The room Ke Xun entered appeared to be a small living room, containing only a sofa and a wardrobe, both covered in a thick layer of dust.
Walking to the sofa, he carefully examined it using his phone's light. The old, faded sofa cover still bore the wrinkles of someone sitting and lying on it. On the coffee table in front of the sofa sat a teapot and several teacups, the bottoms of which were covered in dust and dead insects, with tea stains clinging
to the sides. Ke Xun opened the wardrobe and searched it thoroughly, finding only bottles and jars. He even moved the sofa to check the floor underneath, and finally used his phone's light to examine the ceiling and walls inch by inch.
Emerging from the room, he saw Zhu Haowen and Mu Yiran had also finished their inspection and returned to the central hall. The three of them exchanged their findings.
"If you ignore the pool of blood at the door and these bloody footprints," Ke Xun said.
"And something happened that brought this way of life to an abrupt halt," Mu Yiran continued, "it was as if all of life's progress had stopped in an instant, freezing all the scenes in that moment."
"The strange thing is," Zhu Haowen said, "that in these scenes, we didn't find a single person, or rather, a human corpse. It's as if they were erased from the picture by an eraser. Of course, if we find anything on the second floor, then disregard what I said."
"So, shall we go up to the second floor?" Ke Xun asked, his gaze inquiring whether the two were ready.
The trail of bloody footprints, the amount of blood being terrifying, came from the second floor.
"Up," the two men said.
So, as usual, Ke Xun walked in front, Mu Yiran in the middle, and Zhu Haowen behind, the three of them spaced two or three steps apart, neither too close nor too far apart, maintaining a position where they could lend a hand at any time, and also be ready to escape at any time, as they filed up the wooden stairs leading to the second floor.
"Creak—" "Creak—"
Even with the three of them treading with utmost care and lightness, the old staircase still creaked and groaned, the echo lingering long and drawn out. As their footsteps left, the final sound trailed off with a long, dull "cluck cluck cluck." It
was like the dying groan of someone whose throat was stuffed with sawdust, desperately trying to speak but unable to utter a word. The
bloody footprints on the stair treads looked very unsteady, and there were also bloodstains on the adjacent wall—handprints, splattered blood, and marks from rubbing against the side of a face.
"Just how much blood did this person bleed?" Ke Xun exclaimed again, stopping in front of a relatively complete human-shaped bloodstain on the wall. He pointed it out to Mu Yiran and Zhu Haowen. "Look at this mark. This person is almost entirely covered in blood."
"A man, about 1.85 meters tall, with a strong build and well-developed limbs," Mu Yiran examined the bloodstain. "If we rule out the possibility of a sneak attack, it wouldn't be easy for an ordinary person to inflict this level of serious injury on a man with such a physique."
"With such a large area of bleeding, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say he was cut into a thousand pieces," Zhu Haowen said.
"Don't scare me," Ke Xun turned and continued walking upstairs.
Zhu Haowen: "..." At least pretend you're scared.
There were also four rooms on the second floor, all with their doors tightly closed. The two windows in the central hall were covered in dust, making the room dark.
Ke Xun stood at the top of the stairs, shining his phone light around for a while, then said to the two behind him, "Cover your heads with your clothes; there's cobwebs and dust everywhere."
The three of them covered their heads, faces, and hands with their coats, which they had already taken off, leaving only their eyes exposed. Ke Xun looked at the bloody footprints on the floor and saw that they led to what appeared to be the master bedroom: "Let's go straight into this room."
The other two had no objections. Ke Xun carefully used his hand covered by his clothes to push aside the crisscrossing, dusty cobwebs in front of him, slowly walked forward, and stopped in front of the master bedroom door.
Shining his phone light on his feet, he saw thick, dark bloodstains seeping out from under the door, even more and thicker than the pool of blood inside the downstairs door.
Ke Xun reached out and grasped the doorknob, but before he could exert any force, the door suddenly creaked open.
A large, dark, chaotic mass rushed towards them. Ke Xun reacted extremely quickly, taking a step back and dodging, and promptly pulling Mu Yiran and Zhu Haowen away from the doorway, one in each hand.
A buzzing sound accompanied a swarm of dark, chaotic flies bursting out of the room, exploding in mid-air and crashing into cobwebs, stirring up dust throughout the room.
"Flies," Zhu Haowen frowned, pulling at the clothes covering his face to cover himself more tightly.
"There must be tens of thousands of flies." Ke Xun waved his hand to shoo away the flies swarming in front of him, pinching his nose with his other hand to block out the extremely nauseating stench that followed the flies out of the room.
"You two wait outside, I'll go in first?" Ke Xun said.
These horrible flies and the smell indicated that the situation inside the room was definitely not pleasant.
"No need, since we're here, let's go in together." Zhu Haowen said, about to step out from the doorway and go into the room first, but Ke Xun pulled him back.
"Why are you so honest?" Ke Xun said, swiping to open his phone's camera, then reaching into the room and taking pictures.
Zhu Haowen: "..." This guy's brain is getting more and more agile.
Ke Xun withdrew his hand, opened the video he had just recorded, and showed it to the three of them. However, even though it was just a video, it was enough to shock him so much that his hand trembled. If Mu Yiran hadn't reacted quickly and caught his hand holding the phone, it probably would have fallen from his grasp.
The room in the video contained a double bed, heavy curtains were drawn, and a wardrobe set stood against the wall.
There was no one in the room, or rather, no corpse, but the bed, curtains, wardrobe, floor, walls, and even the ceiling were all soaked or splattered with thick, black blood.
It was like a living hell.
Zhu Haowen had never seen so much blood before. Even Qi Qiang, who committed suicide by slitting his throat in "Pure Land," hadn't shed this much blood.
Thick, black, sticky filth covered every corner of the room, as if sprayed from a high-pressure water gun. The floor was splattered with pools of blood, teeming with swarms of enormous black flies.
Zhu Haowen turned away, suppressing a couple of dry heaves.
Ke Xun turned off the video and looked at Mu Yiran: "How is it? Do you still want to go in?"
"You two wait here, I'll go in and take a look." Mu Yiran said, stepping into the room.
"Haowen, you wait here, Yiran and I will go in and take a look." Ke Xun followed Mu Yiran through the door.
The nauseating, putrid stench in the room was almost suffocating, evaporating into a pungent odor in the sweltering heat. Flies swarmed around, occasionally bumping into them.
Ke Xun and Mu Yiran, one opened the wardrobe to check, the other lifted the covers to inspect the bed.
The choking dust, the swarming flies, the thick stench of decay, and the suffocating dim light were all stirred into a pot of moldy, rotten porridge by the two people's very careful movements.
They searched the room thoroughly, inside and out, but found no useful clues or props. Ke Xun pointed to the walls and ceiling: "Could this blood be covering up some clues?" If that were the case, what they were about to do would be utterly disgusting.
"I don't think clues would be left here so simply," Mu Yiran thought for a moment and shook his head slightly, "but we can't rule that out; it's a last resort."
He then called Ke Xun and prepared to leave the room. As Ke Xun walked out, he carefully examined the stains on the wall. Seeing that the stains were unevenly distributed, it seemed that they weren't just bloodstains, but contained other substances as well. However, Ke Xun didn't want to examine them by hand; he had a feeling they weren't good stuff.
After leaving the room, the three of them thoroughly searched the other rooms on the second floor. The only room with bloodstains was the master bedroom; the other rooms, like the rooms downstairs, remained in their usual, everyday state.
And the three of them found no clues.
Emerging from the residence, Ke Xun tore off the clothes covering his head and face, taking deep breaths of the not-so-fresh air outside. The weather seemed to grow even hotter as time passed. Before the others returned, Ke Xun also took off his lower garments, leaving only his outermost pair of trousers.
"What exactly happened in this house?" Ke Xun discussed with Mu Yiran and Zhu Haowen. "Especially in the master bedroom, what kind of situation would cause someone's blood to be sprayed to that extent?"
"Maybe it's not just one person's blood," Zhu Haowen said. "It could be two people's, or even the whole family's."
"The more you talk about it, the more horrible it gets," Ke Xun said. "Regardless of how many people were involved, this kind of death is definitely homicide, but what kind of murder method would cause blood to be sprayed all over the house, even on the ceiling? I saw that the blood was either sprayed on or splashed on, but it shouldn't have been deliberately smeared on. And the key question is, where did the deceased go?"
"Perhaps before the deceased died, he was the only one living in this house. After the murder, the body was taken away and disposed of, and the house became an uninhabited house, so naturally no one would come to clean or tidy it up," Zhu Haowen said.
"No, this house was at least inhabited by a family of three," Mu Yiran said. "I checked the closets in every room; there were clothes for adult men and women, as well as children's clothes. Regardless of who survived the accident, or whether the whole family perished, this house shouldn't have remained in this state."
"So now it seems there are three questions that need to be answered," Zhu Haowen said. "First, what happened in this house? Second, why was the murder scene preserved? Third, what is the connection between this scene and the search for the signature, or rather, what is the connection to the topic of 'reboot'?"
"I think we need to check more houses to get more clues," Ke Xun said.
As they were talking, they saw their companions returning one after another, each one sweating profusely, having already taken off their clothes, leaving only a thin shirt and trousers.
"Any discoveries?" Ke Xun asked everyone.