Chapter 22: Qin Xiaoyi Carries Hu Xiu Out of the Haunted House

Zhao Xiaorou took her place on the platform with the theatrical flair of someone who had rehearsed the entrance. Her red cheongsam was slit all the way up to her thighs, and the Filorga injections had left her skin with a luminous, almost otherworldly pallor that caught the light from every angle.

Standing beside the radiant Zhao Xiaorou, Hu Xiu had a creeping, unshakeable suspicion that this woman had not come here for the Live Action Role Playing Game at all. More likely, having recently reclaimed her single status with considerable fanfare, she was here to survey new territories populated by handsome men — ready to move in, conquer, and collect.

Sure enough, the moment Qin Xiaoyi swung open Rong City's heavy iron gate, Zhao Xiaorou drew a long, deliberate breath and announced: "Hu Xiu. This is your last chance. If you don't make a move on Qin Xiaoyi today, I am taking him back to Xiafei Court and chopping him into pieces."

"That desperate?"

"What would you know about it? I've been married. Do you have any idea what it's like to release a tiger — starving, ravenous, caged for years — back into the wild? Forget drawing blood. I want to sink my teeth into anything that's still breathing."

"What are you two discussing so intensely over there?" Qin Xiaoyi smiled and lifted a hand toward Zhao Xiaorou in a gesture of mild reproach. "Something so important it has to be settled outside the platform? All our guests are VIPs tonight, and it's rather chilly out here."

It was only October, after all. Inside the game, Qin Xiaoyi was perpetually frozen in the winter of 1934. But the way his smile landed on Hu Xiu had shifted — where it once carried cool, deliberate distance, it now arrived carrying something else, something warmer and knowing, as though the two of them shared a private language the game hadn't written for them.

Waves of feeling surged through Hu Xiu's chest. She made her silent vow with absolute conviction: Zhao Xiaorou, don't even think about it. Feng Youjin and Ning Zechen — those two are yours. But Qin Xiaoyi is completely off-limits. He has already walked me home twice.

She had originally planned to sit at Zhao Xiaorou's table and quietly scheme together to help Feng Youjin's storyline along. Instead, she watched Zhao Xiaorou walk directly to Ning Zechen's table and claim the Behind-the-Scenes role right beside him — settling into the seat with perfect composure, her pale thighs angled with unmistakable deliberateness under the room's soft light.

Is she really going this far? Zhao Xiaorou glanced back across the room, found Hu Xiu's eyes on her, and responded by hiking the cheongsam a full inch higher.

Ning Zechen's eyeballs looked prepared to leave his skull entirely. He had already thrust his hand into his pocket and was pressing money into Zhao Xiaorou's palm — Hu Xiu didn't need to guess. He was paying her to deliver a love letter to Lin Qiumei.

As Zhao Xiaorou rose and walked away, her silhouette curving with proportions so exaggerated they bordered on performance art, Hu Xiu quietly shook her head.

This terrifying woman. A year ago, encountering someone like this would have prompted her to wonder, with genuine disdain, where exactly such a creature had come from. And now here was Zhao Xiaorou, behaving with precisely that same brazen shamelessness — and doing it magnificently.

People truly do become what they once despised, given enough time.

Snowpiercer had changed in the month she had been away. Hu Xiu had never once worried about repetition when returning to the same Live Action Role Playing Game over and over — the venue seemed to have reserved several rooms specifically for new themes, cycling through them with consistent creativity. The strict rule against private contact between players, combined with frequent content overhauls, was almost certainly why Snowpiercer held its position at the top of downtown rankings without ever seeming to slip.

Hu Xiu was quietly obsessed with tracking every new storyline iteration. Each return felt less like revisiting a game and more like coming home to something familiar and beloved.

Glancing at the name tags around the room, she noticed that the journalist and casino owner roles from previous rounds were gone — new characters in their place, the script rewritten again entirely.

This round, Zhao Xiaorou had been assigned a socialite. Hu Xiu had drawn a diplomat — two roles with almost no natural points of intersection.

Yet whenever Hu Xiu allowed herself to imagine more time with Qin Xiaoyi, she inevitably drew exactly the kind of role that placed her on the opposite end of the map from his. It wasn't even surprising anymore. It was simply her fate, apparently.

She had met Qin Xiaoyi outside the game now, which meant the old anxiety of potentially not seeing him had dissolved. Still, it stung to draw a useless role on one of the rare evenings when three hours of genuine proximity might have been possible.

Being a behind-the-scenes role also lacked the particular thrill of prying Pandora's box open with both hands. The old Hu Xiu had craved stability, had wanted to see outcomes confirmed before she committed to anything. The version of her sitting here now wanted disruption in her routines — wanted the floor to tilt unexpectedly beneath her feet. Without the rise and fall, nothing felt real anymore.

If she simply walked in and chased Qin Xiaoyi while ignoring the quest entirely, the romance would feel mechanical and hollow. Zhao Xiaorou had told her, with no shortage of exasperation, that this was precisely why she couldn't seem to win him.

Hu Xiu sighed in the entrance of the grand theater, remembering how she had once tried pursuing Qin Xiaoyi within the fiction of the play — and the way he had looked at her during those moments had made her feel, consistently and acutely, like an absolute fool.

Her IQ simply did not function within his orbit. That was the plain truth of it.

Fine. She let it go. Hu Xiu settled onto a bench and opened her quest card — and without warning, the casino owner appeared and stuck a rose card to her back.

She looked around slowly. She had never seen props like this in the venue before. Something in the back of her mind whispered that this was likely a quest trigger. She peeled the card off and flipped it over. The back was blank.

She had just risen to leave when the casino owner's voice came from the bench beside her, low and measured, as though delivering a secret: "Congratulations. You have plucked this rose — one that bloomed in entirely the wrong place. I have in my possession a property deed: a private residence, situated directly beside the Peace Hotel. No one has ever entered it. When you have earned one hundred thousand in Rong City, come find me. I will give you the keys."

A Hidden Quest.

Earning one hundred thousand alone inside the game was not a small undertaking. Last night's quest reward had been ten thousand. Helping NPCs with errands paid another ten thousand. Manual labor — sweeping dance hall floors, pulling rickshaws — paid a meager three thousand. Reporting traitors within one's own group could yield fifty thousand in a single move, but Hu Xiu could not bring herself to do something that deeply unethical, even inside a fiction. That left the most reliable route: accepting tasks assigned by candidates, which could net between twenty and thirty thousand while building favorability in the process.

She talked her way into a love letter from Feng Youjin, delivered it to Bai Luoyu at the department store while running a careful double game, and walked away with forty thousand. Then she turned her attention to Ning Zechen.

She would not ask Qin Xiaoyi for money unless she had no other option. The finance minister was far too sharp about currency, and she had no interest in being seen through.

She pushed open the door to Room 303 and stopped dead.

Zhao Xiaorou was playing finger-guessing games with Ning Zechen.

She had brought her full bar expertise into the room. One knee rested on the coffee table as she leaned forward, laughing easily, her whole posture arranged with the casual precision of someone who knew exactly what she was doing. The glasses held iced black tea — Hu Xiu could tell by the color after this many visits — but both of them were performing drunk, using the game as a pretext to touch each other's hands.

The surveillance camera mounted overhead seemed, in this moment, decorative at best. And yet Zhao Xiaorou maintained perfect calibration — not revealing too much, keeping skin contact minimal, neither party approaching anything that could be labelled harassment. It was brazen and calculated and, Hu Xiu had to admit, impressively clean.

Ning Zechen had rolled up his sleeves, his forearms pulling the fabric taut across his biceps, laughing with open delight: "Finish this drink, and I'll reward you with thirty thousand!"

Man dies for wealth as birds die for food. Hu Xiu crossed the room in three strides and thrust out her hand: "Officer Ning, may I play as well?"

She left Room 303 with ten thousand. Zhao Xiaorou had cleaned up beautifully, and was spinning in the hotel corridor with visible glee.

Hu Xiu couldn't resist: "Zhao Xiaorou. When I opened that door, I genuinely thought I'd walked into some kind of disreputable massage parlor. You even made the lighting go pink."

"What exactly did I do? I played finger games. And if I did anything beyond that, all I can say is that I had clear intentions and no hidden motives." She paused for effect. "Opportunities don't wait for the prepared — they wait for the decisive warrior. Would someone like Ning Zechen, a gloriously muscle-brained man, really sit around playing house with you and Qin Xiaoyi?"

"I'd love to see the day you have physical contact like that."

"Zhao Xiaorou, wait a moment."

She turned. "What?"

"Lend me thirty thousand. I need it for a quest."

"No. I just made a bet with Ning Zechen to help him become the boss of Rong City."

"And if you win?"

"Not telling..." Zhao Xiaorou delivered a slow, perfectly aimed glance over her shoulder as she walked away.

At the dance party, Zhao Xiaorou and Ning Zechen began dancing rumba.

She had trained as a professional Latin dancer since childhood, and the competitive fire that lived in her body had never fully gone out — it still blazed with the ferocity of a bullfight. But tonight she had learned to manage the heat, to slow the flame into something deliberate and hypnotic. She performed open hip twists with Ning Zechen to the drifting notes of Night Shanghai, letting him lead her hand-in-hand across the floor before drawing her into a close embrace.

Hu Xiu watched from the side and allowed herself a private, withering sneer. Using rumba as an excuse for physical contact. Absolutely disgraceful.

From the audience, Feng Youjin clicked his tongue in admiration: "Isn't that the woman from the marriage scandal last time?"

"Divorced," Hu Xiu supplied. "Single now."

"Extraordinary. She's genuinely talented." Feng Youjin rose from his seat, walked onto the stage, and scattered thick stacks of money with the abandon of someone who had too much of it. The stage immediately filled with players and NPCs surging forward — until only Qin Xiaoyi and Hu Xiu remained sitting in the audience, side by side in the sudden quiet.

Hu Xiu glanced at him — and found his gaze already on her.

She gathered herself. "Minister Qin. I'd like to earn some money. Would you be willing to assign me a task?"

"What is it you want this time?"

"To be honest — I want to buy a property deed. I've run all over Rong City today and I'm still thirty thousand short."

Something moved across Qin Xiaoyi's face — the suppressed beginning of a smile, visible only in the slight narrowing of his eyes, as though he were holding back amusement with some effort. He reached into the breast pocket of his suit and produced thirty thousand. "Consider this your housing fund," he said. "As for the building itself..." A brief, meaningful pause. "You'll have to manage that on your own."

Hu Xiu missed the implication entirely. She accepted the money with genuine gratitude. So dramatic — it's just a house.

Though, now that she thought about it — if she bought the property and rewrote the plot from the inside, perhaps she could become Rong City's new power. Her first act as ruler would naturally be to summon the finance minister directly to her—

She caught herself. What am I thinking about all day long? Zhao Xiaorou has completely corrupted me.

When the time came to collect funds for the candidate vote, Hu Xiu pleaded desperate poverty with a straight face. She counted out her full one hundred thousand and went to find the casino boss, having entirely forgotten about Feng Youjin in the process.

The casino boss's smile upon seeing the money was slow, mysterious, and not entirely reassuring. He produced a key. "Follow me."

Hu Xiu followed with her chin held high. A Hidden Quest? I, Hu Xiu, can handle this alone.

The boss unlocked a door and stood aside. "You will walk the rest of this path on your own," he said. "Take care."

The moment Hu Xiu stepped inside, she understood why this property had been designated newly developed land — previously unused, sitting empty, quietly waiting.

This was a haunted house.

The door clicked shut at her back. She stood still. The background music in this room was completely unlike anything else in Rong City — low and sinister, with sudden swelling peaks that mimicked every horror film she had ever tried to forget. The darkness was thick and deep blue, the kind that swallowed definition and made her own outstretched hand disappear past the wrist. With every step forward, the walls seemed to press slightly closer. Hu Xiu's legs began to soften beneath her. What is this place? I was gone for one month. How did an Escape Room appear inside Snowpiercer?

She had barely finished the thought when a shadow dropped from directly above and hit the floor in front of her with a violent crash. Screaming and laughter erupted from all directions at once.

A cloud of dust bloomed before her eyes. The lights flickered on — and revealed a body.

A real person, falling straight down from the ceiling. What kind of stunt double works like that?

What kind of deranged storyline is this?! Hu Xiu let out a scream, lurched sideways, and spun to retreat — only to find zombies charging at her from behind.

The scene was not a corridor. It was a branching labyrinth — seven or eight diverging routes, each of them swarming. Some zombies ran. Some crawled. Some moved along the narrow ceiling on all fours like things that had forgotten they were supposed to be human, scrabbling toward her with hideous efficiency. Their faces were painted in blood, their clothes ripped and rotting, deep scars carved beneath hollow eyes, withered leaves tangled in wild and matted hair. It was a full-scale Train to Busan recreation, and she was inside it without a weapon, a plan, or any desire to be there.

Why wasn't she running? As Hu Xiu lurched around the fallen body, a hand clamped around her ankle with sudden, terrible certainty. She went down hard, hit the floor with a thud that knocked the air from her, screamed, and began crawling forward on her hands and knees, abandoning all dignity entirely.

She had never touched an Escape Room in her life. This level of extreme horror was built for veterans, people who sought it out with open eyes. If she had known — if anyone had told her — she would rather have accepted any other fate. But there was no going back now. Zombies pressed in from behind and above. Tears blurred everything; she wiped them away and kept crawling, but her body had stopped cooperating, gone slack and unresponsive as wet cloth. She spotted an open door ahead and flung every remaining scrap of will into pushing herself upright. She staggered through it. She slammed it behind her and stood trembling, her breath coming in ragged, helpless bursts.

Her clothes were caked in grime. The set design was horrifyingly convincing. Behind her, the door shook violently under the impact of fists — the wood splintering at the edges, beginning to smoke with the force of it, moments from giving way.

She turned. Skeletons and rotting figures packed the room at her back.

Hu Xiu's weeping came out in broken, humiliated waves as she stared at the fragmenting door. She had no choice. She was going to have to open it herself and run — through them, back into the dark — without knowing the layout, without knowing where the exit was, without any certainty that she would find it before her legs gave out completely.

She kept repeating it to herself like a mantra: It's fake. It's all fake. Don't be scared. Just call out — the game master is watching. They cannot let a player die of fright inside their venue.

But no sound would come. The terror had swallowed her voice. She had watched horror films. She had thought she understood the concept. But this was four-dimensional, inescapable, and it surrounded her entirely. If the game master wasn't paying attention right now, she thought with genuine, bleary clarity, she might actually die here today.

The door swung open.

Hu Xiu's last fragment of composure nearly shattered — and then Qin Xiaoyi dropped to his knees in front of her. His arms came around her without hesitation, and his voice arrived low and steady, close to her ear: "Don't be afraid. Come with me."

Her tears broke completely loose. She could not stand. This was nothing like the elegant, composed rescue she might have imagined in some other life — she was covered in filth and grime, her face a wrecked mess of tear-tracks, whatever subtle makeup she had applied smeared well past recovery. The zombies' sounds continued outside — struggling, collapsing, roaring — and she could not tell anymore what was sound effect and what was real. She was shaking so deeply it felt structural, as though something inside her had come loose from its moorings.

Qin Xiaoyi took off his suit jacket and draped it gently over her head, then lifted her horizontally, cradling her against his chest, his chin resting with quiet steadiness against the crown of her head. "Don't be afraid," he said again. "Hold onto me tightly."

The sound effects did not stop. Hu Xiu's mind went completely white. The tears kept coming.

Something struck Qin Xiaoyi as he moved — she felt the impact travel through his body, blunt and unmistakable. That had hurt him. She knew it had.

His warmth offered her something, though not enough to dissolve the fear — this particular fear had gone too deep for that. But he walked without faltering, his arms steady, his muscles carrying a certainty that her own body had entirely abandoned. Gradually, the sounds fell away. A door opened. The casino owner stood in the light.

Qin Xiaoyi's voice carried a rare, quiet irritation: "We shouldn't be assigning this kind of mission to players who startle easily. She was nearly paralyzed in there."

"Honestly, I didn't anticipate this either. She comes here so regularly — she's played nearly ten Battle Royales. I assumed she had Escape Room experience."

"She absolutely does not. Look at her. She's still shaking." The corner of his suit jacket lifted gently.

Hu Xiu found herself looking at half of Qin Xiaoyi's face from a very close distance. "Are you all right? I'm sorry for frightening you. I had a feeling something might go wrong when you went in — so I followed. Exactly as I thought."

Hu Xiu, her face still wet, managed only the faintest murmur: "I must look absolutely terrible right now..."

"Not at all." A brief pause, the ghost of something in his voice. "You've just soaked my suit. And... your nails are quite sharp."

She sat quietly on the floor and accepted the wet wipes the casino owner offered. She wiped her face down. She breathed slowly and evenly until the shaking subsided. It took considerably longer than she would have liked before she trusted herself to stand.

Her first coherent thought upon getting to her feet was that Qin Xiaoyi had genuinely impressive muscle definition, and her second was an ironclad resolution: she would never enter an Escape Room again as long as she lived.

By the time she emerged, the Battle Royale had already concluded. The debriefing room was full of animated voices dissecting the game with passionate detail.

Zhao Xiaorou stripped off her equipment and turned — then stopped, studying Hu Xiu's swollen, reddened eyes with open curiosity. "I couldn't find you earlier. Why did you take your makeup off inside? And what happened to your cheeks — are you having an allergic reaction?"

"I..." Hu Xiu exhaled with effort. "It's a long story."

A staff member materialized beside her, holding out a hot towel and a sealed envelope with a bright, professional smile: "Congratulations on completing the Hidden Quest! This was our Halloween Easter egg for October — whoever picked up the rose card was eligible to enter after purchasing the property deed. How was your experience?"

Zhao Xiaorou cut in before Hu Xiu could answer: "How was her experience? Her face is having an allergic reaction. She has clearly been crying. What exactly was in there that reduced her to this state? Do you think she can go home with eyes swollen like that?"

"Furthermore," Zhao Xiaorou continued, with the focused energy of someone presenting a formal complaint, "she is a loyal and dedicated player who came here specifically to see Qin Xiaoyi. Do you genuinely imagine she is happy to meet him for the first time looking like this?"

Hu Xiu thought of the dark room. Of arms closing around her without hesitation. Of a voice saying don't be afraid at exactly the moment she needed to hear it most. She nodded, a little dazed: "Satisfied. This experience was... genuinely very satisfying."

"Are you losing your mind?" Zhao Xiaorou frowned and tore open the envelope. "What is this — Snowpiercer tickets? This is the Hidden Quest prize?"

"That's correct. Successfully completing the Haunted House earns one complimentary ticket. Although technically speaking," the staff member added carefully, "your friend did require some assistance getting out."

"Assistance?"

"Yes. She became immobilized inside, so Qin Xiaoyi's actor carried her to safety."

"Rescued."

"...That's one way to put it."

On the way home, Zhao Xiaorou delivered a thorough and colorful condemnation, accusing Hu Xiu of being the most deceptively cunning person she had ever encountered — a woman who had somehow mastered, through apparent accident, the very philosophy Zhao Xiaorou had long held as her own personal doctrine: Opportunities don't wait for the prepared. They wait for the decisive warrior.

After a large bowl of beef noodles with two marinated eggs, Hu Xiu felt sufficiently restored to attempt a rebuttal. Zhao Xiaorou immediately inserted a piece of gum into her mouth. "Not a word. I consider myself a woman of considerable strategy, and yet you somehow always stumble into better luck than me without even trying. How exactly have you been on a continuous winning streak ever since Qin Xiaoyi entered your life?"

Hu Xiu removed the gum. "That's not fair. You don't understand the translator's life — I have plenty of sleepless nights. You've seen me completely broke."

The click of high heels on pavement filled the silence that followed, Zhao Xiaorou showing absolutely no sign of having registered a single word.

"You've touched him. You've been held by him. If Qin Xiaoyi doesn't marry you after all of this, it would be a genuine affront to logic."

"Next time you should go in and buy a property deed yourself. Ning Zechen won't disappoint you."

"I don't need to." Zhao Xiaorou opened her hand between them, palm facing up. Written on her skin in ink, in a neat line of digits, was a phone number. "I already have his WeChat."