Chapter 741: The Top Floor Tenant

A curtain of rain connected heaven and earth, falling heavier and heavier. With my vision blocked, even using the Judging Eye, I could barely make out faint silhouettes moving inside the Ancient Building opposite me.

I wasn't sure if they were obsessions or ghosts. The distance was simply too great.

'The building is completely empty. Where did the Red Building tenants go?' I retracted my gaze and glanced at the elevator in the middle of the corridor.

The only light on the entire top floor emanated from there—a faint, eerie green glow.

The elevator had stopped on the top floor and hadn't gone back down. Even more bizarrely, the doors were opening and closing in an endless loop, as if people were constantly walking in and out.

'Granny already explained things in great detail. There shouldn't be any other secrets hidden in this building, right?' I walked toward the elevator on high alert.

The corridor was so quiet that time seemed to have stopped. Only the stain-covered elevator doors moved.

Pressing my back against the wall, I counted my heartbeats to keep track of the time.

Further down, the elevator doors were closing, but they didn't shut completely. It looked like they bumped into something before sliding open again.

I slowly approached. Nothing unusual happened. Half a minute later, I finally reached the elevator doors.

As I watched the elevator doors slowly slide open, the faint light cast a sickly pale hue over my face.

'A severed hand?' The cut was clean. Its five outstretched fingers were thin but powerful, stained with dark, coagulated blood.

I had seen this hand before. More accurately, I had once seen another severed hand exactly like it.

I stepped closer and crouched down, studying it intently.

The skin color, the size, the thickness of each finger...

'This is a left hand. It belongs to the same corpse as the right hand the Doctor gave me.' A dismembered body would cause massive public panic anywhere else, but here in the Red Building, it barely mattered.

'This is interesting.' When I left the Doctor's home, he inexplicably insisted on giving me a severed hand. His reasoning was that if I encountered an obsession, I could throw it to distract them.

'The Doctor, Bai Ya'er, and Zhu Li all live on the same floor, so they should have a decent relationship. It's impossible that the Doctor would try to sabotage Zhu Li's plans. Thinking about it this way, him giving me that hand was definitely done with malicious intent.' I had thrown that severed hand away in Zhang Shuxue's apartment. But the terrible part was that I had now run into the other hand. Since both hands came from the same corpse, if they attracted danger, then that danger was right around me now.

'This hand looks like a specimen, but its preservation process differs from standard methods. That's why the bloodstains on the skin weren't properly cleaned before it was submerged in formalin.' Both severed hands were likely prepared by the Doctor himself. He had many similar specimens in his room. At first, I thought it was just a "personal hobby" of his, but now it seemed these specimens actually possessed some kind of function.

I raised my head. The old elevator probably hadn't been maintained in a long time. It was like a tin trash can with a mottled, peeling floor. A massive black plastic bag had been tossed in the middle, radiating a foul stench.

Sticking my head into the elevator, I checked the ceiling. There were no cameras, and most of the floor buttons on the panel had fallen off.

'Did the severed hand fall out of this black bag?'

I had seen quite a few bags like this in Zhu Li's and the Doctor's apartments. They oozed slime and reeked.

Though I was extremely reluctant to get close, I stepped into the elevator and opened the bag to solve the mystery.

Merely lifting a small corner released a pungent stench.

It was a difficult smell to describe, like a mixture of disinfectant and meat broth. Just one whiff made my hairs stand on end, and I immediately held my breath.

Thick, viscous liquid dripped onto the floor. It was dark brown, resembling paint, yet far thicker. It seemed to be mixed with something else.

'When paint and blood mix together, does the blood still coagulate?' The top layer of the bag was full of ordinary domestic trash. The most conspicuous items were blood-soaked wads of toilet paper and bandages. The blood had coagulated on them, and after soaking in the paint, they had completely rotted away.

'This was definitely taken from Zhu Li's room. He's the only one in the Red Building who uses paint.' I tore the bag open and dumped out its contents. The scene before me was hard to stomach, even for a battle-hardened live show streamer like me.

Shattered plaster casts, scattered internal organs, cleanly severed fingers, and human bones that had been polished smooth and turned into works of art.

This didn't look like household trash at all. It looked more like a devil's collection.

'Lunatic...' I subconsciously covered the lens of my Live Show Phone. This sight was far beyond what most people could handle.

Sifting through the trash through the plastic bag, I found a clay jar the size of an adult's fist hidden among the gory, gruesome debris.

The mouth of the jar was sealed shut; something seemed to be inside.

The clay jar sat dead center, so it would have been hard for it not to catch my attention. I glanced back at the pitch-black corridor. After making sure nothing was out of the ordinary, I steeled myself, reached out, and pried open the lid.

A pungent stench immediately poured out. I looked down. Pickled inside the clay jar was a heart riddled with holes!

I slapped the lid back on, my expression turning grim.

'If these things are Zhu Li's household trash, why would they be in the elevator?'

The elevator in the Red Building could only be used from the seventh floor upwards. Opening it from the lower floors required an insider's access. As I thought of this, a previously ignored character flashed through my mind. 'There is one more person living in Unit 1 of the Red Building!'

Zhu Li had said that the building's Security Guard and his wife lived on the third floor of the Red Building. If there was someone in the building who could unlock the elevator control room and access the elevator from the first floor, it was highly likely to be the Security Guard.

Cold sweat broke out on my forehead. During my conversations with both the Old Granny and Zhang Shuxue, they both seemed to casually overlook this person.

Thinking back on it now, it was incredibly abnormal. The Red Building actually had a Security Guard? Would anyone even dare approach a building like this at night? What was the point of his existence?

If I hadn't seen the unusual way the elevator operated, I probably never would have remembered him.

'Anyone who can work as a Security Guard in a place like the Red Building is definitely not ordinary.' I felt like my thinking had been constrained, boxed into a corner without a breakthrough point.

It was definitely too late to head back down to the third floor of Unit 1 to look for the Security Guard now. I stared at the black plastic bag in front of me, taking in the filthy, bloody mess scattered across the floor as my brain raced.

'Why did they put this trash in the elevator? And then go through the trouble of sending it up to the top floor?' The severed hand stuck in the doors seemed to be a clue. I vaguely felt like I had grasped something, but I just couldn't fully piece it together.

I stepped back out of the elevator without touching anything else.

'The Red Building tenants have all left their rooms. What the hell are they planning?' I had no idea if these people were hiding somewhere else in the building or if they had already left entirely. Not seeing a single soul truly left me feeling unnerved.

This had nothing to do with Daoist arts or my level in ghost arts; it was simply human instinct.

The elevator doors continued opening and closing, endlessly repeating.

I memorized the placement of every single item, then turned around and walked toward the deepest part of the corridor.

The corridor seemed to have grown a shade darker. Relying on the glow of my phone screen, I swept my gaze over each door number until I finally stopped at the very end of the hall.

'This is the one.'

I didn't act rashly. Just to be safe, I first listened closely at the door for any noise inside.

'No sound of breathing. There's no one inside.' Just as I reached out for the handle, my Judging Eye suddenly spotted something.

An incredibly thin strand of hair was tied between the lock and the handle! If I had pulled the door directly, it would have definitely snapped.

'This guy sure is careful.' I silently rejoiced that I hadn't acted recklessly. I untied one end of the hair and turned the doorknob.

'It's locked?'

The person living at the very top of the Red Building seemed completely different from the other Red Building tenants. Their way of doing things was entirely unlike the rest.

This person was cautious and paranoid. They didn't seem at all like someone whose mind was controlled by an obsession.

'Could he really be a live show streamer too?' A single hair didn't prove anything. I turned up the brightness on my phone screen and shined it at the keyhole. Then, I took out the key to Bai Ya'er's room. After getting a clear look at the internal pins, I pulled out a banknote and folded it into the corresponding shape to pick the lock.

Unlocking doors with a banknote was something I had already done during my broadcast at the Henshan Psychiatric Hospital. It wasn't difficult for me.

After a few attempts, I finally managed to open both the inner and outer doors. I tucked the banknote away and slipped inside.

It had been several hours since I arrived at the Red Building, and this was the only room I had entered that didn't have a foul odor.

The owner must have opened the windows frequently for ventilation. Thanks to the airflow, the room didn't even smell musty.

Standing at the entrance facing the living room, I could see the window at a glance.

There was very little furniture inside, and absolutely no clutter. It was obvious the owner was a highly capable and decisive person.

I pulled back the curtains. From this position, I had a perfect downward view of the Ancient Building directly opposite. The vantage point was excellent.

'Good airflow... Could it be that the owner frequently leaves the window open because he's constantly keeping watch on that Ancient Building?' This apartment was much simpler than I had imagined. Aside from a table and two wooden chairs, the living room was empty. I closed the curtains, then checked the kitchen and bathroom, rummaging through the trash cans. Everything had been cleaned spotlessly.

'Not a single flaw?' I stood in the middle of the living room and looked toward the bedroom. That was the only place left to search.

I pushed open the inner door. A desk was pressed flush against the yellowing wall, and a wooden single bed sat on the other side.

A neatly folded quilt rested on perfectly smooth bedsheets. Apart from that, there was nothing else in the bedroom.

I walked over to the desk and pulled open the drawer. Inside lay several different colored pens.

'Only pens, but no paper?' The lack of furniture and daily necessities in the apartment was almost pitiful. My gaze shifted back and forth between the desk and the bed. 'The bedroom isn't big to begin with, so why put a desk in here at all? He has no paper, so what's the point of just leaving a few pens?'