At first glance, Harriet’s story sounded ordinary. But the more one thought about it, the more unsettling it beca, leaving a lingering fear in the heart and a chill running down the spine.
Of course, everything she had seen while unconscious could be explained away as a “dream” or a “hallucination.” But the coincidences were simply too striking—
The victims had been Rescue Team Two, and it was Rescue Team Two that appeared in her dream. The team mbers and the university students had died in the sa place, and in the dream they were gathered together, “having a party.” Annie and the others had been buried by a mudslide and suffocated to death, and in the dream, her voice had sounded muffled as though her mouth were full of sothing…
What was even more frightening was that after Harriet recovered and went to the site of the mudslide to pay her respects to her fallen teammates, she was shocked to discover that the clearing in the forest where the accident had occurred was exactly the sa as the place she had seen in her dream.
“That incident completely changed the way I viewed the world. After that, I realized I could no longer devote myself wholeheartedly to search-and-rescue work as I once had. So, shafully, I beca a deserter. I submitted my resignation and left the forest rescue team.”
Even seven years later, Harriet’s voice still trembled slightly as she spoke of it.
No one doubted the truth of her story.
Instead, her words left everyone feeling uneasy, frightened, and deep in thought.
If the supernatural was not rely fiction but sothing that truly existed, then could what they were experiencing now be another crisis caused by supernatural forces?
Very likely.
After all, the events of the day had been far too bizarre. If one or two people beca disoriented, that was understandable. But for so many people to keep circling the sa area without a single person noticing? That was genuinely eerie.
“Suppose… suppose we really are dealing with sothing supernatural. What should we do?” Martina asked in a trembling voice.
Faced with the students’ hopeful gazes, Harriet fell silent.
She didn’t know how to answer.
She was only an ordinary person. Even though she had experienced things that defied normal understanding, her knowledge of the supernatural was superficial at best—a re brush with the unknown rather than any deep understanding of it.
She couldn’t even figure out why the group had been walking in circles in the first place, let alone how to solve their current crisis.
“I think our perception has been distorted.”
In the midst of the silence, Everly suddenly spoke, imdiately drawing everyone’s attention.
The situation was becoming increasingly clear: the cultists seed determined to trap them in the cabin until they died. Lying low and waiting would accomplish nothing. While everyone still had their strength, and while food and water supplies remained sufficient, they needed to rally everyone’s efforts and find a way out as quickly as possible.
“Distorted perception?”
“That’s right.” Everly nodded. After a mont’s thought, she explained her knowledge in a way that would be easy to understand.
“Perceptual distortion ans that what you see, hear, or otherwise perceive differs from objective reality. Take a sheet of white paper, for example. The process by which we see it can be summarized like this: cone cells in our eyes capture the light reflected from the paper and convert that information into bioelectrical signals. Those signals are transmitted through the optic nerve network to the occipital lobe of the brain. The cerebral cortex then processes the signals and concludes, ‘white’ and ‘paper,’ feeding that information back into our conscious awareness.
“Perceptual distortion interferes with the transmission and processing of that information. It causes the brain to arrive at conclusions that don’t match the actual object. A white sheet of paper in front of us might be perceived as ‘red human skin,’ or sothing else entirely.”
“I knew it!” Misha exclaid, putting on an expression of sudden realization and dutifully playing along with Everly’s explanation. “We’re all people with plenty of wilderness-survival experience. Our sense of direction shouldn’t be that terrible. The whole day, everyone thought we were walking in a straight line, and not a single person noticed anything was wrong. So it turns out our perception was being distorted!”
“Exactly.”
Everyone present was a legitimate university student; none of them were stupid. After hearing Everly’s explanation, many began to look thoughtful.
“Everly, your theory does explain the strange things we’ve been experiencing,” one student said. “But how are we supposed to resist this kind of distortion?”
Everly shook her head. “We can’t do it on our own.”
Perceptual distortion was an extrely common phenonon in supernatural horror stories. Many classic ghost-story scenes—such as blood pouring from a faucet or a sink turning into a pool of blood—were essentially the result of the victim’s perception being distorted.
When those who had encountered the supernatural asked uninvolved bystanders to verify what they had seen, they would discover that water was still just water; it had never turned into blood at all. Their brains’ thods of processing information had simply been warped and contaminated.
Because this kind of distortion appeared so frequently in horror scenarios, Everly had specifically sought out Rebecca during her spare ti to learn more about it. According to Rebecca’s explanation, paranormal practitioners generally had two ways of dealing with the widespread problem of perceptual distortion:
First, carry items that enhanced ntal defenses.
Second, raise one’s ntal strength to a level beyond the enemy’s ability to influence.
As for the first thod, ntal-defense artifacts were highly sought after. Anything with even moderately good effects was usually in the hands of paranormal practitioners and treated as a treasured possession. Most of the items available on the open market were barely useful.
Everly herself was a good example. The cross necklace and crystal pendant she wore were both supposedly capable of providing so degree of ntal protection. In reality, however, when everyone had been deceived during the day, she had not sensed anything amiss and had followed the group down the wrong path along with everyone else.
That alone showed just how unreliable those items really were.
As for the second thod, increasing one’s ntal strength was not sothing that could be accomplished overnight. Ever since elentary school, Everly had consciously practiced ditation to train her mind. Unfortunately, she was only an ordinary person, and her talent for ntal cultivation was fairly average.
According to what she had heard, people born with psychic abilities—or witches who possessed magical bloodlines—needed only a little training before they could instantly discern the boundary between reality and illusion.
Everly was intensely envious of them.
Returning to her own situation, although her ntal strength was nowhere near that of those gifted individuals favored by fate, Everly had still spent more than a decade secretly training it. Among ordinary people, her ntal resilience was undoubtedly exceptional. If even she could not resist the distorting force in the forest, expecting everyone else to overco it through a bit of simple training was nothing short of a fantasy.
“But we can find the source of the perceptual distortion and destroy or eliminate it,” Everly added.
Most forms of energy in this world are transmitted as waves. If the force that distorted human perception was also treated as a kind of wave, then it must have a source emitting it.
That source could be a special object, or it could be so kind of supernatural creature.
“Then which do you think is affecting us—a thing or a living creature?”
“I lean toward it being an object.”
This wasn’t just a random guess.
The very first ti she had seen the cabin through the storm, Everly had felt a powerful sense of unease. Yet so far, aside from being unable to leave, no one had encountered any real danger there. That in itself was strange. Furthermore, throughout the entire day, the group had done nothing but circle through the forest around the cabin. They had never truly left its vicinity. Perhaps that was the cabin’s way of keeping them there.
“I think there may be so kind of cursed object or occult formation hidden inside the cabin. It’s continuously emitting energy and affecting our perception. If we can find it and destroy it, we might be able to leave the cabin.”
“What could it be?”
“I don’t know. But we should at least try looking for it. Maybe once we see it, we’ll recognize it for what it is.”
The group exchanged glances. They all felt that Everly’s reasoning made sense.
Everyone present rembered the school shooting two years earlier and held Everly in high regard because she had been the one who brought down the perpetrator. Combined with their interactions since then, during which she had spoken little but consistently co across as reliable, the mont Everly presented a theory and proposed a solution, the group imdiately seed to find an anchor. Their uncertainty faded, and they instinctively wanted to follow her lead.
Feeling the weight of everyone’s expectant gazes, Everly turned to look at the two teachers.
Ted, as usual, remained taciturn and offered no reaction. Harriet, however, gave her a small nod of approval.
With that, Everly stopped holding back and naturally assud command of the group.
“In an environnt this dangerous, being alone is extrely risky. I’d like everyone to stick to the previous team assignnts and operate in groups. The two teachers should stay together as well.”
“Understood.”
“While there’s still so daylight left, let’s get moving.”
No one objected.
The students split into the three groups that had been assigned before the trip, while the two teachers ford a separate team of their own.
The teachers’ group, being more capable of protecting themselves, headed outside into the rain to search for clues. One student group inspected the cabin’s interior walls, while the other two took shovels and began digging around the ground. At Everly’s command, everyone launched into a thorough search for anything suspicious.
Everly’s group was assigned to examine the cabin’s inner walls.
The five mbers divided up the walls among themselves, tapping and probing the wooden surfaces. Whenever they found a crack or gap large enough to conceal sothing, they poked and pried at it with whatever tools they had on hand.
After a long period of searching, they failed to find the cursed object they had been looking for.
Instead, they made an unexpected discovery.
The crisscrossing lines that covered the interior walls were not so special woodworking technique at all—they were human scratch marks.
Misha had found a broken fingernail lodged in a gap between two wooden planks.
The inside of the fingernail was stained with a dark, blackish-red residue. The tip of the nail was severely worn down, mixed with fragnts of tree bark and wood splinters. Upon closer inspection, faint blood streaks could be seen within the “lines” on the wall. When the fingernail was placed against them for comparison, the width of the traces matched the nail perfectly.
This discovery sent a chill through everyone in the cabin, and they searched with even greater urgency.
However, despite how thoroughly they looked—scouring the entire cabin and even the surrounding area—they still could not find any trace of the formation or the so-called cursed object Everly had ntioned.
Rumble…
Thunder crashed outside as the rain grew heavier and heavier. The teachers’ group eventually could not withstand the storm and returned first, supporting each other as they staggered back into the cabin. Their lips were already purplish from the cold, and their teeth chattered uncontrollably. They sat by the fire for a long while before finally recovering.
The students inside the cabin were not doing much better.
While searching indoors, despite the relatively low physical exertion compared to their long trek earlier in the day, everyone felt as if their limbs had been weighted down with heavy lead. Exhaustion pressed on them like vines, spreading everywhere and binding them tightly.
One boy with poorer stamina searched for a while before his head began to bob up and down—he actually dozed off on the spot.
Even Everly was starting to feel an overwhelming sense of fatigue.
To use an analogy: if a person’s energy were a pool of water, then while they were inside the cabin, it felt as though a malicious hole had been opened at the bottom. Their stamina was draining several tis faster than normal.
After a full day of trudging through mud and rain, everyone was already exhausted. Under such conditions of accelerated depletion, even an iron man would not be able to endure it.
Everly knew this feeling was inseparable from the cabin itself. At tis, she even had the unsettling impression that the cabin was alive—that it was siphoning energy from the people inside, gradually weakening them.
But even so, the group could not possibly leave the cabin and step out into the rain at night. In the cold of late autumn, being exposed to rain would only make death co faster.
Seeing everyone already panting heavily and losing strength in their movents, Everly had no choice but to call off the search and have everyone return inside the cabin to rest first.
User Comments
0 comments from readers