Chapter 63: Before Dawn (1)
Trading a single chocolate bean for a lackey was a bargain no matter how Tang Cuo calculated it. Furthermore, having suffered such a massive psychological blow, this new lackey accepted reality without a shred of suspicion.
As for why the character panel didn’t display a “poisoned” status after he swallowed the pill—the big boss had already explicitly stated it was a delayed-onset poison. What more proof did he need?
“Where did you get the key to open the door?”
“Downstairs, in the butler’s room.”
The lackey’s name was Qi Hui. Upon entering the instance, he had spawned in the butler’s room and smoothly retrieved the keys hanging from a hook behind the door. The keys were threaded on a circular steel wire, jingling loudly in a large bunch. Qi Hui had used three to unlock the attic door, leaving two keys of unknown purpose.
The Yu Residence was a two-story Western-style mansion with an attic. According to standard setups, the masters lived on the second floor while the servants stayed on the first. Tang Cuo walked down the stairs, his footsteps echoing faintly through the hollow, empty house.
It was undeniably a magnificent and opulent mansion, combining the grand atmosphere of Chinese design with Western luxury. The wooden floors of the corridors were lined with carpets, crystal chandeliers hung overhead, and framed paintings decorated the walls every few meters.
However, the doors to the rooms on both sides of the corridor were shut tight. Tang Cuo tried the two remaining keys, but they didn’t work.
From the second floor down to the first, almost all the doors were locked. The only exceptions were the kitchen, the utility room, and the butler’s and maid’s quarters. Aside from these, only public areas like the first-floor living room were accessible.
The second floor also featured an open-air balcony, but the door leading to it was completely sealed off. This wasn’t merely a system-enforced restriction; the masters of the house had installed heavy iron bars, sealing it shut entirely. Likewise, iron bars were installed outside every single window. They were exquisitely crafted with complex, beautiful patterns, but that couldn’t change the fact that they were prison bars.
The entire Yu Residence was a cage.
The front door on the first floor and the back door in the kitchen were both deadlocked. Tang Cuo took a lap around the house, roughly grasped their current situation, and stood in the kitchen, falling into a brief moment of contemplation.
Before Dawn was an escape room instance, but it wasn’t a conventional one. Generally, escape room games involve continuously unlocking new areas, moving from one room to the next until the entire map is unlocked and you escape. But in this Yu Residence, the different zones were separated by overlapping spaces or temporal leaps.
Right at that moment, an ear-piercing telephone ring shattered the silence.
Qi Hui jumped in fright. Just as he was about to cry out about ghosts, his vision blurred as Tang Cuo dashed out of the kitchen. He hurriedly followed, watching Tang Cuo accurately pinpoint the source of the sound—a rotary telephone next to the plant stand in the living room.
Tang Cuo calmly picked up the receiver. “Hello?”
Jin Cheng’s smiling voice came through the earpiece. “Judging by this voice, am I speaking to Mr. Tang Cuo?”
Tang Cuo: “Get to the point.”
Jin Cheng: “Isn’t looking for you the point?”
Tang Cuo: “I’m hanging up.”
Jin Cheng: “Wait, don’t. It wasn’t easy getting this call through. If you hang up on me, we really will end up like the Cowherd and Weaver Girl, only meeting once a year across the magpie bridge.”
Tang Cuo had no words for him.
Jin Cheng finally turned serious. “This is the Yu Residence in 1926, 7:00 PM Beijing time. Preliminary observation: the magnetic field here is highly unstable. The lights are flickering, ghosts are weeping, and there are bursts of chilling winds. More importantly—I am the only player here.”
As he spoke, Jin Cheng was looking up at a middle-aged female ghost poking her head out from the ceiling. One human and one ghost locked eyes. Jin Cheng leaned casually against a plant stand, completely at ease, while the female ghost clung to the chandelier, glaring at him hungrily.
The lights flickered, and the swaying metal fixture let out agonizing, teeth-setting creaks. Four of the nine light bulbs were shattered; the remaining five cast a ghastly, macabre glow over what was once a magnificent hall. Looking around, dust and cobwebs blanketed the sofas, the stairs, and every visible surface.
Over the phone, Tang Cuo asked: “How did you dial out?”
Jin Cheng: “There was a phone book next to the plant stand. I looked it up. Since we’ve been separated, it confirms the possibility of overlapping time and space. But this isn’t a solo-clear instance. We’re teammates, which means there must be a way for the different timelines to connect. I looked everywhere, and this phone seems to be the only link.”
Thus, Jin Cheng had done something seemingly illogical—he dialed the Yu Residence’s phone number from inside the Yu Residence.
He tried for a solid ten minutes. The line only returned the crackle of static, unable to connect. Finally, the signal stabilized, and Tang Cuo’s voice came through.
“Remember this, the number is 1446,” Jin Cheng said, then asked, “What about your side?”
“My timeline should be before yours, between 1923 and 1926. The Yu Residence is perfectly preserved, with no abnormalities for now. There are two players here, including me, and no ghosts.”
“Which means there is at least one other timeline.”
“At least one.”
“Do you need any help?”
Since they could communicate across different timelines, it meant the clues each needed might be in the other’s hands, requiring mutual assistance. But Tang Cuo hadn’t found anything pressing that he needed help with yet. There was only one crucial detail he had to point out.
“The time is mismatched. It’s 10:00 PM on my end.”
“Ten o’clock?” Jin Cheng raised an eyebrow.
“Correct. My sunrise will happen three hours earlier than yours.”
The moment Tang Cuo said this, Jin Cheng immediately understood.
The mission required them to escape the Yu Residence before dawn. If dawn arrived at different times in each space, then Tang Cuo would be dead before Jin Cheng even saw the sunrise. If the clues in Tang Cuo’s timeline were cut off, Jin Cheng would have a very high probability of dying as well.
Realizing this, Jin Cheng said, “But that conflicts with the intel we gathered. The longest clearance time among those three people was around twenty-four hours. There are two possibilities: either the time can be adjusted, or players can travel between the different timelines.”
Tang Cuo largely agreed with this deduction. Just then, static crackled over the phone. He frowned and was about to speak when Jin Cheng interrupted him: “I have to hang up. There’s a female ghost here who wants to dance with me.”
Tang Cuo: “…”
Jin Cheng: “Dressed as a maid, around forty years old, square face, with a wound on her chest—beep—”
The call disconnected.
In that final second, Tang Cuo heard the sound of an impact; a fight had likely broken out. He immediately set down the receiver to look for the phone book, but couldn’t find one.
Qi Hui finally found an opening to lean in. “Brother Tang, was that Brother Jin on the phone just now? Did you guys figure out a way to communicate this fast?”
Qi Hui possessed an exceptional level of self-awareness for a lackey. He hadn’t even met Jin Cheng yet, but was already calling him “Brother Jin,” and he felt zero pressure calling Tang Cuo—who was younger than him—”Brother.”
Tang Cuo retorted, “You guys came into this instance without figuring out a proper strategy first?”
Qi Hui was left speechless, too embarrassed to admit that their grand strategy was simply to latch onto big bosses.
Tang Cuo didn’t press the matter. Jin Cheng’s description had given him a direction: the middle-aged maid who had turned into a ghost. During their earlier quick sweep, they had only seen the butler’s and the maid’s rooms. The wardrobe in the maid’s room was filled with young women’s clothing. Therefore, if there was a middle-aged female servant, she lived in another room.
Most likely, the room right next to the maid’s quarters.
Tang Cuo located the room. Judging by the style of the door and the size of the space, this had to be it. The room past it was significantly larger and couldn’t possibly be for a servant.
The key was the problem. Where was the key?
The map was too large; finding one tiny key would be difficult. Tang Cuo ordered Qi Hui to conduct a carpet search, combing through every inch, while he himself paced unhurriedly down the corridor.
A moment later, he arrived back at the butler’s room.
Aside from the essential bed, desk, and wardrobe, the butler’s room was virtually devoid of any extra decorations. A small blackboard hung on the wall, documenting a daily schedule written in neat chalk handwriting.
6:00 AM: Preparation
7:00 AM: Breakfast
9:30 AM: Receive guests
12:00 PM: Lunch
3:00 PM: Prepare afternoon tea for Miss
6:00 PM: Dinner, brew medicine for Madam
12:00 AM: Piano room
Judging from this schedule, the Yu Residence had a “Miss” and a “Madam,” meaning there should also be a “Master.” Aside from the Madam being ill, nothing else stood out for the moment.
However, what did “12:00 AM: Piano room” mean? That specific time was far too eerie.
It was currently an hour and a half away from midnight.
The piano room should be on the second floor. A piano room in a wealthy household wouldn’t be small, and there was no such room on the first floor. But all the rooms on the second floor were locked.
He returned to the living room and dialed “1446.” The phone yielded no response.
It seemed to be a one-way connection.
Over in the hallway, Qi Hui was still flipping up carpets, executing a literal carpet search. Tang Cuo watched with his arms crossed for a few seconds before turning and walking into the kitchen to rummage through the cabinets for medicine.
If the Madam was sick and needed medicine, the herbal packets should be stored in the kitchen. The butler was a man and couldn’t possibly go in and out of the Madam’s room every day, so tasks like serving her medicine were most likely handled by the middle-aged maid or the younger maidservant.
Shortly after, Tang Cuo pulled a square tin box out from one of the kitchen cabinets. It emitted a faint smell of traditional Chinese medicine. It was a combination lockbox, requiring a four-digit code.
This was highly unusual. What kind of medicine required a combination lockbox for safekeeping? Were they afraid of it being stolen? Or afraid of it being seen?
What was the code?
Tang Cuo stared at the lock, narrowing his eyes slightly. The person who set the code had to be the one responsible for brewing the medicine every day. The butler might not be the one serving it, but he was definitely the one brewing it.
Otherwise, he wouldn’t have specifically noted it on his blackboard.
Carrying the lockbox, Tang Cuo returned to the butler’s room to search for clues. But the belongings of this rigid, meticulous butler were pitifully scarce.
His clothes consisted only of identical suits. His only book was a copy of the Tao Te Ching, and it didn’t look frequently read. He didn’t keep a diary, his birth and death years were unknown, and there were no numerical clues to speak of.
Wait.
Tang Cuo flipped to the title page of the Tao Te Ching. A few lines of text were written there in fountain pen.
[A’pei: This is your first day at the Yu Residence. I gift this book to you in the hopes that you will gain something from it. Jiayin Year, sixth day of the sixth lunar month. Yu Wangnian.]
Yu Residence. Yu Wangnian.
This person was either the Master or the Young Master of the Yu Residence, and the Jiayin Year corresponded to 1914. Tang Cuo carefully mentally cross-referenced the historical events of 1914, aligning the lunar and solar calendars, and deduced that the sixth day of the sixth lunar month should be July 28th.
On the butler’s first day working at the Yu Residence, he was gifted a book by the master of the house, and he kept this single book right by his bedside. It was evident that this date was incredibly important to him.
Tang Cuo immediately input 0728 into the lock. With a click, the box opened on the very first try.
“Holy shit.” This scene deeply shook Qi Hui’s soul. Even when playing escape rooms in the real world, he rarely saw anyone crack a code on the first attempt.
Tang Cuo ignored him and directly inspected the contents of the box. Inside were five packets of medicine and a key.
Seeing Qi Hui leaning in, Tang Cuo casually tossed the key to him, ordering him to go open the door while he untied the medicine packets to inspect them. All five packets were identical, containing common ingredients like ginseng and astragalus; as for the rest, Tang Cuo couldn’t identify them.
Just then, Qi Hui called out from the hallway, “Brother Tang, come quick, the door is open!”
The maid’s room was similar in size and layout to the butler’s room, but it held vastly more items, crammed full of miscellaneous belongings. Ever since entering the instance, Qi Hui had done nothing but search for things, and the realization that he might have to search room by room downstairs made him feel this instance was very different from what he had imagined.
But just as he was about to start searching, Tang Cuo suddenly stopped him. “Go brew the medicine.”
Qi Hui was stunned. “Brew medicine? What for?”
Tang Cuo: “Just brew it if I tell you to.”
Qi Hui was utterly bewildered. They were here to clear an instance; why were they suddenly brewing medicine for an NPC? But with his life in Tang Cuo’s hands, he didn’t dare resist, and resentfully carried the medicine packets to the kitchen.
Over the next ten minutes, Tang Cuo turned the maid’s room completely upside down. To save time, he used the most violent and efficient method—tossing absolutely everything out until the room was emptied.
Through this method, he actually managed to find a small, blue floral cloth bundle buried deep and pressed flat at the bottom of the wardrobe. It was a handkerchief containing several items: a silver hairpin, three silver dollars, a pearl, an old gemstone necklace, and a gold pocket watch.
These were absolutely not items a maid should possess, nor did they look like rewards bestowed by a master.
Tang Cuo carefully examined the hairpin and the gemstone necklace but found no clues. He then picked up the pocket watch. It was in relatively good condition, about 80% new, and felt heavy in his hand—likely made of solid gold. The dial was embedded with gemstones, making it extremely valuable.
But the watch was broken. The dial was shattered, and faint traces of dark red blood stained the chain. The blood had clearly been wiped away, leaving only faint remnants, but it was still conspicuous enough to catch the eye.
This was the first trace of blood Tang Cuo had seen in this mansion. To be more precise, in the pre-1926 Yu Residence.
In Jin Cheng’s timeline—the 1926 Yu Residence—the mansion had already turned into a haunt for ghosts. Yet the current Yu Residence was perfectly intact. What kind of catastrophic upheaval had occurred during these two or three years?
Tang Cuo looked closely at the pocket watch again. On the back, near the bottom, he discovered two tiny engraved letters: wy.
Wy. Were these someone’s initials?
Having no further leads, Tang Cuo temporarily pocketed the watch and moved on to search the rest of the items. But despite the sheer volume of things in the room, very few were of any use. After half a day of searching, aside from learning her name was Wenjuan, Tang Cuo found absolutely nothing.
Meanwhile, Qi Hui had finished brewing the medicine. He was highly suspicious, guessing that there might be an NPC in the Madam’s room and that this medicine was meant for her, perhaps to prevent her from transforming into a boss and going berserk.
But he never in a million years expected the big boss’s next action to be even more shocking than his wildest guesses.
“Y-You drank it yourself?!” Qi Hui’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets in horror.
Tang Cuo calmly set the medicine bowl down, wiped the residual dark liquid from his lips, and opened his character panel to check the results.
[Character]
ID K27216: Tang Cuo
Character Points: 0
Force: 72
Intelligence: 34
Charm: 8
Rating: A
Health: 99%
[Yu Wangnian’s Hatred: Adds a Weakness debuff, all attributes -10%]
Survival is not easy; please keep up the good work.
Case closed. This wasn’t medicine to cure an illness at all. It was a poison designed to severely weaken a person without being immediately fatal.
The prisoner in the attic, the iron-barred windows, the sick Madam, the thieving maid—what twisted, dark secrets were hidden within this opulent mansion?
Suddenly, the telephone rang again.
