“This world is no longer like the normal world. So the key to opening this room door is definitely in the husband’s room. Only the husband could enter 506. And that ghost just now… it chased after me the moment it heard me going upstairs. The door back there hasn’t even had time to close.”
Zhao Mingyue quickly analyzed the situation and looked toward Bai Yu. “Sister Bai, if I go downstairs now, I’ll run right into the husband’s ghost, won’t I?”
“You want me to deal with him?” Bai Yu understood Zhao Mingyue’s intent.
“Yes. Otherwise, with two ghosts… we’ll have trouble handling them.”
The Backward Walker and the husband’s ghost—both of them were now waiting for her on the fourth floor and the stairs below. She didn’t dare go down.
While ascending earlier, she had heard Bai Yu angrily shout at that ghost, and then the ghost had fled. Bai Yu must have made a move, which meant she was capable of killing it.
“I can do it. I can kill not only that ghost, but all the ghosts in this building. But that would affect your quest’s progress. Besides… this isn’t the only path you can take.”
Bai Yu’s eyes, deep as an abyss, turned toward the staircase. “Lu Liangting is here.”
“Lu Liangting? He’s only arriving now?”
“Yes.”
Bai Yu could sense three living auras entering the building. The first two were clearly Lu Liangting and his cousin. But the third… Bai Yu couldn’t be certain of their identity. The only certainty was that this third person was absolutely a Game Participant.
“So what should we do now?” Zhao Mingyue blinked, her hands clutching the Magic Staff. She understood what Bai Yu meant by “another path”—simply let Lu Liangting help her lure the Ghostly Monsters away.
“Circle around. Go to the other side and hide.”
The building’s structure was shaped like the character “ri” (a rectangle divided into two spaces). Circling around would eventually lead back to the staircase.
Zhao Mingyue nodded. Standing outside Room 506, she could clearly hear something inside scratching at the door, accompanied by faint, flickering cries for help, the voice so agonized it was almost distorted.
Hardly daring to take a deep breath, Zhao Mingyue circled around and stood in a blind corner, ensuring that no one coming up the stairs could see her.
Just when she thought she’d have to wait for Lu Liangting to come up, Bai Yu, floating beside her, suddenly used her blood threads to lift the small incense burner outside Room 503 and then violently smash it to the ground.
In the dark, silent corridor, the shattering of the ceramic incense burner was startlingly loud, like a thunderclap.
The sound of the shattering echoed. Zhao Mingyue distinctly heard the fellow walking backward on the stairs quicken his pace, heading up.
At the same time, a disturbance came from the fourth floor. Once the Headless Old Man had gone up to the fifth floor, the footsteps of a second person appeared. This person’s steps quickly drew the Headless Old Man away. After they vanished onto the fourth floor, someone else came upstairs.
It was these footsteps that awakened the man hiding on the fourth floor once more.
“No one is allowed upstairs!” The hoarse, low voice rang out, full of venomous hatred.
As expected, this shout made the person coming upstairs quicken their pace. Zhao Mingyue tilted her head to look—it was indeed Lu Liangting’s figure, and a shadowy form was following right behind him.
The shadow was pitch-black, its clothes burned and melted, fused with large patches of its flesh, emitting waves of nauseating stench. Drops of black, purulent blood splattered onto the ground with a sizzling sound.
“No one is allowed upstairs!”
Gulping, Zhao Mingyue silently prayed for Lu Liangting. She hadn’t originally planned to lure him up with this method.
Without needing Bai Yu to speak, seeing both man and ghost disappear around the corner of the corridor, Zhao Mingyue immediately darted toward the stairs to head down.
But just as she reached the fourth floor, something caught the corner of her eye.
The person who had been chased toward the third floor by the Headless Old Man had, for unknown reasons, turned back.
The current situation was this: the Headless Old Man was coming upstairs from below, she didn’t know how long Lu Liangting could hold on up there, and the husband’s ghost could return at any moment. If she moved any slower, she could be trapped in one of the rooms on the fourth floor.
Arriving on the fourth floor, it was just like the fifth—layered with a blood-red filter. The air was saturated not only with the smell of disinfectant but also a mixture of rotting stench and the smell of burning.
Just as Bai Yu had said, one of the rooms on the fourth floor was indeed open.
If she wasn’t mistaken, this room was where the landlord had once lived.
A sigh of relief escaped her involuntarily. Thank goodness it wasn’t her own room. If she had come out and seen her own door open, that would have been… interesting. It would have meant she’d been living with a ghost all along.
Quickly reaching the door of the room, Zhao Mingyue looked at this place, ravaged by fire and never cleaned up afterward. She almost had to force herself to walk inside.
But she didn’t notice… that Bai Yu had vanished.
As lightning tore across the sky, bringing a moment of bright illumination, the shadow she cast was no longer that of a girl with long hair and a white dress.
The ghost that belonged to that room was gone, drawn away and held back by Lu Liangting, unable to return for a while. And the Female Ghost of Room 506 was also trapped in her own room.
In other words, although Zhao Mingyue had entered a “Haunted House,” she had ironically arrived at the safest place right now.
With Zhao Mingyue’s immediate safety of no concern for the time being, Bai Yu had her own matters to attend to.
The graceful, white-dressed figure appeared in the fourth-floor corridor, walking step by step toward the stairway entrance.
She was going to meet an “old friend,” to let this “old friend” know that the Ghost Stories in this building weren’t limited to those few weaklings.
Xia Han was currently being chased by the Headless Old Man. She had initially reached the third floor, intending to deal with the old man there once and for all. But the situation had taken an unexpected turn.
Her intelligence was flawed. There was another freak living in this building.
That man in rain boots and a raincoat was a complete lunatic. He’d been knocking on doors since the second floor, asking every household one question.
“Have you seen my wife?”
Xia Han had seen the man’s wife—strapped right onto his back!
The man was carrying a swollen, waterlogged female corpse on his back, asking people if they’d seen his wife? His wife, who had died in this very building, one of the tenants from last year.
Xia Han ran up the stairs quickly, a Fierce Ghost relentlessly pursuing her from behind, with a madman carrying his dead wife’s corpse also in the mix. In such a situation, any other woman would have been terrified out of her wits. But she wore a full smile, as if playing an amusing game.
However, coming up from the corner of the third floor, just as she stepped onto the first step, her body froze.
She looked up and saw a young woman with long hair in a white dress. The girl was beautiful, her silhouette in the darkness like a dancing butterfly.
Yet the aura of this young woman made Xia Han’s body tremble uncontrollably.
This thing… it was absolutely not from this building!
Xia Han’s pupils constricted. She turned to flee, but the dark red chains, their ends tipped with sharp cones, were faster.
Squelch. The chains pierced through Xia Han’s heart.
She stiffly turned her head back and found the young woman in the white dress now standing right beside her, having appeared out of nowhere.
Down the stairs, the Headless Old Man had been preparing to come up. Noticing Bai Yu had killed his prey, he paused for a moment, then silently turned around and walked back down, backing down thoroughly.
“Jason, guess who I am?”
