Chapter 17 Night of Sacrifice (13)
Zhu Ming sat bolt upright in bed.
The voice continued, “Mingming, I’m so scared. Why are you ignoring me? Don’t you want to see me? Mingming…”
BAM!
A loud crash cut off the voice. Zhu Ming jumped out of bed, grabbing a chair and smashing it against the door.
“Enough is enough!”
Using Yin Yu to taunt her repeatedly… even Zhu Ming had her limits.
“Get lost!” she yelled, kicking the door. “Get the hell away from me!”
She had often imagined how she would react if she ever saw Yin Yu again.
But the reality was, they were over. Yin Yu was gone, as if she had never existed. The hurt, the hope, everything was in the past.
Zhu Ming admitted she had still loved Yin Yu at first, but she had gradually learned to let go, to bury that name deep within her heart, to revisit those memories only in the solitude of the night.
The chair, rebounding off the door, clattered to the floor. Zhu Ming grabbed it and smashed it against the door again, a wounded animal lashing out in pain and fury.
The sound of wood splintering echoed through the villa. The force of the impact shattered the chair, scattering pieces across the floor.
Then, silence.
The ghost in the hallway felt a surge of curiosity. It desperately wanted to know what inner demons this person was battling. The rules allowed it to create illusions and lure the participants out, but it couldn’t see what happened inside their rooms.
Despite being on its home turf, with darkness as its stage, it felt a flicker of fear, a chilling sense of danger emanating from behind that door.
How… how was that possible?
It silently approached the door, peering through the peephole. He could see them all, secretly, surreptitiously, leaving them nowhere to hide… A bloodshot eyeball suddenly filled the peephole, the black pupil a bottomless abyss.
The eyeball moved, pressing forward, as if trying to squeeze through.
The ghost recoiled in terror. It was the most horrifying sight it had ever seen. Its icy heart nearly leaped out of its throat. For a moment, it forgot it was the ghost, overcome by a primal fear of the darkness.
Inside the room, the woman pressed against the door smiled grimly as the bloodshot eye retreated from the peephole.
“I see you.”
She raised her middle finger at the peephole. “Bastard, you just wait. I’ll skin you alive!”
The ghost, startled, then enraged, was furious. This was its trick, its way of terrifying the living. How dare a human turn it against him?
No, this was unacceptable. It was a ghost, a powerful ghost. These humans were its playthings, meant to cower and tremble before it!
It lunged at the door of 2004, determined to scare the occupant with its terrifying eye.
But it couldn’t meet the gaze of the person inside.
It saw a middle finger.
It nearly exploded with rage.
…
That night, the secrets of not only 2004 were probed, but all the other guest rooms as well.
Inside room 2005, Yun Zouchuan said to the door, “Stop pretending. My mother would never be here. She hasn’t even come down from the mountain.”
Inside room 2006, Xiao Xue took a sip of water and sighed. She heard her parents urging her to open the door, her younger sister’s frightened but obedient whimpers, and her older sister’s haughty command:
“Get over here and open the door!”
She remained silent. There was no point responding to a fabrication.
When she didn’t answer, the voices outside changed tactics. The haughty tone became pleading and pathetic. “Little sister, I won’t be angry anymore. I’ll be nice to you. I love you the most. Don’t you love me anymore? Open the door!”
Xiao Xue smiled faintly. Even though it was fake, hearing her older sister speak to her like that was a strangely comforting experience.
And then there was room 2007.
The ghost, frustrated by its lack of success, approached the last room, the room of the guest it both hated and feared the most.
What were her attachments? How would she react?
It eagerly peered through the peephole, but saw nothing.
It thought it heard the sound of a distant wind, but it was an illusion. The villa was silent as a tomb, devoid of any emotional response, any change in heartbeat or breathing.
It was as if the occupant of 2007 was a block of ice, impervious to its tricks, her inner thoughts impenetrable.
…
In the darkness, Zhu Ming walked barefoot across the debris-strewn floor. The only chair in the room was broken. She sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes heavy but sleep elusive.
The ghosts were said to grow stronger as time went on. Even they knew to use Yin Yu to tempt her.
Zhu Ming stared blankly ahead, her eyes unfocused. She replayed the events of the instance in her mind, examining every detail.
She had made a promise. She would kill that ghost.
After a while, she stood up and walked to the window, suddenly pulling back the curtains.
The shadows of the trees loomed outside, motionless in the still air, like countless figures buried alive.
Drip, drip.
A pale, swollen arm reached through the window, dripping with a foul-smelling liquid, the soft, decaying flesh pressing against the glass.
A distorted face appeared outside, its nose, mouth, and eyes sunken into the flat plane of its face like lumps of clay. It stared at her greedily, its swimsuit a shocking red, its skin as white as paper.
The window rattled, the sound of flesh and water scraping against the glass sending shivers down her spine. The drowned ghost clung to the window, a slimy, writhing mass, a predator waiting for its prey to emerge from the safety of its den.
Zhu Ming tilted her head, looking at the ghost. A smile touched her lips. “I’ve been wondering… how did you die? You two seemed so in love. It couldn’t have been a crime of passion, could it?”
She turned on the housekeeper’s phone, the bright screen momentarily blinding.
She stared at the MMS photo, then at the timestamp.
5:17 a.m.
So it was that time already.
In the normal world, the midsummer sun would be rising, but here, everything followed the rules of the instance, including sunrise and sunset.
Every day, the sun rose at 6 a.m. and set at 3 p.m.
Day and night were clearly defined, separated by a three-minute twilight zone.
Half an hour later, Zhu Ming checked the phone again.
5:45 a.m.
She went to the bathroom, watching her reflection morph into the drowned corpse.
“I thought about it last night while I was washing my hands,” she said to her reflection. “Tricking Lao Gao into turning off the lights and taking a shower was clever. It would definitely work on someone already on edge.”
Lao Gao’s cause of death was easy to deduce.
The water ghost had killed him.
He was image-conscious, physically weak, and covered in the stench of the pool water. It was natural for him to want to wash. If he had been more careful, he might have survived.
But he had been fooled by the illusion in the mirror, believing he was safe inside his room, that only the flashlight caused the ghostly transformations. So he had showered in the dark.
The water system in the villa was clearly interconnected. All the water sources, except for the bottled water and the water lilies on the roof, had the same foul smell. That was how the water ghost entered the rooms.
She had followed the flow of water through the pipes, entering the showerhead and drowning Lao Gao in her long hair…
After his death, the door to his room had unlocked automatically, and the housekeeper had entered, cleaning up the trash and the water and hair in the bathroom. It had then gone to the common bathroom on the first floor to wash its mop, inadvertently clogging the drain with the long strands of hair.
In the morning, finding the bathroom dry, they had assumed Lao Gao had died in the pool, a victim of the water ghost’s revenge. They hadn’t realized that entering the pool wasn’t a prerequisite for death.
It was a clever trick, preventing them from investigating the pool further and obscuring the true cause of death.
And perhaps, another unsuspecting victim would fall for the mirror illusion and shower in the dark.
Zhu Ming decided to do just that. She turned off the flashlight and turned on the shower.
“Tonight, I’d like to invite you in for a chat.”
The water streamed down, and Zhu Ming stood beneath it, fully clothed, the cold water carrying a faint, unpleasant odor.
When did the change begin? When the water flow slowed, or when the smell intensified?
She turned off the shower, wiping her face. She knew that once the transformation began, it wouldn’t stop easily.
She walked out of the bathroom, her clothes soaked, leaving a trail of water on the floor.
She checked the phone again.
5:51 a.m.
A dragging, slithering sound echoed from behind her, the sound of wet flesh scraping against the floor. Something cold and slimy followed the trail of water, wrapping around her leg.
Zhu Ming turned and shone her flashlight. Click. The light flickered on.
The movement stopped, but the presence remained.
Click. The light vanished.
The cold, decaying hair moved again, coiling around her leg, the sluggish main body moving slowly, like a worm, but the hair itself quick and agile.
Zhu Ming turned on the flashlight, pulling the hair away from her leg, and took a step back towards the door.
She turned off the flashlight, waiting for the rotting ghost to appear. The hair, freed from the light, reached for her again.
The stench of decay filled the room. There was no human voice, only the rustling of hair, the dripping of water, the squelching of flesh against the floor, the clicking of the flashlight, and the endless, internal screaming.
Light and darkness battled, the beam of the flashlight appearing and disappearing in a steady rhythm, the darkness slowly encroaching.
Zhu Ming watched, unblinking.
Finally, the nightmarish ghost reached her leg, its cold, slimy flesh, bloated and decaying, pressing against her skin, trying to engulf her.
It might have succeeded. Once caught in its grasp, there was no escape.
But Zhu Ming turned on the flashlight again.
Disgusted, the ghost recoiled from the light, unable to advance. Zhu Ming helped it along. She grabbed a handful of its long, tangled hair and yanked its head upwards.
The pungent, hospital-like stench of decay filled her nostrils, but Zhu Ming didn’t flinch. She looked at the ghost’s horrifying face with an expression of cold pity. “So that’s how you died. How pathetic.”
She released her grip, watching impassively as the corpse slumped to the floor.
Zhu Ming turned, opened the door, and walked out.
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