Night fell.

In the depths of the ancient, gloomy castle, all the attendants had vanished. There wasn’t a single soul to be found—apart from the very much alive Gu Yuhuan, everything else seemed dead. Dead, deathly silent. Every heavy door was frightening enough; before opening one, you could never know what lay behind it.

Bluebeard’s castle had three floors in total, and there were one hundred and twenty-three keys.

Gu Yuhuan thought that probably no one who entered this game would be reckless enough to open the door belonging to the golden key.

Gu Yuhuan’s physical condition was average among women. From childhood to adulthood, passing her PE classes had never been a problem, but that was about it. At sports meets she could only ever take part in things like shot put or discus; if she joined running events, it would be an embarrassment to her class. Now she was wearing a heavy dress, her waist cinched tightly by a corset. Every step made her feel stifled. By the time she climbed up to the third floor, she was already panting. After steadying her breathing for a moment, she opened the door marked No. 123.

Click.

The door opened.

Inside the room were large chests, all standing open, filled with every kind of jewel. Their glittering radiance was intoxicating. Some chests contained exquisite, expensive clothing, adorned with various gemstones, each piece dazzling in its own way. If these things had appeared under normal circumstances, no one would have been able to resist them. Unfortunately, her life was at stake, and she didn’t even know whether these things were real. Gu Yuhuan had no mind to admire them. From among the hanging clothes, she found a set of lightweight men’s clothing. Around the collar was sewn a ring of smooth, round pearls. Presumably because this string of pearls—almost perfectly uniform in size—was already valuable enough, no other decorations had been added. After changing into it, she felt it was a little big on her, but it didn’t hinder her movements.

She searched the room but didn’t find anything particularly noteworthy.

Gu Yuhuan closed this door and opened Door No. 122. This room was piled full of gold coins. At night, the lighting here was actually better than during the day. It had been raining all day, casting a gloomy pall over the entire castle. At night the rain stopped, and moonlight streamed in. Without having to rely solely on candlelight, the room was brighter than it had been during the day.

This room, too, was filled entirely with gold coins, glittering everywhere.

Gu Yuhuan had played puzzle-solving adventure games before—things like XX Manor, XX City, XX’s Secret, and the like. She wasn’t particularly brave and didn’t enjoy horror-themed games, but she quite liked pure puzzle-solving ones, so she had some sense of how these worked.

Games like this usually involved searching different rooms for useful items, then finding a way to escape based on clues. That tested the player’s patience and powers of observation. A real-life version, however, was a survival game altogether—completely different from merely “playing” a game.

After closing that door, Gu Yuhuan continued opening others in the darkness. When she opened the eighth door, what she saw at last was no longer gold, silver, or jewels. That meant she might be able to find useful clues in this room.

This room was covered in a thick layer of dust, but it wasn’t hard to tell that before it was abandoned, it must have been very luxuriously furnished. The person who decorated it had clearly put a great deal of thought into it. This was a woman’s room, and the one who arranged it was very likely a man.

Gu Yuhuan’s mother was a detective novelist, very famous within her circle. From an early age, she had emphasized cultivating her children’s thinking abilities. Under her mother’s guidance, Gu Yuhuan developed strong reasoning skills, and by middle school she had already begun experimenting with literary creation. Compared with her mother’s rigor, however, her own thinking tended to be more free-ranging and divergent.

After searching the entire room, Gu Yuhuan felt somewhat disappointed, because the only thing that could really be considered a clue was a single oil painting hanging above the bed. The background of the painting was this very room. The man in the painting was the master of the castle—King Bluebeard. Yet the Bluebeard in the painting was strikingly young. He was turning his head to look at the beautiful blonde woman standing behind him. Their hands overlapped, resting on the back of a chair. There was even a gentle smile on King Bluebeard’s face.

Although the Bluebeard in the painting was strange and ugly, the smile on his face made him appear spirited and heroic, as radiant as the rising sun. If not for the signature blue beard, Gu Yuhuan could hardly believe that the person in the painting and the gloomy, terrifying king of the present were the same man.

“…What on earth has time done to you?”

…Of course, no one could answer her.

Gu Yuhuan had a bad habit: the more nervous she was, the more talkative she became.

With the thought that it “might” be a useful item and would be better to keep with her, Gu Yuhuan took the frame down, removed the oil painting, folded it carefully, and slipped it into the inner pocket of her clothes.

There was nothing else useful to be found in the room, so Gu Yuhuan continued her search.

The entire third floor seemed to be the private domain of the “master of the castle.” Most of the rooms were filled with gold, silver, and jewels. The remaining rooms were mostly unused, but judging from their decor, their former occupants had all been women of various kinds. None of these rooms brought Gu Yuhuan any further gains.

In the second half of the night, Gu Yuhuan finally made a new discovery: she found King Bluebeard’s room.

This room gave off an unpleasant feeling—dim and oppressive. The windows were shut tight, and not even moonlight could enter. Gu Yuhuan set the candlestick on the desk and saw several framed paintings on the study’s wall. The frames were arranged in a row, each containing a lifelike portrait of a young woman. Every one of them wore a dignified smile, and the background of each painting was the castle’s main gate.

The beauty in the first painting was exactly the same woman as the one she had found earlier.

This great beauty must have been King Bluebeard’s first wife.

Gu Yuhuan also noticed that the women in these paintings were astonishingly similar. This resemblance wasn’t because she was bad at distinguishing Western faces, but because they all shared the same defining traits—blonde hair and deep sapphire-blue eyes.

Not every painting fit this pattern, though. Even after entering this strange world, Gu Yuhuan’s appearance had not changed. Her own portrait now hung at the very end of the row, like a yellow soybean mixed into a pot of green mung beans—no matter how you looked at it, it was an obvious misfit, as if it had been mixed in by mistake.

“…I’m probably not King Bluebeard’s type, am I?”

What a damned game.

In an absolutely silent environment, Gu Yuhuan could only talk to herself to wear down some of the fear brought on by the darkness. It was strange—no matter how deep the night, there should at least have been some sounds from birds or insects, yet there were none. Not a single sound. The silence was terrifying.

There were thirty-nine paintings in total, thirty-nine queens. Adding Gu Yuhuan herself made a full forty people.

Gu Yuhuan shivered, then focused herself and pulled open the desk drawer, discovering a pile of torn paper scraps.

“Puzzle pieces?”

Most puzzle-solving games really do include a jigsaw stage, and this was often Gu Yuhuan’s favorite. She had once completed massive puzzles with more than five thousand pieces.

This “puzzle,” however, consisted of only a few hundred scraps at most—far too easy. The “stage” relaxed her mind. She took out the torn pieces and laid them on the table, focusing and calming herself as she gradually pieced together the smiling face of a woman.

A beautiful blonde woman sat naked on a cashmere rug, her body covered only by a semi-transparent gauze scarf that served as a meaningless token of concealment. She leaned against the bedside, smiling seductively. It was an intensely sensual smile, heavy with sexual innuendo. In her deep sapphire-blue eyes, it was as if tiny hooks had grown, wantonly snagging the heart of whoever looked at the painting.

Her features were exquisitely refined—a true, undeniable beauty. Gu Yuhuan instinctively felt that if she were a man, she would never be able to withstand such temptation. Even as a woman, she found herself transfixed by the figure in the painting.

King Bluebeard’s first queen.
Stripped of her dignified façade, she was like a blooming poppy flower…

In Gu Yuhuan’s awareness, the breathtakingly gorgeous woman in the painting suddenly curled her lips upward.

A gust of wind came from nowhere. Gu Yuhuan’s hand jerked, and the puzzle pieces were thrown into disarray.

She no longer cared about the scattered pieces. Her forehead was slick with sweat, and a chill ran down her back.

…This painting!!!

It was alive!

“Tap, tap, tap.”
“Tap, tap, tap.”

The candle had already gone out. In the darkness, her hearing was amplified, and with the castle as silent as a ghost town, even the faintest sound seemed endlessly magnified.

Bluebeard only returned to the castle during the daytime—so who could this be?

The fear she had been suppressing began to stir. She tried desperately to calm herself, but her heart pounded like a great drum—thump, thump, thump—without stopping. She was so nervous she was almost short of breath.

The footsteps stopped at the door. The visitor gently knocked.

“Beautiful queen, I have come.”

The words sounded as if they had been wrapped in a moist tongue for a long time before being spoken, each syllable soft and warm, carrying a damp, husky quality.

The phrase “beautiful queen” triggered Gu Yuhuan’s memory. She did not put down the brass candlestick in her hand, but lowered her voice and said, “I’m inside.”

The door opened. In the moonlight appeared a man wearing a loose, flowing white robe, his chest bare. As he walked, large stretches of skin were revealed; his long, powerful legs were almost completely exposed. His perfect lines glimmered softly under the moonlight—and at the sight of him, Gu Yuhuan abruptly felt her mouth go dry, an instinctive physical reaction she couldn’t suppress.

His looks were simply too much… far too lethal.

Perhaps beauty in this world doesn’t bewitch people—only because it doesn’t quite qualify as “true beauty.”

When Gu Yuhuan saw his face, she froze slightly.

The moment he saw her, he stepped forward and embraced her fervently, showing no surprise at all that she was holding a brass candlestick. He grasped the wrist of the hand holding it, pressed his forehead against hers, and gazed at her with ocean-deep blue eyes.
“Don’t be afraid, beautiful queen. I’m here. Relax—put it down.”

Gu Yuhuan’s spine softened, and she obediently let the man take the candlestick from her tightly clenched hand. He set it on the table and relit it. His profile came back into view—and there was a small mole beneath his left eye.

A mole at the outer corner of the left eye was known as a “peach blossom mole.” What caught Gu Yuhuan’s attention was that her boyfriend had a mole in the exact same spot.

That tiny mole made Gu Yuhuan lower her guard a little toward this man—the queen’s lover.

[Bluebeard’s Law, Rule Four: The beautiful queen has a handsome lover who appears in the latter half of the night.]

Of course, this was a man with a standard Western appearance. Western handsomeness was different from Eastern handsomeness—their features were more sharply defined, and often a single pair of deep-set eyes was enough to pull someone in. Gu Yuhuan’s boyfriend was, naturally, an East Asian man. She had been a devoted looks-enthusiast since childhood, so her boyfriend’s appearance definitely passed the bar. They were handsome in completely different ways.

Gu Yuhuan discreetly pushed the lover away.

“I miss you madly, my dear!”

The lover’s affection was like surging magma—scalding and unstoppable. He wrapped his arms around Gu Yuhuan without giving her room to refuse and kissed her hair, “The king hasn’t left the castle in a very long time, and I haven’t seen you in just as long, my dear. Beautiful queen! My longing for you plunges me into boundless agony every day, as though a dagger were constantly carving into my heart. Only when I see you does this torment pause for a moment.”

Gu Yuhuan: “……”

…I have a boyfriend!!!

God-tier looks…

Gu Yuhuan turned her head away.

Her movement drew the man’s attention to the oil painting fragments on the table. He asked her urgently, “My dear, are you searching again for a way to deal with the king?”

Gu Yuhuan’s expression shifted slightly as the man took her hand.

“I beg you, my dear! Please stop looking for ways to deal with the king. Let things remain as they are!”

Something stirred in Gu Yuhuan’s heart, and she tried saying, “Don’t you want to see me every day? Don’t you want to be openly together with me?”

“I do. But compared to my wish to be with you forever… if that wish would bring you danger, then I would rather never have met you in the first place.”

His words were so sincere. Even though Gu Yuhuan rejected his embrace, he still stayed by her side, accompanying her as she conducted a carpet search of the third floor. All along the way, he gazed at her with a pair of melancholy blue eyes filled with devotion.

With his company, Gu Yuhuan passed a calm and steady latter half of the night.

When dawn was approaching, she reached the final room on the third floor, and a sudden, uncontrollable drowsiness washed over her.

The lover’s gentle voice reached her ears:
“It’s almost dawn, beautiful queen. Let me escort you back to your room.”

The voice grew softer and softer, as if afraid of disturbing his beloved’s sleep.

“…May you have sweet dreams.”

Gu Yuhuan sank completely into darkness.

Author’s note:
Gu Yuhuan: “I really do have a boyfriend!!!”