Chapter 226: What Is She Doing?

"She came in with you?" I paused, momentarily stunned by Xiaobei's words. Judging by her voice on the phone earlier, Li Manman should have been somewhere else entirely.

Xiaobei shot a fearful glance at the axe in my hand and shrank his neck, taking a step back. "At first, Sister Manman really did call to say someone broke into the Haunted House and that I should keep an eye out. But later, I ran into her on the first floor. She told me to stop looking, saying the guy had already left."

"I was still wondering how she got in when she told me to test the Haunted House's mechanisms. She said the bosses were coming for an inspection tomorrow."

I watched his expression the entire time he spoke. He sounded completely sincere. "Was Li Manman with you the whole time you were testing the mechanisms?"

"Yeah, she was right behind me the whole time."

"Now that's strange." I rested the axe on my shoulder. "Are there two Li Manmans?"

"Bro, if you're done asking questions, let's head out. This place is pretty creepy at night." Fear leaked into Xiaobei's eyes; he was terrified I might do something crazy with the axe.

"If you're such a coward, how did you dare come in here alone at night?" I supported him as we headed downstairs. "What exactly do you do in the Haunted House? Why are you dressed like that?"

"I handle the Haunted House's maintenance. Sometimes I fill in as a ghost or a killer." Seeing me head for the stairs, Xiaobei stopped me. "Let's take the staff passage. It leads straight outside."

He stepped over to the corner and tore down a notice listing the rules and regulations, revealing a slide hidden behind it.

"You lead the way." I waved the axe, making Xiaobei go first while I followed behind.

The forty-five-degree slide dropped directly to the second floor, depositing us into a room I had never seen before.

"What is this place?"

"A secret room. The Amusement Park just opened and no visitors have found this place yet, so we're using it as a temporary break room." Xiaobei stripped off his white lab coat and pointed to a pile of torture implements against the wall. "Don't be nervous. Those are just props. They're all fake."

It would have been better if he hadn't said anything. The moment he brought it up, my attention was drawn to the corner, which was piled high with all sorts of instruments of torture.

"Does a Haunted House really need this many props?" I prodded the pile with my axe. Metal clinked against metal; they were all real.

"Chains, fishhooks, steel wire." My gaze suddenly caught on something. Snagged on the end of a rusty piece of wire was a scrap of red cloth.

"It looks just like the fabric from that red dress. Could it really be such a coincidence?"

I quickly sorted through the clues in my head. When I entered the first theme, I had found five child corpse mannequins and the faint figure of a girl in light red.

According to the Haunted House's background story, you could only escape by finding the one girl who survived. But in reality, all five children had been murdered. The only difference was that the word on one mannequin's forehead hadn't been carved with a knife, but written with a pen.

Aside from the five corpse mannequins, there was a sixth "person" present. She was the exact reason I had run into the second horror theme without even searching the third floor.

Thinking back carefully, I had also seen the figure of a girl in light red while riding the tunnel coaster. The moment we shot through the tunnel, she had been sitting right behind me.

Looking back, that girl definitely wasn't human. But what was her goal? Why was she always hovering around me?

A light red figure, a light red dress, and now a scrap of light red fabric buried in a pile of torture implements—I wouldn't believe for a second that these things weren't connected.

Judging by my past experiences, a murder really had taken place in this Haunted House a long time ago. The victim was that little girl. She had been abducted, dragged into this building, and possibly even tortured to death right here in this secret room.

But I hadn't seen any related news reports online. Knowing the local authorities, they would have certainly invited the media for massive publicity if they had solved a major murder case. Thus, it was safe to assume the little girl's killer was still at large.

'Could it be that the girl's ghost wants me to help clear her name?' Thinking it over carefully, I couldn't be sure. If this had happened after the livestream officially started at midnight, I probably would have believed it and centered my investigation around her ghost. But it was only just past eleven o'clock. The Amusement Park had only been closed for five or six minutes, and there were still plenty of people outside. Wasn't it a bit too early to hand me such a perfectly coherent string of clues?

If I treated the livestream like a game dungeon, the ghost of the girl in light red was probably just a side quest. My top priority was still finding Tie Ningxiang.

"What are you looking at?" Xiaobei flicked on the lights in the break room, peeled off his fake scars, and changed into his own clothes. "Don't mess around with those props. You might hurt yourself."

I slipped the scrap of red cloth into my pocket and turned around to follow Xiaobei out, but when the light hit his face, I suddenly noticed something new.

"What is it? Is there something on my face?"

"Nothing. Let's hurry up and get out of here." I waved it off casually, but in my mind, I had just confirmed one thing: this guy named Xiaobei was lying.

Under the glare of the lights, I used Chasing Eye and spotted faint white smudges on his neck and the sides of his nose. They were makeup stains.

What kind of makeup required covering the entire face and neck in white powder? The answer was obvious. Tonight, Xiaobei had dressed up as a Clown!

He had washed his face and changed into the Doctor's clothes before entering the Haunted House. I didn't know what his goal was yet, but I definitely had to keep my guard up around him.

The secret room had a passage that led straight outside. Having changed his clothes, Xiaobei took the lead. "Why are you still holding that axe? It's a Haunted House prop. You can't take it outside."

"Sorry, I'm a little on edge." I tossed the axe aside, but didn't pull out the iron tongs hidden at the small of my back.

"It's normal to be tense. When I first started here, I didn't even dare stay for the night shifts. You get used to it eventually."

Stepping out of the Haunted House and leaving that gloomy, oppressive environment behind, I let out a long sigh of relief.

"Over here!" Li Manman stood near the Haunted House entrance, waving at us. "Hurry up! The park is closed, don't linger!"

Walking up to Li Manman, I looked her up and down. "Did you find them in the maze?"

"I found one of them." Li Manman led me into a small staff-only room near the maze entrance. Surprisingly, the room was full of security monitors. "It's very difficult for a normal person to make it out of our Amusement Park's Magic Mirror Maze. Even the staff need a map to navigate it freely. These monitors are set up to prevent visitors from getting lost and breaking down inside. The moment we receive a distress signal, the staff watching the monitors immediately go in to rescue them."

Li Manman pulled up a video feed of the Magic Mirror Maze exit on one of the computers. The timestamp was from about fifteen minutes ago.

She fast-forwarded for a moment, then paused the footage. "Right here."

I looked to where she was pointing. Sure enough, the screen showed a woman not wearing a staff uniform walking out of the maze.

"Tie Ningxiang? Why is she alone? Where's Yi Yi?" The bad feeling in my chest grew stronger. If Tie Ningxiang and Yi Yi were together, I wouldn't be quite so worried. After all, Tie Ningxiang could easily take down a couple of grown men in close combat, and as a sharp-minded detective, it was entirely possible for her to seize an opportunity and escape.

My biggest fear was that Tie Ningxiang and Yi Yi had been separated. Tie Ningxiang would inevitably act on impulse if she was worried about Yi Yi's safety, and Yi Yi was just a helpless little girl with no way to fight back.

Remembering the ghostly figure of the girl in light red back in the Haunted House, I slowly clenched my fists. The livestream still hadn't officially started yet, but the sense of powerlessness it gave me exceeded any I had felt before.

The livestream task was completely baffling, the phone call beforehand made absolutely no sense, and I had no idea where to even start with the so-called clues.

'The key to this livestream really is Tie Ningxiang. I need to find her before the livestream can continue.' I watched the familiar figure on the screen, but as the frames ticked by, I suddenly found something strange.

"What is she doing?"

On the monitor, Tie Ningxiang didn't seem to be in any rush to find Yi Yi. Instead, she just stood at the exit of the maze, repeatedly reaching her hands behind her back. It looked exactly as if something was clinging to her back, and she was trying to rip it off.