According to Ghost Cave, the vengeful spirit really would track people down through the internet and kill everyone who opened the black envelope.
Gao Tian’s temples throbbed. ’What am I supposed to do now? Get my baseball bat from the closet and co back to fight the thing outside my window to the death?’
’No, that’s wrong.’
’The other ghosts in the group also accepted the black envelope. Why aren’t they worried about the spirit tracking them down?’
Gao Tian suddenly rembered sothing Ghost Cave had said.
’Ghosts can’t be killed. Only the living can be killed.’
Even if that vengeful spirit went after them, Ghost Cave and the others wouldn’t care. They were already ghosts.
This was Ghost Cave’s thod of finding the only living person in the group and killing them.
He walked to the window again and glanced toward the alley.
The spot where the red-eyed man had been standing was completely empty. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
’Where did the red-eyed man go?’
There was only one possibility: the red-eyed man had left the alley and was on the move.
Realizing he couldn’t delay any longer, Gao Tian ran to his bedroom as fast as he could and dug a baseball bat out from a pile of clothes. He threw on a jacket and stuffed all his loose change into his pocket.
Just as he was looking for his keys, KNOCK, KNOCK, KNOCK. A series of raps ca from the study’s glass window. It sounded as if soone was standing outside, tapping on the windowpane, signaling for Gao Tian to open up and let them in.
Gao Tian froze in the hallway between the study and the bedroom, trapped and unable to move.
This was the third floor, and there was no air conditioner ledge or any other foothold outside the window. It was impossible for an ordinary person to be standing at this height.
Gao Tian slowly turned his head toward the study. At the window was a large, deathly-pale face with crimson eyes and a sharp nose pressed tightly against the glass. It was the red-eyed man from the alley. He had sohow teleported to the window and was now slapping at the glass, gesturing for Gao Tian to open it and let him in so he could kill him.
The red-eyed man’s strength was imnse. Each slap against the window made the entire wall rumble. Gao Tian could tell the thing could easily shatter the glass and climb in, but it didn’t. It was toying with him. It wanted to torture him slowly, to savor the fear of a man on the verge of death.
Just as they were locked in this stalemate, the sound of a window opening ca from upstairs. An angry woman’s voice roared into the quiet residential complex:
"What ti is it?! Still banging around? Don’t kids have school and adults have work tomorrow?!"
Gao Tian recognized the voice. It was Granny Wang from the fourth floor, famous for her combativeness and her loud mouth. She had once single-handedly berated seven young won from property managent into retreat. The red-eyed man’s banging had disturbed her, so she’d thrown open her window and started spewing curses indiscriminately at what she assud was soone downstairs.
The sudden interruption broke the intense staring contest between Gao Tian and the figure outside the window.
Outside, the red-eyed man also heard the window open upstairs. Its crimson eyes seed to give Gao Tian a playful wink before its entire pale body slithered silently upwards toward the fourth floor like a snake.
The red-eyed man temporarily vanished from outside the third-floor window.
Less than a dozen seconds later, Gao Tian heard a bloodcurdling scream from the fourth floor, a mixture of shock and terror. "What is that—" Then, deathly silence. Granny Wang’s shouting, the banging on the wall—it all vanished without a trace.
Gao Tian knew that by opening her window, Granny Wang had drawn the red-eyed man’s attention, bringing a fatal disaster upon her entire family. By now, her family was most likely dead.
Without hesitation, Gao Tian bolted the study door. That way, when the red-eyed man returned to the third-floor window, it would waste a little more ti getting in to find him.
He’d wanted to dial those three sacred numbers, but for so reason, his phone had no signal. He didn’t know if his ancient phone, bought five years ago, had suddenly given up the ghost, or if the presence of the supernatural was disrupting the signal.
’Forget it.’ Gao Tian gave up.
He pushed open his front door and left his apartnt.
The stairwell leading down was pitch-black. Gao Tian crept down the steps, not daring to make a sound, terrified of attracting the covetous gaze of so unknown thing. As he moved through the darkness, he couldn’t tell if it was just his imagination, but he felt that a pale face was hiding around every corner, waiting for him to walk right into its trap.
A few minutes later, Gao Tian successfully reached the ground floor of the apartnt building.
The mont he stepped out of the building, he heard the sound of a glass window shattering from the direction of the third floor. He looked up and saw a huge, distorted shadow, like a gecko, crawling up the wall to the third floor and slipping through the broken window.
Gao Tian caught his breath, unsure if he was relieved or just terrified. He left the apartnt building as quickly as he could and hailed a taxi by the roadside. The first thing he said to the driver after getting in was:
"Take to the nearest police station.
"And step on it. I’ll pay you double the fare."
Seeing his breathless state, the driver, a middle-aged man, asked:
"What’s wrong, son? You look terrible.
"Want so water?"
Gao Tian thought for a mont. His experiences this past month had been too bizarre—so bizarre that he couldn’t possibly explain them in a short ti.
A thousand words swirled in his mind, but only one sentence ca out:
"Never mind that, just go."
As the taxi drove down the road, Gao Tian, in the back seat, kept looking over his shoulder, checking if the red-eyed man from the complex was chasing him. After confirming there was nothing but a few scattered cars and not a single person behind them, he finally let out a small sigh of relief.
’What in the world was that thing?’
Gao Tian gradually cald down a little and began to force himself to recall all the details of what had happened before and after he fled his apartnt.
There was one thing he couldn’t stop thinking about.
The first ti he encountered the red-eyed man, its entire face was like a large, smooth plate—bare, with no features at all except for two murky, blood-red dots for eyes.
But when the red-eyed man climbed up to his window, during their second encounter, there was a small detail: the red-eyed man had pressed a sharp nose against the glass—
The red-eyed man had grown a nose.
’What does that an?’
Gao Tian didn’t know if this was a good thing or a bad thing. He subconsciously pulled out his phone and glanced at the dark, powered-off screen, using it as a makeshift mirror.
Gao Tian’s nose was also sharp.
’Was the nose the red-eyed man grew... modeled after my own?’
Just then, the taxi began to slow down, and the driver’s voice ca from the front seat:
"Uh, the police station is just across the street there.
"It’s a bit tricky to make a U-turn at that spot. Can I just drop you off here and you can walk over?
"It’s not far. Should be fine, right?"
Gao Tian was about to say that was fine. He looked up toward the opposite side of the road, at the safe haven with its blue and white sign. Logically, it should have been a reassuring sight.
But Gao Tian saw a figure standing behind the glass doors, staring blankly at him.
It was a deathly-pale face he knew all too well, with two blazing red eyes and a sharp nose. And now, it also had lips as thin as a razor’s edge, curved slightly into a V-shape, smiling in his direction.
The red-eyed man was standing right there, behind the glass doors of the police station, waiting for him. And now, not only had its pale face grown a nose, but it had also grown lips.
It seed that every ti Gao Tian t its gaze, a new facial feature was born.
Gao Tian’s expression changed drastically. He changed his mind again:
"Driver, get out of here, now!
"As fast as you can! Get on the highway, get as far away from this place as possible!"
Watching his passenger’s frantic behavior, the driver had no idea what was going on. From his perspective, the police station across the street was completely empty. Forget a red-eyed man at the door; he couldn’t even see a single police officer. He simply couldn’t understand what his passenger was so afraid of. To him, Gao Tian looked like he was having so kind of ntal breakdown.
But the taxi driver didn’t really care. As long as the fare was paid in the end, it was all good. The passenger wanted to get on the highway, which ant a bigger fare for him. There was no reason to refuse the job.
The driver slamd on the gas and sped away from the police station.
As they sped along the elevated highway, Gao Tian began to ntally outline the red-eyed man’s characteristics.
The thing killed without batting an eye. After it climbed through Granny Wang’s window, not a single one of the four family mbers even managed to cry for help, let alone fight back.
Its tracking ability was terrifyingly effective. As long as you had opened that black envelope, the red-eyed man would hunt you relentlessly until you were dead. It didn’t matter if you got in a taxi and fled to the ends of the earth.
Furthermore, in the process of chasing him, the red-eyed man had already grown a nose and lips that were remarkably similar to Gao Tian’s own features.
Gao Tian didn’t know if, after evolving further, the red-eyed man would eventually have a face identical to his own.
’Why is it doing this? To kill and then live on in the human world as "Gao Tian"?’
The more he thought about it, the more hopeless he felt. No matter how hard Gao Tian wracked his brain in the back seat, he couldn’t think of any way out.
Right now, the only thing that gave him any sense of security was this taxi speeding down the empty road.
As long as he was in the taxi, Gao Tian was temporarily safe. No matter how fast the red-eyed man was, it probably couldn’t outrun a car.
But Gao Tian couldn’t stay in the car forever.
He would have to get out eventually.
Just then, up in the driver’s seat, the car’s two-way radio crackled to life—
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