After seeing these choices, Bai Yan unexpectedly had the guts to relax and let the dust settle for a bit. The third ghost has finally appeared.
“Since the three ghosts had shown up in this specific apartment complex, doesn’t that mean that the other two players also live here?”
Bai Yan lowly mumbled to himself as he stared at the three choices in front of him, “Right now, the three ghosts have come out. This round of the game has three players in it. If every person has a corresponding ghost, then that would make sense. Following this train of thought and analyzing the situation, if I just pretend to not see it, it could possibly go away on its own, but the text strongly emphasized the narrow slit by the window, saying that if the ghost baby turned sideways, it could get in. If I didn’t do anything, wouldn’t it enter tonight?”
“In this game, doing good deeds would result in ghosts dealing with you, then what about wrongdoings? Will the consequence be the ghost stirring up some trouble?”
Bai Yan thought about the choices again, including the one where Wu Jingang would ruthlessly die, making his heart feel roused. But dwelling on each of them for a while, he ultimately didn’t move his hand towards that option, instead, he picked the safest one.
The game was played in a considerably strange way. Maybe this time, he could experiment if he could resist the ghost inside this game.
Since Bai Yan still had four resurrection coins left, he couldn’t help but think about border-lining wooing death.
When he was saved during the old granny incident, his body particularly felt sore, but this constant ache surprisingly made him feel a bit happy since it took away his boredom.
With these thoughts filling his mind, he didn’t hesitate and pressed ‘B’ on the screen.
Immediately, the game took over his body, and Bai Yan happily darted to the kitchen, grabbing a long staff. He rushed towards the window, where the ghost baby stood from the other side, fixing its bitter gaze at him.
Upon seeing this, Bai Yan quickly opened the window and violently smashed the baby with great force. After a few swings, the ghost baby fell from the ledge and dropped three stories down, emitting the echoes of a fallen heavy object.
After driving away the ghost baby, Bai Yan slowly extended his neck and peaked down. The ground was messily splattered with fresh blood. The ghost baby seemed to have fallen to its death.
Bai Yan heard himself exclaim from alarm and promptly closed the window shut. After he once again laid on his bed, he finally got back control over his body.
“Option B was great! The ghost baby wasn’t hard to handle at all.” Picking the right choice, Bai Yan couldn’t help but feel a bit depressed. He was ready to justify himself but didn’t think that the ghost baby would be so useless.
Before closing his eyes, Bai Yan carelessly glanced back at the window, and on it was only a long streak of blood. The ghost baby apparently wouldn’t be coming up again.
Wait a minute. What was on the window resting on its stomach?
Bai Yan immediately put on his eyeglasses that he had put down and found out that the ghost baby had sneakily crawled up again, not knowing when it came up. It firmly adhered to the glass panes of the other side, still using its pitch-black eyes to bitterly stare at the people inside. The scene made Bai Yan feel that this situation was far from good. This time, the expression on the ghost baby’s eyes seemed to have increased the chilliness it had brought in, making Bai Yan get goosebumps all over his body.
After intently staring at each other for a half a minute, Bai Yan was still contemplating if his choice was correct or not. But gradually, he felt that something was amiss. He sensed that his body was once again not under his control. He slowly walked over to the window and pulled the window open, little by little. This time, the app had nothing to do with commanding his body.
He watched the ghost baby unhurriedly climb on the window and got close to it using its tiny bloody hands.
Afterward, Bai Yan saw darkness prevail in his sight. He soon saw that the ghost baby was suddenly upside down, still lying on its stomach on the glass with malicious eyes trailing him. But, this time, he and the ghost baby were face to face and were uncomfortably close. The ghost baby’s face looked bruised through the window, the only thing separating them was a thin layer of transparent glass.
When did the ghost baby become upside down when it climbed up?
An epiphany quickly flashed through Bai Yan’s mind. The sudden weightlessness he felt came from his feet.
Bai Yan quickly realized that the one that was upside down wasn’t the ghost baby but was him all along.
A second before dropping from the window, Bai Yan saw the darkness beyond the windowpane and noticed for the first time that observing from outside the window was unexpectedly frightening in its own way.
The third floor.
The second floor.
The first floor.
There wasn’t enough time to think about it as his head kissed the ground. He smelled the strong odor of blood after he fell in a split second, not knowing if this blood was from the ghost baby or was from himself.
Amid his painful huffs of breaths, Bai Yan’s heart was fully satisfied as he returned to the time he was selecting a choice.
Looking at the three identical choices from before, he gazed at the ghost baby, when its eyes weren’t as sinister as he saw earlier. This time, Bai Yan had chosen to follow his brain.
He originally assumed that the ghost baby was nothing but a weak chick, incapable of crawling up the window again after being shot down. He was even ready to ridicule it in his dreams. This was proof that the ghosts in the game’s world were forever powerful, extremely terrifying, and shouldn’t be provoked.
After pressing Option C, Bai Yan remotely laid down and closed his eyes, pretending to be asleep.
Although he felt that he and the ghost baby had shared eye contact for a long time, quietly pretending to be asleep just made him look more suspicious.
However, the ghost baby merely ate the whole front, staring at him as he pretended to sleep. The powerful ghost baby surely felt his recognizable fear. But since Bai Yan wouldn’t interfere with its plans, the ghost magnanimously spared him and didn’t sacrifice him to the heavens.
He laid on the bed for a few seconds and then heard the distinct burst of rubbing sounds from the glass on the outer window. Soon, the sounds became weaker and it seemed as if the ghost baby was crawling somewhere else.
After experiencing an extremely disturbing storyline, Bai Yan could’ve stayed awake from excitement, but the satisfaction he got from the fulfillment of his cravings urged him to sleep. Unconsciously, Bai Yan slowly drifted off to sleep until 2:30 AM, when he was rudely awoken by the aggressive barks of a dog across the hall.
“Bark. Bark. Bark. Bark”
With only two measly hours of sleep, Bai Yan didn’t want to particularly open his eyes again, but the Gods above inevitably didn’t want him to sleep comfortably. The dog’s constant barks ceased as the familiar sounds of meat chopping from next door echoed through the walls.
“Bang bang bang. Bang bang bang.”
The next-door’s sturdy grandma used her strong and healthy body to chop up some meat. Even if Bai Yan closed his eyes, he could still imagine the enchanting scene.
Even dead people won’t forget the old lady’s appearance after seeing it. After the incident, Bai Yan already knew that the old lady was chopping up the poisonous insects she had gathered inside her basket and used the ritual money to fold the insects into dumplings, so he didn’t feel the slightest concerned and just closed his eyes, determined to not wake up again.
People fear the unknown the most. When he still didn’t know if the neighbor was chopping up human flesh, he would still take the time to speculate what the neighbor was doing and also what it was chopping up. But, after knowing what it was, his heart didn’t feel as nervous as before. On the other hand, the rhythmic sounds of chopping made him feel sleepy, calling him to be drowsier by the second.
Bai Yan endured sudden dizziness when he awoke from his deep sleep. He wanted to have a good night’s sleep and truly didn’t feel like opening his eyes.
“Crash. Crash.”
“Crash. Crash.”
As Bai Yan was about to sleep, the grandmother’s incessant water boiling and meat chopping sounds were surely for boiling the dumplings in the pot to cook the ritual paper thoroughly. The next thing he knew, the sounds of the marble tiles coming from upstairs were pulling Bai Yan back from the edge of his sleep.
It’s not over yet.
At this moment, Bai Yan was finally aware that something was wrong. It was as if there was something in the game that insisted on keeping him awake.
While he was still putting effort into closing his eyes, the floor above’s marble tiles made crashing noises. At the same time, a baby’s wails slowly accompanied this racket. After his eyelids moved a bit, the baby’s cries became increasingly intense as if it had been crying all night.
It was indeed a lively evening.
The cries from upstairs were getting worse. Finally, Bai Yan couldn’t take it anymore and opened his eyes.
As he opened his eyes, he received a shock.
Two pitch-black holes were in front of his eyes. The rotten skin was so close to his face that if he got any closer, the two’s faces would be clinging to one another.
Bai Yan rigidly shifted his eyes and saw Wu Jingang sitting beside him. His waist and back were abnormally straight while his face was pulled up to his cheeks in an unbelievable curve. They were face to face.
It was only after Bai Yan moved his head a little that he realized that Wu’s neck was stretched so far that it looked like a bent water pipe, a structure that no human being could possess.
Wu Jingang was dead.
Experiencing several heart-racing choices, Bai Yan was already familiar with the app’s patterns, so he calmly waited for his phone to buzz. Just as he had expected, his phone started to vibrate.
Bai Yan turned over the phone. His head was finally clear and was able to fully understand the situation.
Okay. For the development of the story, the app resorted to shameless means.
Bai Yan gave in and looked at his phone. The app had a new pattern tonight.
[Tonight was a noisy night. Dreadful things kept showing up in front of you, making you extremely frightened. You don’t know what’s going on.]
[A barking dog, a crying baby, the marble tiles in the ceiling, and water boiling and meat chopping sounds in the middle of the night made a racket. All of them appeared at the same time, making you rouse from your dreaming state. As you woke up, you were afraid to open your eyes, but you also discovered that Wu Jingang was sitting up. He sat beside you and with his bent and long neck, his deathly pale skin, his corpse-like face stuck to yours, staring at you for half of the night.]
[You have a small hunch that from the moment you fell asleep, it sat up and used its long white slender neck to hang down its head.]
[Dread had once again arrived, so you decide:]
[A. That this must be a dream. How could a person’s neck bend like this? You close your eyes, turnover, and go back to sleep.]
[B. Like yesterday night, continue to wake up Wu Jingang and tell him what happened right now.]
[C. How could a neck twist like that? Is he still a human? That isn’t my husband anymore. I need to kill him.]
After reading the three new choices, Bai Yan’s face slightly twitched as he felt a sudden itch in his palms. He wanted to kill the person who kept interrupting his sleep and threw his phone away.
With five minutes to spare, he crawled up and took a good look at the monster’s snake-like neck.
He was sure that this wasn’t a hallucination. He used his hand to carefully feel around the man’s neck, which had twisted in a way that it felt cold and smooth to the touch.
Being able to stroke the ghost’s neck so openly may be the only time he could do this during his career in the game.
Bai Yan hit the snake-necked monster since his heart wasn’t stirred with excitement. Instead, the rage that welled up from having his sleep interrupted became even more powerful.
Seeing that the countdown had almost reached its end, the sleep-deprived Bai Yan’s rationale was on the verge of crumbling.
Anyway, it’s been released once. Let’s just get it over with.
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