Chapter 265: Chapter 226: Refrigerator
The black plastic bag contained a human head, and without saying, the remaining parts of this unfortunate fellow were packed in the other bags.
It was the cheating ex-boyfriend the woman had mentioned, dismembered and hidden in the fridge.
"Drip."
"Drip."
The sound of slippers hitting the floor echoed from the bedroom, causing Li Qingxuan to shudder. He quickly shut the fridge door as the woman walked out of the bedroom.
Leaning against the bedroom door frame, the woman’s eyes carried a teasing gleam, "What are you doing, is there a problem with the fridge?"
Li Qingxuan, maintaining a composed expression, walked towards the woman and handed her the cold beer he was holding, saying seriously, "Miss Su, I came to give you a massage at your invitation, not as your servant. I hope you understand that."
The woman laughed, carelessly twisted off the bottle cap, and took a few sips before lying back down on the bed, posing seductively like a boneless snake.
"Massage my shoulders, they are sore."
Li Qingxuan, feeling helpless, began to loosen the woman’s shoulders. But as he worked, he sensed something was off—the woman’s shoulder seemed...as if there was a scar, and the bone felt odd, as though it had been broken in the middle.
The next second, the woman twisted her body slightly, the nightgown covering her shoulder slipped down, and in the dim candlelight, Li Qingxuan witnessed a horrifying sight.
He saw a vicious, everted wound on the woman’s pale shoulder. The wound, running vertically, appeared to have been caused by an ax or a similar chopping instrument, nearly severing her arm.
The reason the woman’s arm had not yet fallen off was solely because someone had crudely stitched the wound together with coarse linen thread, needle by needle. Li Qingxuan was stupefied by the sight. The stitching was devoid of any skill, the scars hideously ugly, resembling those on a tattered rag doll.
Furthermore, Li Qingxuan caught sight of a ghastly gash on the woman’s neck—a blow from the ax had also removed her head, and her body was now a piecemeal construct.
Li Qingxuan had finally understood why the woman was so pale; she was nothing more than a blood-drained corpse, the pungent scent of perfume serving to mask the stench of decay.
Concerned about arousing the woman’s suspicion, Li Qingxuan took a deep breath and continued the massage, addressing the woman’s requests for a shoulder, spine, and waist massage in turn.
As he massaged her waist, Li Qingxuan was on the verge of breakdown; the woman’s slim waist was completely severed, and with each application of pressure, there came a horrifying sound of broken bones grinding against each other.
The woman lying on the bed suddenly turned over and stared fixedly at Li Qingxuan. Pretending as if nothing were amiss, he kept his head low and continued the massage, even though his fingers occasionally pressed into the wounds.
"Your mouth has a scent I don’t like," the woman said shrilly, "There’s a little cabinet on the bathroom wall, go clean it up immediately."
Li Qingxuan dared not disregard the woman’s command, keenly aware that the woman seemed ready to show her hand. He worried that if he went back to the bedroom, he’d fall prey to her murderous intent.
He went to the bathroom as instructed and opened the small cabinet on the wall. Inside, there was a brand-new blue toothbrush, a rinsing cup, and an unremarkable tube of toothpaste.
Li Qingxuan turned his head to look at three other blue toothbrushes on the washbasin, his heart sinking. Apparently, every ex-boyfriend that fell victim had gone through what he was experiencing now.
Not daring to brush his teeth, Li Qingxuan tiptoed out of the bathroom with goosebumps. To his surprise, the door had been opened at some point just enough to allow a person to slip through sideways. Peering through the gap, the hallway looked quiet and peaceful.
If it had been before, Li Qingxuan wouldn’t have hesitated to dash out, but after reading Teacher Yang’s script, he had grown more cunning and suspected that this was very likely a ghost’s trap.
He hadn’t completed his task for the night; he still hadn’t massaged Miss Su’s legs. He couldn’t just leave without saying goodbye.
Three blue toothbrushes on the washbasin correlated to three ex-boyfriends. He had found one, but where were the other two?
This thought suddenly filled Li Qingxuan with confidence. If the bodies hadn’t been found, did that mean those two had escaped?
In other words, even if one brushed their teeth with the blue toothbrush, there might still be a way to escape the female ghost’s pursuit.
To confirm his theory, Li Qingxuan crept over to the large freezer and gently slid open its door. But the next second, all his hopes of survival were dashed. Clenching his jaw and trembling all over, he couldn’t make a sound.
Inside the freezer were pieces of bodies, frozen stiff and neatly arranged.
Two bodies.
Two heads placed on top, both men, whose faces still displayed the fear they must have felt right before their deaths.
Brushing your teeth with the toothbrush meant death, no exceptions.
But defying the client’s order also meant death, likely even more gruesome.
Faced with certain death either way, Li Qingxuan couldn’t see any path to survival.
Time ticked away, and strangely, no urging voice came from the bedroom. Li Qingxuan understood—the woman knew she had him completely under her control.
No, it was a female ghost.
Li Qingxuan took a deep breath and forced himself to remain calm. He began to meticulously analyze every sentence the female ghost said to him. Under immense pressure, his mind raced, and soon, he noticed something strange.
The female ghost hadn’t directly compelled him to brush his teeth; instead, she had insinuated that there was a smell in his mouth and guided him to seek out the small cabinet on the bathroom wall.
"Having a bad taste in my mouth doesn’t necessarily mean I have to brush my teeth. I can just rinse with toothpaste, or, if push comes to shove, I can swallow half a tube if need be."
Li Qingxuan didn’t hesitate. He didn’t touch the life-threatening toothbrush but instead grabbed the toothpaste and squeezed it into his mouth, rinsing vigorously. After a few rinses and worrying that the taste might not be strong enough, he ingested half a tube, only stopping when even his burps tasted of mint.
When he returned to the bedroom, the female ghost was still lying on the bed, all her nightclothes discarded. Her pale body was covered in ghastly and terrifying wounds. Now, Li Qingxuan had confirmed that the woman was indeed a ghost and had suffered a brutal dismemberment before her death.
She was dismembered while still alive, as could be deduced from the degree of distortion in some of the wounds; the woman had been struggling at the time.
When Li Qingxuan, with a mouth full of toothpaste froth, exited the bathroom, he was met with a chilling sight—the door to the room was tightly shut, but the refrigerator door was ajar, and a human head, placed askew, was staring intently at him through the gap.
Li Qingxuan immediately understood that the open door he had seen before was nothing but an illusion by the ghost. The door that had actually been opened was not the room door, but the refrigerator door.
Had he chosen to escape through the room door earlier, he would have ended up inside the refrigerator, keeping the company of whatever was in there.
"Brother, you’re dead and still trying to drag me down with you, that’s not cool," Li Qingxuan silently muttered to himself, then closed the refrigerator door.
After returning to the woman’s bedside, Li Qingxuan bent down and continued the massage. Now that the woman noticed the toothpaste froth in his mouth, she stopped talking.
Once the full-body massage was completed, the woman gestured for him to leave. This time, the bedroom door was open when he left.
Before leaving, Li Qingxuan glanced at the wall clock; the time had reached 11:55 PM, meaning he had lingered in room 4017 for nearly an hour.
However, the result was positive; he had managed to survive. But his original plan was disrupted, and he no longer had time to find Yang Xiao since after midnight, something dreadful would appear within the apartment.
Without further hesitation, Li Qingxuan quickly returned to his own room on the sixth floor.
...
Half an hour earlier, Xu Xinyi, after giving herself a thorough mental pep talk, had also taken action. Her task was the same as Yang Xiao’s last time. Knowing oneself and the enemy, she was confident.
Xu Xinyi even felt that Yang Xiao was incredibly lucky. Had the task been assigned to her from the start, she believed she could have completed it just as well.
It was just a matter of having some courage. If Yang Xiao wasn’t afraid, then neither was she.
Standing in front of room 6037, Xu Xinyi knocked on the door. Everything unfolded just like Yang Xiao had described—the pitiable Old Lady Wu claimed her son was ill and hoped she could take a look. If Xu Xinyi managed to cure her son, there would be a hefty reward.
Once Xu Xinyi was invited into the bedroom, a hand reached out from behind the curtains, resting by the bed.
Drawing on Yang Xiao’s experience, Xu Xinyi claimed she was a descendant of a traditional Chinese medicine family. While pretending to take the pulse, she took the opportunity to observe the characteristics of the hand.
Sure enough, she spotted a tattoo on the wrist—the same one as that of the first man who had died.
Once confident of this discovery, Xu Xinyi’s courage swelled as she boasted about her exceptional medical skills. She bargained with Old Lady Wu, hinting subtly that if she wanted to save her son’s life, she had to pay up, for her home visits were quite expensive.
Old Lady Wu seemed like a provincial elderly woman who had never seen the world before, cowed by Xu Xinyi’s bluster, tears of urgency streaming from her eyes as she begged Xu Xinyi to save her precious son, ready to trade all her belongings for his life.
Xu Xinyi didn’t want to waste too much time, knowing she had to return to her place before midnight. Seeing that it was about time, she began to answer the questions based on the standard answers Yang Xiao had provided.
Squinting, Xu Xinyi rhythmically took the pulse, shaking her head and droning on in a self-assured manner, "Old Lady Wu, let me ask you, does your son have a tattoo of a sky-reaching python on his arm, with a tongue sharp as an arrow?"
Upon hearing this, Old Lady Wu’s upper body darted behind the curtains. Moments later, her excited voice rang out, "Yes, he truly does!"
"Ha ha, another question for you: does your son have a tattoo of a broken dragon on his chest? The tail of the dragon meeting the tail of the python, merging into one."
This time, however, Old Lady Wu fell silent. After fumbling behind the curtains for a while, a strange voice emanated, "No, that’s not right, my son doesn’t have one."
"No?" Xu Xinyi was taken aback, suddenly feeling an inexplicable panic settle in, but still managed to insist, "How... how could he not? Look again, look more carefully."
A moment later, Old Lady Wu emerged from behind the curtain, clutching a solitary arm, her gaze piercing Xu Xinyi with malice, "My son has only one arm left. Where would a chest dragon come from? You’re an ignorant quack!"
Gazing at that severed limb and turning toward the empty bed, Xu Xinyi was dumbfounded, her face stricken with terror. But before she could even scream, Old Lady Wu pounced on her, pinning her down and ripping apart her mouth, tearing her tongue to shreds.
Then she pulled out a rusty cleaver from behind her and started hacking away at Xu Xinyi’s face and body, cursing as she slashed, until the blood that splattered painted the entire wall red.
