Chapter 235: Painted Souls

Pulling my foot back, I looked at the countless phantoms in the mirror. I silently retreated into the room and closed the door.

'The risk is too great.' Even with the Fate Ghost's protection, I had no confidence I could escape the maze unscathed.

I paced anxiously around the narrow room. I couldn't afford to be impulsive right now. Holding the Underworld Live Show Phone, I asked the chat experts in the livestream for advice, but no one had any good suggestions. Most of the livestream viewers were completely baffled.

Something tugged the hem of my shirt. I turned to see the Girl in Red standing inside the wooden box.

She pointed beneath the wooden chest, signaling me to push it aside.

"There's something hidden under the box?" I took out my iron tongs and tapped the bottom. "It's empty?"

The four corners of the wooden box were nailed to the floor. It took a lot of effort to pry the nails out. When I finally pushed the box aside, a deep, seemingly bottomless secret passage appeared before my eyes.

I shined my flashlight inside. Moss grew on the damp walls, and the rotting wooden stairs looked like they were on the verge of collapsing.

With the box out of the way, the girl took the lead and headed inside. Full of doubt, I followed closely behind her.

Stepping down the creaking stairs, I felt as though I had returned to the Haunted House. An icy chill surged from all directions; the temperature inside this underground hole was much lower than outside.

The girl led the way while I had the Fate Ghost guard the rear. Its pitch-black hair clung to the walls of the passage, carefully inspecting every inch of the space.

'The maze designer was able to evade the security cameras to kill people and hide their bodies, so it's no surprise there are secret passages in the maze. I just don't know where this one leads. If I keep going, will I run into the mastermind?'

Thinking of this, I slowed my pace, trying my best to avoid making any noise.

There wasn't a single shred of light underground. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, a room piled high with various miscellaneous items appeared before me.

Under the beam of my flashlight, I saw that the most numerous items inside were unfinished dolls. I walked closer and casually picked a few up to inspect. They were solid plastic dolls wrapped in a layer of skin, but as for the inside...

"Plaster?" Smelling the distinct scent of plaster, I grew curious and smashed the doll onto the ground.

What happened next made me gasp in horror. When the outer layer of plastic and plaster shattered, it revealed a corpse inside that had been air-dried for a long time.

It was completely degraded, making the human muscle structure unrecognizable. The flesh had turned purplish-black, and all the blood vessels were clogged. It was absolutely terrifying.

'Murdering living people, setting them in plaster, and then wrapping them in a layer of plastic to act as dolls?' I broke out in a cold sweat at the killer's psychotic method of hiding corpses. This method was easier said than done. The manufacturing process was incredibly complex; the killer would have had to stay beside the corpse for at least three to four weeks.

I looked at the room full of dolls, swung the iron tongs, and smashed a few more of them.

Although the scene before my eyes wasn't bloody, it felt far more horrifying than those gory murder cases.

There were fragmented dolls everywhere. Every single one of these ugly toys actually concealed what was once a vibrant human life.

The room wasn't large, and it was basically filled to the brim with dolls.

The girl walked ahead of me. After just a few steps, she suddenly stopped.

"What's wrong?" I followed her gaze. The girl stood rooted to the spot, raising a scar-riddled hand toward the corner of the room.

Pressed beneath a pile of broken toys was a doll with a similar build to the girl. Torn, threadbare strips of red cloth hung from it. I could faintly tell that they had been forcefully ripped from a red dress.

I moved the surrounding dolls aside and dragged this specific one out.

'Red fabric. It feels exactly like the red dress I picked up in the Haunted House. Could this doll be hiding the girl's corpse?' I examined the toy in my hands. The facial features indeed bore some resemblance to the girl. I couldn't bear to smash the doll right in front of her, nor did I want to prove who exactly was hidden inside.

"Let's go," I sighed. I took off my own jacket and draped it over the nearly naked doll, then placed her back in her original spot. "Don't worry. I'll definitely catch the killer and give you all justice!"

Continuing forward, we passed through an iron gate. An awful stench drifted through the air, smelling like boiling oil, or perhaps raw wax.

Shining the flashlight ahead, the beam revealed several dust-covered machines that recreated the hellish scene from five years ago.

This was a small underground workshop for processing biological wax. What was raw wax? Simply put, it was wax made by extracting biological fat.

'The machines are covered in dust, and spiderwebs have formed on the switches. These things haven't been turned on in a long time.'

Finding a small wax-making factory beneath the maze was an unexpected discovery. Accompanied by the girl and the Fate Ghost, I didn't rush to leave. Instead, I walked past each machine, vividly reconstructing their demonic actions from back then in my mind.

I remembered that the Amusement Park had a wax museum. At the time, I had wondered why a wax museum was specially built inside a theme park; that kind of outdated exhibition hall didn't fit this joyful place at all. Now, everything made sense. This wax museum wasn't actually meant for the living to visit; it was just to provide a resting place for the corpses.

Thinking of this, I felt even more certain that the mastermind's psychological perversion had reached its absolute peak. Not only did he enjoy torturing and killing people for pleasure, but he also turned those innocent victims into art pieces for tourists to view.

Most likely, while the oblivious tourists laughed and played beside the wax figures, the killer had been hiding by the door, silently watching. He was enjoying that special kind of thrill, while also assessing and selecting his next prey.

Passing between the machines, I noticed the air in the basement was murky and permeated with a strange stench.

I walked forward. Movable ladders were placed along the aisles on both sides. I tried climbing up one of the ladders. Upon reaching the top, I found that the ceiling panel above could be opened, perfectly matching the various security camera blind spots in the maze above.

'The design is incredibly ingenious. The killer is a genius. It's just a pity he didn't walk a righteous path and instead poured all this talent into committing crimes.'

Since anyone who entered the maze would be attacked by Mirror Ghosts, I had no choice but to find another way out, walking all the way to the end of the passage.

At a fork in the road, I saw an isolated compartment. The door wasn't locked; it was left slightly ajar.

'There's no dust on the lock. Someone visited this room before I arrived.'

Pushing the door open, I stepped inside. The walls of the small compartment were entirely covered in cloth. Against the wall sat a crafting table covered in graffiti, and several rag dolls with their eyes and noses ripped off were tossed upon it.

'They look similar to the rag dolls in the Haunted House.'

I casually picked one up to examine it. The original faces of these rag dolls had all been torn off, and someone had drawn other people's faces onto them with a marker.

Some of the rag dolls only had half a face drawn on, while many others had their faces pierced through by the pen tip. It seemed the person drawing their faces had an extremely violent temper and was deliberately using these rag dolls to vent.

'Back in the Haunted House, I thought it was strange that the facial features of these rag dolls were all torn off and replaced with other people's expressions. Now it seems there's a hidden reason behind it.' I brought a rag doll with a pierced cheek up to my eyes and pulled out the marker. It was a very ordinary pen, but I saw something extraordinary inside the rag doll's body.

"Hair?" I pulled a clump of a woman's hair out from the rag doll's torn face. Comparing it to the contours drawn on the doll's face in marker, the face drawn on this rag doll also seemed to be a woman's.

Faintly, I felt as if I had grasped onto something. I tore open the other rag dolls on the table. Most of them had hair hidden inside—some long, some short. Others contained fingernails, and one even had half a severed finger hidden within.

'Rag dolls hiding pieces of living people inside... why does this feel a bit like the hex sorcery art?' I stared at the various expressions drawn on the rag dolls' faces and suddenly thought of the seemingly endless Mirror Ghosts in the maze. 'Ghostly entities can't just spawn out of nowhere. Could it be that every Mirror Ghost corresponds to a rag doll like this?'

I thought of Li Manman, and then I recalled the rag doll with a mole on its cheek that the Girl in Red had left on the stairs.

'It seems this thing is the medium used to control the Mirror Ghosts.' The face drawn on the rag doll with the marker was incredibly lifelike, as if it had been sketched using the deceased as a direct reference, bearing quite a striking resemblance.