Their time had not stopped or repeated, and yesterday's memories had not vanished. There was no time loop.
Given that, their time still moved forward, so they had to finish the clearance task within the remaining six days.
Xu Ruosi thought the same. She put away her display item, "We just need to clear it early and leave."
The seven of them arrived at the Mannequin Building. Looking up, they first saw a mannequin whose pale head was just jammed under the bottom edge of the glass window, and it gave them an inexplicable feeling of being watched.
"Those mannequins won't come to life too, will they?" Xie Ling whispered.
Xu Huo and Long Aotian had already gone in first. These mannequins looked much more normal than the wax figures, not posed strangely—mostly there to showcase clothes and decorations, wearing wigs.
"These dummies are so realistic," the middle-aged man said.
The long-curly-haired female player had already started taking one apart, but they were just ordinary plastic mannequins, only one or two sizes bigger than a normal person.
"They all have numbers." Xie Ling picked up the tag hanging from a mannequin's hand, "C201."
"Those numbers are on the cemetery graves too," the male player who followed the long-curly-haired woman said. "Most of the tombstones in the Beheaded Cemetery don't have names, just letters and numbers."
"What do you mean? The cemetery buries mannequins?" the middle-aged man asked involuntarily.
The male player shut up when the question was directed at him.
The middle-aged man's face didn't look good either. Xie Ling hurried to smooth things over, "Everyone wants to clear this quickly. It's not worth wasting time on arguments. Let's get to know each other. We won't bring up past things for now."
Down one step, three people let the matter drop temporarily. Xu Huo and the others also learned their names.
The long-curly-haired player was Xiao Ling, the male player was Yu Guangnan, and the middle-aged man was Liu Chengyi.
After introductions, Yu Guangnan continued describing the Beheaded Cemetery.
Yesterday Xiao Ling had led them to dig graves. Most of the coffins they exhumed contained mannequins. The manner of death was similar—beheading, made very realistic. Each mannequin's neck had been neatly severed, then the head and body were stitched together to mimic how real corpses were buried, and the number on the mannequin matched the inscription on the tombstone.
"Considering this place is an Amusement Park, using mannequins isn't too strange," Xiao Ling said. "It's just that I don't know what the connection is between the cemetery and the Mannequin Building."
"Did you dig up any corpses?" Xu Huo asked at that moment.
"Yes," Xiao Ling replied candidly, "but they had rotted down to bones. Besides the cervical vertebrae, they had fractures all over, hardly a single intact bone. They weren't very old; they must have been tortured before death."
"Why do you say that?"
"I can tell the age of the fractures," Xiao Ling said. "In the three corpses we dug up, every finger and toe had been broken at different times. An ordinary person wouldn't be so unlucky as to break bones every couple of days. I can't think of a reason besides torture."
"Could it be human experimentation?" Xu Ruosi suggested.
Xiao Ling flicked a glance at her and ignored it.
"Probably not," Xie Ling said. "Human experiments wouldn't involve repeatedly breaking bones like that. Besides, that merchant wasn't trying to cure genetic disease, was he? The directions don't match."
"You didn't dig up all the graves, did you?" Long Aotian's focus was always different.
"Over a hundred graves, I'm not an idiot," Xiao Ling said, rubbing his injured arm.
"Do you remember the highest number?" Xu Huo asked while checking the mannequins in the shop.
Xiao Ling and Yu Guangnan thought for a moment, "Over a hundred. We didn't pay attention to whether the sequence was complete."
"You think they're connected?" Xiao Ling asked.
"The mannequins in the Mannequin Building and the numbers at the cemetery are linked. They might have been buried in number order," Xu Huo said, walking up and down and noticing some numbers were missing. Thinking of the three wax figures that had run out of the Wax Figure Hall this morning, he suspected these mannequins could also move.
But the wax figures that escaped the Wax Figure Hall were ghost characters from the scare story: one was the middle-aged man who had followed them as Xu Ruosi described, and the other two were the twins Xie Ling had mentioned. He didn't know whether the missing mannequin numbers had any special meaning.
They inspected the entire small building and found nothing unusual, then the group moved to the adjacent Insane Prison.
The layout here made people uneasy. The dim, old decor gave off a decaying smell. The stained floor and wall panels looked as if they'd been soaked in some liquid, filthy and hard to clean. From the entrance, multiple iron doors were locked in sequence. The cells were filthy beyond stepping into: used tissues, strange unidentified liquids, and clogged yellowed toilets.
It was made so realistically that one could almost smell it at a glance.
Further inside were rooms holding "prisoners," all played by mannequins; the wardens who beat them were also dummies.
There were male and female mannequins. Besides corporal punishment, there were scenes of rape, bribery and more, getting uglier the deeper you went. The wardens not only abused and humiliated the "prisoners," but would arbitrarily pick people to execute by beheading, electric chair, forced poisoning and other methods.
The players present all felt somewhat uncomfortable. Xu Huo walked to the end of the prison and then came back, arriving at two "female prisoners" pressed to the ground. He kicked away the dummy on top and lifted the "female prisoner's" clothes.
"Using a pregnant woman image for this set—whoever designed this pavilion is disgusting," Xu Ruosi turned her face away.
Xu Huo, crouched before the dummy, looked grim. The Wax Figure Hall had told of a mass epidemic and real bodies buried underground, which suggested the sets in the Insane Prison might reflect real past events.
Examining the clothing on the "prisoners" carefully, they were not prison uniforms but closer to everyday wear. Most of the "wardens" wore white shirts and white pants, which didn't fit a prison scene.
"How about we dig underground to see if there are corpses?" Xie Ling, who also sensed something, proposed.
Although Xu Huo thought it unlikely there would be corpses here, he glanced at the swollen belly of the "female prisoner" and agreed.
They tore up the floors throughout but found no remains. Just as they were about to leave, the Insane Prison's main gate suddenly shut and locked automatically. Several iron chains extended from the lock, and in the blink of an eye they covered the entire exterior of the prison pavilion.
At the same time, a few players appeared outside the gate. They stood at varying distances along both sides of the street. One of them, fat and well-fed, hungrily eyed Xiao Ling, "I told you someone got here before us. Look at that little woman—such tender skin, she'll be delicious!"