So cold.
Why was it so cold? Lan Yu instinctively wrapped himself tighter in the quilt yet it felt heavier than usual, damp, sodden, as if it had locked inside its cold water. The quilt, which should have been fluffy and soft, offered no warmth at all. Instead, it steadily fed the chill into his bones and yet, despite the bone deep cold, Lan Yu did not feel uncomfortable.
There was a faint sound of dripping water by his ear. The sound was ethereal and distant, echoing again and again, waves of sound drilling into his ears before departing, only to return once more. It was so real that Lan Yu had no choice but to open his eyes.
Was the bathroom leaking?
Everything around him was pitch black. Not even the faint glow that should have filtered in through the not quite blackout curtains by the window was there. Lan Yu’s bed was near the side; he reached toward the headboard, tugged at the curtain and looked outside.
Has the power gone out?
But that single glance made the hand clutching the curtain tremble slightly. Outside, there were no lights, no starlight, not even the vague outlines of buildings that should have been barely visible.
Once again, he heard the sound of water dripping into water. This time it came from behind him, as though he could almost sense circular ripples spreading outward after each drop, moving slowly in his direction.
He loosened his grip on the curtain and, without realizing it, grabbed hold of the frame of the bunk bed instead yet everywhere his fingertips brushed past felt damp and icy.
Lan Yu sat up. His healthy foot touched the ground as he searched for his slippers but the moment his foot landed, a piercing cold surged up. A layer of standing water had flooded the floor, nearly submerging his slippers.
At the head of the bed, Lan Yu groped for his temporary crutch and made his way to the light switch, intending to turn it on.
Click.
Click.
Click.
No matter how many times he tried, the light showed no sign of turning on.
Fear slowly climbed up Lan Yu’s spine. He felt his way to Duan Gaozhi’s bed and reached out to touch the mattress. The moment his hand met the surface, a chill seeped into his skin. Duan Gaozhi was there but cold, cold like a corpse.
“Brother Duan… Brother Duan… Brother Duan, wake up.” Anxiety thickened Lan Yu’s voice as he shook Duan Gaozhi’s body but there was no response at all.
Could he be dead?
Lan Yu’s hands trembled as he checked Duan Gaozhi’s breathing. Thankfully, though faint, it wasn’t completely gone.
He turned his hopes to Lin Zixi but just like Duan Gaozhi, Lin Zixi couldn’t be woken no matter what.
Their bodies were so cold that Lan Yu couldn’t even tell whether the two of them were simply asleep or had already lost consciousness.
At this point, Lan Yu had to face a reality with an alarmingly high probability, it was haunted again.
Cold sweat rolled down from his forehead. He turned around, wanting to grab his phone and turn on the flashlight to see his surroundings but the phone that had clearly been charging before he went to sleep refused to power on at all.
“Please don’t do this to me…” Lan Yu’s voice trembled with tears as he leaned on his wooden crutch and turned to push open the door to the boys’ dormitory.
Their shared residence was located in a high rise building within an old residential complex near a restaurant area. There were eight apartments per floor. Duan Gaozhi had rented three adjacent units, had the originally unfinished apartments simply renovated and turned them into dormitories. At the entrance corridor, he had installed a metal gate to prevent random people from entering.
Once outside the boys’ dormitory, the girls’ dorms were directly across and next door. In the darkness, Lan Yu felt for the door and immediately began pounding on it with all his strength. His knocks echoed loudly throughout the space, far more hollow than usual, the reverberation stretching unnaturally far yet the closed girls’ dorm door offered no response whatsoever.
Lan Yu turned and tried to open the metal gate separating the dormitory area, desperate to get out. At the very least, he could reach the main road where there were more people, maybe someone could help him.
But the gate was locked tight. There was no way to open it. Lan Yu gripped the iron bars, his entire body stiff with panic.
“Why… Why is it haunted again?” He was already terrified of ghosts and they just kept coming one after another. Lan Yu was nearly in tears.
It was too quiet. Aside from the sound of water, there was nothing at all. The oppressive silence made it almost impossible for him to even breathe. Then, at that very moment, the pitch black darkness seemed to recover just a hint of visibility.
He slowly raised his head.
On the other side of the metal gate, everything was soaked, walls and floors slick with moisture, no different from where he was standing.
A dark shadow slowly rose up from beneath the surface of the water.
Its outline grew clearer: enormous, grotesque, twisted, without any definite shape at all. The bulging mass of water gradually advanced toward Lan Yu. The previously quiet surface came alive with splashing sounds, like shallow waves lapping against rocks under the push of a wind.
He wanted to run but where could he run? He was locked inside the dormitory. Was he supposed to jump straight down from the twelfth floor?
Lan Yu’s grip on the gate tightened until his hands ached but as the swollen surface of water drew closer, it enveloped his hands. The solid iron bars beneath his fingers were replaced by something soft and yielding. It felt like touching pliable rubber as the water forcefully pried open his tightly clenched grip, separating his hands from the gate.
It was clearly so cold.
So why didn’t it feel painful at all?
Lan Yu loosened his hold slightly, trying to silently pull his hands free. Only then did he realize that his hands were completely wrapped in water, as if something were holding his wrists.
“Are you… going to eat me?” Lan Yu lowered his head, afraid to look. After forcing himself to read horror novels lately, he was terrified that the moment he lifted his eyes, he’d see countless skulls wrapped inside the water. “If I die and turn into a ghost and we’re all ghosts, it’s going to be really awkward.”
He sensed that his hands weren’t being restrained. Instead, it felt more like they were being gently cupped.
A strange sound came to his ears, drop by drop, like water falling onto different surfaces, each producing a different pitch. Those sounds gathered together, forming words that he could understand.
“Go… ho… me…”
Lan Yu listened carefully. As his attention shifted, he unexpectedly calmed down a little. He repeated the words one by one under his breath.
“Home… family… really… miss… you…”
The corners of Lan Yu’s mouth drooped.
Again. Telling him to go home.
“You… al…ways… suf…fer… wronged? Dad… Mom…”
“……. are very…. An… An…. gry.”
Once he regained a bit of composure, Lan Yu mustered some courage and whispered softly, “I’m living… really, really well.”
“Go home!!”
A torrential downpour exploded into existence.
The roar of rain slammed into Lan Yu’s ears like an explosion. The violent noise was as deafening as thunder. What had once been faint and ethereal instantly became dense and overwhelming, like countless living beings screaming in agony.
Lan Yu stared wide eyed at the suddenly surging tidal wave before him. That frenzied, furious, howling monstrosity completely overwhelmed his fear once again.
Lan Yu burst into tears.
“I.. I understand…” He didn’t know whether it was rainwater or tears burning into his eyes. His voice shook, breaking apart with sobs. “Don’t be angry… I understand, I understand… I’ll listen…”
The sound of rain gradually quieted.
Lan Yu was soaked through from head to toe yet he did not feel cold at all.
He watched as the surging currents before his eyes, once leaping like crashing waves, slowly settled back into stillness. As the fear receded, a deep sense of grievance swelled up in its place.
“You can’t take… good care of yourself. Come home….”
That was the final sentence the water left behind.
The streams of water that had been shimmering faintly in the darkness receded bit by bit, vanishing beneath Lan Yu’s feet. They took away not only all the water that had flooded the space but even the moisture clinging to Lan Yu’s body. His clothes dried completely, as though nothing had ever happened.
Lan Yu knelt on the floor when he suddenly realized that the lights in the public area behind him had turned on. He stared blankly at the bulb, remaining there for a long time without managing to come back to his senses.
While Lan Yu was still sitting on the floor, under the no longer dim lighting, a black shadow appeared.
That coiling shadow seemed to be devouring all the light around it. The emotions Lan Yu had only just managed to stabilize threatened to collapse all over again.
Why… again…
Still kneeling on the floor, Lan Yu saw the cane lying off to the side being picked up by that shadow.
Before he could even process what was happening, he was suddenly lifted into the air, carried horizontally.
Lan Yu: “??????”
The motion activated light dimmed once more after a brief moment and Lan Yu could no longer see anything at all.
His entire body stiffened. His vision was completely stripped away; his sense of direction failed him. Lan Yu couldn’t tell whether he was being carried somewhere or being swallowed whole.
It wasn’t until he was gently set down onto a soft bed that he felt something familiar. The texture beneath him was familiar, the temperature gradually warming again. The quilt was comfortable.
It was his bed.
Unable to see anything, Lan Yu only felt something repeatedly and gently brushing over his cheeks, even grazing his eyelids, forcing him to close his eyes.
And in the very next instant, he sensed his consciousness sinking into an extremely deep darkness.
Within that world, like the depths of a dreamless sleep, Lan Yu felt himself being wrapped up, his entire body, his cheeks, his mouth and nose…
As though he had been placed in the safest place in the world.
“Achoo, achoo, aaaah, achoo…”
Lan Yu was jolted awake by the sound of three consecutive sneezes and shot upright.
Brilliant morning sunlight flooded the room, illuminating everything. Lan Yu reached toward the head of the bed, fumbling for his phone.
He had slept for a very long time. Normally, he didn’t require much sleep at all yet he’d unexpectedly slept this long.
The moment he recalled what he had experienced the previous night, a violent shiver ran through him. His mind went blank and he began to tremble unconsciously.
“Achoo… mmh…”
When Duan Gaozhi and Lin Zixi finally woke up as well, Lan Yu discovered that both of them had caught colds.
Lin Zixi wasn’t too bad, just a stuffy nose that made his voice come out muffled whenever he spoke. Duan Gaozhi, however, was in far worse shape. Clearly, a middle aged man’s constitution couldn’t compare to that of a younger person’s. Even without a thermometer, just the heat to the touch and the flush on Duan Gaozhi’s face were enough to show how abnormal he was.
Duan Gaozhi had a fever.
“What the heck is going on? I felt freezing last night but couldn’t wake up. So I really did get chilled?” Lin Zixi spoke in a nasal voice. After just a few words, his nose clogged again. He blew his nose hard. “How come you’re totally fine, Lan Yu?”
“I… um… uh…” Lan Yu didn’t know how to explain it. He couldn’t exactly say that he hadn’t gotten sick but had instead run into a ghost. “I’ll go buy you some medicine.”
“Hey, stop right there. Stop,” Duan Gaozhi immediately stopped him. “Your leg’s still broken, what are you running around for? Achoo…”
Lan Yu obediently stopped where he was standing. He couldn’t bring himself to say that a ghost had come looking for him to go home and as a result, had frozen the other two people in the dorm.
“You don’t need to. I’ll go.” Lin Zixi, though clearly unwell from the cold, was still better off than Duan Gaozhi, who was completely stuck in bed. He put on a mask and headed out to buy medicine himself.
“I could actually go too…” Lan Yu mumbled guiltily.
“It’s fine. Let him go. He can’t work for the next couple of days anyway. In food service, with a cold this bad, he’d spread it to the customers. Let him rest and go back once he’s better, cough, cough…” Duan Gaozhi began hacking as he spoke, lying there half dead. “Ah, this is miserable. Why does everything keep happening lately? Have I been cursed with bad luck or something?”
Lan Yu went to the bathroom, soaked Duan Gaozhi’s towel in cool water and placed it on his forehead. After that, he grabbed some snacks to fill his stomach a little.
When Lin Zixi came back, he also brought breakfast he’d bought from a roadside stall, including a portion for Lan Yu. “Breakfast vendors aren’t even fully open yet at this hour. This is the first steamer basket of buns, still hot. Eat up.”
It was only after finishing breakfast that Duan Gaozhi barely managed to shake off his near death state. He urged Lan Yu to head to work.
Their restaurant also handled breakfast service. With his broken leg, Lan Yu would probably move more slowly and needed to leave even earlier.
“Brother Duan, aren’t you going to tell your family?” Lan Yu asked as he changed into his restaurant uniform.
“My wife still has to take care of the kids. I’ll be fine after lying low for a couple of days,” Duan Gaozhi said.
“If you don’t tell them, won’t they worry?” Lan Yu pressed.
“That’s exactly why I’m not telling them,” Duan Gaozhi replied as he lay back down, waving his hand to urge Lan Yu to hurry up and go.
Listening to the overlapping coughs from Duan Gaozhi and Lin Zixi, Lan Yu rubbed his nose, leaned on his wooden crutch and headed off to work.
✦ ✧ ✦
Cresvynia
[Translator]
☕ A LITTLE SOMETHING FOR THE TRANSLATOR
A mysterious coffee offering may increase translator happiness by 37%. Probably.
☕ BUY THEM A COFFEE →
✧ (づ｡•ㅅ•｡)づ ☕ ✧
✦ thank you for reading ✦
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ChaptersChapter 1 · Who wants to go back to be a minor plot device?Chapter 2 · StartChapter 3 · I’m terrified of ghostsChapter 4 · Do ghosts exist in this world?Chapter 5 · ShadowChapter 6 · There’s something wrong with how this book is dressedChapter 7 · The ghost drew a heart for himChapter 8 · Make troubleChapter 9 · Don’t scare me!Chapter 10 · I’d rather be scared to death than go backChapter 11 · Want to eat together?Chapter 12 · A cleaning ghostChapter 13 · Regret it now?Chapter 14 · ParentsChapter 15 · Find FaultChapter 16 · Ghostly photos?Chapter 17 · Nickname: White ShadowChapter 18 · A haunted taxi?Chapter 19 · Extreme fear turns to angerChapter 20 · I used to be a messChapter 21 · Best friendChapter 22 · Turning pointChapter 23 · The threat of ghostsChapter 24 · It’s not a ghost, it’s eerinessChapter 25 Part 1 · First time entering the eerie houseChapter 25 Part 2 · First time entering the eerie houseChapter 26 · Borrow moneyChapter 27 · He’s jealousChapter 28 · RetributionChapter 29 · Revenge from a Strange SourceChapter 30 Part 1 · How could you be so carelessChapter 30 Part 2 · How could you be so carelessChapter 31 Part 1 · What would happen if I ran away from home again?Chapter 31 Part 2 · What would happen if I ran away from home again?Chapter 32 Part 1 · Firmly uphold the right to privacyChapter 32 Part 2 · Firmly uphold the right to privacyChapter 33 Part 1 · The brother who brought down death to protect his belovedChapter 33 Part 2 · The brother who brought down death to protect his belovedChapter 34 Part 1 · Being secretly massaged by a shadowy figure in publicChapter 34 Part 2 · Being secretly massaged by a shadowy figure in publicChapter 35 Part 1 · Go to my dear older brother and sister’s bedroomChapter 35 Part 2 · Go to my dear older brother and sister’s bedroomChapter 36 Part 1 · Being favored by everyone in the eerie houseChapter 36 Part 2 · Being favored by everyone in the eerie houseChapter 37 · We must protect our precious childChapter 38 · It’s too tragic, I can’t bear to watch anymoreChapter 39 · Because of the unique companionshipChapter 40 · The first meeting with the admirer of the protagonistChapter 41 · It’s eerie, but they’re all real family members!Chapter 42 · Using the eerie house to get a cheat codeChapter 43 · The baby’s crying after getting drunk is so cute!Chapter 44 · A traitorChapter 45 · All family members can help the baby.Chapter 46 · When the family is happy, they will hug their waistChapter 47 · Ear piercings were adornedChapter 48 · Treasure are the most precious itemsChapter 49 · Revenge is not an easy thing to doChapter 50 · Because I couldn’t see his faceChapter 51 · One of his brothers is a continuous mountain rangeChapter 52 · How could we possibly run into characters from the original storyChapter 53 · The gems my brother gave me piled up into a small mountainChapter 54 · One can feel an overwhelming sense of superiority.Chapter 55 · Sleeping with a shadowy figure means you won’t be afraid of ghosts at allChapter 56 · The fireworks display to celebrate my baby was absolutely devastating!Chapter 57 · It wasn’t this restaurant that treated us; it was another oneChapter 58 · His super-rich older sister paid for his treat!Chapter 59 · He’s different from beforeChapter 60 · It’s all so weird, isn’t it normal for people to want to disappear?Chapter 61 · Wen JieChapter 62 · Has the identity of this strange child been discovered?Chapter 63 · Those who make their child angry are unforgivableChapter 64 · Being too inquisitive about other people’s private affairs will bring you troubleChapter 65 · A person not to be covetedChapter 66 · Can you bridge the racial divide by staying close to your family?Chapter 67 · What to do if my child doesn’t want to celebrate their birthday?Chapter 68 · The baby is also a second-generation, a bizarre second-generation!Chapter 69 · We are clearly each other’s only friendsChapter 70 · The House of Eeries really did throw a ridiculously huge birthday partyChapter 71 · Why would he feel competitive towards his friend?Chapter 72 · Try to appease the jealous shadow.Chapter 73 · If you’re going to take revenge, you should do it in front of him!Chapter 74 · Now that things have come to thisChapter 75 · My baby’s travel is strange and worryingChapter 76 · One of the older brothers who crawled into the suitcase and followedChapter 77 · He resolutely refused to leave his abandoned brotherChapter 78 · I don’t want my baby to see my terrifying true formChapter 79 · I love hugging you like this.Chapter 80 · It’s a good thing to know you.Chapter 81 · Does my brother also want to go out and have some fun?Chapter 82 · His Older brother?Chapter 83 · Xiao Ming!Chapter 84 · I’m doing great as long as the original text doesn’t go crazyChapter 85 · What’s there to be afraid of when everything’s shrouded in eeriness?Chapter 86 · Let’s have a fight for the sake of the original ownerChapter 87 · How did they know he wasn’t the original owner?Chapter 88 Part 1 · Was the shadowy figure injured?Chapter 88 Part 2 · Was the shadowy figure injured?Chapter 88 Part 3 · Was the shadowy figure injured?Chapter 89 Part 1 · To inflict countless severe emotional blows on someoneChapter 89 Part 2 · To inflict countless severe emotional blows on someoneChapter 91 Part 1 · He was like a human in a supernatural taleChapter 91 Part 2 · He was like a human in a supernatural taleChapter 92 · Someone is secretly using underhanded tacticsChapter 93 · The right people I once followedChapter 94 · Let go of your prejudices against the protagonist.Okay! How come on one complain that we can’t right click the link and open a it in a new webapge??Chapter 95 · Favoritism from his current friendsChapter 96 · The baby is going to marry into our familyChapter 97 · The idea of falling in loveChapter 98 · Want to replace your baby?Chapter 99 · What’s wrong with double happiness?!Chapter 100 · It’s just a matter of raceChapter 101 · I need to balance dating and studying!Chapter 102 · After the shadowy figure gained a physical bodyChapter 103 · Confess your love to the eerie house!Chapter 104 · Even with such pampering, your baby still lacks a sense of security.Chapter 105 · How much help did he receive that he didn’t know about?Chapter 106 · You are not worthy to be the middlemanChapter 107 · Is there anything wrong with me being petty?Chapter 108 · You can have both love and studies!Chapter 109 · Suppressed and restrained desiresChapter 110 · What does an unforgettable yet ordinary date need?