Chapter 36: Chapter 36: Twisted Hell
That strange, white oval object was a woman’s face!
It was pressed flush against the floor of the third story, a bizarre smile on its face as it flashed past at an incredible speed, quickly vanishing into the darkness.
When you thought about it, her posture in the darkness was utterly grotesque.
A person’s head couldn’t possibly be pressed against the ground while walking normally. To create such an effect, the woman must have had her entire body lying flat on the floor.
But that raised a question. If she was lying flat on the ground, how could she move so quickly? Was she a crab, scuttling sideways at high speed?
The cackling woman upstairs was undoubtedly a ghost—and a particularly strange one at that. Gao Tian immediately ordered all his thugs to pull back, and not just because he was worried about their safety. If this cannon fodder were all killed on the stairs, he would be the first one the woman targeted when she came down.
The middle-aged man had seen his fair share of trouble. Hearing Gao Tian’s angry shout from downstairs, he sensed something was wrong. While retreating, he drew his gun and fired repeatedly at a bizarre silhouette he saw squirming toward him out of the void.
At the same time, the cackling woman’s face on the third floor was finally revealed in full—
A pale, snake-like neck supported a flat, round face as it stretched out from the third floor, cackling bizarrely at Gao Tian and the men on the stairs below.
Her neck was not only pale and long, but also extremely flexible. It twisted and turned like a boneless serpent, as if trying to lock onto a target. Her unremarkable face was permanently fixed in a distorted smile.
The thugs were utterly shocked by the sight. How could a normal person’s neck stretch to such a length? The body connected to that neck and face remained hidden in the darkness of the third floor, its true form unrevealed. ’Skinny Monkey and the others who went up first must have already been killed silently in the dark.’
The three men on the stairs retreated toward the second floor, firing continuously.
Countless bullets whistled into the woman’s suspended face, kicking up sprays of blood. But her face maintained a faint, world-weary expression. The wounds swallowed the bullet casings and healed at an incredible speed, as if she were completely unaffected.
In their shock, the men quickly emptied their clips. When they pulled the triggers again, all they heard were the powerless clicks of empty chambers.
The middle-aged man’s hands were shaking violently. Fumbling, he pulled a new magazine from his clothes but failed several times to load it into his pistol. His hands were simply trembling too much.
THUD, THUD, THUD.
From the third floor, two irregular, round objects came tumbling and bouncing down, leaving long trails of blood on the stairs.
They were the heads of Skinny Monkey and San Hu. The cuts at their necks were clean, and their faces wore cautious expressions, as if they were completely unaware of the fact that they were dead.
Downstairs, Grey Wolf and the others had rushed up to provide support as soon as they heard the gunshots on the second floor. When they saw the impossibly long neck slowly extending down from the third floor, and the resentful woman’s face at its end, they too were utterly shocked.
Strangely, the woman’s face simply stopped between the third and second floors. It just watched the men below, smiling quietly, showing no immediate intention of attacking them.
"Bullets... bullets are almost useless against this thing."
Standing amidst a floor of spent casings, the middle-aged man gritted his teeth and warned the newly arrived Grey Wolf and Crocodile in a nearly hoarse voice.
Gao Tian was also wondering why the woman from the third floor hadn’t killed them yet. ’Does this ghost have some kind of murder rule we haven’t triggered?’
’Does she only attack people who enter the third floor?’
Just then, his phone buzzed repeatedly in his pocket with a series of incoming message alerts. They were all from the Jialan Society chat group—a conversation between ghost users. Unfortunately, with everyone’s attention fixed on the woman’s face hanging between the second and third floors, Gao Tian had no time to check his phone.
[Living Person’s Apartment]:
Something’s happened. My old home has been invaded.
[Ghost Infant]:
WTF?
What a coincidence. Could it just be some kids or a homeless person who wandered in by accident?
[Living Person’s Apartment]:
No. My pot is on the third floor. These people are armed. They’re clearly here for the pot.
[Ghost Cave]:
@Living Person’s Apartment Are they Ghost Hunters from another province? Where did they get your home address?
Should I make a trip? I’m temporarily free to move around. But it would take me three hours to get to Hengzhou.
[Living Person’s Apartment]:
@Ghost Cave Don’t worry for now.
When I left my old home, I had a feeling something like this would happen. I raised a ghost and left it on the third floor.
What’s more, I even cut off a piece of my Ghost Realm and left it to guard the place.
Anyone who enters, even a top-tier Ghost Hunter, will be trapped inside the Ghost Realm and eventually killed by the ghost.
No one will take my pot and get out alive.
Back in the old house, Gao Tian hadn’t seen the chat conversation, but he wasn’t an idiot. He knew that the filthy thing on the third floor must have been left behind by Xu Yuan. The purpose was to raise a ghost to kill any treasure-seeking Ghost Hunters who came calling.
Seeing that the woman hanging from the third floor still showed no signs of attacking, and after a brief stalemate, Gao Tian began to slowly back away. He retreated toward the first-floor stairs, trying to leave without provoking her.
The other thugs also kept their guns aimed at the hanging pale face as they scrambled to back away. At this point, forget fifty thousand yuan; not even five hundred thousand or five million could convince them to stay. What good was money if you were dead?
The woman watched them leave, swaying slightly in the air and cackling incessantly.
Suddenly, she stopped laughing. She opened her blood-red lips, revealing a black, toothless mouth, and began to speak:
"Li Santian..."
"Li Santian."
"Li Santian!"
Her voice sounded extremely awkward, like a machine deliberately imitating the cadence of human speech.
’Who is Li Santian?’
’Was Li Santian the name of this woman Xu Yuan was keeping in his old house when she was alive?’
Gao Tian searched Zhao Qiang’s memories and suddenly recalled it: Li Santian was the real name of the thug nicknamed Crocodile. Crocodile’s original name was Li Santian.
He was carefully backing out of the second floor with the others, wondering why the woman was calling his name.
After his name was called three times, Crocodile realized something was terribly wrong. He roared and raised his pistol, mashing the trigger wildly. With a sharp SNAP, his head suddenly seemed to lose all interest in his neck. It split open in four directions, like a sliced watermelon, and fell away from his body.
In an instant, Crocodile became a headless corpse, his body thudding to the ground.
Seeing this, the remaining thugs let out heart-wrenching screams. They lost the last of their sanity and turned, running for their lives down the stairs. Nothing could have stopped their desperate flight.
Gao Tian also dashed down to the first floor. He immediately understood one of the ghost’s murder rules: if she called your name three times, you would die a violent death.
And to make matters worse, the woman only needed to look at you to automatically know your name. This murder rule was pretty much inescapable. If she targeted someone, they had no way to escape.
As he reached the first-floor hall, the woman’s muffled voice drifted down from upstairs, seemingly chanting another name. He didn’t know who the next victim would be.
The main door on the first floor leading outside was still open. But when Gao Tian reached it, he forced himself to suppress his terror and didn’t rush to leave the white house.
Because the scenery outside the white house was wrong.
The sky, once black with a hint of sickly white, had at some point turned completely blood-red. The clouds seemed alive, squirming slowly along the horizon, while the sun and moon had become two bloody sickles hanging above their heads.
Bathed in the glow of the blood-red sky, the weeds and old furniture in the yard also turned crimson. They no longer looked like things for the living, but rather like the Sea of Blood and the Bridge of Helplessness that the dead cross on their way to the underworld.
’What the fuck, is this even Earth anymore? Where the hell have we been sent?’
"Don’t go out! Haven’t you noticed how weird it is out there?!"
Although Gao Tian sensed a silhouette pursuing them from the third floor, he had a gut feeling that the "world" outside the white house was even more dangerous.
Hearing the order from his boss, "Zhao Qiang," Grey Wolf, who was just one step from the doorway, had already started to halt. But at that exact moment, the woman on the third floor finished chanting a name three times again. The middle-aged man beside Grey Wolf split in two right down the middle without getting out a single last word. Blood splattered over everyone.
This time, not even the boss "Zhao Qiang’s" words had any effect. Grey Wolf’s mind was filled with nothing but the desire to survive. Without a second thought, he bolted through the doorway.
The moment he entered the "blood-red world" outside, Grey Wolf’s stocky, one-point-eight-meter frame was instantly flayed, as if a layer of skin had been peeled away, exposing his multicolored nervous system and bright red flesh. Soon, even those were slowly dissolved by a strong acid. A complete, white skeleton precipitated inch by inch from his body. He turned his white skull one last time, as if trying to flee back into the house. But with a CRASH, his entire body disintegrated, leaving behind only a foul stench.
A perfectly fine man, dismantled alive just like that.
At this, the frantic urge to escape the white house was forcibly cooled.
The outside had also become a twisted world. Taking even half a step out of the white house meant being instantly melted.
But the white house wasn’t safe either. The long neck supporting the woman’s face was slowly descending, passing from the third floor, through the second, and floating down toward the first. Clearly, the ghost Xu Yuan had raised wasn’t going to let the invaders go so easily. It was coming for them.
This was bad. Leave the house, die. Stay in the house, die. In an instant, Gao Tian found himself trapped in a hopeless situation, caught between a rock and a hard place. No matter what he chose, death was the only option.
