Eldritch Horror Theatre

‘This should be the place.’

Checking the house number, Fu Qian nodded in satisfaction.

Mindful of the time, he hadn’t wasted a single moment after leaving the Police Department. He had headed straight for the address Stan gave him.

During their earlier back-and-forth, he had managed to coax some information out of Stan. But to maintain his imposing facade, he had been forced to act unfathomable, which meant the details he actually walked away with were quite fragmented.

What he could confirm so far was that Stan was undoubtedly connected to the corpse in the storage room. It was even highly likely the sheriff was the killer, and that Joseph knew about it.

But as for what exactly happened back then and what had caused it, he still couldn't be sure.

Nor could he be certain if any of this would actually help him escape.

Perhaps this place could give him some answers.

Pondering this, Fu Qian gave the door a push.

Inside was an ordinary-looking room. It appeared to have been vacant for some time, the space utterly ransacked and the floor covered in footprints.

‘Sheriff Stan has definitely been here already.’

Fu Qian muttered to himself, not particularly surprised.

The footprints clearly belonged to more than one person. Combined with the sheer scale of the mess, it was obvious the door had been left unlocked for a long time, inviting a parade of thieves to rummage through.

According to the bizarre rules of this world, everyone took it for granted that a lock could only be opened by a Key, so picking one simply wasn't a possibility in their minds.

And someone leaving home without locking the door was quite a rare occurrence.

In all likelihood, someone had come by later with the Key and intentionally left the door unlocked when they departed.

Fu Qian scanned his surroundings as he thought.

Sheriff Stan undoubtedly fit the bill.

First of all, the occupant was dead. The Key on his person had most likely fallen into the hands of his killer.

Furthermore, Stan not only knew this address, but when faced with Fu Qian's request to check the victim's belongings, he had suggested coming here without ever mentioning a Key. It seemed he was completely certain Fu Qian would be able to get inside.

As for why he had intentionally left the door unlocked—the best way to cover up his tracks was to let more people trample over the scene.

By leaving it unlocked, time would eventually erase all evidence.

In fact, this strategy had been extremely successful. From the looks of it, the place had been turned upside down countless times.

At a glance, there was hardly anything of value left to find.

But that was only true for other people.

After looking around, Fu Qian's gaze quickly settled on a desk.

The items on it were just as chaotic, and the drawers had been yanked open.

Stepping forward, Fu Qian picked up a notebook from the surface.

It was thin and ordinary—the kind of thing one could easily buy at any stationery store.

The only special thing about it was the incredibly crude lock on its side.

[Locked. A Key is required to open.]

Fu Qian tested it and promptly received the expected prompt.

This had to be the reason it hadn't been opened yet. Very few people would go out of their way to search everywhere for a Key to something that looked so worthless.

Given how laughably simple the mechanism was, Fu Qian casually found a piece of wire and popped it open in a matter of seconds.

“...A very special place. They seem to possess a strange thought process, believing that any locked place cannot be opened, and they never question why...”

Once open, he found the contents were akin to a diary.

The pronoun used was ‘they’.

Fu Qian's eyes narrowed slightly as he read on.

“...I even asked my classmates what to do if a Key was lost. They told me I could only get a replacement Key made, but the procedure would be very tedious, so they advised me to keep it safe...”

“...Very strange, but one thing is clear: right now, all I need is the simplest lock to safely hide any secret... And once I leave, I just have to toss the Key away, and this will become information that can never be touched. Quite interesting...”

“...Things have become hard to understand. I’ve completed one task after another. The content is always very simple, nothing you’d call difficult, yet there is always a next one waiting for me...”

“...I am certain I haven’t done anything wrong, but it feels like I’m caught in a vortex. As I get pulled deeper and deeper, I can’t see any sign of an end. I’ve never encountered anything like this...”

“...I’m getting a little hesitant. Should I try failing a task to see what happens? But wouldn’t that be falling short by a single basket of earth... Just hold on a little longer. Keep going, Edral...”

‘I knew it!’

Seeing this, Fu Qian let out a long sigh.

The suspicion he had harbored all along was finally confirmed today.

It was obvious this notebook belonged to a predecessor. And unsurprisingly, he had already died behind that bizarre door.

Through the diary entries, he could clearly feel the man's transition from initial curiosity to eventual unease.

The earlier entries had no dates, but they each had a number.

The numbers occasionally skipped and weren't entirely sequential. By the time it reached the passage of self-doubt, the number next to it was already 12.

Fu Qian guessed this represented the number of completed tasks.

It was likely that after realizing he couldn't escape, this man had subconsciously started counting them.

At the same time, from the notebook's contents, it was evident that this guy named Edral hadn't received the prompt to escape the Furnace. Otherwise, he wouldn't have wondered why it still wasn't over.

As for why he hadn't received the prompt, Fu Qian believed the answer was already written in the notebook—he had successfully completed every single task.

In other words, he had never experienced a task failure that cost him his SAN Value.

It seemed the prompt for the Containment Conditions required a drop in SAN Value to trigger.

‘This is the importance of a skeptical mind!’

Fu Qian felt a surge of emotion for a moment.

Although he hadn't had any hard evidence to prove something was wrong at the time, he hadn't wanted to be entirely passive, so he had simply chosen to fail a task.

The facts proved his instincts had been correct.

In truth, it was already impossible for Edral to receive the prompt by the end, because he had gone through at least twelve tasks.

Based on Fu Qian's own experience with the punishments scaling exponentially, if Edral had tried to intentionally fail a task at that point, the SAN Value deducted would have been an astronomical figure. He most likely would have gone insane on the spot.

While he was hesitating over whether to test the waters, he had actually already lost all margin for error.

Furthermore, according to his description, the tasks he received hadn't seemed very difficult.

This reminded Fu Qian of his own first task.

Come to think of it, if he had completed it as requested and hadn't crashed that tragic student-teacher romance, perhaps he wouldn't have been dragged into all of this later, and the task difficulty would have plummeted.

This was a path he had simply never chosen.

Then again, the name Edral felt a bit familiar, like he had seen it somewhere before.

Briefly searching his memory, Fu Qian quickly recalled where it was—in Medea's pile of photos.

One of her former lovers had shared this exact name.

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