Chapter 159: House Of Evil Ghosts
Seeing that staying here to communicate with each other wouldn’t yield anything useful, and with the time about right, the group prepared to enter the apartment.
There were several buildings here identical in appearance to the apartment in front of them, probably built at the same time.
They stood outside the apartment, silent all around, surrounded by the same cluster of buildings in front, behind, left, and right. The time was 5:50 p.m., the spatial tone a dull gray and deep blue. The first floor had shops, unattended stores, yet neon signs flickered with red light.
The environment here exuded a sense of oppression and unreality, making one feel as if plunged into a nightmare from the last century, even the occasional evening breeze blowing through the intersection seeming like a ghost breathing down one’s back.
Before even entering the apartment, the tone of this mission was almost confirmed. After stepping into the apartment, this dull oppressive atmosphere became even more pronounced.
The apartment was somewhat dilapidated, and upon entering, the first things to catch the eye were the blackened floor and mottled wall surfaces. The air carried a faint musty smell and the stench of garbage. The old bulbs on the ceiling were yellowed and blackened, as if flies trapped inside had left their corpses.
The apartment’s door was an iron door, with no elevator. The stair railings were rusted, as if no one had tended to them for a long time.
“This place shouldn’t have anyone else living here, right?”
Qiu Tian kicked away a garbage bag and rotten fruit blocking the middle of the road, frowning as she glanced at the spiderwebs in the corner.
“It looks abandoned.” Auntie Duan’s gaze fell on the iron doors of these rooms, some open and some closed. Through the door gaps, it was visible that the insides were mostly long abandoned.
The group reached the stairwell entrance. Before entering the corridor, they spotted an old small blackboard on the mottled wall surface.
The blackboard still had a line of handwriting remaining. Lu Jinzhao carefully discerned it, then confirmed it read:
[Inside this apartment, loud noise is prohibited, running in the corridor is prohibited, leaving garbage inside the room is prohibited.]
“What is this?” Qiu Tian’s brows hadn’t relaxed: “Is it a taboo? Will breaking these lead to being pursued and killed by ghosts?”
“Written so blatantly right here? Seems a bit too simple-minded.” Tan Meng beside her narrowed their eyes, seemingly not agreeing.
Seeing them about to argue again, the eldest Auntie Duan quickly stopped them: “Whether real or fake, just try to follow them, alright?”
Lu Jinzhao didn’t speak, carefully observing the blackboard and everything in sight.
The handwriting on the blackboard was very neat, like it was printed. No useful information could be gleaned from the handwriting.
Tan Meng and Qiu Tian ultimately didn’t argue, both holding back their breath. Lu Jinzhao didn’t understand why these two just couldn’t get along—perhaps it was the so-called magnetic field incompatibility?
But they’d reached the Class A Platform—couldn’t they even manage surface-level pretense?
Or was this their surface-level pretense?
Seeing it was almost six o’clock, just in case, the group didn’t explore the building first. Instead, they agreed to head to their respective rooms first, ensuring they were all inside their rooms by exactly six, leaving half an hour to explore their own rooms, then gathering at the door at 6:30 for a collective exploration of the apartment together.
Before entering 302, Lu Jinzhao had observed the general state of the other rooms in this building. Unlike the first floor, the third floor rooms all had closed doors, and the corridor was relatively tidy, without the garbage piled up in the corridor on the first floor.
But the walls and lighting were similar to the first floor, all in a dilapidated state.
Time was tight; she only had time for a brief glance before pressing down the door handle to open the door to room 302.
Room 302 also looked abandoned for some time, but the previous furniture hadn’t been removed; instead, it was covered with white cloth, forming a stark contrast to the dirty, messy chaos of the first floor.
Apart from more dust, the windows completely pasted over with newspaper letting in little light, leaving the room pitch black, and the electric lights having some poor contact, room 302 at least appeared to be a normal room.
This was what Lu Jinzhao thought before uncovering the white cloth.
She was inevitably going to uncover these white cloths covering the furniture. This was the room assigned to her by the train; she had to figure out what was inside, where abnormalities might appear. And when she grabbed the dust-covered cloth and lifted it, she saw the filth hidden beneath the white cloth.
The old sofa had its surface cut open and cotton removed, a rotten corpse hidden inside. Long-coagulated blood had formed a black sticky shell. The twisted rotting corpse still had four arms and legs inserted into it that didn’t belong to her. Even though the five features were rotten and blurry, it was still discernible from the widely gaping mouth and limbs what kind of painful scream she had let out before death.
A single glance at this twisted rotting corpse was enough to chill one to the bone.
And this was just the first white cloth.
Lu Jinzhao felt a slight chill in her heart; there were three such cloths in the entire room.
She began thinking about the possibility that not returning to this room might lead to early pursuit and kill by ghosts due to violating the “tenant” identity.
In just a few seconds, Lu Jinzhao had adjusted her mindset and walked toward the second white cloth, which seemed to cover a “television.”
Before uncovering it, she had already imagined what it might be, but upon revealing it, she was still shocked by the scene before her.
On the TV cabinet was not the big-headed TV she had imagined, but a human trunk with hands and feet chopped off. Her abdomen was cut open, internal organs hollowed out, replaced inside by her own head.
The word cruel was insufficient to describe this corpse’s fate. Even Lu Jinzhao didn’t want to look directly at this long-rotten corpse.
The last remaining white cloth covered the “dining table.”
When the white cloth was lifted, revealing the corpse under the dining table—pressed against the ground, with intact limbs, no extra things that shouldn’t be there, merely bisected at the waist—Lu Jinzhao inexplicably felt a bit relieved.
Even though this could be considered cruel, compared to the previous two corpses, this one truly brought her no further shock.
As the white cloths were lifted one by one, the room, originally filled only with the smell of long uninhabited decay and dust, gradually took on the smell of rot and corpse stench.
Whether the pasted-over windows, the oppressive lighting, or these corpses with bizarre death appearances full of horror, all told of the room’s oppression and wrongness.
And she had become this room’s new tenant.
“So, what happened here before me?”
Lu Jinzhao suppressed the discomfort in her heart and carefully looked at these three corpses.
What did these corpses want to convey to her?
She squatted down, approaching these rotting corpses, meticulously checking for possible clues.
Unfortunately, under severe rot, almost no useful information remained. The only certainty was that the time of death for these three corpses seemed very close.
After all, their degrees of rot showed little difference.
