“It genuinely isn’t normal,” Yan Qingwen said, face grave. “When it attacked Su Man it didn’t even raise its head — as though it didn’t need its eyes at all to know exactly where each of us was positioned.”

“With those tiny eyes of its, there’s no way it could have a 360-degree unobstructed field of vision,” Bai Youwei said, her expression displeased and her voice cold. “The referee must have left out some information again.”

Shen Mo looked toward the staircase.

Both Tan Xiao and Su Man had been severely injured — the places where the Nail-Tooth Beast had bitten them were soaked in blood and gruesome beyond description.

“Let’s tend to the wounded first.”

…

Though it had been only a one-minute berserk phase, the injuries were extremely grave.

The puncture wounds from the iron nails were a bloody mess of shredded flesh — even the bones inside had been driven through. Even after Shen Mo applied the mud to the wounds, the effect remained limited.

Su Man’s right hand was nearly severed; Tan Xiao remained unconscious throughout.

“We won’t survive a three-minute berserk phase,” Yan Qingwen said grimly.

Even though the Nail-Tooth Beast wasn’t the largest of the guests, its speed, strength, and its precise ability to locate targets all made it far more terrifying than the two previous visitors. One minute had already produced two critically injured people — what would three minutes mean?

The upstairs Cheng Weicai, Pan Xiaoxin, and Zhu Shu had nowhere useful to hide regardless;

Bai Youwei had her rabbit, but an electric shock would probably be ineffective against the creature;

And everyone else, facing a monster whose entire body was as hard as metal, had absolutely no means of inflicting harm;

And then there were the beads — ordinary attacks could delay the beast two or three seconds, Thunder Burst could extend that to seven or eight. That was helpful enough in a one-minute berserk phase, but if the berserk time was three minutes, what good were those few seconds of delay?

They were stuck in a deadlock.

Unless…

They found the remaining nails.

“Let’s keep looking,” Shen Mo said. “Thirty-six to thirty-eight nails. We need at least that many — not one less.”

Li Li stood up: “Let’s do another sweep and see if there are any nails we can still remove. Thirty-odd isn’t a small number — there must be something we missed somewhere.”

Cheng Weicai and Pan Xiaoxin nodded along.

“I’ll check the kitchen.”

“I’ll go up to the attic…”

Everyone scattered in different directions.

…

Two hours later, they reconvened in the living room and shook their heads at one another.

Not a single nail found.

This wasn’t surprising.

Even before they had decided to invite the guest inside, they had already scoured every inch of this house multiple times. Trapped here for days, they knew every corner of the doll house with uncanny familiarity. Every nail that could be removed had been removed — there were almost no exceptions.

Searching again would naturally yield the same result.

Everyone sat in silence inside the house.

The Nail-Tooth Beast was still outside.

From time to time it pressed itself against the ground and ground its teeth — rasping, scraping sounds.

Those sounds were deeply unsettling.

Li Li couldn’t sit still. He stood up and paced back and forth to ease his restlessness.

Su Man sat on the sofa with her injured hand suspended, more silent than she had ever been.

Bai Youwei was irritable too. She slanted a sideways glance at the crystal ball on the tansu cabinet and said: “What if we…”

Before she could finish, the ball seemed to have anticipated what she was going to say, and suddenly spoke:

“Hey! Don’t say I didn’t warn you — attacking the referee is a serious violation!”

Pan Xiaoxin glanced at the ball, then back at Bai Youwei, and whispered: “Weiwei jie, the music box can’t be dismantled.”

Bai Youwei thought for a moment. “But it’s so strange — a music box appearing in this place, and it has absolutely no function beyond reciting that nursery rhyme… Actually, does the nursery rhyme even need to be delivered in the form of a music box? It could just as easily be announced as part of the game rules by the referee. Before, it said something about being for the sake of atmosphere…”

As she spoke, she couldn’t help frowning as she looked at the crystal ball.

“Is it really just for atmosphere? Or is it to mislead us, to make us assume the crystal ball and the music box are one and the same thing?”