The backyard was choked with weeds, and there was no sign of Wenshu having stepped upon the few flagstones. Looking back towards the inner room, it was utterly bare save for a high transom window. Wang Jue muttered under his breath, "Did Wenshu pull a disappearing act on us?"

Zhang Yuqiu shook her head. "No one can truly vanish into thin air. Even magic is just sleight of hand to fool the eye; you only find it amazing because you can't see through it."

"And you can see through it, then?" Wang Jue hugged his arms across his chest, adopting a challenging posture, clearly waiting for the young mistress to produce the correct answer. Seeing this, Zhang Yuqiu merely shrugged and walked into the main hall, stopping before the table where she cried out in shock, "Li Taiming is gone."

Wang Jue and Hou Dayong hurried in behind her. Sure enough, the spot where Li Taiming had been lying moments before was now empty. They shifted the table and benches, turning the space inside out, only to discover that he hadn't even left a single strand of hair behind.

"What in the world?" Wang Jue asked, astonished.

"This room must be the key. To watch two living people vanish right before our eyes without leaving the slightest trace..." Zhang Yuqiu took a deep breath. For her, who had never visited the Original Shadow Villa or the Reflection Villa, what was happening was utterly unbelievable.

At this juncture, Hou Dayong was the calmest among them. Having frequented the spaces between the morgue and the Original Shadow Villa, he was intimately familiar with mechanisms that seemed to offer no exit yet connected to other worlds. He knelt by the base of the walls, meticulously inspecting the perimeter. Once he confirmed there were no hidden exits, he moved to the inner room, checking each of the bare walls one by one. Finally, he shook his head at Wang Jue and Zhang Yuqiu. "They must have passed from this room into another world, but how they did it, we have no idea."

Zhang Yuqiu pulled the note Li Taiming had passed her from her pocket, carefully unfolding it. Under the dim light, she saw that it was completely blank—not a single character written upon it. Wang Jue and Hou Dayong, noticing something she produced from her pocket, automatically crowded around, taking the note and examining it every which way several times. Finding no mystery in it, they asked in unison, "What is this?"

Zhang Yuqiu frowned and didn't answer them. She walked to the side of the main door and gave it a gentle push; it opened with a creak, unlike the earlier stubborn resistance. The entire house seemed to have lost its purpose, standing wide open to the three of them—doors and small entrances alike—allowing them to come and go freely, leaving not a trace of its former peculiarity.

"Why is it like this? Earlier, the main door was firmly locked against the three of us, and the side door wouldn't budge. Now we can move freely. What exactly did you take out?" Wang Jue asked, bewildered.

"Ahem... ahem..." Zhang Yuqiu feigned a couple of coughs, uncertain whether she should reveal what was written on the paper, especially now that both Li Taiming and the writing had mysteriously vanished. She was even less sure that they ought to know what was on it. At least for this specific time and place, discussing it seemed highly inappropriate. So, she shifted the topic. "Let's think this through again from the beginning. Xiaoshu chased Xiaoyu to the old jeep. The group might have clashed with other Undead there. Li Taiming was brought here, half-dead. Wenshu was left at the scene and brought us to this house. Judging by Wenshu's erratic state, there must be more than one Puppet King controlling her. If what Yuan Qi and Fan Jia said is true, what happened to Wenshu should reflect the conflict between the old and new Puppet Kings. She said Xiaoyu told us to follow her, yet once here, she vanished mysteriously. This implies that Xiaoyu’s control over her was cut off again at some point. She was supposed to lead us to where Xiaoyu and Xiaoshu are, but because someone else took control, we ended up in this situation."

"So, Xiaoshu and Xiaoyu are not in a good position right now," Wang Jue picked up the thread.

"They must be in great danger," Hou Dayong added.