Kaidan Game Train: Abide Rule or Die!
Chapter 226: Knock on the Door at Night

Chapter 226: Chapter 226: Knock on the Door at Night

The piano wire was caught in her mouth, and as she bit down, it sank into the corners of her mouth.

"Hiss!" Ni Tian’s face showed pain, but before she could retreat, Xu Huo grabbed her head and smashed it hard onto the ground!

The floor tiles shattered, Ni Tian’s face was cut, and amidst her shock and anger, she turned her head to bite at his wrist, but as the piano wire was yanked back sharply, her whole head was pulled backward, followed by a chill pressing against her throat!

Taking the opportunity to fall backward, Ni Tian dodged the deadly strike and grasped the piano wire beside her face, yanking it hard to pull it out, but the wires crossed behind her head weren’t so easy to remove, and she was lifted to her feet.

"Ugh!" Her abdomen took a punch, and Ni Tian spat out blood, her hands steadying the piano wire as she shouted, "Help! Murder!"

Xu Huo thrust the dagger into her open mouth.

"Er... Er..." Ni Tian’s forehead was sweaty, her eyes fixed on the hilt of the dagger in front of her as she tried to keep her mouth open, she mumbled, "Don’t kill me..."

"Thud thud thud!" Someone was knocking at the door. Xu Huo quickly moved behind it and swiftly opened the door after hearing Xie Man’s voice.

"Can you keep it down a bit..." Xie Man’s words were cut short as Xu Huo opened the door. She couldn’t help but step back, glancing inside, and then said, "Please consider the feelings of residents living next door."

Xu Huo looked over at Gao Jun’s tightly closed door to his right, then turned back to her, "Sorry, I have violent tendencies."

At that moment, Ni Tian made a noise as she fell to the ground.

Xie Man stared at Xu Huo calmly, cursed "Psycho" under her breath, turned, and walked away, but instead of returning to her room, she headed toward the exhibition hall, only to spin around suddenly and run back while lowering her voice to shout, "Quick, hide back inside!"

Pan Siming, who had just opened his door, and the gloomy man immediately retreated back into their room. Xu Huo, seeing a long and eerie shadow cast on the ground by the light, also closed his door and locked it from the inside.

He quickly went over to Ni Tian and knocked her out with a knife, then returned to the door, patted his back, and the Girl in the Painting, turned into paper, slid out from his coat.

Xu Huo pointed towards the door, and the Girl in the Painting immediately attempted to drift out from under the door crack, but he held her back.

"Wait," Xu Huo mouthed.

The Girl in the Painting nodded, then mimicked his actions by pressing her ear against the door as a human.

There was the sound of something hard scraping over the floor tiles in the corridor, moving slowly from the exhibition hall to the upper corridor, pausing at the junction before moving to the left.

"Thud!" A knocking sound unlike that of a human rang out.

After a single knock, the room door smashed against the wall, followed by the scream of the player nicknamed "Octopus Card Bear," but the scream stopped abruptly in less than half a second!

The sound of the hard object sliding out of the room and moving to the deeper left side followed, then it began knocking on doors:

"Thud!"

"Thud!"

This time it knocked twice, but whatever it was didn’t break into the rooms. Instead, it moved toward the right side corridor, slowly approaching Xu Huo’s door.

"I’ll go hit it," the Girl in the Painting showed Xu Huo through her phone screen.

Xu Huo shook his head slightly; the sound did not stop in front of his door but continued on, passing Gao Jun’s room and heading toward the woman in leather’s room.

"Thud!"

"Thud!"

"Thud!"

This time there were three knocks, then it turned back and headed for the exhibition hall.

The scraping sound faded in the direction of the exhibition hall, and the corridor outside became quiet.

The next morning at seven o’clock, the lights in the exhibition hall lit up, and players began to emerge from their rooms.

Nearby, Pan Siming and Fan Shiji were the first to go to Deng Yu and Big Bear’s room, followed slightly later by everyone else, who all twitched at the sight of the room’s condition.

Setting aside the door that was kicked in, from the center of the room to the right-side bed and wall, there seemed to have been a slash from a huge knife, a deep groove that nearly sliced the entire room in half.

Deng Yu was gone, but Big Bear was sitting at the edge of the collapsed bed.

"What did you see last night? Where did Deng Yu go?" Pan Siming immediately stepped forward to ask.

Big Bear shook his head, "I didn’t see anything. When I heard the noise, Deng Yu said it was safer with the lights off, so we turned off the lights in the room. But after the door was smashed, I was swept up by a strange wind, hit my head on the bedside cabinet, and passed out. When I came to, Deng Yu had already disappeared."

There was a hint of blood on the bandaged side of his head, with shredded clothing and a bloody headscarf at his feet, beside which on a corner of the bedside cabinet were congealed bloodstains.

You Huanhuan handed half a bottle of Self-Healing Potion to Big Bear.

"You’re quite lucky to be alive after all that," the gloomy man said sarcastically.

After drinking the Self-Healing Potion, Big Bear said, "We still don’t know what happened to Deng Yu..."

"Let’s check the exhibition hall," Pan Siming turned and said.

The group returned to the exhibition hall and, after inspecting each column, found no trace of Deng Yu—no person, no body.

"There’s no blood on the ground, no drag marks," Pan Siming said, frowning. "Could Deng Yu have just vanished into thin air?"

"The creature that appeared last night must have been the instance’s boss, right? Could it have eaten Deng Yu?" You Huanhuan whispered.

"Did you see what that thing looked like last night?" Pan Siming asked Xie Man.

Yet Xie Man shook his head, "Honestly, I didn’t get a clear look at what it was. It was in front of the statue in the center of the exhibition hall, and I only saw a shadow as tall as the statue behind it. I was too afraid to look closely for fear of being discovered."

"As tall as the statue?" Fan Shiji looked up at the statue not far away. "Isn’t that about five or six meters tall?"

Placed in the center of the exhibition hall was a male statue, draped in cloth, holding a book in his left hand and his right hand beneath the draped cloth.

Big Bear swallowed hard, "Could it have killed Deng Yu?"

"Let’s not worry about whether it killed Deng Yu for the moment," the woman in the leather jacket said at this time. "The knocking last night had a pattern."

"The first knock was one, the second was two knocks, and the third was three. What does that signify?"

"Moreover, it only attacked the first room. Why?"

"Could it be the order in which we entered the art gallery?" Xie Man pondered before saying. "Who was the first to arrive?"

"It was me," the gloomy man said.

"Then it’s not that," Pan Siming read off the players’ names, "First was Deng Yu, Big Bear."

"I was second," Fan Shiji said.

"And I was third," the woman in the leather jacket said.

"What is the connection between these four people?" Pan Siming kept looking at them.

"What if there is no connection between them?" Ni Tian said, covering her injured corner of the mouth. "It might just be the instance randomly killing."

"It can’t be random killing," the woman in the leather jacket said. "If it were random, it wouldn’t have spared Big Bear."

Big Bear licked his lips, saying, "I might know why."

"It’s the painting, I saw Deng Yu accidentally damage a corner when he was taking it down to check yesterday."