Fang Tian had barely run a few steps when the sound of a door being shoved open came from behind. Judging by the cadence of the footsteps alone, Brother Jie was a great deal faster than the girl who'd chased him down swinging a tripod earlier.
He just couldn't work out one thing.
What in the world was going on with this Qingkong University?
He'd only come here to register, to daydream a little about the four beautiful years of college life ahead — so how had the genre of his everyday romance abruptly switched to something straight out of Outlast?
Fang Tian felt the air grow thin, as if his lungs were about to leap out of his chest.
Still, as an armchair player of the Outlast series, Fang Tian had picked up one little trick from watching streams —— when someone's chasing you, whatever you do, don't look back.
Even if the footsteps drew close, even if Brother Jie had very possibly already appeared right behind him, he absolutely must not turn around.
But after charging blindly ahead a few more steps, Fang Tian sensed something else was off.
For one, the corridor ahead seemed to stretch on without end, and the once-smooth tiles underfoot had taken on a sticky, sucking feel; with every step, it was as if he were treading on a pond.
The smell of blood was growing thicker.
After several seconds of bracing himself, Fang Tian drew a deep breath and looked down at his feet.
The once-spotless white tiles had been dyed red with blood, and the blood ahead showed signs of growing deeper still. In those few seconds of running, it had risen over his ankles. He soon realized it was seeping out from the gap beneath a door to his side.
The wooden door was overgrown with fleshy buds, stalk-like tissue creeping off into the depths of the dark. Less than a dozen meters ahead, Fang Tian saw the walls already sheathed in a lining of flesh — this was plainly no longer the way he'd come.
『Appreciator's Sanity detected critically low. Please leave this area as soon as possible.』
The system delivered fresh bad news, and at the same time his status bar showed Sanity at 『0/5』. Unlike the instant blackout from his first sight of Senior, though, this time a one-minute countdown appeared behind the status — a countdown that, for the first time, let Fang Tian feel the change of his Sanity hitting zero.
Every three seconds, a rhythmic, wringing pain shot through his chest, as if an invisible hand were squeezing his heart. Fang Tian's mind went blank, all his senses sinking into extreme sluggishness; only on a rational level did he know he was still running forward without stop.
The footsteps behind him drew nearer. The system and Brother Jie had launched a pincer attack from front and back.
Faced with such a hopeless spot, a clever man would already have reloaded his save.
A pity reality offered no reload-and-retry option — which meant he could either burn through the last of his Sanity in this heavily mind-polluting place, or stop and fall into Brother Jie's hands.
"Over here, quick — come in."
At his wit's end, an ethereal call sounded in Fang Tian's mind.
He found the source of the voice with ease —— in this space swallowed up by fleshy buds, there stood a single wooden door, untouched by the corruption.
Almost without thinking, Fang Tian seized the door handle and threw himself at the door with all his might.
Heaven leaves a way out for everyone; surely among ghosts and monsters there had to be a good soul like him, ready to draw a blade for a stranger in need!
In that moment, Fang Tian believed it.
A pity reality didn't match his lovely imagining. The wooden door didn't open; the handle in his grip felt welded in place, refusing to turn so much as a hair.
"Tsk, tsk."
"Took the bait."
"So gullible."
"Hilarious."
"Come on in."
"Then, with us......"
"Become one!"
The ethereal call in his mind turned abruptly shrill and ear-splitting. Fang Tian felt a stab of pain in his temples — in an instant it was as if a dozen different voices came flooding into his brain, none of them bothering to hide their derision of him.
He instinctively tried to let go, only to find the stalk-like buds on the handle had at some point spread all over his forearm, and were still creeping over his body at a visible pace.
The next moment, the wooden door opened its "eyes."
Densely packed gazes converged on Fang Tian all at once — eyes belonging to all manner of different people, beaming countless kinds of negative emotion at him.
Even without a fear of clustered holes, Fang Tian's skin crawled under the stare of all those eyes.
Whatever happened to trust between man and ghost!?
Argh, this place is the absolute worst!
This whole way along, all he'd run into were people who wanted to beat him up, ghosts who wanted to do him in, and monsters who wanted to do him in.
Dragged by an immense force, Fang Tian drew closer and closer to the eyes on the door. Just as he was about to sink into that dense mass of eyes, a hand came to rest on his shoulder.
At the same instant, the whispers in his mind let out a shrill, agonized scream. To Fang Tian it felt like a sonic boom going off inside his skull — enough to drop the remaining 20 seconds on his Sanity countdown straight to zero.
Everything before Fang Tian's eyes went black.
......
"What are you two doing?"
Hao Xue caught the collapsing Fang Tian in one arm, knit her brows, and put the question to Feng Jie, who stood with his scalpel raised high.
As she spoke, Feng Jie gave a casual slash, and the fleshy buds stabbing at him from the wall were cut into several pieces, their spattering juices passing through his insubstantial body to scatter across the far wall.
"You two know each other?"
Feng Jie answered with a question, sizing up Hao Xue and Fang Tian with a probing look.
"A junior who just came to register today...... Let me ask you — why did you bring him to a place like this?"
"Because when I ran into him, a little girl was chasing him and walloping him, screaming 'pervert' the whole time. The way I see it, helping a junior sister teach a creep a lesson is the duty of any senior."
At that, Hao Xue fell into thought.
"So it really was a misunderstanding?"
Feng Jie was taken aback.
"No."
Hao Xue recalled the scene of her own first meeting with Fang Tian and shook her head. "More like an occupational habit."
This fellow had restless hands and feet; preying on a lone girl under cover of a dark and windy night did rather fit Fang Tian's style. Two different girls groped in a single day — it left Hao Xue genuinely worried about the moral climate of her alma mater these days.
"I'd meant to give him a scare, but I never expected the corpse delivered yesterday to suddenly wake up."
"Need a hand?"
"No need. Take him back. I can handle this myself."
Hao Xue nodded. The right arm circling Fang Tian's waist lifted lightly, and under Feng Jie's astonished gaze, she swept Fang Tian up the stairs in a princess carry.
These two...... haven't they got their roles backward?
Feng Jie watched Hao Xue go, then tightened his grip on the scalpel. Provoked, the fleshy buds proliferated faster still. Behind the shredded wooden door was an enormous tumor of flesh.
The tumor pulsed rhythmically, like a heart. Faces without eyes covered its surface, features contorted as though enduring tremendous agony.
Feng Jie heaved a sigh and stepped slowly up to the tumor.
"Rest in peace."
The hand rose. The blade fell.