Chapter 724: Obsession

I carefully digested Zhang Shuxue's words; they held a massive amount of information.

She claimed Li Ming's transformation was caused by a ghost from the Red Building possessing him. If anyone else had seen his current terrifying state, they probably would have believed her without hesitation. But as a Ghost Cultivator, I had witnessed all kinds of evil spirits and monsters. I understood ghosts better than anyone.

The moment I first encountered Li Ming, I had used my Judging Eye to inspect him inside and out. There wasn't a single trace of malevolent yin energy on the boy. Ghostly possession was entirely out of the question.

I turned to look at Zhang Shuxue. If I wanted answers, I still had to start with this woman.

"I sympathize with what you've been through, and I really want to help you, so I hope you won't hide anything from me." I pointed at the crack in the door, Li Ming's chilling sounds of chewing still echoing in my ears. "You said everyone living in the Red Building is a ghost, and that anyone who enters will be haunted. But I've been in the Red Building for quite a while now, so why haven't I seen these ghosts you mentioned? Could they have already entered my body?"

The woman tried to speak, but I waved a hand to cut her off. "There's one more thing I want you to answer truthfully. When I first entered your room, I noticed an obvious emotional shift in you the moment you saw Li Ming. You must have seen him before. Coincidentally, right before I came to the Red Building, I happened to chat with this kid's friend. I know he isn't a tenant here. He was abducted and brought to the Red Building just tonight."

I slowed down, reaching the most critical point. "After I saved Li Ming, I asked him about his abduction. He forgot most of it, but he did tell me one thing: he caught a fragrant smell of meat on his kidnapper. I've been in the Red Building for a while now and visited several tenants, but when it comes to the smell of meat, your room is by far the strongest."

"Didn't you say you've never left the Red Building? Are you telling me the meat scent Li Ming smelled didn't come from you?" I threaded my fingers into the woman's black hair. By the end, my voice was as cold and sharp as a knife.

"It wasn't me! You've misunderstood. That person definitely wasn't me!" Zhang Shuxue squirmed, her voice gradually weakening as if even she didn't know how to refute it anymore.

"What is the relationship between you, Zhu Li, and the Doctor? Was it you who impersonated the legendary Black Umbrella Woman, or was it Bai Ya'er?"

Under my interrogation, Zhang Shuxue finally spat out the truth. "I have nothing to do with them. I wish I could kill them all! But I can't. It's just like how I clearly had the chance to escape the Pig Cage Apartments, but didn't dare to leave. A monster lives inside my body. It has assimilated me. There's nothing I can do, and I can't control myself."

Standing beside me, Zhang Shuxue pressed her face to the crack in the door, looking at Li Ming with sympathetic, pitying eyes. "I'm just like him. From the moment we ate that first piece of meat, we could never go back."

Seeing that I still didn't understand, she walked over to the bed and picked up the plate from the nightstand. "These are the bones left over from what I ate yesterday."

I glanced at the white bones on the plate. They were gnawed completely clean without a single shred of meat left. The surfaces were covered in bite marks, and some spots had been bitten clean through, as if the eater had wanted to swallow the bone fragments as well.

"You must be curious why I'm showing you these bones, right?" Zhang Shuxue let out a miserable laugh. "I was the one who gnawed on these bones. When the hunger strikes, I could even eat any living thing right in front of me. Would a normal person do that?"

"When did this change start happening to you?"

"It started after I ate that first piece of meat in the Red Building. Every so often, I would feel hungry, but it's different from normal hunger. It's an emptiness in the soul. The only way to fill it is to constantly consume large quantities of meat."

"You keep saying that anyone who moves into the Red Building will be haunted, and that everyone living here is a ghost. Is this hunger related to ghosts? That's what I'm curious about. If possible, could you let me see the 'ghost' inside you?" A faint light gleamed in my eyes. My true qi surged as my Judging Eye kept running. If any change occurred in the woman, I would notice it immediately.

Hearing my words, the woman rubbed her face with both hands. "Haven't you already seen it? Just now..."

"Just now?" I paused, recalling when I had tried to hypnotize her. She had suddenly snapped awake from the hypnosis, her eyes cold, greedy, and carrying a deep tinge of evil.

It wasn't a split personality, nor did I sense any yin energy or foul aura, which ruled out the possibility of a ghost. So what exactly was on Zhang Shuxue?

While I was thinking, a sudden noise came from outside the room. I looked through the crack in the door.

Li Ming was standing on a chair, lifting the entire basin of meat broth with both hands and tipping his head back to pour it down his throat.

The rich, greasy broth slid down the corners of his mouth and dripped onto his chest. Perhaps the basin full of broth was too heavy; after only a few gulps, his arms gave out, and the whole basin spilled downward.

"Crash!"

Drenched in the spilled broth, Li Ming didn't stop. After licking the remaining meat scraps from the basin, he hopped off the wooden chair, his belly distended. He dropped onto his stomach and used his small hands to scoop up the minced meat from the floor, shoving it directly into his mouth without caring about the filth.

The broth had splashed everywhere, flowing all over the room. It just crawled along the floor, chasing after the juices...

"Ignore him. Once he's out of food, he'll quiet down." Zhang Shuxue was also watching Li Ming. Her pupils clearly reflected the boy, but it felt as if she were looking at herself.

"Eating the meat in the Red Building turns people into this?" I shook my head. "Zhu Li and the others feel completely different from you. They've lived in the Red Building for so long; they must have eaten the meat here too."

"You haven't seen what they look like when they act up, so how do you know they're different?" Zhang Shuxue stared straight at me. "I'm not too sure about Bai Ya'er. In the entire Pig Cage Apartments, she's the only one who never eats in her rental room, and the only one who frequently leaves for the Jinghai Urban District. But I am absolutely certain that my brother and Zhu Li have both eaten the Red Building's meat. Now, I strongly suspect my brother's mental instability is because he visited the Red Building when he was a teenager."

"Wait a moment. Zhu Li once told me that the tenants in the building are divided into two categories: humans and pigs. Hearing you say this, I think I'm starting to understand. All the tenants in the Red Building who are dominated by hunger and have eaten meat are classified as pigs. And 'human' must refer to Bai Ya'er. She has never eaten human meat, and at the same time, she is Zhu Li's loyal follower." All the clues connected together, and Zhu Li's artworks flashed through my mind. They primarily featured dismemberment and desecration—cruel and apathetic. Anything related to the human body was depicted as shattered and broken. That was his artistic style.

I had also noticed an interesting phenomenon in his works. For example, in the piece "Banquet", a pig wearing a suit sat neatly at a dining table, while the dishes on the table were carved-up human cadavers. This hysterical form of expression was shocking, and it also reflected a key trait of Zhu Li's art.

In his pictures, pigs held a status far higher than humans. This definitely wasn't the kind of moral high ground advocated by an animal protection society; it was more like an ancient slave society, like the way slave owners treated their slaves. Humans, instead, had become the lowly creatures.

His mindset was incredibly dangerous. I felt a chill run down my spine. After figuring this out, another question was answered as well.

That piece called "Skin Grafting" used himself as the model; he had sewn a piece of pig skin onto his own thigh. Thinking about it now, doing that was his way of stating his stance, carrying out his "faith" in a way ordinary people couldn't understand.

'So he himself is a pig. I was wrong. But how did this twisted mindset of his form? What did he experience in the Red Building? Was it merely because of human meat?' I glanced at Zhang Shuxue. I still remembered our conversation when I first met her; she had referred to people as "things." Obviously, she also belonged to the pigs, only her humanity hadn't completely dissipated yet.

'Every problem has a cause and a process, and correspondingly, a solution.'

Only after I finished my thoughts did Zhang Shuxue continue. "You've met Zhu Li, so you must have heard the word 'them' from his mouth."

"I have. Zhu Li even showed me portraits of those things. One was covered in bite marks, and the other had its internal organs hanging loose inside its body." I didn't know why Zhang Shuxue was suddenly bringing this up.

"Actually, the reason I turned out like this is related to those things. They hide inside the bodies of the living, using hunger to dominate us, and only fall into a brief slumber after eating their fill." Zhang Shuxue revealed a shocking secret to me. "I don't know what they are either. Zhu Li says they are the ancestors of the Ancient Building, their resentment lingering over this land because they were eaten by their own kind. The old woman on the second floor says the people from back then are all dead, their bones turned to ash, their souls scattered with nothing left behind. She says what we see is just an obsession—an obsession with eating. They don't have a concrete physical form, nor are they a single person or entity. They're something left behind, akin to a curse."

Zhang Shuxue spoke very vaguely; even she didn't fully understand it herself.

"There's one more thing I need to tell you." She pointed outside at Li Ming. "I haven't lived in the Pig Cage Apartments for too long, but I know that this building requires living people to move in every year. Otherwise, all the tenants will suffer. According to the old woman on the second floor, this is also related to the existence of 'them.' It seems that if the obsession is suppressed for too long, it erupts."

"So you constantly hunt for prey, inflicting your own suffering onto new victims? Have you ever thought that keeping this up will form an unsolvable cycle?" I looked at Zhang Shuxue expressionlessly. Human nature was selfish. If not for selfishness, the Pig Cage Apartments from decades ago wouldn't have seen people eating their own kind just to survive.