Chapter 740: People Gone, Building Empty

'Could this blood have been left by the little boy?' The little boy living on the sixth floor was very likely Gu Junsheng's reincarnation. The obsessions treated him as one of their own, which was how he had survived alone in the Red Building after his parents were murdered. 'Zhang Shuxue has no reason to hurt that child, but judging by how terrified the boy was of Li Ming, he's still extremely afraid of obsessions.'

Following the blood trail, I arrived at the eighth floor. The door to Zhang Shuxue's rented apartment was unlocked. As I pushed it open, a greasy, meaty aroma wafted out.

A food basin lay upside down on the floor, meat broth spilled everywhere. A few faint outlines of footprints could be seen in the mess.

'These footprints belong to Zhang Shuxue. The toes point toward the door. After she rushed out barefoot to chase me, she never came back. As for the shoe prints, they're very small; they should be Li Ming's. He was crawling on the floor, so most of them are incomplete, but the toes also point toward the door. That kid didn't return after leaving either.' I carefully examined every print. Aside from Zhang Shuxue's and Li Ming's, only my own remained.

'Where did they go?' After leaving Zhang Shuxue's apartment, I had run into the obsession covered in bite marks. I'd wasted a lot of time running around before hiding in the Old Granny's home, completely disconnected from the outside world. All the sudden changes in the Red Building must have happened while I was listening to her story.

'Everyone is gone. What are these Red Building Tenants trying to do? Manipulated by obsessions, their minds consumed by gluttony and greed, they should be launching endless attacks against me. Does an obsession mutate after merging with a person?' The obsessions had always seemed to act purely on instinct, but now I felt something was wrong. They were displaying a strong sense of discipline, as if a shared brain were commanding them from the shadows.

Walking further inside, I saw an overturned chair and walls splattered with greasy broth. I didn't linger, heading straight into Zhang Shuxue's bedroom.

My coat had been tossed into this cramped, narrow little room. Zhang Shuxue had ripped it off me and casually thrown it onto the floor. I had paid special attention to it at the time, and its position hadn't changed.

'No one entered the room, and the coat hasn't moved. The things in my pockets should still be there.' I breathed a sigh of relief. The other items were fine to lose, but the Live Show's Brooch Camera was too crucial. That thing would expose a lot of my personal information.

Picking up the coat, I shook off the dust and reached into the pocket.

My talismans and Daoist scriptures were all there, but when my hand brushed the breast pocket, my expression slowly froze.

'Where's the Brooch?' I held the coat up and inspected it repeatedly. The spot where the Brooch Camera had been pinned was completely empty!

My face turned cold. Slipping the coat on, I carefully searched every corner of the bedroom, then thoroughly rummaged through the living room, but I couldn't find the Plum Blossom Brooch.

'It didn't fall off inside the apartment. So where did it go?' I recalled the scene from earlier. Both Zhang Shuxue and Li Ming, controlled by obsessions, had chased me out like maniacs; they wouldn't have had time to take anything. And while I was gone, the floor only bore the footprints of their departure, none showing their return. This was enough to prove they weren't the ones who had stolen the Plum Blossom Brooch.

'Why aren't there any footprints?' Zhang Shuxue's room had originally been designed to imprison her. All the windows were bricked up; the only way in or out was the front door.

'The meat broth is splashed erratically. If someone were paying close attention, it might be possible to enter the room without stepping in it, but that would require an extremely high degree of coordination and balance. Bodies controlled by obsessions make large, exaggerated movements; they shouldn't be able to pull that off.'

'It's either an agile, nimble person in hiding, or something without feet.'

I had to find the Live Show's Plum Blossom Brooch. Whether it was a human or a ghost, taking my stuff meant they had entered the game.

'Nothing else is missing, only the Brooch. Whoever took it must know its significance. It's highly likely another live show streamer made a move.' Sitting on Zhang Shuxue's bed, I slowly calmed down. 'Was it Zhu Li, or the person living on the top floor?'

My eyes darted as a possibility occurred to me. 'If the person on the top floor is the live show streamer, did they take the Brooch to tell me to go find them?'

This was an extremely optimistic guess, and even I wasn't too confident about it.

'I can go up and take a look.' I glanced at the alarm clock on the wall. It was 1:25 AM. There was still a long time until dawn.

'The emergency stairwell is on the seventh floor, and I need to get to the top floor of Unit 4...' I planned the route in my head. This definitely wasn't me overreacting; the Red Building was far too bizarre. Obsessions could appear at any time, and the Red Building Tenants—who were even more terrifying than the obsessions—had all vanished without a trace. I had to be careful.

Their disappearance likely heralded the prelude to a conspiracy specifically targeting me. Of course, it was also possible they had run into unprecedented trouble themselves—that something extremely dangerous had infiltrated the Red Building.

Neither guess was good news for me. Among all the players involved, I held the fewest clues, making me the most passive participant.

Stepping out of the room, I scraped the broth off the soles of my shoes. Only after ensuring my tracks wouldn't be exposed did I head down and enter the seventh-floor emergency stairwell.

The Old Granny hadn't clarified exactly when the Red Building was constructed. I only knew that from the moment it was built, the building had been riddled with misfortune and danger.

The deep, long corridor seemed endless. I pulled my collar tighter as the scar on my chest throbbed with a dull ache.

'The top floor of Unit 4... What does that person living at the highest point of the Red Building want? Zhu Li mentioned before that the higher the floor in the Red Building, the more dangerous it is. For him to survive this long, he definitely isn't an ordinary person.' My hands continuously practiced the hand seals Xue Zhuo had taught me, ready to deal with any emerging obsessions at a moment's notice.

Not even the sound of the wind could be heard in the pitch-black corridor. I had walked halfway down when my Judging Eye suddenly caught a faint glimmer of light.

'Pale green?' I focused my gaze. The light was coming from the elevator. 'This building is so dilapidated. It's quite something that the elevator can still operate normally.'

I didn't pay much attention at first, my mind preoccupied with what I needed to do next. It wasn't until I walked right up to the elevator that I realized something was wrong.

My ears twitched as true qi flooded the acupoints behind them. Using Breath Listening to pinpoint the location, I caught the sound of the elevator rising.

I turned my head blankly to look, slightly surprised to find the floor numbers on the elevator display constantly changing.

'4, 5...' In just a moment's distraction, the elevator had already ascended to the fifth floor.

'Someone is using the elevator?! Didn't Zhu Li say to never go near the elevators? Who is bold enough to ride it at midnight?' The elevator was still rising. Seeing that it had reached the sixth floor, I gritted my teeth, decisively pressed the button beside the doors, and immediately turned and ran.

Right as I ducked around the corner, the elevator arrived at the seventh floor.

Circulating the Profound Truth Mental Method to regulate my breathing, I hid in the shadows, my eyes fixed on the elevator.

A few breaths later, the stain-covered elevator doors slowly parted.

One second, two seconds, three seconds...

No one stepped out of the elevator, nor did anything reach out from inside. Even more bizarrely, whoever was inside didn't close the doors!

Normally, when a person riding an elevator realizes it has stopped automatically and sees no one waiting outside, their natural reaction is to press the close button and leave immediately.

But the scene before me left me baffled. Why hadn't they closed the doors and left?

It was the dead of night. With the elevator inexplicably opening in a place like the Red Building, wasn't the person inside afraid?

If I were just a mischievous kid pulling a prank, the one feeling truly terrified right now would probably be me.

'Is the elevator empty? Is it malfunctioning and running automatically? Or is the passenger inside... not a normal human?'

Pinching a talisman and the Live Show Phone between my fingertips, my other hand formed the seal Xue Zhuo had taught me. Fully prepared for anything, I stepped out of my hiding spot and slowly crept toward the elevator.

In a place like the Red Building, which was shrouded in gloom the moment night fell, the tenants must have grown accustomed to the dark. Compared to the concealing camouflage of darkness, light was likely a bad omen. Take the voice-activated light on the first floor of Unit 1, for example—whenever it lit up, it was a guarantee that something bad was about to happen. After all, the people heading upstairs here never made loud noises that would trigger the lights and draw prying eyes.

My heart slowly rose into my throat. Not knowing what was hiding inside the elevator, I couldn't help but feel a bit tense.

Step by step, I approached the doorway, but just as I was about to reach it, the filthy elevator doors suddenly slid shut.

'Fifteen seconds. That's the automatic dwell time for this elevator.' I watched the display next to the doors change from 7 to 8, feeling somewhat helpless. 'Just missed it. I'll wait and see if it comes back down later.'

The floor number quickly jumped to 9, finally stopping at the eleventh floor.

I stared fixedly at the display, keeping track of the time, and realized that after stopping at the top floor, the elevator didn't move again.

'Did the person riding the elevator just now go to the top floor?' Their destination matched mine. Thinking about it, there was still a chance we would run into each other.

I raised my hand, my fingertip hovering over the elevator button, but I didn't press it for a long time. 'It's better not to alert them for now.'

Turning away from the elevator, I climbed the stairs, floor by floor, all the way to the eleventh floor.

Strange as it was, I didn't see a single obsession the whole way up. Many of the Red Building Tenants had also left. With some of the metal apartment doors left open, I went inside to investigate. Slipping my hand beneath the unmade blankets on the beds, I found that some still retained a faint trace of warmth.

'Where did all these Red Building Tenants go? Zhu Li is in Unit 1, but I'm in Unit 4 right now. Did they all coordinate this?' While I had been taking refuge in the Old Granny's room, what on earth had happened inside the Red Building?

Stepping out of the emergency stairwell, I stood on the eleventh floor. Through the corridor window, I could see outside.

One or two bolts of lightning occasionally streaked across the ink-black night sky. Under that fleeting illumination, I could see the desolate, barren land outside.