662 Feels Like Home

The entrance was knocked down. The metallic door slammed into the wall, and it gave Xiao Yu some hope. She had heard that man’s voice on the phone before. It was Mr. Jia who wanted to rent her place. She thought she was dead for sure, but there was now a ray of hope.

Xiao Yu knew the ghost was inside the room, but she had no other choice. Xiao Yu took a deep breath, tightened her fingers, and then pushed the dresser door open. “Help! There’s a ghost here! I’m here!” She grabbed her phone and rushed out of the room. However, when she arrived at the lobby, her hope crushed her. The entrance door was perfectly unharmed. No one had kicked it down. “This is impossible! I heard the sound of it slamming earlier!”

She grabbed her hair. Fear curled around her like snakes. Xiao Yu almost lost her mind.

“Han Fei, why did you stop here? Aren’t we going to the seventh floor?”

“Wait a minute. I feel like something is close. Don’t you hear someone crying for help?”

“No! Are you hallucinating?”

The two men’s conversation echoed in Xiao Yu’s ears. However, Xiao Yu couldn’t see them. They were like people in alternate dimensions, and this building was where the dimensions overlapped. People with strong spirituality could sense something.

“I’m here! I’m just beside you!” Xiao Yu pleaded for help. She took out her phone to call Han Fei but realized the time was stuck at 6.01 pm.

“Help! Can you hear me?” Xiao Yu’s tears fell. She didn’t have the time to cry. Scary footsteps echoed inside the room. Wet footsteps surfaced in one of the rooms. The mirror beside the dresser reflected a strange man. His neck was snapped and caved in a terrifying angle. His spine was poking out. His whole body appeared strung. He was hanged. His head was almost separated from his body.

Xiao Yu saw the reflection, and she almost lost her mind seeing that man. She didn’t dare to stay. She screamed and crawled up the stairs. The entrance was locked, and the corridors changed. After time stood still, she appeared to have fallen into a ghost world.

“Xiao Jia, can’t you hear any cries for help? I have a feeling that someone is close to us.”

“Don’t scare me, please.”

“I think I can touch them. I really felt someone brush past me earlier!”

The two men paused and then moved upstairs too.

“I’m just beside you! Why can’t you see me?!” Xiao Yu raced upstairs. The footsteps kept coming from behind him. The hanging man was not worried that Xiao Yu would escape. No living human could ever leave this place.

“No, there is definitely something around us. She is calling for help. I can hear her cry! She is running upstairs! We need to follow!”

“Han Fei, slow down! I’m scared!”

The two men’s voices followed the girl. They were moving alongside her in another world. Xiao Yu had no choice but to retrace her steps. When she came down, the corridors were still normal, but now, the apartment rapidly aged. The cracks on the wall spread. Hair fell from the black gaps, and there was occasionally a blinking eye. The doors of the rooms also became different. Their colors deepened. Some were stained with blood, some had yellow talismans, and some had police tapes.

Ever since she entered and left the dresser, the whole apartment building changed. Xiao Yu cried and screamed as she ran up the stairs. However, no one came to help her. She was completely dominated by fear. Her brain couldn’t work properly. Her legs were moving on their own. Xiao Yu didn’t dare to turn around. She ran all the way to the fourth floor. The voice-activated light on this floor was broken. One of the room doors was left half-open. Light filtered out.

“Is anyone there? Help!” Xiao Yu screamed. She pulled open the door, hoping her neighbor could help her. However, when she looked into the room, her body was frozen. The dark room had no lights. Inside the empty living room, there was a television broadcasting something weird. Through the static, one could see a black house. In the black house, there were seven black men and a red girl. They killed each other. Their bodies were torn apart and then sewn together again. This scary image froze Xiao Yu at the door. She turned around and ran up the stairs.

When she came to the fifth floor, the voice-activated lights turned red. All the white couplets were dyed red. When Xiao Yu passed, she could smell an alluring scent of meat. Xiao Yu turned to look, and Xiao Yu’s face paled. A wooden doll in a wedding dress was seated beside the dining table. Its body was bound with red twine. When Xiao Yu glanced at it, the doll’s head was moved by the threads and turned with a creak!

Xiao Yu was spooked, and her phone fell to the ground. The wet footprints were close to her. She didn’t have the time to pick up her phone and continued to crawl up the stairs. The endless scares pushed Xiao Yu to her limits. However, she couldn’t stop. Her survival instinct kept her going.

Xiao Yu ran past the sixth floor and returned to the seventh floor. Xiao Yu hesitated. She knew that the ghost had surfaced in her room. “Mom is not here anymore.” The mother strung on the ceiling light was gone. Xiao Yu’s only hope was gone. Her legs weakened. “The person who loves me the most is gone. I will face endless trauma and torture. In that case, I might as well end everything myself.”

Xiao Yu knew that she was running in circles. She couldn’t outrun despair. Xiao Yu didn’t run to the 8th floor. She ran back into her room and into the bedroom. The bedroom window was left open. Jumping through the window would end her fear. In the past, when she was in a nightmare, she would make this choice. “That’s right. This is just a nightmare. I can escape from it soon!”

The window was before her. Xiao Yu took slow steps. She could touch the night sky outside the apartment.

“Yu Yi!” A wail came from the living room. Xiao Yu turned back to look. Her bloody mother crawled out of the glass pieces and pounced in a direction. The blood flew everywhere. A strange man slowly appeared. Xiao Yu’s mother started to fight for the bloody phone with him. Xiao Yu’s mother was so much weaker than the man. The faint black mist radiating off the man could scorch her skin easily, but she didn’t mind. As she screamed to stop Xiao Yu from jumping off the building, she tried to imbue the last piece of her soul into the phone.

“Mom!”

Xiao Yu saw this, and her fear was dominated by another emotion. Her shaking hands grabbed the chair in the room. She ran over without much thought. She slammed the chair at the man in the living room. The chair phased through the man. It didn’t cause the man any harm, but it made him angrier. The pupilless eyes glared at Xiao Yu. While he was distracted, the mother’s body crawled into the phone. At the same time, Xiao Jia and Han Fei charged into the room. They saw an empty living room. They felt something was strange when Xiao Jia’s phone vibrated. It was an unregistered number.

“Shall we answer it?” Xiao Jia turned to Han Fei. Han Fei’s expression was severe. He held the knife and slowly entered the living room. Since Han Fei didn’t say anything, Xiao Jia accepted the call. The moment he did, the phone’s time stopped. The temperature dropped. Everything aged. They were dragged by the ghost into a different dimension!

Han Fei stopped. He looked at the man who was almost two meters tall before him as well as Xiao Yu who was at her limit. He sucked in a cold breath.

“The fuck?!” Xiao Jia held the phone and stood at the door. His hand that held the phone was shaking.

“Please save my daughter! I’ll do anything in return!” A pleading cry came from Xiao Jia’s phone and the phone in the hanging man’s palm. Han Fei didn’t hesitate. He moved faster than the hanging man. He darted forward and cut through the man’s neck!

The man’s head rolled to the floor.

“Get over here!” Han Fei screamed at Xiao Yu. He knew the man wouldn’t die so easily. He continued to attack him. Han Fei remembered the weaknesses of the human body. His every stab was fatal, but ghosts were different from humans. Even though the man had lost his head, his body could still move freely.

“How are you supposed to kill these things?” Han Fei had no memory, so he was running on instinct. He tried to recall the ghost stories in his script. Earlier, he used the ritual to suck away the black mist around the boy and then had the other ghosts consume him. But now, Han Fei only had the knife given to him by the clown.

“The thin black mist is the ghost’s resentment. This hanging man is a Lingering Spirit too! To kill him, I need to dissipate the black mist around him first!”

Before the hanging man reacted, Han Fei kept on attacking. He knew he only had this chance.

“Phone! Mom’s phone!” Xiao Yu, who fell to the ground, saw Xiao Jia and Han Fei. It was two rays of sunlight cutting through the clouds. She quickly climbed up from the ground. She knew she couldn’t be a burden for Han Fei.

Han Fei got the reminder from Xiao Yu. He slashed through the man’s arm. However, even after he was dismembered, the man’s arm refused to let the phone go.

“Why won’t this thing die?” Xiao Jia screamed. “Han Fei! Behind you!”

The hanging man’s body was chopped into pieces, but with the black mist’s help, the wound started to heal, and strange body parts grew out of them.

Han Fei stabbed through the man’s arm and quickly retreated when he got the bloody phone.

“We need to retreat now!”

The fact that Han Fei could survive so long with a Lingering Spirit was already very amazing.

The three of them ran down the stairs, but Xiao Yu gave them the bad news. “This building is locked. We can’t leave through the front door.”

At that moment, they heard a spine-chilling sound from Xiao Yu’s room. It sounded like someone had cracked all of his bones and then pieced them together again.

“Xiao Yu, have your mother call the landlord! Ask him what really happened in that room. Why is there a hanging man there?!” Han Fei was anxious. The encounter with the hanging man left a deep impression on him. While the hanging man mutated, Han Fei’s group came to the first floor. They used many different ways to open the door, but it was to no avail. It felt like darkness had blocked the door and trapped them inside the building.

“This is not working!” Xiao Jia saw Han Fei starting to cut the door with the knife, and he tried to get him to calm down. “Do you hear that? There are more footsteps. Did the man grow more legs?”

“Since we can’t leave, we’ll have to face him head-on.” Han Fei’s heart raced, but his brain was calm. “There are many tenants here, so he can’t be the only ghost. Yesterday night, we saw the bride on the fifth floor. We can lure him there.” “What if we’re targeted by two ghosts?” Xiao Jia sighed. This was the first time he heard someone offer this solution to deal with ghosts.

“We’ll die facing one ghost, and we’ll still die facing two ghosts.” Han Fei stopped wasting time. He turned to run back up the stairs. “Other than the fifth floor, the room on the fourth floor with the television is also very suspicious. When I passed by it earlier, I had a strange feeling in my heart.”

“What feeling?” Xiao Jia followed closely behind Han Fei.

“It feels like home.”

“What?” Xiao Jia couldn’t believe his ears.

“How can I put it? For a moment, it felt like I had returned home.”

 

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