Li Xiu stared at the scratches on Fang Qian’an’s body. His face paled.

His lips moved, but no sound came out.

In fact, when Li Xiu woke up in his hard bed this morning, he still held the illusion that “it was all just a nightmare.”

However, when he turned over and sat up in a cold sweat, the stinging pain when he raised his hand popped this fantasy like a bubble.

He stared at the fresh teeth marks on the edge of his palm for a long time.

When changing clothes, Li Xiu was unsurprised to see bruises under his ribs that were close to turning blue.

As they fell from a high altitude, the tall boy kept hugging him tightly as if he wanted to squeeze Li Xiu into his body. Because of these marks, even now, Li Xiu could feel the dull pain coming from his ribs when he breathed a little harder.

No matter what, Li Xiu didn’t want to admit that he’d had an encounter with ghosts.

But there was no way he could continue to escape from everything that had happened in the past two days.

“I don’t understand…..what’s going on…..” After an unknown amount of time, the pale and shaky boy held his head and huddled on the sofa, whispering in fear. “This kind of thing is not scientific at all!”

“But we just experienced it.”

Fang Qian’an also sat next to Li Xiu unconsciously.

Stealthily absorbing Li Xiu’s body temperature that was slightly lower than that of ordinary people, Fang Qian’an felt his heart, which had been in turmoil since last night, finally calm down somewhat.

“There are ghosts in this world,” he murmured.

“I already knew that.”

*

Fang Qian’an’s mother was a lunatic. 

The woman was obviously still a sweet and gentle lady when Fang Qian’an was young, but at some point she started to become abnormal.

At first, she would just talk to herself inexplicably. Later, perhaps she saw some things that didn’t exist, which developed into violent and hurtful behavior. And this brand of violence would be especially grave when she saw Fang Qian’an. Every time he saw his mother, all Fang Qian’an received from the woman were screams and curses, as well as extreme fear.

Because of this, Fang Qian’an had barely seen his mother ever since he could remember.

“…..Children that age usually clamor for their mother, but I never did.” Fang Qian’an lowered his head to look at his toes as he spoke in a low voice.

After a long pause, he glanced at Li Xiu beside him.

“Aren’t you going to ask why?”

Li Xiu stared blankly for a second, and said calmly after a moment’s delay: “Oh. Why?”

The corners of Fang Qian’an’s mouth twitched when he heard the other’s incurious tone.

He took a deep breath.

“Because back then, I felt my mother actually run to my room to see me every night…..I just lay in bed with my eyes closed and felt her arrival while half asleep. Her hair would hang onto my face…..”

The young child closed his eyes tightly and lay motionless in bed.

He could feel his mother’s breath and her soft fingertips constantly tracing his cheeks. It was a very tender, very gentle touch.

Countless times, Fang Qian’an wanted to open his eyes and throw himself into his mother’s arms. But in the end, he held back.

Because of the few times he met his mother in the daytime, he came to the deep realization that his mother didn’t like him with his eyes open.

[“Eyes…..there is something in his eyes, don’t you see? There’s something behind his eyes!”]

[“No, I have to dig it out, or else it’ll escape…..Qian’an, don’t be afraid. It will only hurt a little bit. Mom will make it quick.”]

[“Don’t call me crazy! You just don’t understand! That thing is right there! It’s looking at me, it’s smiling at me! I saw—”]

One time, if Aunt Su hadn’t arrived in time and stopped the woman, the innocent and unknowing Fang Qian’an would have had his eyes gouged out with a spoon by his mother. Thus, even though his mother was by his side for countless nights, he didn’t dare open his eyes, fearing that the woman’s tenderness would leave him as it did during the daytime.

However, he knew that his mother was still fond of him.

“I’ve always thought this.”

In the lounge, Fang Qian’an’s face gradually lost all expression.

The boy narrated in a strangely calm tone: “Until one day, I couldn’t pretend to sleep anymore. Because that day, the woman tried to strangle me to death. Due to this, the old man couldn’t tolerate such a lunatic in his family anymore, so he called people from the mental institute over, tied her up, and directly sent her away.”

“I was really scared. I thought I’d never see her again, but she came back that night.”

“So that day, I opened my eyes and…..”

Then, Fang Qian’an discovered that the person sitting at his bedside every night was not his mother at all.

That “thing” had a hunched body, weak-necked with its back arched high, its head hanging down.

A mess of hair dangled, covering her entire face.

That face was bloody, blurred, and fragmented.

Its cheeks had fallen away, and a rotten tongue fell right between its white teeth, rancid blood falling from the tip. And every day, it used such a tongue to meticulously lick the child’s face.

“It had no muscles in its face and couldn’t move its teeth to chew or gnaw, so it could only lick.”

As he recalled the past, Fang Qian’an’s face grew increasingly pale.

Li Xiu: “…..It seems like you were under a lot of stress due to your mother’s attack during the day, and your brain finally converted your anxiety and fear into nightmares or hallucinations when you were asleep.”

The young man said dryly: “That’s what the psychiatrist said.”

Everyone told Fang Qian’an that it was a hallucination or a nightmare.

But Fang Qian’an knew that was not the case, because long after that incident happened, he would still sense something peering at him from the shadows of the room when he closed his eyes at night.

“Uh, then, if that’s the case, haven’t you gone to see some kind of great master?”

“I have,” Fang Qian’an responded crisply. “I was defrauded of a lot of money later.”

The lounge fell into dead silence once more.

Li Xiu was silent for a long while, and finally, after a long sigh, he faced reality with a bleak expression.

“Given that there are a lot of theories linking ghosts to quantum entanglement, then, suppose there really are ghosts in this world and we’re really so unlucky as to be haunted.”

Once he started to think about ghosts in terms of quantum energy, the remaining shakiness in Li Xiu’s tone gradually dissipated. The youth’s expression was still very bad, but his whole person seemed much calmer.

“What we need to know now is, what on earth are this ghost’s intentions?”

Li Xiu touched his lips slightly with his fingers, unknowingly entering his usual thinking mode when he would mull over test questions and papers in advance.

“Let’s list the known conditions first…..the two of us fell into a nightmare together. And the first event that we experienced was encountering a ghost on the negative third floor…..no, that’s not it, the first abnormality was…..”

Fang Qian’an and Li Xiu blurted out in unison:

“It was the Xiao Family Haunted House!”

“That wall in the Xiao Family Haunted House!”

The two subconsciously raised their heads and looked at each other, both of them seeing their anxious faces in the other’s eyes.

In last night’s nightmare, they had both seen the wall covered in talisman papers, and of course, the little red door.

“…..Lao Wang’s friends accidentally discovered the door in the haunted house, so they planned to take you there, lock you up, and mock you.”

But when that group of people took Li Xiu there by force, they didn’t find the door in that room.

Then came the bullying, and the wallpaper fell off to reveal a wall full of strange talismans.

It was from that day on that everything went wrong.

“That incident, I…..I did something wrong. I-I’m really sorry.”

“Oh.”

When the topic of the bullying was brought up, the atmosphere in the lounge suddenly became stagnant.

The two parties sat upright on the sofa. As the victim, Li Xiu’s expression didn’t change at all, with his lips only slightly pursed. Fang Qian’an, however, looked extremely uncomfortable.

The tall boy scratched his hair hard and muttered for a long time. Only then did he look at Li Xiu with awkward expectation, his tone extremely weak: “I know there’s no use apologizing, but back then I really seemed to be possessed.”

“……”

“Yeah, I really didn’t like you much at that time, but what happened next, I-I never would have done that before.”

He didn’t realize that something was wrong previously, but now that Fang Qian’an recalled it carefully, he realized that his behavior at that time was truly bizarre.

He was not the kind of person who was sensitive to violence. After all, he had grown up around it.

However, he had ordered someone to hold down the thin young man, took pictures, and took the initiative to reach out and touch him. Watching the other party struggling to resist had endlessly excited him…..

It was all too complicated, too troublesome, and not a thing Fang Qian’an would enjoy.

But it was undeniable that back then, that kind of thing indeed triggered a dark and burning heat within him.

What on earth…..was wrong with him?

Fang Qian’an suddenly grasped his head in a moment of self-loathing, his heartbeat thumping loudly.

Right, back at that time…..

Who was it who first suggested taking Li Xiu to the haunted house?

Those two friends of Wang Rongfa’s? Wait, who were those people?

In the midst of this turmoil, Fang Qian’an heard Li Xiu next to him speak almost indifferently.

“Song Chen and Amazi.”

“What?”

“Those two were also at the haunted house. And they ended up in the hospital the next day.” Li Xiu glanced at Fang Qian’an with a frown. “Have you forgotten? Later, the dean of students came to see me about the matter. Considering what happened to both of us, I now have a reasonable suspicion that the reason those two scumbags were taken away by ambulance has something to do with the haunted house.”

In fact, Li Xiu didn’t feel happy at all after Fang Qian’an apologized, but now was not the time to dwell on the harm caused by school bullying.

Li Xiu asked word by word: “Fang Qian’an, the others who went to the haunted house at that time…..how are they?”

*

At the same moment—

Qiming Secondary School.

At the building complex.

Floor: B3.

“This damn place, fuck, the power’s out again…..”

“Ai, it can’t be helped. I heard that the foundation wasn’t laid well back in the day, and there’s water seepage all the time. Trouble only happens when there is a problem with the circuits.”

As the two flashlight beams swayed, the school janitors chatted all the way as they patrolled the negative 3rd floor of the complex.

“It’s so dark, I can’t see clearly. There’s only garbage here, I don’t know what we need to inspect.”

One of the janitors complained repeatedly as he looked at the tight office doors and the messy piles of cardboard boxes in the corridor.

The other janitor responded: “We still need to inspect it. After all, it’ll be locked up until next year. I heard that the elevator was out of order yesterday and two students got in. What if someone were to be locked inside?”

Because there really was a problem with the circuits on this floor and a lot of things had happened in the past two days, the school leaders had no other choice. After receiving a request to strengthen the elimination of hidden dangers on campus, the logistics department simply sealed off all the unused areas in the school. 

It was the same here.

If nothing else happened, this place would likely not be reopened until the next year when the teaching materials were replaced.

The school janitors walked back and forth down the corridor twice. Seeing that the elevator had been blocked by an iron gate, and that there were no abnormalities elsewhere, the second janitor rubbed his neck and patted his partner on the shoulder.

“It’s done. Let’s go, let’s go, my whole body feels uncomfortable here.”

His partner didn’t want to bother in the first place. Seeing that his responsible and honest partner was saying the same thing, he quickly dragged this person without delay toward the only exit on the negative 3rd floor.

……

They were gone.

Great, they left. He won again this time. Hahaha, he wasn’t fooled.

The school janitors would never know that after they left, in the dark and silent negative 3rd floor corridor, a boy was curled up in a ball and shivering in a seemingly normal cardboard box.

He listened with contentment to the conversation and footsteps as they left, and a twisted smile appeared on his face.

I knew it.

Wang Rongfa continued to pump himself up.

As long as he hid here, those things wouldn’t be able to find him.

Thus, they could only use this method to try to lure him out of his hiding place.

What a joke.

Only in this way could he fool them.

He would hide well.

Yes, yes.

Never, never would he let himself be discovered.

Just hide well.

Just hide.

He was safe.

Just…..hide…..

Hide……

*

There was a click.

The door was locked.

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The Author Has Something to Say:

Li Xiu: How can ghosts exist in this world! (Afraid, trembling, terrified)

Li Xiu: Oh, so ghosts are actually the quantum state form of the human spiritual body? That’s fine. (Calm)

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Chapter 21 << Table of Contents >> Chapter 23