Chapter 41 - Flowers In The River And The Moon’s Reflection In The Lake (V)

Editor: Kitty

Despite having no signal at all, the cellphone received a text message.

The notification sound was an old, jingling song, and its sudden ring in the empty cla.s.sroom scared Luo Jian to the point where gooseb.u.mps appeared on his skin. It took a long time for him to respond. He pressed his fingers on the keyboard of the cellphone to turn it on. The text message was very strange. The sender’s name was empty, and the contents were as follows:

[You are in a double-sided secret room; one side is real while the other side is not, and the door that you can escape from is only present on one side. Can you recognize the difference between reality and illusion? Even if your body dies, the illusory world will still keep its doors wide open for you so that you can remain here forever. Perhaps that’s how you will meet your end.]

“Truth and fallacies.” Luo Jian put away the cellphone and checked his surroundings. The room appeared to be the same as what he’d seen previously. Except for the lack of corpses, the cla.s.sroom was no different from before. The blackboard still held the scribbled poem…… poem. Luo Jian’s eyes widened suddenly, and he stared at the blackboard. He found a strange phenomenon: the words on the blackboard…… were written in reverse.

“The mirror’s world,” Luo Jian muttered to himself.

“Here…… It’s the world in the mirror.”

“Since it’s reversed, then this is the illusory world, and the battle I just experienced was the so-called reality.” The blood, fighting, killing, and sounds of shrieking were real. Luo Jian sat on the ground with his back against the blackboard. He looked at his hands that wore a pair of dark black tactical gloves. There were many traces of blood on the exposed knuckles, and blood had spilled all over the gloves. He still remembered the sensation of waving the butcher’s knife and the feeling of chopping all the corpses into pieces. It was very real. There were also splashes of blood on his face. Bright red colours had stained the entirety of his vision.

Was there anything more frightening than reality?

The time on the cellphone had stopped. Besides this, Luo Jian didn’t have any other tools to check the time. He did not know how long it would be until he reached the three-hour mark or how much longer he could stay in this secret room. Luo Jian didn’t have any way to figure out these answers.

When he saw the message, Luo Jian understood that not only had he failed to find the key to open the door, but he also had no way to determine which was the real door. What would happen if he accidentally opened the wrong door?

If Luo Jian guessed correctly, then this secret chamber was like its name, Flowers In The River And The Moon’s Reflection In The Lake, and was a secret chamber reflected in a mirror. The room consisted of the real world on one side and the mirrored world on the other, that is, the so-called reality and illusion. The world in the mirror appeared inverted, which Luo Jian confirmed using the words written in reverse on the blackboard. If everything was as he imagined, then the books and textbooks in this cla.s.sroom and the words inside them would also be reversed.

And this chamber…… Luo Jian was previously astounded by the bodies that disappeared without a trace. When he’d calmed down, he found that the whole illusory chamber appeared to be reflected. The windows that had been on the right were on the left, and the placement of the doors had changed from left to right. In other words, everything was placed in the opposite location.

And all this made up the mirrored reflection side of the secret chamber.

Although he did not yet know whether it was helpful or not, time seemed to stop in this illusory secret chamber. The three-hour time limit had halted at a certain point, but Luo Jian was not sure whether time was still flowing normally outside in the real secret chamber.

There was a door in the illusory secret chamber and one in the real secret chamber. Which one was the real exit? According to common sense, most people would think that the door in the real secret chamber was the real exit. If everything in the illusory secret chamber was an illusion, then naturally, even the door should have been fake.

But the secret chamber was not a place where common sense ruled. Since even the dead could be resurrected, why couldn’t the real door be in the fake world?

Since there were two doors, there were probably two sets of keys.

When Luo Jian thought of these issues, he felt a slight headache. He antic.i.p.ated that there would be a lot of possibilities. If there were two keys, he would face the same problem. It was impossible to have a key that was on one side while the other key was built in the opposite way. The secret chamber had laid down a trap for Luo Jian: there were two identical doors in different s.p.a.ces. The locations of the doors were different, with one on the left and the other on the right, but the two doors appeared the same. Not only that, but the keyholes also looked the same. Naturally, a situation where the keys would have different appearances would not exist.

That is to say, Luo Jian had to distinguish not only which door was the real exit, but also which key was the real key. If the fake door was opened with the real key, or the real door was opened with the fake key, he didn’t know what would happen to him.

The trap was deliberately laid by the secret chamber, and naturally, the goal was to trap Luo Jian in here forever. Time would continue to flow in the real secret chamber. If the right door and key couldn’t be found before time ran out, then in order to survive, Luo Jian would have to enter the illusory secret chamber where time came to a stop.

As he thought about this, Luo Jian suddenly understood something. His face was pale white, and his face was covered in cold sweat.

If he really couldn’t escape, it would be just as the text message had described. Even if his body had died, the illusory world would still keep its doors wide open for him to let him remain here forever……

“I would still end up dying.”

But so far, Luo Jian had not found any keys…… no, he did have a bunch of keys that he’d taken from the teacher’s body.

Luo Jian reached out and took out the keys, breathed in deeply, and went to the door of the secret chamber. He began to check the fit of every key, but unfortunately, he didn’t find a match.

“It seems that these keys are really useless.”

Not everything in the secret chamber had a role to play. It depended on how you reacted. Some people were born as strategic geniuses at this sort of game. They could quickly and accurately find the keys and props and solve the puzzles, but it seemed that Luo Jian wasn’t one of those people.

In both work and daily life, Luo Jian had always thought that his IQ was high enough, but here, he hated that he couldn’t eat Newton’s apple so that his IQ would soar to the levels of Edison, Einstein, and even fictional figures like Sherlock Holmes.

In such a chaotic situation, Luo Jian even began to recall the stories of Detective Conan’s confined room murder cases, but they didn’t help his current situation at all. After searching through the illusory secret chamber, Luo Jian found that there were no big differences between the real secret chamber and this one here. Except for the opposite placement of the objects and the reversed words in the textbooks, there were no differences, and there was nothing extra here. There was nothing missing except the bodies that disappeared.

“Why are there no corpses in this illusory secret chamber?” Luo Jian was helpless and started to think about this problem. He suddenly thought of the key prop that linked the two mirrored chambers, the broken mirror.

So, how did the mirror break? Why were the fragments in the hands of several different corpses? Who was the owner of the mirror? Luo Jian had a rough guess as to the answers to these questions. It was impossible for boys to use this kind of small mirror, so it absolutely had to belong to a girl. There were not many girls in the cla.s.sroom. There were only five or six female corpses among the 30-something corpses.

Luo Jian suddenly noticed a small detail. All the pieces of the mirror, except for the ones he got from the teacher and found on the ground, had been hidden in the corpses of women. The last one was found in his seat when he woke up in the secret room.

There was also a problem that he discovered after much thinking. There was one missing corpse in the cla.s.sroom: the one that belonged in the seat that Luo Jian had been in when he’d woken up at the beginning. There were 35 seats, and Luo Jian occupied one of them. Naturally, Luo Jian could not count himself as one of the students. So, there were thirty-five students but only thirty-four corpses. Where did the last one go?

Was the person who disappeared the so-called murderer? Or was the person not dead?

Luo Jian had a terrible headache. Now, he had no clue. This secret chamber was silent. Luo Jian felt tired since he had been risking his life while fighting for an hour. He had b.l.o.o.d.y cuts on his waist and abdomen and a circle of bruises on his throat. His whole body was full of b.l.o.o.d.y teeth marks. Those corpses were like zombies and had wanted to eat him. Fortunately, they did not seem to have any viral infection. If they did, Luo Jian would be lying dead with them now.

After experiencing a great battle and thinking about the problems of the secret chamber, Luo Jian was exhausted. He was dizzy and wanted to sleep. But Luo Jian was not sure whether there was a time limit in the illusory secret chamber where time had stopped. So, he thought about it and did an experiment. He grasped the broken mirror again and read the poem he’d read before once.

But this time there was no reaction at all. After thinking about it, Luo Jian suddenly came up with an idea and read the poem backwards. Then there was a faint feeling of suffocation. When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the floor was soaked in jet-black corpse water and covered in bone debris.

The corpse of the teacher was still hanging over Luo Jian’s head, swaying slightly.

He had returned to the real secret chamber. The mirror and the mysterious poem seemed to be the key props and keywords, which were essential to the chamber.

The real secret chamber was much more pleasing to the eye than the illusory one. It was just that the disgusting stink of corpses in the air made it difficult for Luo Jian to breathe, but that was not a problem. He was almost used to it. He walked around the cla.s.sroom once again, and he noticed that the only bodies that he hadn’t fought were the teacher’s corpse hanging on the ceiling and the female corpse who had been raped to death. Both were motionless. The female corpse still sat in her original position and was covered with the curtains pulled down by Luo Jian.

It seemed that both were key figures. Judging from the previous message slips that he had found, they were the protagonists of the main incident. Maybe they had something in common.

Thinking of this, Luo Jian went to the woman’s corpse, pulled the curtains away, and began to observe her carefully from her head to her feet.

This girl had probably been beautiful when she was still alive. Her clothes and style were much better than that of the other female corpses. The bones of her hands also had slight cracks, which made Luo Jian guess that her hands had been tied before she died. Similarly, Luo Jian also found that she wore a ring on her ring finger.

Luo Jian suddenly noticed that the ring looked slightly familiar. He observed it for a long time before suddenly standing up and going to the teacher’s corpse on the podium. He looked at the man’s left hand. He wore a similar ring on his hand, and it appeared to match the ring on the hand of the female corpse. It was a pair of lovers’ rings.

Maybe…… Maybe the teacher and this student had some bodily relations, but at the same time, they were just ordinary lovers and were merely dating. Even if the age gap was very large, even if they were not tolerated by the secular world, Luo Jian could see that they indeed did have feelings for one another, which was shown in the act of exchanging rings.

“This is a complete tragedy,” Luo Jian murmured, looking at the ring and feeling a little disappointed and frustrated.

No matter what the cause of the incident was or who instigated the dispute, the girl had merely fallen in love, and the subject of her young love was the teacher in her cla.s.s. However, she was then isolated by the whole cla.s.s. After this, something bad occurred. Luo Jian could not figure out what exactly happened, but it obviously caused some students to completely erupt in anger, which caused some of the more extreme students to rape this girl. The teacher came to save her, but he was beaten and killed by his students and hung on the podium.

Luo Jian felt a little uncomfortable with this conclusion. He moved his line of sight away from the ring and carefully observed the two corpses again. This time, he realized something significant.

T/N: The explanation of the keys and doors may be confusing and I took a while to understand what exactly the author is trying to imply from the raws as well. If you’re confused, comment on the comment section and I’ll try my best to explain. ^~^