Chapter 666: Stain, Elevator, Cigarette [2 in 1]
Translator:Lonelytree
Editor:Millman97
There were screams and wails everywhere; this was a ma.s.s cleansing. The shadow showed a sharp cruelty when the situation demanded it. He would rather kill one thousand innocents than allow the one criminal to escape. After Chen Ge ran out of the building, he soon realized the severity of the situation. The streets, walls, and nearby buildings… the human-shaped stains started to appear on every surface.
They attacked everything within their sight. Be it living humans or dead Specters, as long as they were discovered, the stains" attack was relentless.
"Get lost!" The window of one of the buildings to Chen Ge"s left was cracked open. Through the security mesh, Chen Ge saw a man who was only in his pants slamming a table lamp against the corner of the room as hard as he could. The room door was pushed open noiselessly, and a dangerous aura spilled into the room following the human stain. It was an old man. His back was hunched over, and his faceless features turned to the man. Then with a speed that did not match his body, he charged toward the man at the window.
"F*ck! Don"t come any closer!" The man gripped the ash tray left on the windowsill and lobbed it at the old man. However, the gla.s.s ash tray phased through the old man"s body and, it did nothing to slow him down. The fear in the bare-chested man"s eyes were overflowing. He grabbed everything that he could reach around him and tossed them at the old man, but like the ash tray, they did not hinder his approach at all.
"I fought for this house from a few other mad men. It was a hard fight." The man had seen many strange things during his years in Li Wan City. He had experienced many things, but he had managed to survive them all. He was a mad man and had been sent to the sanatorium multiple times by his family. He had an unshakable faith in the presence of G.o.d, but unlike the other cultish disciples, he saw himself as the divine incarnate. The proof was, no matter how harshly he treated himself, he would never really die. Immortality, that was his claim to divinity.
"F*ck you, old man! You"re making an enemy of your G.o.d!" The man was unable to escape through the window because it was locked behind a security mesh. The house that normally brought him endless security normally now became the man"s iron cage. A fight was his only option. The man grabbed the toppled chair next to him and aimed it right at the human stain"s head.
This. .h.i.t should have caused ma.s.sive blunt force trauma, but to the man"s despair, when the chair landed on the old man"s head, it felt like he was. .h.i.tting a pool of liquid. The chair crashed through the stain. The man quickly released his grip on the chair, but by then, the old man was already standing before him.
The man ran to the bedside, and he finally noticed Chen Ge, who was watching outside the window. He called to Chen Ge for help, but it was already too late. The human stain climbed onto his body, sticking onto his back before slowly dissolving into the man"s body.
The man"s body turned gray at an impossible speed. His hands that gripped the mesh on the window slowly weakened. With the loss of strength, another face slowly appeared above his own, like it was superimposed over it. The new face was wrinkled, ashen, and dry.
The two faces overlapped. The man lost his rationality from extreme pain. He started to crawl toward the corner of the mesh where a small hole was cut out. This should have been the emergency exit that he had carved for himself. One would have a hard time noticing it if one did not pay attention. Now that Chen Ge thought about it, the man probably did not wear a s.h.i.+rt because it might get caught on the mesh when he tried to escape.
"Save me, save me!" Blood gashes opened on the man"s body like he was whipped. The man"s expression was beyond description. It felt as if something had crawled into the blood veins and was rupturing them from within. Grayish blood leaked out from the man"s body, which was wasting away. The pool of blood forming underneath him was completely dark and filled with gray specks.
Several seconds later, the gray specks gathered together, and they crawled out from the man"s body.
That scene, Chen Ge watched extremely curiously. The old man appeared to have been reborn from killing his victim, and other than the desire for destruction, Chen Ge caught a second emotion from the old man—the rush of revenge. The man"s dead body was stuck in the middle of the mesh, and the scary thing was, after the dead body dropped onto the ground, another small stain appeared on the location of his death.
The stain was still shapeless, but Chen Ge had a feeling that if it was left to grow, after another few years, another human-shaped stain would occupy the spot on the windowsill.
"Those killed by the stains will become a stain themselves—this thing works exactly like an infectious disease." The man"s death was extremely painful, and that decreased Chen Ge"s wish to get entangled with any of them. "The shadow"s trump card sure is scary. After the "ma.s.s cleansing", more human-shaped stains will occupy Li Wan City."
A strange sound came from behind him, and the faceless girl was still following behind Chen Ge. At the same time, the old man inside the house also discovered Chen Ge, and he started chasing after him.
"Everything has its weakness, but unfortunately, I don"t have the time to go searching for it." Chen Ge wished to run away from the girl and the old man, but he noticed that there were more human-shaped stains down the road.
"This is not looking good." Chen Ge looked further down the street with his Yin Yang Vision. More and more human stains inside the buildings were waking up. Many murderers were forced out onto the streets, and generally, they were running in two directions. One was the direction where the shadow was fighting Doctor Gao. There were many human stains leading that way, but they were all forced out by the blood fog and chains.
Chen Ge had no idea where the other direction led to. To not expose himself, he followed quietly behind the crowd, mixing into the group of maddened murderers. For those who managed to survive in Li Wan City, no matter how powerful they were, at least there was one quality that they had in common—they all ran extremely fast. When one was chased by Specters, only those who could outrun the Specters would survive.
Li Wan City was not exactly large. Chased by the group of stains, the group of people soon circled around the town. Eventually, they stopped in front of an old-fas.h.i.+oned apartment building. This building appeared even older than the other buildings in town. It had an elevator with collapsible door that were only seen in old movies. Rarely were such elevators used in residential apartments—they were normally used for the transportation of large objects.
"Get out of the way!" There was only so many people that could fit inside the elevator, and everyone wanted to get inside it. When their lives were threatened, this group of murderers revealed their true nature. There was no meaning of group effort between them—they never considered the possibility of group survival, only wanting what was best for themselves.
The apartment was nine stories high and appeared to be the tallest building in Li Wan City. Chen Ge glanced at the building with Yin Yang Vision, and he soon discovered something strange about this place. Other buildings were covered with stains, but this building was curiously quiet. There were no stains and no Specters. In fact, it felt like the place was deserted.
"How come I feel like this building houses a terror more terrifying than the human stains?"
The murderer who was the fastest already charged into the elevator. He pressed for the elevator to close, ignoring those who were trying to get in.
BANG!
When the people outside realized the man planned to escape with the elevator alone, they tossed all their weapons into the elevators. As mentioned earlier, the door of the elevator was collapsible, meaning that there were gaps between them. Furthermore, it moved slowly. The result was that none of them were going to leave with the elevator.
"I think I"ll take the stairs." Chen Ge had no interest in these murderers. They did not even possess the potential of becoming his employee. Instead of fighting with them, he would rather go and conduct the investigation on his own. He walked to the staircase, and before he even walked in, Chen Ge froze like he was electrocuted when he lifted his head upward. Right next to this building"s only staircase was a poster for New Century Park!
The poster was yellowed, and a large part was missing, but Chen Ge managed to tell what it was from the first glance because right in the center of the poster was his Haunted House!
Many years ago, when the theme park first started, Chen Ge"s Haunted House had been the main attraction. At the time, it had been an age when information could not be spread so quickly. The theme park had thus pasted the flyer and ads all over Jiujiang, and the visitors who came to theme park would be given a delicately designed theme park poster. If they enjoyed their experience there, they would help promote the theme park.
If that was all, Chen Ge might not have been so shocked—he would only have been surprised—but he was reminded of something else. On the way there, he had once received the phone call from Fan Chong. On the phone, Fan Chong had said clearly that he had finished Xiao Bu"s game, and the last scene of the game was Xiao Bu entering a building. On the wall of the building was a poster for New Century Park!
"I"ve found it!" While Chen Ge was wandering around Li Wan City earlier, he had been searching for this place. It had eluded him until now. "Xiao Bu is probably here, and so is the clue left behind by my parents!"
At the underground morgue, after Chen Ge fought with Doctor Gao, Doctor Gao had used the last trace of sanity that he had left to show Chen Ge a picture. Inside the picture, Chen Ge"s parents were standing with a girl in red dress—the girl had been none other than Xiao Bu, so Chen Ge could confirm that Xiao Bu knew something about his parents because there had been some interaction between them in the past!
The more missions that he unlocked, the more he realized that the mystery behind his parent"s disappearance was deeper than he had initially thought. The scale of that mystery kept growing, and it was far beyond his imagination. Whenever he thought that he was getting close to the truth, a deeper darkness would be exposed.
He reached out to touch the edge of the poster. Chen Ge looked at the corridor that led to the staircase. He summoned all of his employees and walked up it.
"It"s sealed?" Chen Ge had no idea whether this was the shadow"s doing or the building itself had been sealed a long time ago. The corridor was blocked off by a wall of bricks, leaving not even a gap.
BANG!
Chen Ge tried to hit the wall with the hammer. He realized that the wall was incredibly thick, and it would take him a long time before he could even get a crack on the wall.
"Looks like the elevator is the only way." Xiao Bu might have been hiding inside the building. This was pertinent to the ultimate secret in Li Wan City and the truth behind his parent"s disappearance. Chen Ge switched up his usual kind demeanor. He grabbed the hammer and raced toward the elevator with Xu Yin in tow. "If any one of you dare to close the door, I"ll snap the rope that carries the elevator!"
Chen Ge yelled when he was ten meters away. His tone was flat and calm; he did not sound particularly pushy, but all of the murderers started to quiet down.
The building itself did not have any human stains, and the human stains outside started to slow down whenever they neared the building. However, they merely slowed down; they did not stop. This building seemed to be the second sacred location for the shadow. When he discovered that someone had entered this building, he issued that strange voice again like he was summoning people"s names.
Hearing his voice, the human stains picked up their speed and rushed at the building.
"If the shadow knows that Xiao Bu is hiding here, why didn"t he just come after her? This is his territory." The few murderers were squeezed inside the elevator. Before Chen Ge arrived, they started to kill each other due to the overweight issue. No one was willing to voluntarily exit the elevator, so they had to toss the dead bodies out.
After Chen Ge entered the elevator, it finally moved. With a shudder, it started to move downward.
"Why is it moving down?" The murderer who stood next to the control panel gasped in shock. "I was sure I press for the top floor!"
"Don"t panic. Perhaps there were people downstairs who wished to get up." It was cramped inside the elevator, but even so, there was a respectable s.p.a.ce around Chen Ge.
This building had two bas.e.m.e.nt levels, both rented cellars, mostly rented out to foreigners who could not afford the other rooms. A few years ago, the Jiujiang government had planned to focus its development around Eastern Jiujiang. Everyone had been full of hope for this project. They had built factories and skysc.r.a.pers, and that had attracted foreigners like Jia Ming who went there looking for work. Of course, no one would have expected Eastern Jiujiang to end up like this several years later.
The elevator moved very slowly, and strangely enough, when this elevator pa.s.sed first floor bas.e.m.e.nt, it stopped. The elevator opened to an empty s.p.a.ce. The man who stood next to the control panel quickly pressed on the b.u.t.ton that should lead them upstairs. Moments later, the doors closed, but the elevator still did not move upward, instead continuing to move down. Shortly after, it opened its door at the second-floor bas.e.m.e.nt.
"What"s going on?" The man pressed the b.u.t.tons a few more times, but the elevator doors refused to close. He tried for a long time before gasping in shock. "Why is it showing that we"re over the weight limit?"
The screens on these types of old-fas.h.i.+oned elevators were on the control panel. They were very small, and one would not notice the words there unless one paid close attention.
"No one has left or entered the elevator. Why would we suddenly go over the weight limit? Did something enter the elevator earlier?" Everyone in the elevator had lived for some time in Li Wan City, so they knew about the various situations that they might encounter there.
The problem placed before their eyes was whether to stay inside the elevator or leave. If they stayed inside the elevator, they would make company with ghosts, but if they alighted from the elevator, there might be more ghosts waiting for them outside.
"Perhaps something is wrong with the elevator. Is anyone willing to go out to see if it"s working?" someone suggested, but that quickly devolved into a non-decision because no one wanted to leave. Compared to the darkened underground, moving upward was a brighter choice, or at least that was what common sense dictated.
Maintaining this stalemate was not going to work, and Chen Ge was not going to kill the rest of the murderers—he did not see the point either. Thus, he volunteered to leave the elevator. Strangely enough, once he alighted from the elevator, it returned to normal.
"What"s the meaning of this? Can this elevator detect the weight of ghosts and added their presence to the weight limit?"
After Chen Ge left, the rest of them quickly closed the door as if afraid that the man might suddenly change his mind.
This time, the elevator doors closed honestly. At the last moment, Chen Ge caught sight of several human shadows in the elevator who stood facing away from him.
"I wish all of you luck."
Chen Ge held the hammer and ran down the corridor. The strange things that he noticed grew. For example, there were well-preserved theme park posters on the wall and some abandoned machines, all of which were somehow related to his Haunted House.
He ran to the deepest part of the bas.e.m.e.nt and stopped before one of the doors.
This door looked similar to the others, but there were many cigarette b.u.t.ts littered around the door, and the brand was exactly the one that Chen Ge"s father had a penchant for.