Chapter 43: Performance of Life and Death (Part 1)

Outside the window, heavy rain poured down.

Anthony sat blankly on the chair, staring dully at the mess before his eyes.

Everything was ruined.

He thought so.

His life had completely turned into a mess.

His investment had failed, and his wife had left him—because she suspected he was having an affair… affair?

How laughable.

Anthony’s lips twitched.

He had seen the man who appeared beside his wife that night, yet she still denied it, turning around to shift the blame onto him instead.

Ah, women, women… even when in the wrong, they always acted self-righteously.

She had not been such a woman before.

Anthony still remembered the wonderful time when they had first married.

Back then, their life was so sweet.

She had loved him so much.

But now, everything had changed.

She had begun to nitpick, to order him around.

She had not been like this before—or was it that all women were like this? Before marriage, they acted obedient and devoted, but after marriage, they revealed another face entirely? He admitted that his investment had failed, but in business, were not failure and success both natural outcomes? Had he not also succeeded before? Or perhaps, in his wife’s eyes, his successes were not worth mentioning, while his failures were utterly intolerable?

“Thud!”

From outside came the sound of the front door slamming.

Anthony stood up and looked out the window.

In the storm, he saw his wife striding away with a suitcase, leaving the house.

She walked with such determination, directly boarding a carriage.

She had not even turned her head to look at him once!

Never had Anthony felt more heartbroken than at this moment.

Those once sweet memories now seemed to have turned into poison.

The more beautiful his wife was in memory, the colder the present reality appeared.

At this moment, he was utterly in despair.

His investment had failed, and even his wife had abandoned him.

Then what meaning was there left in his life?

Anthony stood up, staring at the rope before him.

The latter was swaying constantly in the air.

At this moment, Anthony’s mood was incomparably calm.

He stepped onto the chair and even had the leisure to adjust the rope.

Then, without hesitation, he slipped his head through it.

And then he kicked the chair away.

“Clang.”

The rope around his neck suddenly tightened, and Anthony’s eyes widened abruptly.

What was he doing?

He opened his mouth, desperately trying to breathe, yet no air flowed into his lungs.

On the contrary, he felt suffocation, despair, darkness descending.

Everything around seemed to sway, becoming increasingly dim.

The shadows in the already gloomy room now seemed to transform into some kind of living entity, intent on devouring him completely…

Just as Anthony’s rationality was reaching its limit, a voice sounded by his ear.

“Leave it to you, Katie.”

“Yes, Detective.”

With that voice, the next instant, Anthony felt himself suddenly struck by a violent force, so strong it nearly made him vomit out his internal organs.

It felt as if he had been rammed by a galloping warhorse.

Immediately after, a sense of weightlessness came, and the world before his eyes spun wildly, overturning endlessly.

Then Anthony’s body slammed heavily against a wall.

“Thud!”

The hard, cold sensation and sharp pain from his back brought Anthony back to his senses.

The despair and agony that had surrounded him just now vanished instantly with that blow.

He collapsed to the ground, shook his head, and then opened his eyes again.

He saw Levi and Katie standing not far away, watching him.

“Are you alright, Mr. Anthony?”

“I… to be honest, not very well.”

Anthony staggered to his feet, reaching to press his forehead.

At this moment, he could still feel that same pain, despair, and sorrow.

This made Anthony feel a kind of indescribable sadness.

“Fortunately, at the moment, I have little interest in marriage.”

“???”

Hearing his completely irrelevant answer, Levi and Katie exchanged a confused glance.

“This seems very much like a substitute soul.”

After listening to Anthony’s account, Levi spoke.

“Substitute soul?”

“A legend I’ve heard before.”

Levi made something up casually.

“I’ve heard that those who drown do not have their souls leave this world, but are bound at the bottom of the water. Unless they find a new victim to drag down and drown, they cannot rest. In that case, the victim’s soul would take their place, bound underwater, while the original soul could finally rest in peace.”

“This……………”

Upon hearing Levi’s words, Katie and Anthony both revealed expressions of surprise.

Clearly, they had never heard such a ghost story before.

“Is that true?”

“That, I do not know.”

Levi shook his head.

“Just like this house being haunted—it’s all just stories. Whether it’s truly just a story… only if you experience it yourself will you understand.”

“I’d rather not experience it.”

Recalling what had just happened, even Anthony’s expression stiffened.

He reached up to touch his neck—he could still feel the lingering marks.

“It was truly painful and despairing. I would not want to fall to that state.”

At Anthony’s words, Katie also nodded.

Her experience had been the same.

After being swallowed by the darkness, Katie had felt herself become another person entirely—a wife, with a husband and two children, living harmoniously.

However, the husband’s temper grew increasingly irritable, increasingly strange, until at last, Katie watched helplessly as he killed the two children, and then raised the butcher’s knife at her.

Fortunately, Levi had arrived and stopped it all, allowing Katie to separate from that puppet.

So it had not been her own experience, but the puppet’s memory………

And that puppet………

Katie glanced at the puppet slumped by the wall.

Its lifeless glass bead eyes stared at her, making Katie’s hair stand on end.

“Truly unexpected… so this is what you meant, Mr. Levi, when you spoke of… those strange things?”

Anthony, who usually carried a frivolous smile, was no longer sure if that had been an act or simply his personality.

But at this moment, he clearly had no mood left to perform in such a manner.

“If my guess is right, this may just be the appetizer.”

“Appetizer?”

“That’s right.”

Levi nodded.

“You can imagine this house as a heavily guarded castle. Right now, we’ve only reached the outermost area. What you two experienced was more like accidentally falling into the moat—it hasn’t even reached the level of alerting the guards.”

“Then that moat must be truly turbulent.”

Anthony’s smile was stiff.

No wonder—after all, just the appetizer had almost cost them their lives… and without them even noticing it.

He had no idea what it was, nor had he ever seen anything like it before.

In fact, if not for Levi and Katie’s help just now, he would already be dead.

Without a sound.

“I really don’t want to know what the guards inside are like.”

Katie muttered in a low voice, hiding behind Levi.

“Unfortunately, unless we find the ruler of this castle and defeat it, most likely we won’t be able to get out.”

Levi also sounded helpless.

“For now, all I can hope is that those soldiers will follow my order and burn down this house before nightfall. Maybe that will bring a chance for change. But for now, let’s continue searching for the others.”

Katie’s “death” had happened in the bedroom on the second floor, Anthony’s “suicide” in the attic on the third floor, and Levi had already checked the first floor earlier.

The only place left was……………

The cellar.

Levi led Katie and Anthony back to the first floor once more, and along the way, for Anthony, the shock was no less than entering a haunted house for the very first time.

“Mr. Levi.”

Levi turned his head and saw Anthony standing beside him, still wearing that frivolous smile.

Only this time, the smile looked a little stiff.

“Maybe I saw wrong, but just now… that maid seemed to move a little?”

As he spoke, Anthony shifted his eyes, gesturing toward the kitchen stove nearby.

There, a maid puppet stood with a knife in one hand and a potato in the other, as if peeling it.

Yet at this moment, that puppet had raised its head, staring expressionlessly at Anthony.

“Don’t mind her. Just pretend you didn’t see anything.”

Levi withdrew his gaze.

“By the way, which way do we go to the cellar?”

As soon as Levi finished speaking, he once again looked around, and the others followed his gaze—only to freeze at once.

Because at that moment, another maid puppet was standing on the other side of the corridor, one hand extended, pointing toward the corner of the hallway.

“Thank you.”

Levi pressed down the brim of his hat, nodded to the maid puppet, and then walked toward the corner.

Katie and Anthony hesitated for a moment, then followed.

As they passed by the puppet maid, both of them also hesitated, then nodded in turn.

“Thank you.”

Perhaps it was an illusion, but when they lifted their heads again after thanking it, they saw the puppet maid staring at them.

On her previously expressionless face, a faint smile had appeared.

“………………………”

Both of them felt a chill rush up their spines, hurrying to quicken their pace, returning once more to Levi’s side.

Katie instinctively turned her head back for another glance.

“……………That maid is gone.”

“Ahaha… probably went back to work……”

Anthony tried very hard to put on his old frivolous demeanor, but his stiff, monotone-like voice betrayed his true feelings at that moment.

Levi was not surprised.

From Anthony’s behavior, he could tell the man’s profession was likely something like a spy.

But even spies were still human, and humans were naturally afraid and uneasy before the unknown.

After all, Anthony could hardly imagine why a puppet would move on its own.

Levi himself was unsettled as well.

But thanks to all those films, novels, and games he had consumed, compared to the people of this world, he had far more experience—and could at least maintain some measure of calm.

“Alright, here we are.”

Levi stopped in front of a wooden trapdoor in the floor.

“Be careful. From my experience, things underground are never easy to deal with.”

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