Chapter 134: Room of Infinite Horror

My livestream chat was full of random, bizarre names—like Teletubbies Died of Murder, Master Tieling Biao, and Handsome, Skilled, and Loved by Girls. You could tell at a glance that these were online handles.

Right now, though, every ID in the chat had changed to a real name like Li Ming or Wang Wei. I had no idea whether they belonged to living people or wronged ghosts who only remembered their names.

In any case, once I failed to spot Daoist master Wan's ID, I stopped paying attention to the chat. The comments were likely fabricated from my own memories—or the stray ghosts housed inside the Paulownia Mulberry Talisman were deliberately messing with me.

By the time I finished my cigarette, my thoughts were mostly sorted out. 'Assuming this really is Huang Xue's Dream Realm, the first thing I need to do is regroup with Sakurako. She definitely knows more about the Dream Realm than I do, and in a completely unfamiliar world like this, I need a guide.'

'The other priority is Huang Xue. This is her Dream Realm, so I have to make sure she stays safe.' Holding the Underworld Live Show Phone in one hand and carrying the Black Leather Suitcase in the other, I walked around the unfamiliar house.

The place was fairly spacious, with a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and three bedrooms. It looked like it had some years on it: thick grease clung to the range hood in the kitchen, paint flaked off much of the furniture, and patches of plaster had peeled from the walls.

'I entered Huang Xue's Dream Realm, so why did I end up in this room?' Thankfully, I had taken Huang Lan's commission earlier. According to the files she had provided, neither Huang Boyuan nor Huang Xue had ever lived in a place like this.

Before Huang Boyuan made his fortune, they couldn't have afforded a home this size; once he became an executive at Ganding Pharmaceuticals, a place like this would have been beneath his status. From that, I deduced that the owner of this house didn't have much to do with the Huang Family.

"The Paulownia Mulberry Talisman harbors vicious ghosts and sinister things. Could this house be an illusion conjured by those filthy creatures—like a ghost wall?" As I muttered to myself in the room, my ears twitched. A sudden knocking echoed from the front door in the living room.

The moment I reached the door, the knocking abruptly stopped.

'Who could it be?' Opening the door would be simple enough—all I had to do was unhook the iron chain from the bolt. Whoever was pulling the strings didn't seem intent on keeping me locked in.

Still, just to be safe, I crouched down, lay flat on the floor, and peered out through the crack at the bottom of the door. 'Sakurako is wearing a pair of petite white shoes. One look and I'll know if she's the one knocking.'

The hallway outside was too dark to see anything clearly, so I pressed my eye right up to the gap and switched on my phone's flashlight.

The instant my view cleared, the blood drained from my face, and my heart gave a violent lurch.

Silently pulling the phone back, I scrambled to my feet and retreated several steps.

It wasn't Sakurako standing outside the door. It was the blood-drenched face of a woman who had died a horrific death. She was lying right across the threshold, and when I had peered through the crack just now, I had locked eyes directly with her.

Her bloodshot eyeballs had been rolling erratically in their sockets until I appeared—then she fixed a dead, unblinking stare on me through the gap.

"Knock, knock!" The knocking started up again...

'That's a classic door-opening jump scare straight out of a horror game.' With my heart still pounding, I threw a glance at the unlocked door and instinctively backed further away. 'Going out the front door is definitely out of the question. Even if I wipe her out with a thunder talisman, there's no guarantee I won't run into a second ghost.'

Returning to the middle of the living room, I began searching the place for clues. In targeted crimes, every action serves a purpose. Whoever had trapped me here couldn't have done it just to give me a scare.

A sweep of the living room didn't turn up much. Even after moving the cabinets and the sofa aside, all I found were some casual doodles drawn by children.

'There are monsters and princesses among the drawings, so they probably weren't done by the same person. Several children of different ages might have lived in this house.'

Crouching down for a closer look, I spotted a line written in pencil in the most inconspicuous corner of the wall: "I want to marry my big brother, I want to live with my big brother forever!"

'A little sister wanting to marry her big brother?' I brushed it off as innocent childish prattle and didn't think much of it. After pushing the furniture back into place, I moved on to check the other rooms.

When I stepped into the kitchen, I found four sets of bowls and chopsticks laid out on the dining table—three on the left, and one on the right.

Curiously, all the plates holding rotting dishes were clustered on the left side of the table. The person sitting on the right only had rice, with none of the dishes within reach.

'This must be a family of four, with three of them ganging up to bully the fourth. Living under the same roof, why would they do something like that? Could one of them not be related by blood?'

I wasn't being nosy; I was working from the details and using lateral thinking to piece things together.

Leaving the kitchen, I walked into the first bedroom. The room was quite large, furnished with a desk and a bookcase in addition to a double bed.

'Seven Deadly Sins?' I casually picked up a book from the desk. The owner of this bedroom seemed to specialize in Western literature; on the shelves, I found numerous translated volumes alongside various original works from the Renaissance.

Across several notebooks and highly specialized academic papers, I saw a name—Guo Zhiming.

'A lot of these papers are stamped with a college's official seal at the end. Could he be a university lecturer?' The man was clearly well-educated, yet his reading material gave me an unsettling feeling. Besides "Seven Deadly Sins" in my hand, I found plenty of other books on the shelves like "Boule de Suif," "Criminal Law and Art," and "A Brief Study on Fertility Worship."

'He might be a beast in human clothing hiding behind a refined facade.' While I couldn't read the foreign originals, Guo Zhiming had left all kinds of explicit notes in the margins.

Aside from the books, I didn't touch anything else in the room. My gaze swept over the bedsheets. Reeking of a foul, fishy stench and stained with faint blotches, they stood in stark contrast to a room full of books.

Setting the book back down on the desk, I noticed a picture frame lying face down.

I picked it up for a look. There were four people in the photo: a middle-aged man in glasses stood in the center, flanked on his left by a beaming young man and woman, and on his right by a thin, small boy whose face was a blur.

'There's something strange about this family.' The man in the middle had to be the father—the owner of this first bedroom. Just as I had pictured, he looked gentle and refined.

The young couple on the left looked to be head over heels in love. Even while posing for a family photo, the young man couldn't keep his hands to himself, his palm secretly resting against the small of the woman's back.

The woman wasn't resisting; there was a playfully reproachful look in her eyes, yet she was leaning her body right into him.

The only jarring note in the picture was on the right. That frail boy was left out all by himself, his skinny arms hanging limply at his sides, with bruises from beatings visible on his palms and bare knees.

'Going by the strange way the food was arranged on the kitchen table, the one being bullied and abused must be this thin little boy with the blurred face.' No sooner had I figured out one question than new ones followed right behind.

'Why would they abuse this child? And why isn't the mother anywhere to be seen in this family portrait?' Sitting down in the chair in front of the desk, I looked up at the drawn curtains.

'A window? If whoever put me here is dead set on keeping me from getting out, there's no way they overlooked the window. Will I see something utterly horrifying if I pull the curtains back?' Bracing myself, I yanked the curtains open with one hand.

What greeted me was neither a way out to safety nor a terrifying ghost—just a pair of metal window panels.

Both panels were secured with a combination lock and sealed tight, completely blocking any view of the outside.

'Interesting. Do I need a passcode to escape?' I turned the lock over in my hand; it would only open if four digits or letters were entered in the right order.

'A four-character passcode doesn't sound hard at first, but once you combine the digits 0 through 9 with the 26 letters of the alphabet, that's 36 to the fourth power—1,679,616 different possibilities.'

Trying them one by one was out of the question. I would have to find other clues in the house first.

Cupping my chin in my hand, I stared fixedly at the combination lock. Just as all my attention was focused on the window, I felt something lightly brush the back of my neck.

"Who's there!" In a place this eerie, the slightest stir was enough to drive a person crazy, let alone having something touch the back of your neck out of nowhere.

"Is anyone in here?" I whipped my head around, but there was nothing there.

'That definitely wasn't my imagination just now. Something really did touch my neck from behind.' I made a show of turning back around, and before long, something brushed against my neck again.

I snapped my head back once more, and still saw nothing at all.

'Strange...' Refusing to let it go, I pulled out the Underworld Live Show Phone, aimed the camera behind me, and turned back around to sit up straight.

A dozen seconds or so later, something touched my neck again. Instead of turning my head right away, I looked down at my livestream screen.

Right there on the phone screen, I could see it clearly: the corpse of a hanged man was dangling directly behind me, his feet hanging limp as the tips of his toes tapped against the back of my neck, again and again.