Chapter 1000: Chapter 701: Looking for Someone_2
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"Tap."
"Tap."
"Tap."
Dou Jie clutched his backpack tightly, his footsteps brisk and forehead slick with cold sweat. He had passed the fifth and fourth floors but hadn’t seen any sign of Xiao Yaqin. Even after he rushed out of the apartment building, there was still no trace of her.
Dou Jie muttered to himself that this was bad. Most likely something had happened. After all, the area around the apartment was pitch dark, and Xiao Yaqin had twisted her ankle—there was no way she could have gone far.
He didn’t have much of a relationship with Xiao Yaqin, and naturally, it wasn’t worth risking his life to go back for her. Besides, even if he did, the chances of finding her were slim to none. Making a decisive choice, he gripped his bag tighter and dashed toward the parking spot where Yu Kai and Boss Sun were waiting, as he remembered.
But when Dou Jie arrived at the pre-arranged location, he was startled to find no one there. Not only was there no one, but the car was also gone. In that moment, his heart sank halfway to the floor.
Suddenly, a blinding beam of headlights shot toward him from a distance. Dou Jie shielded his eyes and glanced in the direction of the light. He saw a white van parked not far from him, its headlights glaring straight at him. Two people stepped out of the vehicle.
It was Yu Kai and Boss Sun.
Dou Jie hurried over, gasping for breath, and described the situation truthfully. Yu Kai frowned deeply, while the less composed Boss Sun broke out in a cold sweat, clearly entertaining thoughts of driving home immediately.
"We’re going back to look for her," Yu Kai decided. "Boss Sun, you don’t need to come. Stay here and wait for us."
Seeing through Boss Sun’s intention to flee, Yu Kai sternly addressed him, "Boss Sun, stay here and wait. Driving back alone wouldn’t be safe."
Sure enough, that one sentence was enough to subdue him, and Yu Kai didn’t give Boss Sun any time to think further. He grabbed the shaken Dou Jie and headed back toward the apartment.
On the way, Yu Kai explained to Dou Jie that he had instructed Boss Sun to change the parking spot as a precaution.
Of course, Dou Jie understood what Yu Kai meant by "precaution." It was the fear that they might die inside the apartment, with something replacing them and emerging to kill others.
By changing the designated location and hiding the car in an inconspicuous, shadowy area, if the "them" that emerged could locate the hidden vehicle right away, it would almost certainly mean they were ghosts impersonating them.
Dou Jie silently concluded that Yu Kai was no ordinary person—perhaps no less capable than Chu Xi.
"Brother Yu, where are we supposed to look for her?" Dou Jie was starting to feel scared, worried that Yu Kai might recklessly head straight to Room 1319 to search.
But Yu Kai had his own plan. He instructed Dou Jie to retrace the path he and Xiao Yaqin had taken, avoiding Room 1319. If they found her, that would be great; if not, they’d leave immediately. It wasn’t worth losing their lives over a dead person.
Yu Kai was a seasoned veteran of Nightmare World tasks. In such settings, when a teammate went missing, the outcome was always the same—death.
He no longer hoped to find Xiao Yaqin alive but needed her corpse. Discovering the body could yield clues, as a teammate’s death scene in the Nightmare World often provided numerous hints about the killing ghost.
Walking in the dim stairwell, the two flashlights moved cautiously—one ahead and one behind. Leading the way, Dou Jie didn’t hold out much hope; after all, he’d already searched this path once. If there were clues, he wouldn’t have missed them earlier.
Stopping at the sixth-floor landing, Dou Jie called off the search. "Brother Yu, there’s no need to look further. Xiao Yaqin could only have made it as far as this level. She twisted her ankle; she couldn’t have gone far or climbed higher."
"Which floor did she twist her ankle on?" Yu Kai asked suddenly.
"Third—no, fourth floor," Dou Jie recalled.
"Twisting her ankle as soon as she entered the apartment? Is she a pig? Either she was faking it, or something strange happened to her. We’re going upward. Search all the way to the twelfth floor," Yu Kai’s face darkened, his tone icy and stern.
Dou Jie didn’t dare argue. After all, he wouldn’t dare leave alone now, and sticking close to Yu Kai gave him at least some semblance of security.
As they climbed to the eighth floor, Yu Kai first smelled a faint metallic tang of blood. Soon enough, at the corner between the eighth and ninth floors, they spotted dried bloodstains on the ground.
Following the trail upward, they soon uncovered more. When the flashlight beam swept over, Dou Jie froze upon seeing a face staring up at him in death from the steps between the ninth and tenth floors.
Xiao Yaqin’s head faced downward, her feet upward, sprawled grotesquely across the stairs. Her eyes bulged wide, and her mouth gaped open, as though she had seen something terrifying before she died. More chilling was her sideways face turning toward Dou Jie—and her glassy eyes fixed on him directly.
"How could this be..." Dou Jie’s mind was reeling. He had walked this path just moments ago; it was impossible he’d missed such a large corpse.
After ensuring the area was safe, Yu Kai stepped forward to inspect the body. He gently lifted Xiao Yaqin’s head, examining the wound. Shortly after, he concluded, "The fatal injury was to her neck. She fell and broke her neck. She fell from somewhere above—look, one of her shoes is missing."
Dou Jie approached and found that indeed, Xiao Yaqin’s left foot was bare. On a small platform near the tenth floor, he located her missing sneaker.
But Yu Kai’s next words were what truly mattered. "She’s been dead for at least four hours. Lividity has already formed on her body."
Yu Kai lifted Xiao Yaqin’s arm and flipped it over, showing Dou Jie the stark contrast between the deep purplish-red lividity and her pale skin.
But even if they counted from the moment Xiao Yaqin entered the apartment, the timeline didn’t add up—barely more than an hour had passed. Could it be... Dou Jie’s heart sank with a horrifying suspicion: could Xiao Yaqin have been dead even before she got here?
But... how was that possible?
While Dou Jie pondered, Yu Kai crouched beside the corpse, noticing her left hand clenched tightly, as if holding something.
Yu Kai’s first thought was the bell—it had to be the bell. After all, they had only recovered two items from the haunted house: the group photo, now stored in Dou Jie’s bag, and the bell, which Dou Jie claimed had stayed with Xiao Yaqin.
Yu Kai reached out to pry open the dead hand, but to his surprise, her grip was unnaturally tight, refusing to budge.
In the end, Yu Kai whispered an apologetic acknowledgment in his heart, then closed Xiao Yaqin’s staring eyes. He proceeded to forcibly break her fingers one by one until he retrieved whatever was in the palm.
When the object was finally in hand, both men froze—it wasn’t the bell but a torn piece of paper, roughly the size of half a palm, as if ripped from somewhere.
The paper was lined with a grid, containing words and numbers written chaotically. In such a eldritch environment, Yu Kai didn’t have the time to study it closely.
The bell was the key—but even after thoroughly searching Xiao Yaqin’s body, Yu Kai found no trace of the bell. When he asked Dou Jie, the latter was equally baffled.
"This place isn’t safe. Let’s move," Yu Kai decided.
After ensuring there were no other clues, Yu Kai and Dou Jie left, leaving the body lying silently in the frigid stairwell.
While descending, Dou Jie couldn’t resist shining his flashlight upward. His beam landed squarely on Xiao Yaqin’s eerie death mask, and in that instant, Dou Jie was horrified to see that her eyes were open.
Yet in the next moment of dizziness, when he shone the light again, her eyes were shut—as though the previous sight had been pure hallucination.
Thankfully, the pair escaped the apartment building unscathed, and Boss Sun, still waiting at the car, breathed a visible sigh of relief.
From afar, seeing Yu Kai and Dou Jie approach, Boss Sun ran forward like a man clutching at a lifeline, asking eagerly whether they found her. Yu Kai shook his head, followed by Dou Jie. It was a lie they had coordinated earlier—they didn’t want to scare Boss Sun, as they still needed his help later.
"Boss Sun, use your connections to investigate these two individuals. As thoroughly and quickly as possible!"
Yu Kai took the notebook from Dou Jie’s hand, tore out a page with writing on it, and handed it to Boss Sun. On the paper were two names:
Zheng Churou.
Yin Kun.
