Chapter 135: Guess How Many People Are in the House

The hairs on my arms stood on end, goosebumps prickling the back of my neck. Forcing myself to stay calm, I didn't turn around. Instead, I shifted my phone's camera to capture the full figure of the person behind me on the screen.

He wore pajamas. His skin hung loose, and he looked to be somewhere between forty and fifty years old.

I tilted the screen up, eventually freezing on his face. His complexion was a mottled purple, his features unnaturally swollen from suffocation.

'Death by hanging? Suicide?' Hanging was not an uncommon way to die. For someone looking to end their own life, it was a cheap method that required almost nothing to pull off.

Looking closely at his expression, I saw that beyond mere pain, the muscles across his entire face were contorted in a spasm of profound terror.

'No, if this were a simple suicide, he wouldn't have had such a terrified expression right before he died. He was forced into the noose. Or maybe he saw something utterly horrifying in his final moments—something so dreadful that the terror eclipsed the physical agony of death itself.'

I kept my eyes glued to the screen as the corpse swayed rhythmically behind me. It was an incredibly bizarre scene.

I could clearly feel something brushing against my neck, over and over. Just as I debated turning around, the corpse on the screen—whose bulging eyes looked ready to pop right out of their sockets—suddenly looked at me.

Gazing down from above, he rolled his eyes with a trace of resentment and agony. His stare swept past me, landing on the third shelf from the bottom of the bookcase.

The hanging corpse's bizarre reaction gave me a jump, and I nearly dropped my phone.

Standing up from the chair, I took a deep breath and whirled around. But everything behind me remained perfectly normal. There was nothing there.

'The Underworld Live Show Phone can capture the kind of foul things ordinary people can't see. The corpse hanging behind me must be a wrongfully slain soul.'

A hanged ghost dangled in the middle of the study. Judging by his appearance, he was the very same refined, scholarly father from the photograph.

'The father died in his own room. Could there be similar ghosts lingering in the other rooms?' I lit another cigarette. Truth be told, that sudden scare had shaken me pretty badly, and the hand holding my lighter still trembled.

'The corpse's eyes just moved. He seemed to be pointing me toward a specific spot.' Recalling where the hanged ghost's gaze had settled, I stood beside the bookcase. On the third shelf from the bottom sat a clock. It only had two hands, and the time displayed was one-ten.

'A clock?' I shook my head, pulling all the books off the third shelf and piling them on the floor.

'What clue is he trying to give me?' I flipped open a book at random. Its pages were covered in the words "I'm sorry" written in red ink. The densely packed scrawl looked incredibly creepy.

After skimming through a few more books, I quickly found something new.

Inside a reading journal titled "Painful Faith," I found a few fragmented notes the hanged father had written about his own life.

"Living within desire without possessing hope is the greatest sorrow in life."

"As for love, I can perhaps offer a deeper definition. True love requires no regard for morality or human nature."

At first glance, it read like a pretentious academic essay, but as I continued reading, I nearly threw up.

Framed as observational logs, the entries detailed the sordid affairs this professor of Western literature had with seven of his female students. The real kicker came later: while he was sleeping around with his seven students, his wife hadn't been idle either. She frequently invited his male students over to their home as guests.

The details were too graphic to dwell on. After his wife gave birth to their third child, the two finally put an end to their absurd marriage.

I stuffed the journal into my pocket. Finding no other valuable clues, I left the study and stepped into the adjacent bedroom.

This bedroom was only half the size of the study. Aside from a desk piled high with textbooks and an alarm clock, the only other furniture was a bunk bed.

I looked at the soccer ball and two pairs of battered cleats against the wall. 'The two boys must have shared this room. They're about five or six years apart in age. Living in such close quarters, friction would be inevitable. Could the injuries on the scrawny boy in the family photo have been inflicted by his older brother?'

I flipped through the textbooks and workbooks on the desk; they were completely spotless, almost brand new. I pulled open the drawers to find them filled with the usual trinkets boys played with.

'Aside from the absolute mess, there doesn't seem to be anything special about this room.' Not wanting to miss a single clue, I finished checking the desk and turned to the bed. The bunk bed was wider on the bottom and narrower on top. A mosquito net was draped over it, making everything inside look hazy and unclear from the outside.

The older brother must have slept on the bottom bunk. A thick college entrance exam prep book sat at the head of the bed.

'Would someone who hasn't even cracked open a textbook buy exam prep material?' It struck me as odd. I picked up the prep book, and when I flipped it open, I found a thin booklet tucked inside.

'What's this?' The booklet's cover was incredibly vivid. Even I felt my face flush when I looked at it. 'An adult magazine? Like father, like son, I suppose.'

I stuffed the magazine into my pocket. Crucial evidence like this had to be preserved.

The blankets and mattress on the bottom bunk were a chaotic mess, haphazardly bunched together. The top bunk, however, was the exact opposite. Its bedsheets lacked a single wrinkle, and the blanket was folded into a perfectly neat, squared-off block, like a fresh cube of tofu.

'The two brothers were polar opposites. The younger brother must have been introverted, meticulous, and suffered from a bit of an inferiority complex.' I climbed onto the top bunk, peeled back the pillow and bedsheets, and discovered a brown diary.

'Another classic trope straight out of a puzzle horror game.' I pulled back the mosquito net, sat down on the wooden bed slats, and began reading about a child's suffering in a thoroughly dysfunctional family.

"In my memory, I have only seen my mother twice. The first time was when my father got drunk and nearly beat me to death. My brother called her, telling her to come and take her illegitimate bastard away. The second time was when I snuck out of the house. I walked for four hours in the dead of winter, wearing only thin clothes, all the way to the neighboring city to find her. It was bitterly cold that night. I crouched outside the apartment she shared with another man for the entire night. She never let me in. She only cracked the door open enough to say, 'Get out of here.'"

"I don't understand the point of my life. Perhaps I only exist to atone for that woman's sins. She betrayed my father, yet I live off him like a parasite."

"My brother is tall, handsome, and great at soccer. Lots of girls like him, and that includes my sister."

"After father falls asleep, my brother loves to sneak out of our room and slip into my sister's."

"I don't know what they do behind father's back, but I have always felt it was something bad."

"One late night, after my brother left our room, I secretly followed him. I pressed my ear against my sister's door to listen in. That was when I finally learned my brother and sister's secret."

"I will never forget that night. Perhaps a certain kind of awakening began for me then. I crouched outside my sister's door for half an hour. Then, at two in the morning, the door suddenly opened."

"From that night on, my brother and sister treated me even worse. At the slightest annoyance, they would beat me. They forced me to eat spoiled food and drink filthy water. They treated me like a bag of rotting garbage, acting disgusted just by the sight of me."

"I live with them, but we exist in entirely different worlds. To survive, I have no choice but to endure."

"Things got even worse after I graduated from middle school. That year, father brought home a young woman. She was one of his students, and a language teacher at a private high school."

"Ever since that woman arrived, my living space was squeezed even further. I was afraid to let any of them see me. Everyone seemed to harbor a burning rage in their hearts, and what was most terrifying of all was that they blamed it all on me."

"I am so scared. I'm terrified they might kill me. They often whisper behind my back, and their eyes are completely cold when they look at me. I don't want to die."

"Later on, father refused to let me attend City No. 1 High School, which was right by our home. Instead, he pulled some strings to send me to a private high school."

"This high school was located between Xinhu and Jiangcheng. The tuition was incredibly expensive. For a brief moment, I was actually moved; I thought I had misunderstood my father all these years. But reality slapped me hard in the face. They just didn't want to look at me anymore. By sending me to a remote boarding school and putting me in that woman's class, they were simply tossing me aside to be tortured and bullied by her and everyone else."

The diary was packed with information, but I only read a small portion of it.

'The Paulownia Mulberry Talisman was brought out of Xinhu High School. It seems the master of this Dream Realm must be a student from there.' I couldn't be sure of their exact identity just yet, but I already had a suspect in mind.

Out of habit, I reached for a cigarette. But as my hand moved through the air, my fingers brushed against something strange. It was the distinct texture of human skin.

'Did the hanged father follow me here?' I tucked the diary into my jacket and swiftly pulled out a Suppression Talisman.

"What foul spirit dares haunt this place?! Your Daoist master is right here!" I yelled to bolster my own courage, then looked up. Defying the laws of physics, the mosquito net was caving inward, as if something were pressing down on it and slowly closing in on me.

Twenty centimeters, fifteen centimeters, ten centimeters. It was far too close—so close that I couldn't ignore it even if I tried.

It was a man's face. It was a deathly gray, making him look as if he had died from excessive debauchery. The blood vessels that should have been hidden beneath the flesh were bulging on the surface of his skin. It was a deeply terrifying sight.

'It's not the hanged father. This... must be the older brother.' Staring straight into such a horrifying face from mere inches away wasn't something just anyone could do. Fortunately, my experiences with the Underworld Live Show had given me a strong immunity to this sort of thing. "Your dad hanged himself. Judging by the looks of you, it seems like you were poisoned to death."

The mosquito net stopped pushing in when it was ten centimeters away from my face. The ghostly visage seemed to be bound by some rule that prevented it from attacking me.

It rolled its dead, fish-like eyes to glance at the alarm clock on the desk, then slowly faded away.

'Why do you care about the alarm clock?' I jumped down from the bunk and picked up the clock from the desk. The time displayed on it was one-thirty.

'When I was in the study, the clock read one-ten. What exactly do these times mean?'

I had just entered this Dream Realm and had already run into two ghosts. I wiped the cold sweat from my forehead, stepped out of the room, and entered the final bedroom.

'I wonder what secrets might be hidden in the daughter's room?'