A bizarre and terrifying experience; I messed up the dungeon world.

He deliberately grouped the mature woman and the schoolboy together. Putting two problematic individuals together—the mature woman wanting to manipulate others, and the schoolboy (or rather, the strange entity within him) with unclear motives—was intended to create a balance of power between them.

Han Yingying was paired with the girl with the ponytail because he needed Han Yingying to observe the girl up close. Han Yingying was alert enough to gather information without alerting the girl.

"Let's go." Zhou Lang stood up, giving no one a chance to object.

-

Zhou Lang and Brother Liu went to the outskirts of the inn first.

The lake was as still as a corpse during the day. The huge silhouette that had emerged from the lake last night had vanished, but footprints remained on the muddy shore.

Large footprints. Barefoot, with the marks of five toes clearly visible. Each footprint was nearly ten centimeters deep in the mud.

"How heavy must it be to leave such a deep footprint?" Brother Liu squatted down and measured the length of the footprint. "Nearly fifty centimeters. What kind of ghost has such a big foot?"

"A giant's perspective," Zhou Lang said.

"What?"

"Forensic terminology. A corpse submerged in water will decompose and swell, becoming very large."

Brother Liu's expression was not good.

The footprints stretched from the lakeside all the way to the back of the inn, disappearing near the storeroom. Zhou Lang noticed that the storeroom door was closed, the black water that had gushed out last night was gone, and the ground was clean—just like the shoes of the schoolboy in his uniform. The daytime world had erased the traces of night, but the footprints remained.

"Interesting," Zhou Lang muttered to himself, "The footprints haven't been erased."

"What do you mean?"

"Although day and night are different worlds, some things are common. The fact that the footprints haven't disappeared means that the thing that left the footprints crossed the boundary between day and night."

"You mean that big guy that came out of the lake?"

"Yes. It is not bound by the day-night rule—or at least not entirely."

This information is crucial. If there are strange phenomena that are not bound by the day-night cycle, then the meaning of "no safe period" becomes even clearer.

They then went around to the front of the inn and inspected the exterior walls. The walls on the first and second floors were made of wood, but there were several places that had clearly been repaired, and the color and grain of the wood planks were inconsistent. There was a charred mark on the exterior wall of the third floor that had been covered with paint, but the burn marks were still faintly visible under the sunlight.

"There was a fire on the third floor," Zhou Lang said. "Not the second floor, but the third floor."

"You just told Boss Feng about the second floor—"

"I was bluffing him. But as you saw, his reaction proved that a fire had indeed occurred."

Zhou Lang recalled the fragmented information provided by the system. The Eye of Peeping had only displayed a few seconds of footage, but one frame contained flames. Flames were billowing from a window on the third floor of the inn.

A young couple. A young couple who came to visit were implicated and burned to death.

He pieced together the puzzle in his mind. Boss Feng sold his daughter and drowned his wife. After her death, his wife became a monster and sealed him in a cement wall—no, Boss Feng was still active during the day. The one sealed in the wall was his wife herself.

This is contradictory.

The murderer was Boss Feng, but the victim was the one who was trapped?

Unless, a third party intervenes. A force stronger than Boss Feng and his wife has trapped everyone—including the perpetrators and victims—in this inn.

The mastermind behind the scenes.

The person who set fire to the guesthouse.

Zhou Lang looked up at the third floor. The window of the boy in the school uniform's room was open, and the curtains swayed gently in the breeze.

"Let's go check the first floor."

They had already checked the counter in the lobby on the first floor last night. This time, Zhou Lang focused his inspection on a small door in the corner of the lobby. The door was labeled "Storage Room," but when he pushed it open, he found that it wasn't a storage room at all—it was a staircase leading to the basement.

It's not a basement, it's a sewer.

The staircase was narrow, allowing only one person to pass at a time, and the walls were covered in moss and water stains. Zhou Lang turned on his phone's flashlight and shone it down. At the end of the stairs was a pipe, about 1.5 meters in diameter, just big enough for an adult to bend over and pass through.

The sound of running water came from the pipe, intermittent, as if something was moving in the water.

"Shall we go down and take a look?" Brother Liu asked.

"No rush." ​​Zhou Lang closed the door. "The sewers are its territory. Going during the day might be okay, but we don't have enough information. Going in rashly would be suicide."

"It? You mean the arsonist?"

Zhou Lang didn't answer because two people walked into the hall—Han Yingying and the girl with the ponytail.

Han Yingying's expression was somewhat subtle.

"What did you find out?" Zhou Lang asked.

"There are six rooms on the second floor. Besides the three we're staying in, there are three empty rooms. Two of them are regular empty rooms, but the one at the very back—" Han Yingying paused, "is locked. Locked from the outside, a very new lock."

How new is it?

"It's much newer than everything else in the inn. Everything else is old, but the lock is brand new."

A new lock on an old door. Someone deliberately sealed off that room.

"You didn't go to open it?"

"There's no key. And—" Han Yingying glanced at the girl with the ponytail, "She said she has a strange feeling about that room."

The girl with the ponytail shrugged. "When I passed that door, I felt a chill on the back of my neck. Not a temperature chill, but a feeling of... being watched by something."

Her description was incredibly accurate. Too accurate. A newbie entering a dungeon for the second time shouldn't have such a strong sense of the eerie atmosphere.

Zhou Lang didn't expose anything directly, but simply asked, "Any other discoveries?"

"Yes." Han Yingying took something out of her pocket—a yellowed business card. "I found it in a crack in the corridor floor."

The business card reads:

Zhang Yuanpeng

Giant View Ecological Homestay Project Manager

The back has handwritten words: "Increase investment and upgrade the drainage system."

Zhang Yuanpeng. Eco-friendly homestay. Project Manager.

It wasn't Boss Feng. It was someone else.

"This guesthouse may not have always been called an inn," Zhou Lang said. "It has been renovated. Boss Feng may not have been the original owner—or rather, someone took over the place after Boss Feng and turned it into an eco-friendly guesthouse."

"And then something happened?" Brother Liu asked.

"Then something terrible happened."

Zhou Lang carefully put the business card away. More and more pieces of the puzzle were being pieced together. The tragedy of Boss Feng's family was the first layer, Zhang Yuanpeng and his guesthouse were the second layer, the fire and the young couple were the third layer, and what was in the sewer was the fourth layer—the final layer.

He needs to find the key to the new lock.

But just then, a scream came from the third floor.

It was a woman's voice.

A mature, sophisticated woman.

Everyone rushed upstairs. At the end of the third-floor corridor, the older woman leaned against the wall, her face drained of all color. Her hand trembled as she pointed towards the boys' room in school uniforms.

"He—he—"

The room door was wide open. A boy in a school uniform stood in the middle of the room, his back to the door.

No, not standing.

His feet left the ground.

The person was suspended in the center of the room, with their toes about twenty centimeters off the ground. Their head was tilted to one side at such an angle that it looked like their neck was broken.

But he was smiling.