PSP Chapter 32: Pass

The air in the basement was damper than that of the low-rise building outside, with a faint musty smell.

Shen Qingcheng was so shocked that his heart skipped a beat. He leaped behind Lu Qi, who hadn’t had time to see clearly yet, and then let out a long sigh, "Oh my god, that scared me to death!"

Only then did Lu Qi see clearly what had startled him, and he turned his head slightly, saying, "It's okay, it's just a dummy."

Shen Qingcheng was surprised, "Huh?"

The entire basement was about forty square meters, and the bookshelves took up a large part of the area. On the far wall was the red dummy that had shocked Shen Qingcheng.

He didn’t know what material the dummy was made of, but it was very realistic, and even the uneven texture from the skin that had been peeled off was like the real thing.

It was hung by the back of the neck in the corner with its head hanging down and its long hair dangling in the air.

Shen Qingcheng followed Lu Qi to the basement.

A tool table was placed against the wall under the dummy, and on it were all kinds of tools that Shen Qingcheng could not name, as well as many mottled red marks.

Shen Qingcheng: "Is it blood?"

Lu Qi rubbed at it with his index finger and replied, "No."

He picked up a conical tool, and pushed back the dummy's hair, revealing a featureless face beneath it.

Red, peeled, faceless.

Shen Qingcheng had just been caught off guard and startled, but now he was no longer afraid. He observed the tools on the table, and then looked at the hanging dummy, wondering.

Amazed, he said, "Are novel writers all so dedicated nowadays? It wasn’t enough to buy some animals to skin, they had to make the real thing?"

At the foot of the tool table stood an axe with the same red stains, and he reached for it.

Lu Qi: "Don't move."

Shen Qingcheng paused and tilted his head, "Wha--what's wrong?"

Lu Qi frowned and picked up the axe. It was very sharp, the snow-white blade throwing off a cold gleam in the light.

He scraped off a little red powder and crushed it, then cast his gaze downwards and said, "It's blood."

Blood? Why was there blood?

Wasn’t this just an ordinary tool room where the master had made a dummy?

Paint on the tools, but blood on the axe?

Shen Qingcheng stood up straight, "Whose blood is it?"

Did the master hurt someone with that axe?

Lu Qi didn't answer immediately. He ruminated for a moment, then put down his axe and started combing through the basement.

It wasn’t a big room, and the furnishings were simple. Lu Qi quickly found what he wanted.

Behind a bookshelf, he found a corpse, a corpse that had been dismembered and put back together.

For some unknown reason, the corpse had not rotten; it had dried up and mummified. The blood that had been shed when the corpse was dismembered had already dried on the ground, and it was now lying on its back in dirty clothes.

The corpse's face was slightly distorted due to the loss of moisture, but it was still clear that it was a male.

This was a man’s corpse.

Shen Qingcheng: "Is this the master’s body?"

Lu Qi replied lowly, "It should be."

Shen Qingcheng hadn’t expected that the master would die like this--not by being skinned, but by being hacked to death with an axe. He didn't even leave a whole body behind after his death.

Lu Qi: "Did you bring those drawings?"

"Yeah, I brought them." Shen Qingcheng returned to his senses, and took out the stack of drawing paper for him, "What did you discover?"

Lu Qi took the papers and unfolded them, then selected a sheet with a clearer depiction of the red villain.

He carefully looked at what the little red man was holding, and said assuredly, "It's an axe."

"You mean the faceless red ghost the child saw following the master was holding an axe?" Shen Qingcheng looked closer, "Then what they actually saw was the dummy!”

Lu Qi had said that the faceless ghost they met yesterday was the mistress. The mistress shouldn't have been dead yet at that point, so the one the child saw and the one they encountered couldn't be the same.

The master had made a dummy and kept it by his side, and started saying that someone wanted to harm him?

Shen Qingcheng: "There was no mention of the faceless ghost in the mistress’s diary. The dummy was made later on by the master. He couldn't tell the difference between fiction and reality; there was a faceless ghost in his imagination, so he constructed one out of the materials he had.”

Obviously crazy.

"En." Lu Qi agreed with him.

Shen Qingcheng: "Who killed the master? There’s no way that the mistress also went crazy."

And the animals that seemed to have been hiding the whole time, what role did they play?

"No, it's actually possible." Lu Qi said.

Shen Qingcheng had a flash of inspiration, and he blurted out, "It's the medicine!"

Someone changed the master’s medicine, so not only did the master’s condition not improve, it actually became more and more serious.

If the mistress took that switched medicine… a normal person who took medicine for mental illness every day would become sick even if they weren’t originally sick.

Shen Qingcheng didn’t need to think too hard about who had changed the medicine--it was the animals.

Lu Qi had already considered more than that. "Drugs can indeed affect a person's mental state, but the mistress would have needed an impetus to go crazy, and this impetus should’ve been her child. Her child died, she killed the master, and she was skinned and turned into what she is now."

Shen Qingcheng: "Wait, speak more slowly!"

Lu Qi looked at his serious face. The corners of his mouth seemed to raise, and he spoke again he really did break it up and explain it bit by bit.

"In the beginning, the master had mental problems. He went to the doctor and got medicine, but the medicine was switched out, and the more he took, the more serious his condition became. At that point, he hadn't made the dummy, so he was the only one in the painting, waving at thin air."

"The mistress began taking the medicine, which had been replaced without her knowledge, and her spirit began to become abnormal."

"The master was gradually unable to distinguish between fiction and reality. He made a red dummy in the basement and simulated a scene of someone peeping at him and hurting him--that was the red villain holding an axe in the drawings."

"The two children may not have understood what their father was doing, but it’s natural for children to be close to their father. They approached the man, who had become completely insane, and were killed by him by mistake."

"The hostess broke down after learning this and killed the master."

Following this line of thinking, Shen Qingcheng theorized, "Her child and her husband died in succession, so the mistress went insane under the stimulation, and was then, with the use of a hook, skinned by those animals? That’s how she turned into that?"

"En, that's about right," Lu Qi said softly. "Do you understand now?"

Shen Qingcheng nodded again and again, "I understand, I understand, Lu-dage, you’re so amazing!"

Clap, clap, clap. Applause sounded not too far away, from the entrance.

The wooden ladder creaked a few times, and two people climbed down it into the basement: He Wei and Gao Shulin.

The two walked up to Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi, and He Wei said admiringly, "Your analysis is really good, I didn't expect that this time, such a powerful god as Lu Qi was hidden among the players."

Gao Shulin looked at Lu Qi with complicated eyes full of both surprise and regret. It was a pity, but her originally warm feelings toward him had cooled. He hadn’t even heard the sound of the two approaching--he was too careless.

He Wei wasn’t angry at Lu Qi's frozen expression at all, and he took out a few crumpled papers, "Actually, we found more clues yesterday than we showed. Shulin and I also found a few diary pages."

"The mistress wrote in her diary that she also saw the red ghost her husband kept telling her about, so she thought she had misunderstood her husband earlier. She felt guilty, and worried that the ghost would hurt them, and she was always tense."

"Until one day, she saw her husband hack their two beloved children to death with an axe, while the red ghost watched on, smiling.”

"She finally understood that it was not the ghost, but her husband, that was the danger, so the mistress killed him while he had his guard down. She thought she and her children would be safe, if only her husband was dead."

After reading out the contents of the diary, He Wei glanced up and said to the two, "Originally, Shulin and I didn't understand why the mistress was so impulsive. She clearly remembered that the children were dead, but she thought they would be safe if she killed her husband."

"After listening to Lu Qi's analysis, we realized that we missed the key information about the medicine and the animals, thanks to the two of you."

He laughed, "We’re two against two. Neither side can win if we confront each other. Why don't we just take a step back, and submit the customs clearance information together?"

When submitting customs clearance information, you needed to fill in the contributing players’ names. If you only recorded your own name, the other players would only get the basic survival point reward.

It was the fourth day of being in the copy, which meant that other players could only get 4 survival points each.

"To be honest, without factoring me in, Lu Qi alone can already beat the two of you," Shen Qingcheng said without concealment.

Gao Shulin: "Don't talk too much¹." Her job in the real world was a boxing coach.

Shen Qingcheng raised his chin and quirked his eyebrows, completely confident.

He Wei looked at Lu Qi, "What do you think? Cooperating is a win-win. It's not good for either of us if we fight."

Lu Qi said lightly, "No need."

Shen Qingcheng added with a smile, "Because the customs clearance method we chose was to survive until time runs out."

"Are you joking?" He Wei was in disbelief, "If you weren’t planning to solve the story line for customs clearance, why were you looking for clues?"

Shen Qingcheng embarrassedly hooked the fingers of the man next to him in his own and shook them gently, "Because I want to see Lu-dage analyze this. A man who thinks is handsome! To tell you the truth, we’re just here on vacation."

As he spoke, he opened his terminal background and showed them the bright red 11-day countdown, bolded and at the top.

The scene of the two holding each other hurt Gao Shulin's eyes. She gritted her teeth and asked, "What relationship do you two even have?"

Shen Qingcheng shook his hand again, shyly stating, "It's just as you saw."

Gao Shulin looked at Lu Qi, and became even angrier! Lu Qi's expression was indifferent; although he did not confirm Shen Meiren's words, he did not deny them either.

Before, she had only thought that Lu Qi was too lazy to argue with Shen Meiren, but the two clearly knew each other from the beginning!

She angrily said, "Were you messing with me?!"

"Okay," He Wei interrupted her a little impatiently. Wasn’t it just a good-looking man? When he returned to the game space with his survival points, a lot of good-looking men would rush up to him.

He took out the terminal to submit the task, filled in his and Gao Shulin’s names, and clicked to confirm.

The 11 players, including Shen Qingcheng and Lu Qi, soon received a system prompt on their terminals.

Immediately afterwards, the two of them turned into specks of light and disappeared in front of Shen Qingcheng’s eyes. Shen Qingcheng was surprised. Had they really passed like that?

He pulled away, trying to see the system prompt. Unexpectedly, he was held back.

TLN:

¹ Basically, “don’t be too confident”. It’s a warning not to make certain/absolute statements, lest they be embarrassed when they don’t prove to be true.

In case you need a visual for the hooks:

Source

Anyway, I don’t know if I missed something, but I really can’t understand how Lu Qi connected the animals to it, haha. Maybe I just can’t match his intellect. Still, not everything has been cleared up yet!