Chapter 47: A Certain Victim

Because there was no lighting, Li Sanli spent a great deal of effort reopening the door.

Afterward, he stood at the entrance and said to Zhou You,

“I haven’t touched anything inside.”

“That haunted table is in the bedroom.”

“But I don’t recommend that you go in and look at it.”

“That thing is just too creepy...”

Li Sanli was still rambling on about something, but Zhou You had already started walking toward the room.

“Hey, hey, hey, I’m not finished yet. Wait a sec...”

Before Li Sanli could finish speaking,

Behind the two of them, the iron door suddenly slammed shut with a loud Bang!

Did you do that?

The emaciated fat man slowly turned his gaze over, desperately hoping to receive a positive answer from Zhou You.

However, Zhou You merely shrugged innocently.

“...”

Li Sanli rolled his eyes back and fainted on the spot.

Walking over to him, Zhou You pinched the pressure point beneath his nose.

After confirming that nothing was wrong with him, he raised his hand and looked at the brass bell on his wrist again.

Even now, the bell was still ringing.

The problem was...

The sound was extremely faint.

So faint that it could easily be overlooked if one was not paying attention.

Zhou You had never encountered such a situation before.

Even in the Night Watchman scenario, when facing the weakest stairwell face, the bell had never rung this softly.

Before Zhou You could make sense of it, however, the curtains in the distance suddenly dropped shut.

The entire room instantly sank into darkness.

An ordinary person would probably have started screaming by now.

But Zhou You...

After experiencing so many horrifying scenes, his heart had long become as solid as stone.

Even if Sadako crawled out of a television set, he could calmly walk over and ask, “Yaranaika?”

As for a mere curtain trying to scare him?

What a joke.

The other side clearly knew that this was only the appetizer.

A faint murmuring sound began echoing throughout the room.

It seemed close to his ears, yet also impossibly distant.

Just as someone attempted to listen more carefully,

Suddenly,

Slap!

A bright red bloody handprint appeared on the wall.

Then the crimson color rapidly multiplied.

Soon it covered the entire wall.

The whole room seemed dyed blood-red.

The murmuring transformed into wailing.

The cries even rushed directly into his ears.

Yet the bell remained just as faint as before.

In fact, Zhou You himself did not sense any sinister coldness or vicious aura at all.

So he directly ignored the abnormalities around him and walked to the bedroom door.

Slowly, he pushed it open.

There was not much furniture inside.

Only a bed, a wardrobe, and a rear-projection television.

However, there were surprisingly many things besides the furniture.

Skulls.

Tarot cards.

Bizarre folk decorations.

Divination tools commonly used by Romani fortune-tellers.

While there were no disgusting spirit-child dolls, there were enough occult-related collectibles to make it clear this was no ordinary hobby.

“Just how big are Li Sanli and his girlfriend’s hearts? They actually sleep in a place like this?”

Carefully moving a Buddha-shaped Ultraman Tiga figurine aside, Zhou You looked toward the center of the room.

A table stood there.

Compared to the absurd things surrounding it, the table appeared rather ordinary.

It looked like the sort of mass-produced item that might cost only a few dozen pounds at IKEA.

The only unusual thing was that countless yellow talismans had been pasted all around it.

Taking the yellow paper from his pocket, Zhou You compared it.

They were identical.

So he stepped forward twice.

But at that moment, everything in the bedroom began trembling.

A dark shadow gradually emerged above the table.

Like smoke, it gathered together and revealed a female face.

She looked around eleven or twelve years old.

An age when she should still have been attending school.

Yet her face contained nothing but profound fear and madness.

Then a shrill scream erupted.

“Get out!”

The piercing scream instantly swept through everything.

Zhou You frowned but still took another step forward.

“Don’t come near me!!!”

The ghost’s face twisted further.

The entire room began screaming.

The deafening noise filled his ears.

The intensity was almost enough to drive a person’s brain insane.

But at that moment, an exceptionally clear voice rang out.

“Om.”

In an instant, every illusion shattered.

The ghost widened her eyes.

Yet all color vanished from them.

Although she quickly recovered and attempted to scream again, Zhou You had already endured the exhaustion caused by the true word and closed in on her position.

A sharp blade cut through the air.

Cold light flashed across its edge.

It was the gleam of the Bloodstained Dagger.

But just as Zhou You pinned down the spirit and was about to stab downward, he suddenly frowned.

A certain talent had activated at a very inappropriate time.

Under the influence of the Eye That Sees Causes, countless images suddenly flashed before him.

He saw an ordinary yet warm daily life.

He saw laughter and joy shared with friends at school.

But he also saw tears and desperate pleas while being kidnapped.

He saw despair and screams while being dismembered.

Finally, all the scenes froze on a single image.

It was the ghost’s corpse, already cut into pieces.

And a strangely shaped ritual altar.

The next moment, everything vanished.

When Zhou You raised his knife again, he saw something entirely unexpected.

The ghost had not taken advantage of the opportunity to attack.

Instead, she had curled herself into a ball.

Like a frightened child, she hid in the corner and sobbed continuously.

Seriously?

How am I supposed to stab her now?

Given his personality, if the other party had tried to kill him on sight, or had already caused deaths and injuries, then no matter how tragic their circumstances were, he would have eliminated them without hesitation.

Just like Liu Shang and the Security Captain from the Night Watchman scenario.

Good is rewarded with good.

Evil is repaid with evil.

That was the simplest and most fundamental moral principle his grandfather had taught him since childhood.

The problem was that this ghost had never harmed anyone.

She had merely instinctively regarded this room as her territory and driven away all outsiders and foreign objects.

And now she had lost all hostility.

Of course, the main reason was...

Zhou You gently poked her with the handle of his knife.

The crying instantly became louder.

“I say, don’t do that. It makes it look like I’m bullying a little kid...”

Zhou You slumped his shoulders helplessly.

At this point, he truly could not bring himself to attack.

But the thing obviously could not remain here either.

If nothing else, Li Sanli and his girlfriend definitely would not be able to tolerate it.

“So what am I supposed to do...”

“I can’t exactly sell this thing to someone else and let it harm them.”

Scratching his chin, Zhou You suddenly thought of something.

“Wait a minute.”

“Since I’ll be spending quite a lot of time inside the Bizarre Game lately, my apartment is going to sit empty anyway.”

“The security around my neighborhood isn’t very good either.”

“I’m always worried about burglars.”

“So...”

“Why don’t I just move this table into my own home?”