"Your hand…"
Ethan looked at Ryan's left hand. It was already completely immobile, stuck there in a rigid, straight position. It looked as though he couldn't even curl it a little.
And judging from the expression on Ryan's face, the pain was clearly intense.
Yet this had happened merely because the thing outside the door had grabbed it.
"It's fine. Being able to keep my life is already good enough."
Ryan's face was dark as he glanced again at the corpse on the floor. Compared to the boy named Daniel, his own outcome was indeed far better.
"Once we get back to the real world, your hand will recover," Lily said, trying to comfort him.
"That's assuming we can make it back at all…" Ryan nodded at her, but his expression remained grim.
Ethan raised his eyes slightly and suddenly said, "No matter what, we should talk about the rules first. How do you think Daniel actually died?"
He knew very clearly that his own understanding of the rules was still far from enough. These people had all cleared nightmares before, so they might know things he could never imagine on his own.
And from this moment onward, he seemed to finally understand what kind of situation a newcomer faced upon entering this world for the first time.
Just like this dead boy—
his death had, in fact, given them a great deal of important information.
But why did it have to be him?
Was it because he lacked experience?
Or…
Ethan's gaze unconsciously swept toward Ryan's gloomy face.
What if that had been Ryan's purpose all along?
"I suspect this time the rule may have something to do with light," Sophia said slowly.
"Maybe after night falls, players can only stay inside rooms. Or… perhaps we simply can't get close to places of complete darkness."
Hearing that, everyone fell into thought.
Just now, only the outside had been pitch-black, and the ghost had indeed remained hidden in that darkness from beginning to end.
Ryan lowered his arm and continued,
"There's another possibility. The rule this time might actually have something to do with doors. After nightfall, we absolutely must not open a door. It might even be dangerous to go near one…"
"Of course, I still don't know whether there are any other conditions. It's possible that it's not limited to nighttime. Maybe during the day we were just lucky enough that no one died…"
He paused, drew in a deep breath, and then said in a low voice,
"But no matter what, there's one thing I can be certain of…"
"…The ghost can definitely open doors."
An uneasy atmosphere spread around them once again.
But now everyone knew clearly that, at least for this night, none of them could go near that door again.
Ryan's ruined hand, and Daniel's death, were proof enough.
"By the way… what are we supposed to do with the body?"
At that moment, Lily suddenly asked hesitantly.
Everyone froze.
Before anyone could answer, she went on,
"There's actually something I've been wondering the whole time…"
She unconsciously clenched her fist and swept her gaze around the group.
"Do you think… there might be other people living in this temple?"
"That's definitely possible," Sophia nodded.
"There isn't much dust in the kitchen or the room, and there's food here. Logically, people should still be living here. It's just that up until now we haven't seen anyone, so we instinctively assumed this place belonged only to us…"
"You think… they might be living in some other part of Tuanshan Temple?" Ryan asked thoughtfully.
Ethan nodded as well.
Although this temple didn't look very large, their group had only explored a very small section of it. No one knew whether there might be other key figures living in the parts they hadn't yet seen.
If that was the case, then dealing with the corpse became an extremely important matter.
"What do you think we should do with Daniel's body?" Ethan asked.
He didn't know whether they had arrived in this world playing the roles of certain identities, or whether they were simply a group of completely out-of-place strangers.
But from his point of view, if someone discovered that these uninvited outsiders had silently moved into the temple, that would be one thing.
If they were discovered with a fresh corpse as well, then the whole thing would become much harder to explain.
The others remained silent.
In the end, Ryan gritted his teeth and said, "To avoid any accidents, we'd better hide it… Thinking about it now, if we had really thrown it outside earlier, it might actually have caused even more trouble."
As he spoke, his gaze fell on the pile of firewood and straw beside the stove. That was the only place in the kitchen where a body could possibly be hidden.
But Ryan made no move to handle the corpse himself. Instead, with one arm hanging uselessly at his side, he suddenly looked calmly toward Victor and said flatly,
"I'll leave that job to you, Victor. How about it?"
Victor looked back at him with a dark expression. Naturally, he knew exactly why Ryan was suddenly saying this.
"Ethan, you'd better not interfere in Victor's business," Ryan deliberately said to Ethan first, then turned back with a smile that didn't reach his eyes.
"Just now, Victor was the only one who didn't help. I'm sure he feels bad about it too. Now that there's work to do, it'll help ease his conscience a little."
He stared at Victor and smiled.
"Right, Victor?"
Ethan stood to one side and said nothing.
When Ryan had been attacked by the ghost earlier, Victor had been the only one who hadn't moved.
Ethan knew, of course, that Victor had done it to save himself.
But…
that had directly concerned Ryan's life and death.
At the thought of that, Ethan glanced at Victor and a realization surfaced in his mind:
If Ryan had been telling the truth earlier—that a ghost could only kill one person within a short period of time—then Victor's behavior actually made sense.
Daniel had already died.
Perhaps Victor simply hadn't been able to determine whether the ghost's brief cooldown period had begun yet, and that was why he chose to remain where he was.
And what happened later to Ryan seemed to support that theory.
Even if the ghost had a time limit between killings, it was clearly only a very short one. That was why Ryan had still been grabbed.
From a purely theoretical perspective, even if Ryan had died at that moment, Victor—who had remained in the inner room—would not have been in much danger.
In fact, during that extremely brief window after Ryan's death, it would have been the best possible chance to shut the kitchen door.
So if one were being strict about it, Victor's choice had actually been the most prudent one.
"Yes. You're right."
To everyone's surprise, Victor suddenly nodded.
Then he walked straight toward Daniel's corpse and crouched down, as if preparing to move it.
"Wait."
A voice suddenly rang out.
Victor turned his head and saw Ryan staring at him expressionlessly.
Then Ryan said,
"Take off his clothes. I want to wear them."