I Couldn't Tell You Who It Was

Raehee looked around the room.

“Actually, I found this when we searched the rooms of the filming staff, back when we broke down the doors. The room I went into had this under the pillow. When I looked closely, the pattern of the pillowcase was clovers. I thought they were flowers when I saw them from afar.” She swallowed dryly once then looked at me as she slowly suggested, “That… The door leading downstairs. The large door. By any chance, would this key—”

She was interrupted halfway by Seogeung.

“Why are you bringing this up now?” he demanded sharply, implicitly berating her for wanting to survive by herself by hiding the key. Raehee flinched terribly and added in a squeaky voice, “B-but it said in the rule booklet that we should only share information when everyone is on the top floor…”

There was indeed a clause like that.

Ninth, the cast was free to exchange information with each other. However, this was only possible after everyone returned from exploration. Should one person not return from exploration, the exchange of information was forbidden. Breaking this rule would result in a penalty.

“What do the rules that those b*stards made matter at this point?!” Seogeung yelled.

He was right.

We were trapped in this giant mansion. Plus, we were being watched. They said this would be a weeklong shoot, so for at least one week, even if people back at home didn’t see us for a week, nobody would try to find us. We had to survive in this mansion with Goyeon’s corpse for at least one week.

We had to do this all while under the watchful eyes of those who didn’t care whether we died or not.

* * *

It looked like Goyeon’s flashlight was completely busted. It didn’t even work with new batteries.

The one who despaired the most that the flashlight didn’t turn on was Hyehyun. Since he wasn’t a cast member, he didn’t receive a flashlight. As the same team, I at least needed to have a functioning flashlight, but since that wasn’t the case, he must have felt very anxious.

It was funny that Hyehyun thought of me as being on his side. If I had the opportunity to murder someone, I would surely kill Hyehyun first. However, I didn’t mention to him that he should have died instead of Goyeon.

I was not a stellar hunter. The only types of prey that I could catch were weaklings who were both defenseless and put up little fight. I didn’t want to do something useless and make Hyehyun wary of me. Yet I couldn’t help but hate the things I hated, so I couldn’t suppress my annoyance completely.

According to the others, the filming staff told them to not bring others along like their managers. They told me they were surprised that Goyeon and I brought our stylist and manager, respectively. But they took the staff’s words as a mere recommendation and glossed over the matter.

This was the first time I heard this. The staff members who came to meet me never said anything about Hyehyun. But at this point, I wasn’t even sure they were employees from the broadcast company.

Since the group scoured through the rooms of the staff members, all the rooms to the east of the hall were a complete mess. The doorknobs were all broken, and since they weren’t able to close, we had no choice but to stay in the rooms that we were assigned.

This was something I learned later on, but on the search, they discovered several bottles of sleeping pills in the kitchen trash can. They were all empty. Hawoo, upon seeing them, muttered in defeat, “No wonder I could rest well without feeling anxious at all.”

He hadn’t appeared on TV variety shows often, so he thought he would be nervous, but he slept soundly without having a single dream. I thought back to the dinner menu of the first night we were here. It was instant jjamppong. I had only a few spoonfuls, but I remembered being impressed at the range of instant foods these days.

Perhaps Goyeon didn’t eat much, just like me.

Since exploration was possible starting at eight a.m, I had wondered why people were sleeping in so late despite it being the first day of the shoot, but this explained it.

Although we found the black key, people weren’t willing to go back downstairs. I could empathize with the sentiment. It wasn’t weird to wonder whether the shoot was worth continuing. Everyone’s thoughts were a mess and nobody seemed to know what to do from now on.