Chapter 654: Chapter 524: Source_3
Room 701 was a large room, presumably made by combining two smaller rooms. There was no 702, and next came room 703. Yang Xiao helped keep watch as Lu Wencheng pulled a short piece of rusty wire from his pocket, bent it a few times with his hands, and then probed the lock with it. Without any superfluous movements, he poked it gently, lifted it slightly upward, and the lock opened.
As Lu Wencheng gently pushed the door open, he quickly stepped back. The room was pitch-dark and so silent that one could hear a pin drop. Yang Xiao held up the Ghost Lantern with one hand and shone it inside from the doorway. Noticing nothing amiss, they both then entered.
Lu Wencheng, with his combat abilities fully intact, was the first to step in. He felt along the wall as if searching for the light switch.
"Don’t turn on the light, they can see it from outside," Yang Xiao gestured towards the window with his broken arm.
Hearing this, Lu Wencheng nodded repeatedly, put down his backpack, and pulled out a very long flashlight, an old-fashioned one enclosed in a metal case. The yellow light confirmed that the room was an office with several long tables set in the middle.
The tables were wooden, covered with a layer of dark green felt cloth, which in turn was covered by a large glass plate—an old-fashioned arrangement. In addition to the clutter of newspapers and documents, there were also several loose envelopes. Lu Wencheng picked them up and found that many had not even been opened.
Yang Xiao casually opened a few letters and indeed, many turned out to be complaints. Some complained about the management office’s lack of supervision, resulting in East State Mansion becoming a well-known brothel. More complaints were about the clogged sewers at home and the constant foul smell, along with some people mentioning frequent unexplained dizziness.
It wasn’t until he tore open the last letter in his hand that Yang Xiao finally found something of interest.
It was a letter for help.
The writer mentioned that their upstairs neighbor kept to themselves, yet they often encountered strange men in the hallway. There were also strange noises at night upstairs, and they suspected it was a brothel, though they weren’t sure as the two households never interacted.
But lately, it had gotten strangely quiet upstairs. Initially, they thought the men had moved out, but they hadn’t heard any signs of moving. Recently, they’d noticed liquid seeping through their ceiling—not water, nor blood, but some foul-smelling sticky substance, the composition of which they couldn’t determine.
Most peculiarly, it only seeped during the early morning hours, and the foul smell was potent enough to wake them from sleep. Once, unable to bear it, they furiously went upstairs to check, but after knocking several times, there was no response from inside.
However, once they returned to bed, they heard eerie noises from above as if a drunk person was getting up from the floor and staggering step by step.
The footsteps ceased after a few steps, approximately at the door, and then all was still. Overcome with fatigue, they soon fell asleep. The next day, the more they thought about it, the more they felt something was amiss, so they hoped the apartment management would send someone to check.
As he read this, Yang Xiao took a deep breath, thinking that the person who wrote the letter was lucky to be alive. He suspected that the man upstairs had long been killed by a ghost. The ghost took his upper body, leaving behind a Chang Ghost with only the lower half, and the dripping fluid was probably something like corpse water.
The man had gone upstairs at night, rousing the Chang Ghost, but when the Chang Ghost arose to kill, the man had already gone back to bed.
"Look at this." Lu Wencheng came over, handing him a newspaper.
It was a roughly printed evening newspaper with a bold headline that struck the eye: "Unappeased spirits at East Asia Mansion, men upon men, where does the road lead?"
The content was depicted in a bombastically exaggerated language. It recounted a highly sensational story of a loving same-sex couple, where the one playing the male role had an affair with another man in the same apartment and conspired with this newcomer to murder his "wife". They then gruesomely dismembered the body, and the deceased’s lower half was still missing.
"The Source Ghost was this ’wife’," Yang Xiao quickly analyzed. "He targets men from certain professions as an ingrained form of revenge. The missing lower half has transformed into a Fierce Ghost, roaming around. The ghost kills people and takes their upper bodies as it habitually tries to piece together a complete body. What he really wants is his own missing upper half."
Lu Wencheng nodded gravely, "Exactly, I think the same. Now, finding the lost upper body of the Source Ghost is of utmost importance. Once we return it, this crisis may well be resolved."
Once their goal was clear, as they continued to search for information, Yang Xiao’s peripheral vision suddenly caught a glimpse of something hanging on a chair to his right. He turned and walked over out of curiosity, discovering it was a black leather cross-body bag, relatively new. Seeing the bag, it looked familiar to him, and thinking for a moment, his expression suddenly changed, and he immediately urged Lu Wencheng to leave, but it was a bit too late.
As they reached the doorway, they saw three figures standing at the stairwell, blocking their escape route—the same three from the Patrol Defense Office investigation team. The bag hanging on the chair back belonged to the youngest among them.
The leading man fixed his gaze on Yang Xiao and spoke coldly, "We meet again."
"Uh..." Yang Xiao tried to smile, "Officer, what brings you here?"
"Waiting for someone to walk right into the net."
Yang Xiao’s smile froze on his face as he protested, "Officer, we are good people, we came here..."
