Chapter 1454: Chapter 897: Accident (Happy Mid-Autumn Festival!)
Upon closer inspection, the background of the disc packaging is the exterior of a decrepit hospital. The outermost gate is the kind of old-fashioned iron bar gate that only existed decades ago, covered in rust. To the right of the iron gate hangs a sign with the four large characters "Xinglin Hospital".
The filming time is obviously at night, with only a few windows sporadically lit in the entire hospital building. Combined with the dark and chaotic night backdrop, the overall impression is depressingly suffocating.
Particularly, this DV machine model is quite outdated, at least 20 years obsolete in Zhou Mingxiao’s knowledge, and the display screen’s quality is very coarse.
Staring at this display screen, Zhou Mingxiao momentarily feels like he’s watching a low-budget mockumentary, further deepening his fear.
Zhou Mingxiao instinctively swallows his saliva. The camera pans to the right, and another framed picture appears on the display screen.
This is another wrapped VCD disc, also giving the impression of a mockumentary, this time set in a sanatorium deep in the mountains, and the film is titled "The Beginning and End of the Ghost Eye-gouging Tragedy at the Second Kangning Center".
Zhou Mingxiao holds up the DV machine and watches them one by one, the third, the fourth... each name more terrifying than the last, and VCD discs like this almost cover the entire wall. A rough count suggests there are dozens.
Time cannot be wasted here, so Zhou Mingxiao decisively turns the camera and begins to examine the surrounding office area using the display screen with the poor quality.
But the space here is too large—the entire office area has over twenty desks of different sizes. He can’t afford the time to check each one as he doesn’t know when danger will arise, and that Waist-breaking Ghost could strike again at any moment.
Zhou Mingxiao forces himself to stay calm. Quickly scanning the surroundings with the camera, he soon finds a door on one side of the office hall. From his experience, he judges it to be a private office that might contain important clues.
He immediately jogs over, puts down the DV machine, and in front of him is a chaotic dark little room where the door has been burned away, leaving only a few bare walls.
Yet in the DV machine’s footage, everything looks unchanged here, with a black wooden door blocking his way, a note with the words "Keep Quiet" pasted on it.
Raising the DV machine to the wooden door, Zhou Mingxiao stares intently at the doorknob on the screen and reaches out his hand towards the empty space before him.
The next second, his hand unexpectedly enters the frame; immediately after, his palm feels cool, as if he’s truly grabbed onto something cold—a metal doorknob.
With a little downward pressure—the camera lens captures the door creaking open, revealing a narrow but very compact office inside.
The office is quite disordered, two desks are pushed together head-to-head and littered with many file folders, along with papers, pens, a stapler, mugs, and other miscellaneous items.
There is a large olive-green metal cabinet by the wall, and several cardboard boxes on the floor, haphazardly filled with costume props and the like.
Checking every corner of the room through the lens to ensure it’s safe, Zhou Mingxiao first turns around and closes the office door, leaving a gap a few fingers wide to observe anything outside, then quickly moves to the desk and begins to open a file folder.
But upon opening the folder, Zhou Mingxiao is dumbfounded. Inside is a pile of papers stapled together, filled with writing resembling Ghost Talisman, not a word of which he recognizes. It ought to be in Myanmar-Tai languages.
Unwilling to give up, he continues to open several more file folders, but they contain either Myanmar-Tai or Korean and Japanese language systems. If it were Yang Xiao, he might recognize some common Japanese characters, but not Zhou Mingxiao; he hasn’t been exposed to such cultural immersion or developed the habit of watching and learning from adult films. He can’t understand them.
Yet, even if he can’t read them, based on some illustrations and photos, he can roughly guess that these are materials related to paranormal incidents.
These were acquired by the company at a high price for the purpose of filming mockumentaries based on these materials. Those completed VCD discs on the wall are their works.
This aligned with what President Chen told them—that the fire here wasn’t an ordinary accident. Chen’s Strange Film Company offended something during filming, resulting in this tragic incident.
If one path doesn’t work, try another. Zhou Mingxiao begins checking the desk’s built-in drawers, yet whether drawers or the metal cabinet in the corner, they’re all locked, and he doesn’t have the keys. Under these circumstances, he doesn’t dare violently break them open and make too much noise, fearing it would attract those lurking Ghost things.
But he is unwilling to leave just like that, and while filming everywhere with the DV machine, he indeed finds some clues. He discovers a piece of rough-edged paper with a phone number written on it, taped under transparent tape on the outer packaging of a prop-filled cardboard box at the desk’s side. It’s noted as Xu Yan from Pioneer Film Equipment Rental.
Connecting this to the box of props before him, Zhou Mingxiao understands that Xu Yan is from a company named Pioneer Film Equipment Rental, and this box of props is provided by them—they have a collaboration with Chen’s Strange Film Industry.
This is a very important clue. Through this number and name, they can find people associated with Chen’s Strange Film Company. Currently, they severely lack understanding of Chen’s Strange Film Company.
