Chapter 266: Chapter 227: The Blood Handprint
Yang Xiao had no task that night, but in order to support Li Qingxuan who was undertaking a task on the sixth floor, he waited until nearly midnight. Finally, he heard the sound of a door opening outside, followed by footsteps quickly moving in the opposite direction and fading away.
"Phew—" Yang Xiao exhaled with relief. He glanced at the old wall clock and understood that Li Qingxuan had survived the night. However, fearing the arrival of the Ball-slapping Ghost after midnight, Li Qingxuan hurried back, not daring to meet him here.
Because of the shadow of Old Lady Wu, Yang Xiao dared not sleep in the bedroom. He grabbed a thick quilt and reluctantly lay down on the sofa, making sure to turn on all the lights in the room.
Time passed and Yang Xiao’s thoughts grew increasingly blurry. At last, with a wave of irresistible drowsiness, his head tilted, and he fell into a deep sleep.
To be honest, he did not sleep well that night; he had a series of strange dreams. He dreamed that Old Lady Wu, furious, came to his door, demanding to know why her son wasn’t getting better despite using his medical recipe. Too scared to open the door, Old Lady Wu began hacking at it with a kitchen knife, eventually breaking in.
What was more terrifying was that Old Lady Wu had two human heads tied to her waist with thin hemp rope. One was of the man who had rushed into the fog and died at the start of the mission, and the other, unrecognizable due to the chopped and bloodied face, appeared to be a woman, judging from the long hair matted with blood.
"Ding!"
"Ding!"
"Ding!"
...
In a daze, Yang Xiao was awakened by the sound of a bell. When he opened his eyes, it was already daylight outside. The bell was coming from the old wall clock, still striking eight in the morning, just like yesterday.
He hurriedly ate an old-fashioned bread with a burnt taste and drank a can of milk to barely satisfy his hunger. Yang Xiao listened at the door for a while, making sure everything was safe before opening it.
Yet, he’d hardly taken a few steps down the corridor when, the next second, a scream exploded inside the apartment. Yang Xiao was certain it was on the floor below him, very close by.
Yang Xiao did not rush over immediately but waited a moment since he recognized the screamer as Cheng Ya.
Cheng Ya might very well be the only newcomer in this mission, and coincidentally, she had been assigned to investigate a strange noise in the elevator the previous night. According to his judgment, the chances of her surviving were slim.
So... it was very likely a trap, one that had to be guarded against.
Only after hearing hurried footsteps from different directions did he slowly set out. The screaming had come from the third floor, and by the time Yang Xiao arrived, quite a crowd had gathered near the elevator.
Peering through the crowd at Cheng Ya, Yang Xiao, too, was shocked by the scene before him. The woman, who had been perfectly fine yesterday, was now completely unrecognizable.
Her right hand was missing, and the wrist was meticulously wrapped in gauze. Her left eye area was also covered diagonally with white gauze, wrapped around the back of her head several times with medical tape before being tied into a knot to secure it. If Yang Xiao was not mistaken, her left eye had also been removed.
What was odd was that Cheng Ya was completely clean, without a trace of blood on her.
"Cheng Ya, calm down, we are humans, it’s daylight, you’re safe," people tried approaching Cheng Ya, but it was clear she was terrified, curling up in a corner and screaming nonstop.
Just as everyone was at a loss, Fu Xuechang was the first to step forward. Without caring about Cheng Ya’s resistance, he pulled her over and slapped her face twice.
"Slap!"
"Slap!"
Before Cheng Ya could scream, her mouth opened, and she received two more vicious slaps.
There was no denying it, the effect was immediate; Cheng Ya’s dilated pupils slowly focused, and her eyes looking at the crowd became clear.
Tong Han took out a bottle of mineral water from his cloth bag, unscrewed it, and went over to Cheng Ya to help her drink a few sips. Finally, Cheng Ya gradually calmed down.
But just when everyone thought they would be able to learn the full story from Cheng Ya, they found that her memory was very limited, and the logic of what she said was poor, probably because of the overwhelming fear.
In Cheng Ya’s fragmented narration, everyone could only speculate and guess.
According to her recollections, she had left her room at one in the morning and came alone to the third floor of the apartment. She couldn’t remember what happened after that. Still, she was certain she had seen a woman. It was this woman who had left her in this ghostly condition, but the strange thing was that she couldn’t remember any of the intervening events.
"Useless thing," Wang Longhui muttered with a look of disdain.
Tong Han carefully examined Cheng Ya’s body and removed the eye covering, indeed confirming everyone’s guess that her left eye had been removed.
A moment later, Tong Han stood up, his young face filled with solemnity and an undeniable professionalism. "Her left eye has been extracted, and her right hand has been amputated. The perpetrator’s technique was very skilled, and the wound treatment was also very professional."
The words overwhelmed the already fright-struck Cheng Ya, who suddenly began to cause a commotion, "No, that’s not right, that woman made three cuts on my body!"
"Three cuts?"
It wasn’t the time for modesty. Tong Han quickly stripped away Cheng Ya’s overcoat to check her whole body but found no third wound.
Just as Tong Han reached out to remove the last two pieces of cloth covering Cheng Ya’s modesty, Yang Xiao stopped her and then stepped forward, asking Cheng Ya to turn around.
As Yang Xiao unwrapped the bandage from the back of Cheng Ya’s head and pushed aside her long hair, the next second, everyone couldn’t help but gasp — there was a horizontal wound across the back of her scalp.
The wound wasn’t large and there were signs of suturing, done with great professionalism.
Mo Daidai nodded after looking at it and said, "It seems this is why Cheng Ya is having memory issues. That female ghost performed a minor surgery in her brain."
Besides this, Li Qingxuan also discovered a bloody handprint on the inside of Cheng Ya’s taken-off jacket. Since she had been facing them with her back to the elevator the whole time, no one had noticed it before.
The bloody handprint was well-defined with long, slender fingers — it was a left hand. Li Qingxuan held up his own hand to compare and found that the other hand was smaller than his by a size.
However, when Tong Han compared it, he found that the size was almost the same. It looked like this was the hand of the female ghost who had removed Cheng Ya’s left eye and cut off her right hand.
What baffled everyone was that this female ghost disassembled Cheng Ya’s body without leaving any blood behind, yet strangely, after the surgery, a bloody handprint was left, which seemed more like some kind of symbolic gesture.
In addition to this, Yang Xiao found another peculiar detail — the portion of the female ghost’s left ring finger on the bloody handprint was missing a small piece.
After a moment, Yang Xiao understood, "Her left ring finger had a ring on it. This female ghost was married when she was alive."
No sooner had he finished speaking than Qu Yi, who had been silent all this while, changed her expression. She then took out a wrinkled piece of clothing from the cloth bag hanging over her shoulder, spread it out, and to everyone’s surprise, there was a bloody handprint on the back of this piece of clothing as well.
"Last night, while I was on patrol, I encountered a very terrifying figure," Qu Yi recalled. "I think it must have been what you’re calling the Ball-slapping Ghost."
The two bloody handprints were compared and the difference was obvious; the handprint from the Ball-slapping Ghost was clearly larger with thicker knuckles, likely belonging to a man.
More importantly, the bloody handprint left by the Ball-slapping Ghost was also a left hand, and it also had a gap at the root of the ring finger.
"Holy shit," Li Qingxuan was startled. "These two were married!"
The Ball-slapping Ghost and the Surgical Ghost, one male and one female, both left bloody handprints on people’s backs, both on the left hand, and both had rings on their left ring fingers. If you called all of these coincidences, probably no one would believe it.
However, there were differences between the two handprints as well; for instance, the handprint made by the female Surgical Ghost was more on the right side, with fingertips pointing upwards, while the male Ball-slapping Ghost’s was the opposite, leaning to the left, with fingertips pointing downwards.
Male left, female right — it made perfect sense.
Seeing the piece of clothing Qu Yi brought out, Fu Changxue became alert, "It looks like you got caught by that Ball-slapping Ghost. How did you survive?"
Qu Yi shook her head and confessed, "I don’t know either. That thing was very fast, and I couldn’t outrun him. It appeared behind me all of a sudden, and I didn’t dare to move, then... then..."
Wang Longhui grew anxious, "Then what?"
"I... I didn’t dare to look back, and then that thing reached out from behind... it reached out and touched me, fondling all over me."
Li Qingxuan was baffled, "Some sort of pervert?"
"Shut up," Yang Xiao purposely provoked conflict with Li Qingxuan. "He was feeling for money, our hard-earned money!"
This struck a chord with everyone, as they realized what Yang Xiao meant; Fu Changxue nodded in agreement, and said, "Chu is right; it seems this is what the money we earn from our jobs is for. I guess if you have money on you, the Ball-slapping Ghost might let you go."
After a pause, Fu Changxue carefully added, "I mean there wouldn’t be a bloody handprint left."
After he finished, as if a realization dawned on them, everyone turned to look at Mo Daidai. Besides Qu Yi, he was the other one on patrol last night.
But Mo Daidai still had his usual dull and confused expression. He shook his head and said seriously, "I didn’t see any Ball-slapping Ghost last night."
Regardless, the night had been quite fruitful — they learned that there were two ghosts, a male and a female, wandering around in the apartment at night, and they might be a married couple.
"It seems these two are probably the ’external threats’ that the apartment manager was talking about," Fu Changxue sighed and concluded.
It was an evident fact that, as far as it looked, none of the tenant ghosts in the apartment had the ability to go out, and more crucially, tenant ghosts like Old Lady Wu were very fearful of going out at night, and had specifically warned Yang Xiao not to approach the elevator at midnight.
It seemed that what she had been warning Yang Xiao to be wary of was this female Surgical Ghost.
"What about Xu Xinyi?" Suddenly, someone asked.
After a moment, everyone realized that no one had seen her since this morning.
Because they had been attracted by Cheng Ya’s scream earlier on, they all hurried over and in the chaos, they had somehow overlooked the absence of their teammate.
"Where did she go on her assignment last night?" Fu Changxue asked quickly.
"Room 6037, Old Lady Wu who was seeking medical help for her dead son," replied Yang Xiao, who knew there was no easy way to exploit the apartment’s rules. Now, it seemed that Xu Xinyi was more likely to be in grave danger than not.
"Let’s go check it out."
