Paintings of Terror

Chapter 58: Jumping out the Window

Translated by Eve

Edited by EB

Ke Xun enjoyed the affirmation but his nerves were still strung tightly. It wasn’t until the old man slowly left after doing the same action on 616 that he finally breathed a sigh of relief.

The old man didn’t come back downstairs. They didn’t know where he went. Perhaps it was as Mu Yiran had said—the old man was just an illusion.

Just as Ke Xun was about to sleep, frantic knocking suddenly sounded from Room 410. The knocking was very odd. No one had expected this.

Soon after, a shrill scream came from next door.

The voice was very familiar. It was Sha Liu’s.

Ke Xun, who had just relaxed, tensed up once more. He nimbly made his way to the window. However, he didn’t see anyone in front of Room 410.

Another wave of screams came from next door. This time, they could hear both Sha Liu and Qiu Lu. All sorts of noises came from the other room. He didn’t know what danger they were currently facing.

In the end, Ke Xun heard the sound of a window opening. It was the large window that faced the cement wall….

When the sun came up, everyone rushed out of their rooms to lean against the railing. They peered down to see if there were any corpses covered by white cloth in the atrium.

Ke Xun noticed that the atrium appeared to be the same as always. He felt relieved, but a complicated emotion also rose up in his chest.

Mu Yiran’s gaze was on room 410’s door. There was something like a clothesline hanging off of it. There was a red, plastic whistle hanging off of a dirty nylon string.

Although it was day time, the blood red whistle was terrifying. Sha Liu opened the door. She was clearly greatly frightened by the whistle.

“What’s going on? This must have been left by the ghost last night!” Sha Liu looked at the whistle that swung softly with the breeze. She stayed far away from it. “Why did it hang a whistle on our door?!”

Mu Yiran’s voice was cold. “Because someone knocked on your door last night. It probably wanted to give you the whistle.”

Sha Liu was frightened by this. She then heard Ke Xun ask her, “What happened in your room last night? Where’s Qiu Lu?”

Sha Liu started to shake. “Qiu Lu? The knocking last night was too scary. I think someone entered our room too. It flipped over a lot of stuff…. Qiu Lu…she…she jumped out from the fourth floor’s window….”

Ke Xun’s first reaction was to rush into Room 410. He gazed down the window. The dark grey cement was as lofty as ever and the space between was still narrow. The space was about half an arm wide, which was enough for a person to jump down. Ke Xun lit up the darkness with the light of his phone’s flashlight but saw nothing.

“Someone entered your room last night?” Mu Yiran seemed doubtful.

Sha Liu swallowed and then nodded.

“What happened? What did you do after Qiu Lu jumped?”

“I…don’t know anything.” Sha Liu shook her head. She then looked at the slightly swaying red whistle hanging from her door. “I fainted. By the time I woke up, it was already daylight.”

Mu Yiran looked at her probingly. Sha Liu didn’t say anything else.

Everyone congregated downstairs in the atrium. Wei Dong and Zhu Haowen were the last to arrive. Wei Dong even sneered, “I was going to lose it if that old man kept tormenting us with that giant face of his! Damn it, why were our curtains taken down…”

Wei Dong hadn’t finished saying what he wanted to say when he saw people suddenly carry in a corpse covered by a white cloth. Everyone’s hearts sunk. Qin Ci asked, “Why is the corpse being carried in from the outside?”

One of the people carrying the corpse said, “We discovered the corpse by the cement wall. Check if it’s one of yours.”

Everyone subconsciously took a step back, especially Sha Liu. She hid far, far away.

In the end, it was Qin Ci who uncovered the white cloth. “It’s Qiu Lu.”

In the end, Qiu Lu had died.

“Did she fall to her death?” Ke Xun asked.

Qin Ci’s expression was puzzled. He pulled the cloth completely off and began his examination.

Mu Yiran also came over and Ke Xun followed along. Everyone had seen so much death. They had already lost their fear and conflicting feelings around corpses.

Qiu Lu looked very peaceful. If it wasn’t because she wasn’t breathing, they would think she was just sleeping.

Qiu Lu’s body was covered in dirt. It was like she had been dug out from the ground. Her clothes and shoes were all filled with dirt.

Qin Ci pressed down on Qiu Lu’s chin gently. He discovered that her mouth was filled with dirt as well. When he leaned to the side, he also noticed that her ears were filled with dirt.

The soil was very loose. There were also roots of some plants inside. Occasionally, a bug or two would crawl out.

“No wonder we didn’t hear her crash into the ground. She had sunk all the way into the soil.” Ke Xun’s eyes moved to Sha Liu, who had moved far away. His gaze was icy.

“All right, let’s move it outside.” The gatekeeper old man’s voice echoed? through the air.

Soon after, Qiu Lu’s corpse left through the main entrance.

Wei Dong looked around. “Where’s Xin Miao?”

Only then did everyone notice that Xin Miao had not shown up since dawn had arrived.

“Let’s go to Room 402.” Mu Yiran was the first to head upstairs. Everyone else followed after.

Except for Zhu Haowen and Sha Liu.

Zhu Haowen looked up from his phone. “Why aren’t you going?”

Sha Liu forced herself to sound tough. “What about you?”

Zhu Haowen looked at Sha Liu with a complicated expression. He didn’t answer and simply continued to play his game.

Sha Liu, however, turned to head upstairs, her steps agitated.

The door to Room 402 was locked from the other side. When they called from the outside, no one answered. In the end, they busted the door open, but they found no one inside.

“Xin Miao? Are you in here?” Wei Dong called out. No one replied.

402 was the same as always. The interior was filled with scorched marks and two-thirds of the bed was burnt. Xin Miao’s single person mattress was against the innermost wall.

No one knew how this girl had managed to survive two horrifying nights on her own.

The large window facing the cement wall was open. Mu Yiran walked over. “She’s here.”

Xin Miao was stuck between the building and the cement wall between the second and third floors. Perhaps it was because the cement wall wasn’t very smooth—some parts stuck out—but she had ended up stuck.

“She’s still alive.” Mu Yiran’s words woke everyone up. Only Sha Liu, who stood far away, became increasingly pale.

Saving her was rather tricky. In the end, Ke Xun volunteered. They tied him around the waist with some rope. He then slowly climbed down. He tied another rope around Xin Miao and they gradually pulled her up.

Xin Miao stared blankly into space. Her eyes were lifeless.

“She must have been scared senseless,” Old Man Li Taiyong had followed them out of concern.

If they weren’t wrong, Xin Miao must have tried to jump out the window out of fear when the old man had appeared in the small window. That meant that she must have been stuck in the dark crevice for the entire night. She could not go up nor down. She had been stuck in the asphyxiating darkness, drowned in utter fear.

Regardless of what they said, Xin Miao didn’t react.

Wei Dong flew into a rage. “Why did she try to jump out the window?”

Only silence and Xin Miao’s blank expression answered him.

“Yafen’s knocking was just as terrifying but Xin Miao didn’t jump from the window then. Why did she try that last night?!” Wei Dong thought that something was fishy.

Ke Xun looked at Sha Liu who stood at the door. “Not one, but two people tried it. Qiu Lu also jumped from her window. Sometimes, when there are no other visible escape routes, people will clench their teeth and force themselves to bear with things. But when they think there’s another path they can take, the majority of people will cower and choose the escape route.”

Sha Liu suddenly got angry. She glared at Ke Xun. “What are you looking at me for? It’s not like I made them jump out of the window! I only suggested it out of fear.”

Wei Dong walked over to Sha Liu. “Then why didn’t you jump too?!”

Sha Liu was forced back two steps. She screamed with tears in her eyes. “I was also afraid! I didn’t have the guts to jump! What are you trying to do? Are you going to force me to jump?”

Suddenly, a laugh broke out in the room. It came from Xin Miao.

Xin Miao giggled as she stood up. It was like she couldn’t see them at all. She hummed as she walked out the door. She performed a few ballet moves in a very professional manner. She then ran and leaped all the way downstairs.

Xin Miao had lost her mind.

Everyone followed her downstairs.

The gatekeeper old man was waiting for them, the ring of keys in his hands. “The lock on Room 402 has been repaired and the key has been returned.”

“Why was the key returned? Someone still lives there!”

“No one lives there.”

“But…” Wei Dong looked at Xin Miao who was dancing on the second floor. “We didn’t check out!”

The gatekeeper acted like he didn’t hear him. He pointed to each person as he counted. “Seven people in total. You’re all here. Time to eat.”

Ke Xun looked around him. There were indeed seven people. But if you included Xin Miao, there should be eight people in total.

Everyone had come to the same conclusion but no one said it out loud.

Wei Dong’s eyes were red. Ke Xun walked over to wrap an arm around Wei Dong’s shoulder. “Xin Miao’s journey has already come to an end in this painting.”

Wei Dong continued to watch Xin Miao on the second floor. “But she’s clearly still here! She’s still breathing! She can even dance!:

“But in the real world, she’s already dead.” Qin Ci’s voice was solemn.

“Perhaps this is a form of release for her.” Ke Xun pulled Wei Dong into the restaurant.

In the end, they had no choice but to accept this. They silently filed into the restaurant to eat.

Sha Liu seemed to have already adjusted her mental state. She cleared her throat at the table. “Don’t you guys find it strange? The gatekeeper old man didn’t tell us about Room 307.”

Everyone did find it weird. Usually, the gatekeeper uncle would gather us all together to tell us what happened in the past in the room where someone died. Or, he’d tell us the cause of death.”

This happened before breakfast every single time. Today was an exception.

“This can only mean one thing.” Zhu Haowen chewed on a mantou expressionlessly. “That means that yesterday’s deaths had nothing to do with 307.”

Everyone was shocked by this conjecture. But when they thought about it carefully, they thought that it was a reasonable explanation.

“Then how did they die?” Wei Dong asked.

“They either scared themselves to death or were frightened to death.” There was still no expression on Zhu Haowen’s face.

Sha Liu thought that there were still too many unanswered questions. She said, “If the matter with 307 hasn’t been resolved, does that mean that it will happen again tonight?”

Everyone recalled the giant face they had seen through the window. They felt both afraid and annoyed.

Sha Liu continued, “No other spirits were summoned, either. If no one knocks on anyone’s doors, does that mean that the previous night’s nightmare will loop eternally?”

Ke Xun sneered. He cracked the egg in his hand but didn’t speak up. Sha Liu was doing everything she could to convince everyone that the reason why the NPC didn’t explain the deaths was because no one knocked on any doors and not because of another reason….

“That makes sense.” Zhu Haowen glanced at Sha Liu. “But the thing is, the old man didn’t hurt anyone last night. Unless he comes back stronger, we’d end up stuck in an infinite loop anyways.”

“The terrifying rooms are secondary. The most important thing is that we are bound to break through the ground.” Mu Yiran spoke up. “It’s already the fourth day. If my guess is correct, we will completely break out of the earth on the seventh day.”

That’s right. The final major event in this painting was the breaking through the earth.

Zhu Haowen said, “The change in 616 is even worse now. The room is no longer rectangular. You can see that the opening above the atrium has been noticeably pushed together.”

“However, we’ve already searched all the places we can search,” Qin Ci said.

“Don’t be hasty,” Old Man Li Taiyong said, “Didn’t Xiao Ke er find the bamboo drawings yesterday? There has to be a nook or cranny still left unexplored.”

Eve: God, Sha Liu is definitely a unique character. Cunning, puts herself first, selfish, does anything to increase her chances at survival. Unlikeable, but undoubtedly clever.