An old tungsten lamp was suspended in the centre of the room by a black wire, flickering with a dim light.
The quiet atmosphere was like ink dripping into water, and was spreading inside the room.
In the middle of the room was a large round table, which looked already mottled, and in the centre of the table stood a small clock with a very complicated pattern, which was ticking at the moment.
And surrounding the table in a week, sat ten differently dressed people, their clothes looked a bit worn and their faces were stained with a lot of dust.
Some of them were lying on the tabletop, while others were sitting on their backs on chairs, all of them sleeping heavily.
Beside these ten people, quietly stood a man wearing a goat head mask and a black suit.
His gaze pierced through the worn goat's head mask and stared at the ten men with interest.
The seat clock on the table chimed, the minute hand pointing to 'twelve' at the same time as the hour hand.
From far beyond the room came the muffled sound of a bell.
At the same moment, the ten men and women sitting around the round table slowly awoke.
After they gradually came to their senses, they first looked around in confusion, and then looked at each other in puzzlement.
It seemed that none of them could remember why they appeared here.
'Good morning, nine of you.' Goathead was the first to speak, 'It's a pleasure to meet you here, you've been slumbering in front of me for twelve hours now.'
The man in front of him was dressed in a truly bizarre costume that startled the crowd in the dim light.
His mask seemed to be made from a real goat's head, with much of the hair yellowed and blackened, knotted and stuck together.
The goat mask had two hollows dug at the eyes, revealing his cunning eyes.
Between his hands and feet, he not only exuded the unique stench of a goat's body, but also a vague smell of decay.
A man with a tattooed flower arm froze for a few seconds before finally discovering the irrationality of this matter, and with hesitation opened his mouth to ask the goat head, 'Who are you ...?'
'I believe you all have this question, so I'll introduce it to the nine of you.' Goat Head waved his hands happily, looking like he had already prepared the answer.
A young man named Qi Xia sat the farthest away from Goat Head, and he quickly surveyed the room, and after a few moments, his complexion became grave.
Strange, this room is really strange.
There was no door here, and there were walls on all sides.
In other words, this room was closed all around, the roof and the floor, with a table placed in the centre of the room on the side.
In that case, how did they get here?
Is it hard to believe that they sent people here first, while the walls were built later?
Qi Xia looked around again, here, no matter if it was the floor, the walls or the ceiling, there were horizontal and vertical lines through and through, these lines divided the walls and the floor into many large squares.
Another point that made Qi Xia care was the 'nine seats' that the goat head had mentioned.
No matter how one counted, there were ten people sitting around the round table, and with the goat head himself, there were eleven people in this room.
What did 'nine' mean?
He reached out and felt his pockets, and unsurprisingly, his mobile phone had long since been taken away.
'There's no need to introduce us.' A cool woman opened her mouth and said to Goat Head, 'I advise you to stop yourself earlier, I suspect that you have detained us for more than twenty-four hours, which constitutes the "crime of unlawful detention", and every word you say now will be recorded, and will form a testimony against you.'
As she spoke, she rubbed the dust on her arm in disgust, as if she hated being dirty more than being imprisoned.
The cool woman's words did wake up the crowd quite a bit, no matter who the other party was, actually daring to kidnap ten people by herself, no matter what, they had already violated the bottom line of the law.
'Wait ...' a middle-aged man in a white coat interrupted the crowd's thoughts, he slowly looked towards the cool woman and opened his mouth to ask, 'We've all just woken up, how do you know we've been held captive for ' twenty-four hours'?'
His tone was smooth and strong, but hit the nail on the head.
Unperturbed, the cool woman pointed to the desktop clock and replied, 'The clock here points to twelve o'clock, but I'm in the habit of sleeping late, and the last time I looked at the clock at home it was already twelve o'clock, which means that we've been imprisoned for at least twelve hours.'
After she finished speaking she pointed her finger at the surrounding walls and continued, 'As you should have noticed, there is no door in this house, which means that this man went through a lot of trouble to get us inside, he said that we have been asleep for twelve hours, and now that the clock is pointing to twelve again, it means that it has been turned at least two times, so I suspect that it has been "more than twenty-four hours", is there a problem with that ?'
After hearing this reply, the white coat coldly glanced at the woman, suspicion still lingering in his gaze.
After all, within this environment, this woman was too calm.
Would a normal person face this kind of kidnapping and calmly say these words of hers?
At this moment, a robust young man wearing a black t-shirt opened his mouth and asked, 'Goat Head, why are there ten people here but you say there are nine?'
Goat Head was silent and did not answer immediately.
'Damn family shovel, I don't care how many people ... are here,' the man with the flowery arms cursed, and once he propped up the table and wanted to stand up, but he found that his legs were limp and he couldn't make any strength, so he could only continue to point at the goat head and say, 'Powdered sausage. I advise you to be sensible, you probably don't know how serious the consequences of messing with me are, I will really take your life.'
At these words, the expressions of the men in the room all grew serious, there really needed to be a lead at this time, if they could work together to subdue this goat head, then the situation was still under control.
However, the crowd found that their legs did not know what they had been injected with as if they had been injected with something, at this time, they could not make any force at all.
So the flower-armed man could only threaten the goat-head with words, shouting and cursing loudly.
Qi Xia did not say anything, reaching out to slightly stroke his chin as he stared at the seat clock on the table, pondering.
Things didn't seem to be as simple as they were supposed to be.
He knew that Goat Head was talking about 'nine participants', and if there were ten people here, it only proved that one of them was not a participant.
Then who was he?
There were six men and four women sitting in this room, could one of them be the 'kidnapper'?
Goat Head stopped speaking and slowly came to Qi Xia's side, standing behind a young man.
The crowd followed his gaze, only to realise that the young man in front of them was different from everyone else in the room, although his face was also dirty, it was filled with a happy smile.
The goat head raised his palm slowly and placed it on the back of the young man's head.
The young man's smile grew weirder and weirder as he glanced at the crowd with an agitated expression, looking like he already knew what was coming.
Only a muffled thud was heard as the goat-headed man slammed the young man's head hard against the tabletop.
The pinkish-white stuff spread horizontally across the tabletop like poured paint in a flash, splattering everyone's face with spots of blood.
This young man's head was actually smashed to pieces on the tabletop.
Outside the room, a distant bell rang once again.
Qi Xia was so close to the dead man that he felt an unknown object stick to his face, warm, sticky.
He asked himself that his mental strength was strong enough, but he did not expect to start shaking even at this moment.
The girl sitting on the right side of the dead man froze for three seconds before her face finally twisted and she let out a scream.
This scream tore through the psychological defences of the crowd.
To be able to smash the hardest human skull with his hand on a tabletop, was that goat head still 'human'?
How could his skinny body explode with such power?
The goat head slowly spoke, 'The reason why I prepared ten people is because I want to use one of them to silence you.'