Click.

The door to the ward opened.

An older man with a slightly tired expression walked out of the ward and was immediately greeted by a tall young man.

“Teacher. How’s it going? Did that student say anything?”

“Shh.”

Teacher Xu put his finger in front of his lips in a shushing gesture. Looking back at the closed door to the ward, he shook his head slightly.

Then he turned and walked toward the end of the corridor, where there was a small open window..

Xu Qinghe came to a stop in front of the window. He watched the bustling street for a moment, then opened his mouth and lamented to the young man beside him: 

“Qiao Yang, ah. That child just had to be targeted by something like this.”

The expression of the young man named Qiao Yang became grim.

He knew better than anyone that his teacher rarely spoke in such a heavy tone.

“I’ve already questioned Classmate Li Xiu. When he was deceived by Grandmother Qi into giving alms to Lord Hong in their home, he didn’t notice anything wrong and just chalked it up to the family’s elder fooling around.”

“How can that be?” Qiao Yang frowned, doubt flashing through his eyes. “Could that kid be lying? What the old woman brought home was…..was ‘Lord Hong.’ That thing is so vicious. An old woman and a kid giving alms are pretty much seeking death. After all these years, how could nothing have happened to this family?!”

Teacher Xu smiled bitterly and lifted a hand to silence Qiao Yang.

“That’s why I said this matter is so difficult to handle.”

The man removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Li Xiu said that Grandmother Qi always told him to see that thing as a relative, and also told him to call it ‘gege.’”

Recalling Li Xiu’s strange, complicated expression when he spoke of his “gege,” Teacher Xu’s heart sank a bit.

“I’m afraid Grandmother Qi’s gone crazy.” Qiao Yang held himself back over and over, but still couldn’t suppress a curse. “The Xiao family has been offering sacrifices for more than a hundred years, and it still hasn’t lost its vicious nature. She thought she could just take home an evil spirit that had wiped out an entire family and simply offer it rice, like she was raising a little two-bit devil from Southeast Asia. Calling it “gege” and treating it as family? Why do people’s brains get so muddled when they’re old…..”

“Whatever the case, Lord Hong actually responded to Li Xiu calling him ‘gege.’”

Qiao Yang hadn’t expected Teacher Xu to say such a thing, and was simply stunned: “How is that possible?”

Teacher Xu put on his glasses and asked: “Why would it not be possible?”

“Qiming has been safe and sound for so long, so how is it that Li Xiu only started running into trouble after he was bullied? Have you still not realized that those kids who encountered accidents bullied Li Xiu before?”

“Ah? Teacher, you—”

“I questioned Li Xiu’s teachers and classmates,” Teacher Xu sighed. “Students like him don’t fare well in Qiming. The missing Wang Rongfa and the dead Song Cheng were arrogant and domineering in school. Oh, right, there was also something wrong with that male teacher named Ou Yang. He probably also thought to put hands on Li Xiu, and was killed for it. Qiao Yang, what do you think this situation is similar to?”

“S-similar to what?”

Qiao Yang was slow to react.

Hating iron for not becoming steel, Teach Xu glanced at him and said in a low voice: “Isn’t this like when a family’s younger brother or sister is bullied, and the older one goes to help them?”

Qiao Yang was speechless: “Ah? Wait, but, those young students are missing or dead—”

“It’s an evil spirit, not a human being.”

Teacher Xu’s voice became extremely serious.

“Therefore, it can’t distinguish between good and evil. Li Xiu was bullied. If he had a living big brother, no matter how unreasonable he was, the most he would do was go to their door and beat up those bullying brats. But when this thing took action…..”

This time, Qiao Yang finally answered: “It just killed them.”

Teacher Xu nodded.

“Indeed. You see, this is the most frightening thing.”

A light flashed through Qiao Yang’s eyes. He looked carefully at his teacher beside him and tentatively spoke: “Then, Teacher, if that’s the case, will it be okay if we wait for that thing to calm down? It seems that all the students who bullied Li Xiu are dead now—”

Before he could finish speaking, Qiao Yang felt pain on his forehead. The always gentle Teacher Xu was currently furious, and smacked the young man in front of him on the forehead, cursing several times. 

“What do you mean ‘is it okay?’ Huh? Those were human lives! Human lives!” Veins popped out on the man’s forehead. “Even then, how could it be so simple? One must absolutely not use human thinking to speculate on such things. That Lord Hong seems to have truly accepted Li Xiu’s wish and become his ‘gege.’ What do you think it will do?”

“……” Qiao Yang covered his head and didn’t dare speak a word.

“It will only do its utmost to kill that student, take him away, and drag him into its world! Don’t you know that a family is uniform? A thing like Lord Hong doesn’t think about humans and ghosts having different paths to walk. It only thinks that since it is family, its family should be the same as it. What is a family if one person is alive and the other is dead? A dead person can’t come alive, but a living person can become a dead one!”

As Teacher Xu spoke word by word, his expression grew increasingly ugly: “The worst thing isn’t that Lord Hong intends to take Li Xiu away. The worst thing is that not only will it take Li Xiu away, it won’t stop there!”

“Ah?”

“Li Xiu said he was tricked into attending school in that world. Well, the classmates he met that time were all paper figure fakes, so he could tell them apart from real ones. So if Lord Hong feels that the paper figures aren’t good enough, wouldn’t he want to bring all of Li Xiu’s classmates over to keep him company? And if there are students, won’t there have to be a teacher?”

Qiao Yang’s face gradually went pale as he listened to Teacher Xu.

Although it sounded extremely absurd, when he considered the things he had been exposed to over the years, Qiao Yang had to admit that Teacher Xu’s words were not nonsense. 

If this matter wasn’t handled properly, the thing that wiped out the entire Xiao family, the thing that was just barely sealed with the help of spiritual masters across the country, might steal away the entire student body of Qiming.

Just to keep its beloved little brother company.

The silence lingering between master and disciple became unusually heavy.

After a long time, Qiao Yang rubbed his face and steeled himself to ask: “What should we do now?” The young man’s eyes flashed with unconcealed worry. “…..We’ve been searching that student’s house for so long. He said Li Yu’s urn is under the bed in the bedroom. We practically dug through the floor below it, but we found no sign of the urn, ah.”

Theoretically speaking, it wasn’t difficult to deal with something like Lord Hong, whose true body was sealed away with only some remnants left outside. All they needed to do was find the ashes stolen by Grandmother Qi. The ashes contaminated by Lord Hong’s aura could be burned clean using Violet Cinnabar True Fire, and once Lord Hong had nothing left to attach itself to, it could no longer cause any trouble.

But as Qiao Yang said, after discovering the problem, Teacher Xu sent people to Li Xiu’s home to collect Li Yu’s ashes, but found that the ashes that had been enshrined under the bed for over a decade had mysteriously vanished.

And Li Xiu didn’t seem like he was lying.

“There’s no other way. We need to find them,” Teacher Xu said in a deep voice.

As he spoke, he turned his head to gaze deeply at the ordinary-looking ward at the other end of the corridor. The frail youth whom the evil spirit regarded as “family” was in that ward.

Teacher Xu inexplicably thought of the question Li Xiu had called out after him before he left the ward.

“Teacher Xu?”

“En?”

“Will it let me go?”

Teacher Xu hadn’t answered the question directly at that time.

He told Li Xiu to rest well and not think too much, and to take good care of his body.

But in fact, the older man knew the answer to Li Xiu’s question better than anybody else.

No, it won’t let you go.

That thing will definitely come back for you.

*

*

Inside the ward.

Li Xiu sat in the hospital bed. After Teacher Xu left, he stared at the tightly closed door for a long time, then shuddered. Perhaps because he was so weak, or perhaps because he had suffered big a blow in life, Li Xiu constantly felt cold.

He used a remote control to turn up the heat, and pulled a blanket over himself.

He’d learned a lot from Teacher Xu today, and his mind was a bit of a mess. In order to calm down, Li Xiu simply picked up the practice questions Teacher Chen had sent over and finished half of them in one go. The high-intensity mental exertion left the already weak Li Xiu dizzy. Unknowingly, he closed his eyes and fell asleep.

When woke up with an abrupt start, he found that he had slept until nighttime without realizing it.

It was silent inside the ward, and the night was dark outside the half-closed window.

The needle stuck into the back of his hand before he fell asleep was gone, and the IV had also been removed. Gel pens and the exercise book were neatly placed on the bedside table, and there was also a soft quilt over Li Xiu.

Half-sitting up in the hospital bed, Li Xiu sat and thought for a moment. He vaguely recalled that a nurse-jiejie seemed to have come in while he was sleeping.

She seemed to have called out to him a few times, but Li Xiu was sleeping deeply at that time and didn’t wake up.

Li Xiu took a look at his phone.

The sudden flare of light from the screen hurt his eyes. The time was 3 a.m.

In fact, Li Xiu had guessed that it was around this time before he checked.

Since his hospitalization, Li Xiu would inexplicably wake up at 3 a.m. almost every night.

Today was the same.

He was probably just too anxious.

Comforting himself, Li Xiu gritted his teeth and fell back on the hospital bed.

So cold…..

Li Xiu automatically opened the chat box with Fang Qian’an. Judging from the records, Fang Qian’an had sent a steady stream of nonsense, to which Li Xiu would only occasionally reply with one or two sentences.

It wasn’t like he’d thought Fang Qian’an’s nonsense had any merit before.

But now, he looked at that nonsense for a long time.

Teacher Xu hadn’t elaborated before, but since waking up, Li Xiu could probably guess that the “candles” brought to that other world for light were closely related to a person’s lifeline. In the end, Fang Qian’an had burned the entire candle in order to save him.

Therefore, after they were rescued, Fang Qian’an’s condition was much worse than Li Xiu’s. Since that day, he hadn’t received any messages from Fang Qian’an.

That idiot…..

Was he really okay now?

It was difficult for Li Xiu to hide the worry in his heart. His fingertips tapped back and forth on the dialogue box several times, but he didn’t sent a message.

It was so late.

He thought, I’ll wait until tomorrow. Li Xiu shrank under the quilt. The corners of his eyes felt slightly warm. Li Xiu touched the pillowcase and found that it was damp. Perhaps he’d accidentally cried in his dreams.

The hospital was eerily quiet late at night.

Li Xiu hid under the quilt. Loneliness slowly surged up like a rising tide. He’d initially wanted to sleep a little longer, but after lying in bed for a long while, he still couldn’t fall asleep. He could only open his eyes and stare blankly at the closed door to the ward.

The lights in the hospital corridor were always on, and from Li Xiu’s perspective, he could clearly see the faint light leaking into the room through the crack in the door.

When Teacher Xu was arranging a ward for him, perhaps considering everything he had gone through, he’d specially arranged a ward for him that was closest to the nurse’s station.

In the next few days, this became Li Xiu’s greatest psychological comfort.

…..Though he still didn’t sleep well at night.

Li Xiu should have felt at ease knowing that someone was watching over him just on the other side of the wall. However, even he himself didn’t know why he was in such a cold sweat while lying in bed.

Li Xiu’s heart was beating wildly out of control. His throat was tight and dry, and there was the faint taste of blood on his breath.

He held the quilt in a death grip, a voice inside of him shouting unceasingly.

Something isn’t quite right, he thought.

What was it……

Clearly, everything was the same as before. Clearly, the most difficult time had passed. Clearly, he was lying in a room only separated from the nurse’s station by a wall…..

Li Xiu’s breathing came heavy. His back was wet with cold sweat.

“Huff…..”

“Huff…..”

At this moment, he fixed his eyes on the door — the light under the door dimmed slightly as a figure flitted past.

Li Xiu subconsciously held his breath.

But soon, familiar rapid footsteps passed by the door to his ward.

Ah, that shadow must be the night shift nurse. Another ward must have called for the nurse’s assistance.

Li Xiu realized this belatedly.

He slowly breathed a sigh of relief.

But in the next second, he froze again.

“Huff…..”

There was the sound of breathing.

Li Xiu finally realized why he kept feeling that something was wrong.

It was the breathing sound.

He had clearly held his breath in fear just now, but the sound of heavy, turbid breathing could still be heard.

During the seven days he’d been hospitalized, this sound had been lingering around him faintly, overlapping with every breath of his own. So before, he just vaguely felt that something wasn’t right but couldn’t find the reason.

That accumulated uneasiness forced him to wake up involuntarily every night.

And just now, he finally heard the breathing of someone else who shouldn’t be in the ward.

……The sound was coming from underneath his bed.

Li Xiu clutched the quilt tightly. At this moment, the air inside the ward seemed to freeze.

But through the hospital bed mattress, the sound of breathing at once became extremely loud and clear.

Li Xiu did his utmost to hold his breath so that he could hear more clearly, but holding his breath in a state of extreme fear made his head spin.

Who was it?

No, he should say what…..was under the bed?

Li Xiu covered his mouth. His body shook uncontrollably.

Intense fear paralyzed him, but it was as if there was an invisible whip lashing him, and his survival instincts made him subconsciously want to determine what was under the bed.

“Huff……”

Was it an illusion?

Or was he having a panic attack?

Li Xiu tried hard to calm himself.

However, the faint sound of breathing grew closer. At least, to Li Xiu’s ears. And this time, the breathing he heard seemed…..like it was coming from beside him on the bed.

There was obviously only a narrow gap on that side, so how was someone breathing there?

Li Xiu was currently huddled under the quilt.

He didn’t dare to stick his head out.

Because he felt that if he lifted the quilt, he would see something that he never wanted to face in his lifetime.

Li Xiu’s heart was beating like it was about to burst out of his chest in the next second. He bit his lip, trembling, and then turned his phone to picture mode.

Using his fingertips, he pushed the top part of the phone through the gap between the quilt and the bed.

Then, hiding beneath the quilt, he slowly pressed the camera button.

The phone successfully took a series of photos.

Enduring the terror, Li Xiu slowly pulled the phone back under the quilt.

When he checked the photos he had just taken, Li Xiu shook so much that he almost couldn’t hang onto the phone.

Upon looking at the first photo, Li Xiu didn’t recognize what it was right away — he didn’t see a ghost, male or female, lying on his quilt, nor did he see the masked paper figures that once occupied his nightmares.

In fact, the screen was just a blur of black and red.

The center of the screen was black, with only a layer of scarlet at all four corners. Several pictures in a row were the same. It was almost like there was something wrong with his old phone’s camera.

All of the pictures were so blurry.

Li Xiu stared blankly at the screen of his mobile phone.

The epiphany came abruptly

It was at that moment that Li Xiu finally realized what he was seeing.

No, there was nothing wrong with his phone.

That thing was just too close.

So close that Li Xiu’s phone couldn’t adjust the focus, so when the photos were taken, it was just a mass of black and red.

The black was that thing’s pupil. 

And the red was the white of its eye filled with blood.

“A-Xiu, ah.”

Li Xiu heard a familiar elderly voice.

“A-Xiu, why haven’t you brought your gege food today?”

His grandmother, who had passed away a week ago, urged him the same as always.

But his grandmother’s voice had never been so vague during her lifetime.

A faint corpse-like odor mixed with the smell of disinfectant.

Even wrapped up tightly in the quilt, Li Xiu couldn’t isolate himself from the smell.

…..That was not his grandmother.

---

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Chapter 47 << Table of Contents >> Chapter 49