Chapter 363: The Devil's Confession

It happened too fast. By the time Number One—the man in pajamas—and I could see clearly, half of Detective Number Three's body had already been dragged out the door. His composure shattered. He screamed desperately, his face contorting as though his trapped arm were enduring immense pain!

"Help me! Help me!"

Number One and I grabbed Number Three with all our strength, but we still couldn't fight the force outside. Seeing Detective Number Three's body contorting out of shape as though he were about to be dismembered, the others around the round table could no longer sit still.

"What's out there?"

"Damn it! Shut the door!"

They were each harboring a ghost in their belly. Number Six, the thin little man, even started toward me with a razor blade in hand.

"Help me, help me!" More than half of Number Three's body had already been dragged out the door. His face contorted hideously, his mouth gaping wide enough to fit a fist, and his miserable screams filled the room.

As more blood poured from his mouth, Number Three's voice grew faint. The pulling force on my hands suddenly surged. I exchanged a quick word with Number One, and we let go at the same time.

"Help me, help..."

Number Three's body was swallowed by the darkness in the blink of an eye. No one knew what lay outside. Number One slammed the half-open iron door shut. Only the alloy Skeleton Key left in the lock proved that Detective Number Three had ever existed.

Copious amounts of blood seeped into the room from beneath the iron door, and a pungent stench of blood quickly filled the air.

"This game... it's for real?!"

Number One pulled the Skeleton Key from the lock. Together, we moved the cabinet back to its original position to block the iron door.

"There are five minutes left until the game officially starts. I think it's time we all faced reality." Number One tossed the Skeleton Key into the center of the round table; it was the only proof that Detective Number Three had ever existed.

"Number Three is dead? Just like that?"

"Aren't detectives in novels usually calm, highly observant, and incredibly logical? The ones who completely turn the tables at the end of the case? How did our famous detective die right off the bat?!"

"I never liked detectives anyway. Plus, I hated the way Number Three talked. Serves him right."

"With him dead, that's one less strong competitor."

"Exactly. And he didn't die in vain; at least he proved that the iron door is a trap."

No one sympathized with Number Three. Or rather, the people who had come to participate in this game had long forgotten what sympathy even meant.

"None of the thirteen vents can be used. There are no windows, and the only iron door is a trap. If we want to survive, I'm afraid our only option is to play by the rules of the game," Du Yu said. He still wore a faint smile, but his eyes were fixed on Number One.

The room slowly quieted down as everyone looked at Number One. According to the rules of the game, the confessions were to proceed in order of their assigned numbers. How the game would play out, and whether it would get off to a good start, entirely depended on Number One's attitude.

Becoming the center of attention in an instant, Number One remained expressionless. No one knew what kind of mind hid beneath his unkempt appearance. "Fine. I agree to follow the rules and play the game normally."

He glanced at the blood seeping out from behind the cabinet, shivered, and walked toward the Electric Chair on the east side of the hall.

Midnight struck. Alternating red and blue lights flashed on the back of the Electric Chair, and an ear-piercing siren blared from somewhere in the hall. What shocked everyone even more was that as the siren wailed, heavy bangs echoed from the iron door behind the cabinet, as if some monster were trying to smash its way in!

"Is this Electric Chair rushing you?"

"Hurry up! Do you want that siren to keep going? Damn it, the cabinet is starting to move!"

Amid everyone's curses, Number One gritted his teeth and sat down in the Electric Chair. He picked up an object that resembled a motorcycle helmet from the top of the chair and placed it over his head.

When the helmet visor fell, the siren abruptly stopped.

"Something's not right," I said, looking at Number One. "His actions just now felt too natural. He found the helmet and put it right on. And as the crucial Number One, he's the key to getting this entire game started. Could he be a cop? Or is he the hidden twelfth person among us?"

While I was still speculating, Number One began to scream in agony from the Electric Chair. The chair was incredibly dilapidated, and it seemed some of its circuits were leaking electricity.

"Poor Number One."

"Hurry up and confess. Don't waste time."

Once everyone quieted down, Number One sat in the Electric Chair, his face twitching, and began to confess his crimes.

"My name is Wang Shi. I am thirty-one years old. I used to write under the pen name Corpse Body Human Face. I am a suspense novelist."

As soon as he spoke his first sentence, looks of astonishment swept across the room. No one knew the name Wang Shi, but the pen name Corpse Body Human Face was known by many.

"The king of unreliable narration! The leading figure of Northern suspense! He's famous for using narrative structure and clever wordplay to deliberately hide facts and mislead readers, only dropping the truth at the very end to leave them in utter shock! His prose is concise and vicious, his plots are bizarre and unpredictable, and his story structures are practically unimaginable!"

"The same Corpse Body Human Face who skipped out on the national literary awards?"

"Rumor has it he only ever submitted manuscripts under his screen name. No one has ever seen his real face."

"Fuck! I even bought his books!"

Seeing that people recognized his pen name, Number One offered a miserable smile. "Since you know I'm Corpse Body Human Face, you must know my masterpiece, 'Wife-Killing Diary'. Well, everything in that diary is true. I am the absolute psychopath from the novel."

"Throughout my entire life, whenever I faced the woman I loved to the point of madness, I was crippled by anxiety. I grew blind and deaf, my soul entirely unmoored, yet I never dared to cross the line and confess my feelings to her. Nor did I ever take advantage of our most intimate moments to beg her for the single favor I so desperately craved."

"My first wife and I were high school classmates. Her name was Bai Fangfang. After graduating from our senior year, she was accepted into a prestigious university with excellent grades. I ended up at a vocational school, like a toad staring up at a white swan."

"My inferiority complex was probably planted that very day. Six years later, my first book was published. To my utter surprise, she and I crossed paths again—this time as author and reader."

"I poured everything I had into pursuing her. After a year, we got married."

"But our married life was far from happy. She was willful and arrogant, acting like a high and mighty princess, while I was nothing more than her servant."

"When I was twenty-six, another woman walked into my life. Her name was Mu Xueying. She was Bai Fangfang's student, and at the time, she was only twenty years old."

"Her younger body, her teasing and elusive seduction... I became addicted to that feeling. I sank so deep I couldn't pull myself out."

"Soon, Mu Xueying and I were no longer satisfied with seeing each other just a few times a month. I asked Bai Fangfang for a divorce. But my groveling earned absolutely no sympathy from that woman. She demanded half of my assets and threatened to expose my private affairs to all my readers."

"I had never thought about killing anyone before. I used to love her so much, but in an instant, all that love curdled into hate."

"I smiled and fawned as I apologized to her. I cooked her dinner and drew the water for her foot bath. That night, we even had sex six or seven times until we were completely exhausted."

"I acted as if I loved her more than ever. But starting from that moment, I was already planning out how to write a completely real 'Wife-Killing Diary'."

"Every day, I obsessed over methods to kill her. Then, one day, I heard Mu Xueying mention that her school's toxic reagent management had major loopholes, and their laboratory was often left unlocked during the day. I realized my chance had come."

"Using a different, unknown pen name, I managed to procure a highly toxic chemical element online—thallium bromide. It changed hands twice before three five-gram bottles of the poison finally reached me."

"To completely clear myself of suspicion, I didn't go with something as simple as poisoning her food. Instead, I tailor-made the perfect method of death just for my wife, Bai Fangfang."

"From our previous conversations, I knew that Bai Fangfang's mother had a history of mental illness. I also knew that Bai Fangfang was severely nearsighted and liked to wear contact lenses every day to look pretty."