"First climb onto the rooftop, then sneak back down," Ethan explained.
"That works too?", Riyana's eyes widened, and she looked at him in disbelief, "Brother, it's so high up. Aren't you afraid something will happen?"
"If I don't get the key, then something really will happen to me!"
Ethan was a little helpless.
After thinking for a moment, Riyana also felt it made sense, "I guess so. Then hurry back. I'll cover for you in the room!"
"Okay."
Judging from Riyana handing the copper key to him, Riyana should be a harmless NPC in this game, or rather, a neutral NPC. In any case, she wasn't the type to harm Ethan.
On top of that, the memories she still retained were filled with fear of Mom, the BOSS.
As the saying went, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So… Ethan didn't need to worry about Riyana betraying him for now.
After confirming Riyana's position, Ethan didn't waste any more time. He climbed back onto the rooftop along the same route as before.
But this time, he was much more careful. He didn't recklessly jump straight up, instead clinging to the rooftop railing…
But even just sticking his head up to take a look required him to work up his courage.
Who knew whether that woman would suddenly appear again in some bizarre way.
It wasn't that he was particularly afraid.
It was just that being suddenly hit with something like that made it hard for his heart to take.
It was like watching a Japanese horror movie. Usually, they would start with an extremely quiet scene, then suddenly have a huge head lunge toward the screen while blasting an especially loud sound effect or drumbeat to scare you.
That feeling was really unpleasant because it was a physiological fright.
It was somewhat like a natural conditioned response from the body.
Rather than the kind of horror that really made you think about it and feel scared.
That was why Ethan had never really liked Japanese horror movies. He preferred European and American horror movies instead. That kind of direct, bloody horror felt more genuinely frightening and made you feel afraid the more you thought about it, rather than just randomly trying to scare you.
"Whew!"
Ethan took a deep breath. After working up his courage, he finally looked up.
After making sure there wasn't anything strange above his head, he slowly did a pull-up and stuck his head out to look onto the rooftop.
Bang!
A crisp metallic clatter suddenly sounded right beside Ethan's ear.
It startled Ethan so badly that he quickly pulled his head back down.
However, after waiting for a long while, nothing happened.
Only then did Ethan cautiously stick his head out again and look around the entire rooftop. He then discovered that the loud noise just now had come from a soda can being blown off the rooftop by the wind.
After confirming that it really was the sound of a soda can hitting the ground, Ethan finally let out a sigh of relief and climbed onto the rooftop.
The water left behind by the mop hadn't completely dried yet.
The mop and bucket were also scattered around the rooftop, proving that everything Ethan had experienced before wasn't an illusion. It had really happened. The monster had fallen to her death once, and the objects from before the monster's reset hadn't disappeared either.
That was good.
Only after seeing that the monster's belongings were still there did Ethan finally relax.
Otherwise, if everything disappeared whenever the monster reset, then there would be no point in looking for the key on his dead old man either. It would disappear after a reset, so what the hell would be the point of looking for it?
On the water tank's latch, one of the screws had already been loosened more than halfway.
Ethan quickly pulled his school ID card from his pocket and continued unscrewing it. However, after only loosening one screw, the school ID card snapped in half because it couldn't withstand the strain.
But he couldn't find a suitable replacement right now, so Ethan could only bite the bullet and carefully unscrew the remaining three screws.
Fortunately, there were no accidents after that.
Before the entire school ID card broke apart, Ethan finally unscrewed the last screw.
The moment Ethan opened the water tank lid, the strange stench inside almost made him throw up. It was filled with the stench of dead rats, mixed with the foul smell of several meals' worth of rotten fish and shrimp.
By the light falling into the water tank, Ethan could finally see clearly…
"Fuck! These are fucking mushrooms!"
There was no water to be seen in the tank at all. There was only a thick layer of mushrooms floating across the surface, and those mushrooms looked extremely strange. Although they varied in size, every single one was very round, almost spherical.
That alone would have been bad enough, but every mushroom floating on the surface had a large gray-black spot right in its center.
They looked just like eyes.
If Ethan hadn't personally seen Mom tear open one of the eyeball-shaped mushrooms and seen the mushroom stem and the unopened structure inside it, he really would have thought this was a whole pile of eyeballs.
But just thinking about how these mushrooms had actually been grown using corpse water made Ethan want to puke.
"Do I go down or not!"
Looking at the dense layer of strange corpse mushrooms inside the water tank, Ethan began having second thoughts.
After all, whether Dad's body was really inside the water tank was still uncertain.
He had only deduced all of this based on the clues in the diary, so there was no way to be sure. What if he had guessed wrong?
Or… What if there was a corpse inside but no clue?