Eldritch Horror Theatre

The murder scene deep in the shadows was gone.

A wardrobe, a full-length mirror, a single bed, and no television—without a doubt, the room before him was a woman’s bedroom.

As for why he dared to assume the gender so boldly?

Simple. The feel of the hair on that desperately struggling head was all too familiar—Salma.

If his guess was right, he had probably just broken into her house.

The feedback from his hands was equally clear: he wasn’t pressing the back of her head, but her mouth.

No matter how you looked at it, this was the classic trope of getting caught breaking into a house and hurriedly covering the victim’s mouth so no one else would hear.

He had to admit, the character roles the script arranged for him were getting more and more outrageous.

As for why he felt delight rather than panic?

First, thanks to his prior experience with multiple scene transitions, when the lighting suddenly changed and the ”corpse” began to move, Fu Qian’s immediate reaction wasn’t ghosts or hauntings, but a scene shift.Second, this was exactly the result he had hoped for.

...

Placing the notebook under the corpse’s head hadn’t been performance art, but a highly purposeful test.

Originally, after a bout of exploration, the truth behind the School of Twilight had been uncovered.

The main culprit was undeniably pinpointed as Wen, who had fallen from the building; all that remained was to confirm his identity later.

However, once he opened the notebook, everything suddenly gained an alternative explanation.

Those self-directed questions and answers, nearly illegible by the end, seemed to piece together another Eva hidden beneath her quiet exterior with every stroke of the pen.

Fierce, crazed, and at a certain moment, revealing this side of herself to plunge a sharp blade into Salma’s chest.

And at the very beginning of the script, seeing him return to the fourth floor, she had rushed back up to drag him away.

Aside from good intentions to pull him out of danger, Eva’s action now clearly had another explanation—

After the conflict, finally cooling her head, she had chosen to leave quickly, only to run into him—an uninvited guest—midway.

Not understanding why he had appeared there, she chose to play the role of a victim frightened by a supernatural event.

Unfortunately, this trick met its match.

Seeing him turn a blind eye, showing neither fear nor intent to flee, and even going straight back upstairs, she ultimately couldn’t hold back. She rushed back to extend a ”helping hand”—thus preventing the scene in the restroom from being discovered too soon.

Afterward, she had told a ghost story and led him on an escape journey.

Then, because he had hidden his capabilities and failed to open the iron gate, they were forced to maneuver through the building to find another route.

During this process, they bumped into even more bizarre figures.

Such as the deceased Joshua and the two support personnel.

It was quite obvious that Eva hadn’t truly viewed them as ghosts the way she outwardly portrayed.

After he left the storage room, her rapid pursuit of him—rather than fleeing outright—reflected this to some extent.

Rather than reaching a safe place as quickly as possible, she cared more about how the situation developed.

The aftermath was simple; by a strange twist of fate, the blame was pinned entirely on Wen, bringing the ”truth to light.”

For Eva, it was a happy ending she wouldn’t have even dared to imagine.

Of course, Wen wasn’t entirely innocent either. In the version of the ”truth” he had summarized from their perspective before the three of them went downstairs, apart from taking the fall for Eva’s murder of Salma, the rest of the deeds were highly likely his doing.

Attacking Joshua, hiding his corpse, and perhaps even slashing Salma’s face.

Admittedly, that last one wasn’t as certain. It was entirely possible that after Eva cooled down, her loathing for Salma intensified so much that she carved up the woman’s face. It was equally possible that Wen, harboring extreme resentment toward his girlfriend for certain reasons, felt no sorrow upon seeing her tragic death and instead cruelly mutilated her body.

And this was exactly the crux of the matter—from the very first script, what he faced seemed to be a superposition of numerous ”possibilities.”

At the party, it could have been a practical joke aimed at him, or a genuine plea for his help.

Inside the Old House, whether the Jellyfish Vampire was actually deceiving him or not, and whether Wen had truly left or not.

Realizing this, Fu Qian finally formed a hypothesis on the ”correct” way to complete the scripts—was it possible there was no singular truth?

All he needed to do was align the ”possibilities” within each script, just like matching up the same-colored faces on a Rubik’s Cube.

...

What would have happened if he hadn’t pulled the notebook out of the bag, but simply left the building right then?

Because he hadn’t uncovered the ”truth,” would the script have failed to transition?

Probably not.

After all, at the end of the Old House, Wen’s true whereabouts hadn’t been confirmed either.

Fu Qian’s understanding was that after engaging with the foundational elements of each instance, the guided narrative had to remain consistent and free of contradictions.

For example, suppose at the end of the Old House, the vampire had actually lied to him, and Wen hadn’t escaped. If Wen had fallen into some trap in the house and died without Fu Qian noticing, then the person who just fell out the window to his death could have been him, and it wouldn’t trigger a task failure.

But if the house hadn’t collapsed back then, allowing him to patiently search and discover Wen’s corpse, then Wen falling out the window just now absolutely could not have occurred.

In other words, his act of continuously muddying the waters to force people out would directly result in task failure.

A simpler example: if, at the very beginning of the task upon his first meeting with Eva at the party, he had simply pulled a knife and slit her throat, then in any scripts chronologically following that, she could never appear again.

Considering she was a core element of the script in a setting like the School of Twilight, doing so would highly likely result in the task resetting immediately.

To put it simply, it was as if he were picking from a pile of stories—each with multiple versions—and binding together a logically self-consistent set.

Of course, this was fundamentally just a task runner’s brainstorming, lacking sufficient evidence to prove it.

So, after forming this idea, a series of tests naturally followed.

The first was not leaving with the three of them; the script’s reaction was to not end.

Even later, after opening the notebook and learning of an alternate truth, it still didn’t.

But finally, after placing the evidence pointing to the true killer right beneath the victim’s head—ensuring that the police would almost certainly find it when they arrived—the script instantly ended.

Fu Qian’s interpretation was that it concluded without him needing to walk out of the building because, in the script’s judgment, the act of leaving the notebook had already eliminated all other possibilities.

Namely, it locked in the ending where the injustice was redressed.

...

He seemed to have faintly grasped the ”correct” method.

Although his current situation didn’t look too great.

”Salma?”

There was clearly more than just this victim in the house.

Amid the struggle, a puzzled voice drifted in from outside. The person had noticed the commotion, and the doorknob was already starting to turn.

”Wen is gone.”

Taking a step sideways to press his back against the door, Fu Qian spoke in a lowered voice.