer. “Keep up!”

Xie Xinglan moved quickly and disappeared around the corner in the blink of an eye. Ren Ze and Ye Xiaoxiao chased after him, watching Xie Xinglan go up to the second floor, making a half circle around the circular corridor of the castle before finally stopping in front  of the row of servant rooms.

Previously when picking their rooms, they paid special attention to the fact that the servants’ rooms were here. Xie Chi kicked open the servants’ rooms one by one, his face gradually becoming gloomy.

Sure enough. The 11 rooms were empty. They weren’t in the room but they also weren’t outside the room. It was as if they suddenly disappeared. Ye Xiaoxiao were completely dumbfounded when they saw these 11 empty rooms.

Ye Xiaoxiao asked, “Where have the people gone?”

Ren Ze murmured, “Wait—”

Ren Ze connected it with the implication of the ibis and reacted abruptly. “Did the servants change into crows?”

11 servants were missing from the castle and there were 11 crows outside… Ren Ze suddenly remembered something else. The servants always wore black clothes. The clothes were made of unknown material, shiny and soft…

Was it crow feathers? Were the clothes made from the crows’ feathers?!

This also explained why the maid who led them could swallow the key! She wasn’t human, she was a crow! Ren Ze’s heart was pounding.

Xie Chi only had time to nod. He didn’t give an explanation and turned around to leave.

“Where are you going?” Ren Ze went after him.

Xie Chi didn’t stop and had Xie Xinglan run as fast as possible without looking back. “Don’t follow me! I’m going to Jiang Shuo!”

Ren Ze thought he heard incorrectly. Xie Chi was… stopping Jiang Shuo? Did it mean saving the crows? However, he knew Xie Chi would never joke when it was crucial and his heart was going to jump out of his throat. Xie Chi was facing Jiang Shuo this time and might die.

He couldn’t catch up with Xie Chi and could only shout anxiously from behind. “Don’t worry! It is just surveillance. Jiang Shuo shooting the crows is good for us! Why save the servants?! No matter what, you can’t confront him now!”

Xie Chi turned his head, his voice cold. “There might be the ‘Hermit’ among the crows.”

Xie Chi sighed deeply and tried to stay calm. He finally knew what he had forgotten. On the surface, there were 11 actors but only 10 of them were real actors. One was the witch’s body. Then why were there 11 crows to correspond to each one of them? What was the extra one?!

He had ignored the connection between actors, crows and servants. These three weren’t separate. In the beginning when the crows danced, the 11 servants picked a crow and stood in a row. The crows flew out of the servants’ hands and after dancing, flew to the actors in a different order. It seemed to be a one-to-one correspondence between the servants, crows and actors but… what if one of the actors was actually the witch?

Then it became 10 actors, 11 crows and 11 servants. What was the extra servant? What was the extra crow…?

Since it was the death order, there had always been only 10 real actors participating and Xie Qiuying wasn’t in the death order. So why were there 11 servants and 11 crows participating in that weird dance?

All of them seemed to correspond but there were actually many errors and omissions after careful consideration. The condition of 11 actors was no longer valid and their conclusion naturally fell apart.

If Xie Qiuying wanted to hide among them, she became the 11th one. There was one more actor so there must be another crow and servant. These were his previous thoughts. He had been stuck in this place several times and couldn’t go deeper. He even thought it was a useless path. However, if he looked at it from the other way around…

Was Xie Qiuying’s purpose really to hide among them? Obviously not. Otherwise she wouldn’t die so easily. It was ridiculous that it took so much energy to hide among them only to die just due to one or two testing sentences from him. After all, apart from the three of them, the other actors were only slightly suspicious of Xie Qiuying and he would never tell the other actors that Xie Qiuying had a problem.

So why did she do that? She could’ve continued lurking. Then thinking deeply, what was the meaning of lurking? Xie Chi couldn’t figure it out. Did Xie Qiuying simply want to be around them? This was meaningless.

If it was for eavesdropping, weren’t the crows a better choice? She could get any information she wanted without much effort. The witch became a living person and there were always intrigues among the actors. How could they easily reveal information to her?

Let alone when she was a cannon fodder that had no sense of existence. If it was to kill people then that was even more difficult. The tarot cards such as the Tower and Death cards could easily kill people. Why did the witch have to come in person? So far, what the witch had done could be summed up simply—confusion.

Hiding herself wasn’t her goal. The real purpose was to… hide the rules. Further down, the purpose was… to hide the crows.

It wasn’t for the purpose of lurking among them that a crow and servant were created to correspond with her. It was because… there was one more crow. She needed to create an actor and servant to cover up the existence of that crow.

It just so happened that there was a beautiful maid among the servants who was very weird. She praised the woman in the photo frame as the greatest ‘tarot witch’.

Behind the deliberate confusion of the death order, the key information points really hidden were the ‘crow’ and ‘Hermit’. The answer to why the witch killed You Jie, the blank card, came out at this moment. She needed the death of the blank card to cover up the real Hermit card.

After all, in the eyes of other actors, You Jie was the Hermit. Even if the actor knew that You Jie was a blank card, his death would just make people think that the Hermit card was missing. Or You Jie’s death would make them believe You Jie knew a key clue related to the Hermit but was silenced.

They would start the next exploration around You Jie’s death. Their attention would shift. She would let the actors focus on You Jie and ignore the real clues about the Hermit.

The correct number was always 10, no matter if it was an actor or the servants and crows.

Xie Chi hadn’t expected that the extra crow would be changed by the witch. However, motivation was everything. All of the witch’s actions were demonstrating her true purpose.

It just so happened that the Hermit literally meant ‘hiding’. This implied hiding, whether forced or active.

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Proofreader: Purichan