Chapter 9: Madman’s Pantomime: 8

The madman in the corridor clutching cookies shaped like little pistols, the rules about not lazing in bed and not crying and carrying on, the elevator’s reminder, the bathhouse they were headed to next, and the sudden shift in the weather…

It turned out every last detail corresponded to something else. Going by the schedule, the next place they were headed was the bathhouse.

Qiu Xinxin cross-referenced them and dug out every scrap of information tied to the bathhouse.

“Bathe, do not sleep.” “Same-sex guests are strictly forbidden from playing house in the bathroom.” Those were the only entries on their rule list so far.

But one glaring problem remained.

Of the six players in this dungeon, five were men. She was the only woman.

That meant if something went wrong in the bathhouse, there might not be anyone left to collect her remains.

Lin Yi had fallen deep into thought as well.

First, he was not human.

Second, he did not count as human.

Third, he was not human…

Ruan Yu, meanwhile, wore an expression of breezy serenity. He reached up and pressed his wounds again, then casually wiped the blood off on the hem of his shirt.

Everyone was lost in their own thoughts. Nan Lin glanced, faintly puzzled, at the various statues of silence around him, then turned and walked off without a word.

Sure enough, he thought, I still don’t understand how their brains are wired.

Ruan Yu had been tracking Nan Lin’s every move, and he was the first to follow.

Soon the whole group arrived at the bathhouse, right on schedule.

Because the asylum had stood for so many decades, much of its infrastructure dated back to a bygone era. Each floor had only two bathhouses, side by side. Men on the left, women on the right.

The cloth curtain hanging in the doorway gave off a faint sour stink. Nan Lin and Ruan Yu exchanged a glance and went in first.

Lin Yi followed close behind, and Zou Zhiming brought up the rear with Song De slung over his shoulder.

Once they had all disappeared inside, Qiu Xinxin took a deep breath, lifted the curtain, and entered the bathhouse next door.

The bathhouse was divided into two sections. On one side ran a long, continuous pool lined with a row of spigots. On the other, waist-high cubicles had been partitioned off with wooden planks, each with a showerhead hanging crookedly overhead.

Once he had the layout in mind, Zou Zhiming, who was still supporting Song De, suddenly spoke up. “He won’t stop shaking.”

At that, Nan Lin did see Song De twitching uncontrollably, muttering something under his breath.

“Save me… save me… I don’t want to die…”

“Am I crazy? No! I’m not crazy, I’m not crazy!”

“What do we do?” Zou Zhiming’s gaze bounced back and forth between Nan Lin and Lin Yi.

In the muggy air, Nan Lin turned on one of the spigots, snatched up a rotting wooden basin, and the moment the cold water had barely covered its bottom, he flung it into Song De’s face without the slightest warning.

Zou Zhiming had no chance to dodge and got splashed wet along with him.

But after that basin of water, Song De’s condition visibly improved. His eyes were still unfocused, though he could barely be counted as lucid.

Nan Lin: “Keep an eye on him. Don’t let him fall asleep.”

After all, the rule list clearly stated: [Bathe, do not sleep.]

“Right, got it.” Zou Zhiming looked at Nan Lin with gratitude in his eyes, only to find that the man seemed entirely indifferent to his thanks, head bowed, idly filling a basin with water.

He felt as though he ought to say something more, but then Nan Lin spoke again. “Come here.”

Zou Zhiming hurried to answer. “Oh.”

Another figure moved faster, however, circling straight past him toward Nan Lin.

Zou Zhiming looked more closely and realized Nan Lin’s gaze had never been on him at all. Those eyes were fixed, unblinking, on… Ruan Yu, wasn’t that his name?

He scratched his head in some embarrassment. The cropped stubble felt prickly against his palm.

Lin Yi shot the others a mildly exasperated look, then walked off to a corner by himself. Staring down at himself, wrapped up tight as he was, he found himself at something of a loss.

Compared to the strange atmosphere on that side, things were far more ordinary where Nan Lin was.

His gaze lingered on the crisscrossing wounds covering Ruan Yu’s body. Even as he marveled at how the man had managed to do that to himself, he said, “Take it off.”

A blush crept slowly across Ruan Yu’s face: S… so… so soon?!

He raised his eyes to Nan Lin, one hand resting on the buttons of his shirt, looking so adorably helpless that it was positively bewitching. It reminded Nan Lin of a kitten whose owner had just fastened a bell around its neck.

Nan Lin felt something stir in him, some emotion he couldn’t quite parse.

He peeled the labels off the few packets of wound medicine he had and stuffed the whole lot into Ruan Yu’s arms. Then he shifted aside to give him room.

He understood that applying medicine was an intensely private thing. It usually meant a person was at their most helpless and vulnerable, and it tended to make their guard and their aggression spike.

Nan Lin leaned against the window, watching the dark shadows sway outside. He checked the time again. Fifteen minutes left until the washing period ended.

“Brother.”

Ruan Yu’s soft voice came again. Nan Lin turned to find those eyes brimming with unshed tears.

He paused, then asked coolly, “What?”

Ruan Yu turned slightly, presenting his scarred back. “I can’t reach,” he said quietly.

From that angle, the clean, beautiful lines of his muscles showed perfectly. Tensed as they were with pain, the soft contours of his body had grown taut and defined, like a painting of brutal beauty that traced out the most primal of desires.

Set against a body like that, Nan Lin realized with a jolt that this man’s beauty was aggressive in nature. Only under his deliberate disguise was it buried beneath layer after layer of docile compliance.

Yet no disguise, however seamless, could hold up once a single seam split open. That was all it took to invite suspicion.

Nan Lin’s retreat was swift and coldly distant, and the faint thread of pity he had carried vanished with it.

In that instant, he seemed to become again what he had once been: a lofty, pure white existence, untouched by feeling.

Sensing Nan Lin withdraw, Ruan Yu finally raised his head and brushed away the tears clinging to the corners of his eyes before they could fall.

With Nan Lin gone, he couldn’t be bothered to cry.

But when Nan Lin reached the other side of the bathhouse, his brow furrowed. He crouched down, patted Zou Zhiming on the shoulder, and woke the man with a gentleness that was anything but gentle.

Zou Zhiming jerked awake. His pupils slowly came into focus, and then naked panic flooded his face. A sheet of cold sweat drenched his back, and his heart leapt straight into his throat.

Nan Lin asked in a frigid voice, “What happened?”

“Sorry, sorry, I… I don’t know! I was just sitting here, and then all of a sudden I felt so sleepy I couldn’t keep my eyes open!”

“How much sanity do you have left?” Beside Zou Zhiming’s near collapse, Nan Lin was calm to the point of terrifying.

Snapped alert again, Zou Zhiming pulled up his personal status panel, and his face went even paler. “Under 55!”

Nan Lin: “…”

Outside the dungeon, Nan Lin’s complicated expression was rendered in sharp detail on a personal screen.

One of the spectators laughed. “This rookie has already burned through more sanity than this Nan Lin guy even started with!”

“HAHAHA, I can practically see the deadpan in his eyes.”

“Um…”

“What?”

“Do you guys want to take a look at… his current sanity?”

“…”

“…”

Inside the dungeon, Nan Lin glanced at his own sanity. Not a ripple went through him.

【Player Nan Lin’s sanity: 40.】

Nan Lin: Perfectly normal. Don’t panic. Not a big deal.

(Like hell it wasn’t. It was a huge problem.)

He knew his mental state had never been good. But when he had entered the game the previous round, it had never been deducted automatically like this.

Could it be because of Murder Day?

Nan Lin pressed lightly against his wound. The sour, biting pain dragged his thoughts swiftly out of that place.

Yet he clearly wasn’t all that heartbroken, was he?

Whatever had been taken from him, he would simply take it back. That was all there was to it.

So why was it like this?

【Player Nan Lin’s sanity drops: 40 → 39】

Hearing that, Nan Lin hastily let go and gave his own wound a few comforting pats.

No one else noticed the turbulence hidden beneath his calm surface. Ruan Yu followed after him without a trace, keeping a comfortable distance.

The bell rang again, marking the official end of the washing period.

They filed out of the bathhouse one after another. From the bathhouse next door came Qiu Xinxin, running, her face white but with no visible injuries.

She took several deep breaths. Her voice still trembled, but she had recovered a fair bit of composure. “There should be a tunnel underneath the women’s bathhouse too.”

Nan Lin’s brow twitched. Are we playing whack-a-mole here?

“However,” she steadied her voice, “I couldn’t get in. At first I just noticed the spot sat slightly higher than the ground around it, maybe a few millimeters.”

“But here’s the problem. It seemed to be… alive?”

She sounded almost unsure of those last two words, her voice rising at the end as though asking a question.

“I only touched it like this.”

Qiu Xinxin held out her hands to the empty air, as if she were feeling something beyond comprehension.

“Like this, and then the entrance responded to me. It covered my hand. Just like that. It said the tunnel below could let me leave the asylum. I wanted so badly to say yes…”

She raised her other hand and interlaced its fingers tightly with the one she had held out.

The gesture looked exactly like that of a devout believer.

Nan Lin’s voice cut through her reverie. “Take a look at your own sanity.”

The instant he said it, Ruan Yu leaned in close. “Brother… you suspect she’s…”

Nan Lin: “Mm.”

She wasn’t insane. But her mind had been contaminated, and her perception had begun to distort.

This Initial Dungeon was concentrating its attacks squarely on sanity…

Nan Lin rubbed his fingertips together, an expression of sudden understanding on his face.

A coincidence… or someone’s deliberate design?

Qiu Xinxin opened her personal panel. The moment she saw how far her sanity had plummeted, her face turned exceedingly grim.

【Player Qiu Xinxin’s sanity: 59.】

“It dropped 23 points…” she murmured. “But I didn’t do anything wrong.”

Yet under Nan Lin’s gaze, Qiu Xinxin suddenly understood her mistake.

Setting aside whether a bathhouse, an area soaked in water for long stretches, would even have a tunnel beneath it, the mere fact that a dead object had answered her call should have set off alarm bells. She hadn’t noticed a thing.

“Had you answered it, you’d probably be insane by now,” Nan Lin stated, perfectly objective.

“I don’t know. I completely lost my head back there. I’m sorry.” Qiu Xinxin’s voice shrank smaller and smaller until she stopped, her face faintly flushed with embarrassment.

Nan Lin was puzzled. What did she have to apologize for?

She hadn’t done anything, had she?

But why had it gone after her? Had she unwittingly broken some rule?

It seemed he needed to find the remaining rule sheets as soon as possible and piece the whole list together.

With that thought, he turned and headed back toward the wards alone, ignoring Ruan Yu, who skipped along behind him.

[Bedtime: 20:00–6:00]

The group was preparing to return to their rooms when Lin Yi abruptly stopped. “Song De, I’d suggest you share a room with Zou Zhiming tonight.”

But Song De, who had only just come back to himself, did not trust him in the slightest. He shouted, “The nurse already assigned our rooms! You want me dead, is that it!”

He barged past Qiu Xinxin, sending her staggering, and stormed back to the room he had been given from the start, slamming the door shut behind him.

“Looking for a death sentence,” Nan Lin murmured.

It had only been an offhand warning. Since the person it was meant for refused to appreciate it, he had no one but himself to blame if the other players left him to his fate.

Silence settled over the corridor once more.

Back in the same room, Nan Lin met Ruan Yu’s gaze.