Horror Movie Survival Rules Chapter 254: Wooden Cabin (5)

At first, everyone thought the structure appearing before them was a new shelter.

Finding a wooden cabin in the damp, muddy forest would normally be sothing worth celebrating. After walking all day through sludge-like terrain, everyone was cold, exhausted, and felt as if their legs had been filled with lead. The sight of a cabin made them eager beyond words to step inside and rest.

However, as they drew closer, not only the teacher leading the group, but even the students began to look uneasy and uncertain.

It looked familiar—too familiar.

The pitch-black open doorway, the glass windows covered in spiderweb-like cracks, even the crooked-neck tree standing not far from the entrance—all of it was identical to the cabin they had stayed in the previous night.

Could such a coincidence really exist in the world?

The closer they got, the more subtle and uneasy their expressions beca.

When they were only a short distance away, one of the boys could no longer hold himself back. He sprinted forward and entered the cabin through the open door, getting there before Harriet could stop him.

The next second, before anyone could react, the boy rushed back out in a panic, his face filled with alarm, holding a small palm-sized flashlight.

“This is—this is my flashlight! This morning while I was packing, it accidentally fell out of my bag, and I only noticed halfway through the hike. Just now—just now, when I went inside the cabin, it was lying on the floor, in exactly the sa spot where I slept last night…”

He did not continue speaking, but everyone understood what he ant.

They had returned.

After struggling through the fog-filled forest all day, they had taken a huge detour… and ended up back at the sa cabin.

“How is that possible…?”

So of them refused to believe it. Breaking away from the group, they rushed into the cabin as well. Monts later, one startled shout after another rang out from inside, confirming without a doubt that the boy’s discovery was real.

Everly did not join the others rushing into the cabin. Instead, she stayed outside with the remaining group, gathering around Harriet as she opened the handheld GPS to check the recorded route for the day.

Sothing was very strange.

Even though everyone clearly felt that they had been walking in mostly straight lines, the GPS track showed otherwise.

After leaving the cabin that morning, they had only traveled a short distance in a straight line before beginning to circle around it.

And those circles were anything but regular.

On the map, the path sotis stretched into elongated ovals, sotis ford blunt arcs. As they walked, it even behaved like a “ghost wall”—looping tightly around a central area in small circles before expanding outward again into larger loops.

For most of the day, they had been unknowingly drawing countless circles around the cabin.

And in the end, the route closed itself—bringing them back to where they started.

Harriet’s expression turned extrely grim.

“I am certain that throughout the entire day, I followed the pre-set waypoints and navigated according to the GPS.”

As the group leader, she was also the one responsible for guiding them. A mistake of this magnitude placed an enormous amount of pressure on her.

“Could it be that the navigation function is broken?” a student asked tentatively.

Harriet tried all the GPS functions one by one. Nothing seed wrong. But aside from a navigation error, she could think of no other explanation… or rather, she did not dare to.

After a long silence under the students’ fearful yet hopeful gazes, she finally said with a bitter tone:

“Yes… it must be broken. It’s my fault. I should have checked whether the GPS was functioning properly before we set out.”

“It’s okay, teacher. Even without GPS, we still have compasses. And if that doesn’t work, we can still use tree rings, moss, or the sun to find direction!”

“Right, right. It’s just a bit more walking, that’s all. It’s not a big deal. On the bright side, at least we don’t have to spend the night in the forest.”

Students who had co out of the cabin also heard about the situation and gathered around Harriet, offering words of comfort.

Among everyone present, only Everly reacted differently.

She took another handheld GPS from her bag and said loudly, “The teacher’s GPS isn’t broken.”

“What?”

“I an the teacher’s GPS is not malfunctioning. When we set out, I also brought a handheld GPS for safety reasons. And during the day, whenever the teacher stopped to reorient herself, I repeatedly took out my own GPS to verify our route. I can prove that throughout the day, we were walking exactly according to the waypoint navigation. The teacher’s GPS did not fail.”

“How is that possible! If we really followed GPS navigation…”

Everly nodded at the student who had interrupted her.

“Yes. That’s exactly why I also know this isn’t scientific. So I believe we’ve encountered a supernatural event.”

“What do you an?”

“Hey, that’s not funny, Everly.”

BOOM!

As if responding to the students’ words, a flash of lightning cut across the sky. Not long after, thunder cracked loudly, and heavy rain suddenly poured down without warning, cascading from above.

It was raining again.

Everly frowned at the sky and quickened her speech toward her classmates.

“You can ask Teacher Harriet yourself whether I’m joking or not…”

She then turned to Harriet.

“Teacher, since it’s co to this, I don’t think there’s any need to keep hiding things. Please tell everyone everything unusual you’ve noticed along the way. We are all adults—we have the right to know the truth.”

“This…” Harriet hesitated, then sighed as if giving in. “Alright. Let’s go inside and talk.”

eting Everly’s firm gaze, she paused for a mont before finally giving up resistance.

The group then moved from outside the cabin into the building.

Even though the door had been open all day, letting air circulate, for so reason the strange odor inside the cabin had not weakened. In fact, it seed even stronger than when they had left that morning.

There was still a bit of dry firewood left inside the cabin. Enduring the foul stench, everyone lit a fire and sat around it. Harriet then laid out everything suspicious that had happened during their journey—stairs, footprints, the shelter missing supplies, and the “ghost-wall” looping they had experienced that day.

“I know that even after hearing all this, so of you still may not believe it. But I have always believed that ghosts, demons, witchcraft, magic… things beyond the boundaries of human understanding and not recognized by mainstream society, all of them actually exist. They are like shadows beneath our feet, dust hidden in corners—quietly lurking in places no one pays attention to. And then, at a certain mont, they suddenly tear apart the illusion of peace and reveal a bloody reality before us.”

After saying this, as if to strengthen her argunt, Harriet fell silent for a mont before bringing up a long-buried mory—an event that had completely shattered her materialistic worldview.

“You all know that before becoming a teacher, I was an experienced outdoor adventurer working in a forest search-and-rescue team. But what you may not know is why I left that job and returned to my hotown to beco a teacher at a university…”

It happened seven years ago, during her ti with the forest search-and-rescue team.

At that ti, a group of university students had gone camping in the deep mountains of West Yalijifu State during their sumr break, and they went missing. Harriet’s team was dispatched, with five squads entering the forest to search for them.

“Our search did not go smoothly. It was the rainy season, and it kept raining intermittently. Everything was wet. Rivers were swollen, and places that used to be shallow enough to wade across were no longer passable.”

Harriet’s Fourth Squad searched the forest for three days without finding anything.

On the night of the third day, the team found a high piece of ground and set up camp there.

After three days of intense search operations, everyone was completely exhausted. Harriet, in particular, had caught a cold from being repeatedly soaked in the rain and spent the entire day in a dazed, feverish state. She forced herself to take a few pills and crawled into her tent. The mont her head touched the sleeping bag, she imdiately fell asleep.

In the middle of the night, she suddenly heard a voice calling her na.

“Harriet… Harriet…”

The voice was slow and drifting, its pronunciation muffled and unclear, as if spoken with a mouth full of water.

Harriet jolted awake and crawled out of the tent, looking around.

Under the faint, dim moonlight, she saw a familiar-looking figure standing a few ters away in the forest.

“Harriet, it’s …” Seeing her stand up, the figure raised its left arm and waved. “Co here…”

Harriet never understood what ca over her at that mont.

A person waving to her alone in the middle of the night in a forest should have been terrifying—but she felt nothing of the sort.

“It was like I was hypnotized. My vision narrowed until all I could see was that swaying arm and the slow, slurred voice. I didn’t notice anything unusual at all… I recognized it. It was my colleague Annie. She was also a mber of the forest search-and-rescue team. We were close—we even occasionally went shopping together.”

Annie kept waving at her.

At first, her voice was soft and gentle. But when Harriet didn’t approach, it gradually turned anxious, and that gentle tone began to carry a hint of distress and sharpness.

“Co… co…”

Harriet’s expression grew dazed as she walked toward the figure.

When she reached it, a cold hand suddenly shot out and grabbed her wrist.

“Finally, you’re here. Everyone’s waiting for you!”

Annie gave a slightly eerie smile, clicked her tongue in mild reproach, and dragged Harriet toward the dark depths of the forest.

At that ti, Harriet’s mind felt as if it were drunk. She remained in a hazy, unsteady state of consciousness. She did not resist, and obediently let Annie pull her through the forest at a frantic pace.

In the end, the world suddenly opened up before them—a clearing appeared in the woods.

The clearing was brightly lit.

Four search-and-rescue mbers from Annie’s team, along with six young people dressed like students, were gathered at the edge of the clearing, dancing, singing, and laughing loudly.

Those six students were, unmistakably, the targets of the rescue mission.

When they saw Harriet, the people in the clearing stopped dancing. With identical movents and smiling faces, they all waved at her.

“Finally… you’re here. Co join us.”

“Yeah, co play with us!”

At their calls, an overwhelming urge suddenly rose within Harriet—she wanted to go over, wanted to join them, wanted to be together with everyone… together…

Her gaze beca unfocused, and a radiant smile identical to theirs appeared on her face as she stepped toward the clearing.

“What are you doing!”

Just as she was about to cross the boundary between light and darkness and step into the brightly lit clearing, a sharp shout suddenly rang out.

Harriet was startled.

She looked up and saw a tall, sturdy figure standing in front of her.

It was Thomas, the captain of Search-and-Rescue Team Two—a rigid, stern man who rarely smiled. While everyone else had been welcoming her, he alone had stood aside with a serious expression, showing no friendliness.

“Captain, Harriet is here to join the gathering,” Annie quickly pleaded on her behalf.

The other mbers of Team Two also chid in:

“Yes, yes, even though Harriet isn’t from our team, she’s still part of the sa organization. Don’t be so hostile toward her.”

Thomas kept a stern face and barked at his team mbers:

“No!”

After saying this, Thomas turned to Harriet as well, his voice stern.

“What are you doing here?! This is not a place you should be!”

“But I—”

“Go back!”

“Don’t co any closer. Go back!”

……

Thomas’s final roar echoed through Harriet’s mind like the tolling of a church bell. The sound reverberated, shaking her out of that dazed, muddled state.

When Harriet opened her eyes again, she found herself lying in a hospital bed.

The teammates keeping watch beside her burst into tears the mont they saw she had woken up.

“Later, I learned from my teammates that shortly after I passed out that night, I developed a high fever. Everyone tried every possible way to bring my temperature down and called for outside assistance. After great difficulty, they managed to get to the hospital. However, because of the delay, my condition had progressed from a simple cold into severe pneumonia. At one point, the doctors even issued a critical condition notice. But fortunately, I eventually regained consciousness.”

“As my body gradually recovered, my teammates told another piece of long-hidden bad news—the bodies of the missing university students had been found. Along with them, the bodies of mbers of Search-and-Rescue Team Two were also discovered.”

Based on the traces left at the scene, people reconstructed what had happened.

On the day of the incident, among the five search-and-rescue teams, Team Two was the first to encounter the missing university students in the forest.

The university students had been trapped on a sandbar in the middle of a river.

That sandbar had originally just been a slightly elevated clearing in the forest, but after days of continuous heavy rain, the river had swollen—turning it suddenly into an isolated island.

The water level kept rising. Fearing that the students would drown, Team Two imdiately began a nightti rescue operation.

Unfortunately, at that very mont, the heavy rain returned.

Upstream, the slopes had been soaked and destabilized by the rainfall, triggering a landslide.

Everyone present was unable to escape in ti and was swept away, all of them perishing in the disaster.

And the timing of the landslide was precisely the sa night Harriet had collapsed into a high fever and lost consciousness.