Chapter 3: The Evil Of Humanity
Lin Ling has two identities. Currently, he is the boss of this Magical Wonderful House, and his other identity is that of an escaped mental patient.
Rest assured, those people won’t catch him anymore.
Because the people in the hospital would never imagine that their missing Patient No. 8 actually escaped by traversing.
Lin Ling, who lost his memory from childhood and grew up almost entirely in the mental hospital, once caused chaos in the containment hospital. He often engaged in behaviors such as inducing fellow patients to self-harm, worsening patients’ conditions in various ways, and even tormenting the staff into psychological trauma. The hospital suffered greatly and was at its wits’ end, eventually locking Lin Ling in a single room.
In the single room, with no one to prank, Lin Ling began idly pondering philosophy. Then one day, he suddenly had an epiphany and gained enlightenment. He suddenly remembered many past events, and at the same time, he felt an indescribable connection established with this small dwelling that was originally in a different dimensional space. It was as if the small dwelling had deeply bound with his mind and soul, making him realize that he could rely on this small shop to leave the mental hospital at any time.
Regarding this, Lin Ling at the time thought that this strange small dwelling was just like the mountain stronghold story Old Wang from the next room over had told《Harry Potter and Doraemon》, a golden snitch that could take people shuttling through spacetime.
In any case, Lin Ling, who still had some family emotions toward the mental hospital, decided to leave a letter to all the staff at the mental hospital before leaving. From the old dean who was often angered into heart attacks by him, to the red-capped mushroom under the third big tree in the backyard, he left a sentence for each, expressing his perfunctory reluctance, and incidentally mentioning the memories he had recalled. Only then did he leave the mental hospital contentedly, bringing this small dwelling full of eerie objects to this world, and opening a small shop in a little-known place.
Of course, what Lin Ling didn’t know was that the old dean nearly died of anger after seeing the content of the letter he left.
“Dear Grandpa Dean, I suddenly remembered my past. It turns out I was once a wealthy king with a heart yearning for world peace…” The old dean didn’t even finish reading one sentence before his vision went black. He crumpled the letter in rage and threw it on the ground.
This was, to date, Lin Ling’s fourth autobiography, and each one was more absurd than the last.
No one can trust a mental patient diagnosed with severe delusional disorder and exhibiting certain antisocial personality disorder traits…
To this day, Lin Ling considers himself a mature boss. In just three months in this world, he has completed three deals in total—quite an achievement!
Look, legends about his small shop are even starting to circulate online.
“Ah, afternoon tea time.” Lin Ling rummaged through the refrigerator that refreshes with fresh ingredients every day and pulled out a pack of spicy strips. While complaining that the spicy strips were as tough as cowhide, he walked to the computer at the front desk and sighed, “Another day of high self-refreshing.”
Chewing the tough, hard-to-bite spicy strips, Lin Ling arrived at the currently most popular Tieba platform for sharing spiritual anomalies and eerie matters, searching for the next little white rabbit like Yu Lianyun.
Soon, his gaze locked onto a featured missing person notice post. He typed rapidly, striking the keyboard: “OP, have you ever heard of a magical forest cabin?”
……
After returning to the hotel room, Yu Lianyun immediately paid extra to have the hotel staff get her an old-style video tape projector.
After setting up the equipment, Yu Lianyun rubbed her hands afflicted with frostbite, then tremblingly inserted that black video tape into the projector.
“I don’t want to die yet…” Yu Lianyun murmured. She sincerely hoped this video tape could become the treasure that reverses her exhausted life; she was truly at the end of her rope.
The projector emitted a clear operating sound, and the television began displaying silent images.
At the start, the image showed a four-second countdown. With each count, the image blinked once, as if the countdown was filmed from the perspective of a mysterious eye. Yu Lianyun suddenly felt inexplicably as if she was being stared at by the image.
The countdown ended, and the main content recorded on the video tape officially began. First to appear was a woman in white wearing a white gauze dress with disheveled hair. She sat in front of a dressing table mirror combing her thick long hair. Most of her hair nearly covered her entire face, but through the motions of combing, the gaps revealed her fair face, graceful jawline, and alluring eyebrows and eye corners. It was not hard to see that this woman had a stunningly beautiful face.
Yu Lianyun couldn’t help but feel a touch of admiration at this fleeting glimpse. She continued watching. The first half of the main content seemed to showcase this beautiful woman’s daily life. Strangely, though she was the protagonist under the lens, aside from that one image in the dressing table mirror, the woman never showed her full face again. The other characters appearing in the woman in white’s life were the same… The recording angle of this segment was quite odd, giving an indescribable sense of peeping.
In this first half, one segment caught Yu Lianyun’s slight attention: the woman had some conflict in her interactions with her neighbor household.
Whenever the woman went out, two indifferent faces would always poke out from the doorway of the neighboring house—one old, one young, with similar eyebrows and eyes, seemingly father and son. They always had expressionless faces, but their eyes were full of dark desire.
They were clearly peeping, but when the woman in white sensed the line of sight and turned back to look at them, the neighbor father and son never withdrew their gaze or hid. Instead, they continued staring, gazing at her with even more fervent eyes, even revealing pathological laughter on their faces.
The woman lowered her head wanting to leave, but at that moment, the neighbor’s wife would return from outside right on time, then reveal a ferocious expression at the silent, head-lowered woman in white and curse her viciously. Unfortunately, this was a silent recording, so Yu Lianyun didn’t know what was being said in the video; she could only guess it wasn’t anything good.
This seemingly cyclical daily life record went back and forth four times, each slightly different. The woman in white, who often dressed up in front of the mirror, became increasingly exhausted and perfunctory. Her once smooth hair grew messier and messier, while the neighbor’s wife’s attitude toward the woman intensified—from verbal abuse at first, to physical violence, and even later yanking out a large handful of the woman’s hair, leaving her bald in a big patch.
The second half seamlessly connected. Even though the woman in white was abused miserably by the neighbor’s wife, to the point where her current appearance was so terrible it could no longer be called beautiful, the neighbor father and son’s peeping at her never stopped.
It was another new day. The woman in white proceeded with her head down as usual but stopped midway. The following image showed a full 10 seconds of stillness, but careful observation revealed that the environment was always subtly changing—it wasn’t stillness, but the people in the image had stopped moving.
The woman stopped on the road near her house entrance, as if waiting, while the neighbor father and son from next door continued staring fixedly at the woman in white’s back, as if expecting something to happen.
Just as Yu Lianyun was puzzled about what was going on, she suddenly noticed a streak of blood flowing from the T-junction corner of the road.
Immediately after, the image switched. The woman in white arrived at the corner and discovered the neighbor’s wife’s deformed, inhuman twisted corpse curled under a truck’s wheel, with a shiny silver kitchen knife still clutched in the corpse’s hand.
This seemed to imply that the neighbor’s wife had planned to stab the woman in white to death with the kitchen knife today, so she had been lurking at the corner the woman in white passed every day, waiting. But unexpectedly, she was crushed to death by a speeding truck today.
The neighbor’s wife’s death was too bizarre and miserable, filling Yu Lianyun with an inner chill.
This horror stemmed from humanity’s malice—its source could be known, yet it was hard to gauge!
Yu Lianyun shuddered, but then she felt a burst of ecstasy, because she discovered her lost body temperature was recovering. That shudder brought a bit of horror but also clarity and warmth to her.
“This video tape… it works!” Yu Lianyun felt both excitement and fear. Amid this conflicting emotion, she watched the video’s content to the end.
Then the image switched, and Yu Lianyun saw the woman in white sadly sitting by a well crying, her delicate body trembling, evoking pity.
Yu Lianyun guessed the woman in white was perhaps grieving the neighbor’s wife’s death. Though she didn’t support such overly tolerant saintly mind, she couldn’t deny the woman in white’s kindness.
But the very next scene, Yu Lianyun witnessed humanity’s malice once more.
Suddenly, two men burst into the image—one old, one young—rushing toward the woman in white. Looking closely at those two crazy, ferocious faces, they were precisely the neighbor father and son who always peeped at the woman in white. They teamed up to push the panicked woman in white into the well, then the son even found a large stone from the well’s edge and smashed it viciously into the well.
After doing all this, the pair of mad father and son still hadn’t stopped their perverted behavior. Finally, they fetched a few stone slabs and used cement to completely seal the well.
Seeing this, Yu Lianyun couldn’t help clenching her fists, her breathing quickening. She found it unbelievable and couldn’t understand why this father and son had so cruelly killed this woman in white. Was it revenge for the dead neighbor’s wife?
Immediately after, the television image began flickering eerily. Vaguely, Yu Lianyun saw the neighbor father and son meeting miserable deaths in their home, with a deformed-torso woman standing in the center of the two wide-eyed corpses.
That woman had a deformed figure, tattered clothes, and a twisted face, but those eyes peeking through the hair strands, filled with malice toward the world, allowed Yu Lianyun to recognize her at a glance. This woman, who had killed the father and son by some means, was the woman in white whom they had jointly thrown into the well.
She had returned with hatred and rage!
Yu Lianyun felt her heart wrench in pain, as if gripped tightly by an invisible hand, but the pain passed fleetingly. Clutching her chest, she persevered and watched the video tape’s final content, only to see the woman in white’s eyes growing larger and larger, with a traditional Chinese numeral imprinted in them becoming clearer and clearer.
It clearly read the number: Seven!
New author seeking votes and collection~~~~~
