The two of them reached the stairwell.
They saw that the iron door leading to the third floor already stood open.
From above, an unbearably foul stench came rolling down.
It was the very same smell as the corpse-water dripping from above their room!
The stench of rotting animal matter!
Liu Chengfeng couldn't stomach the smell; he clamped a hand over his mouth and nose, brows screwing together.
Fighting down the urge to retch, he followed Ning Qiushui up to the third floor.
Once they arrived, the reek of rotting flesh grew so much thicker that Liu Chengfeng lost control entirely; his stomach spasmed and spasmed until at last he crouched down and vomited!
"Urk—"
Liu Chengfeng dry-heaved, his face ugly in the extreme.
Ning Qiushui patted his back.
Having emptied out his dinner, Liu Chengfeng felt a little better.
They advanced along the pitch-black corridor. The floor beneath their feet was sticky and viscous. Liu Chengfeng's face was ghastly pale—there was no light to see by, but he could guess well enough what was underfoot...
Corpse-water!
The stuff coated... the entire floor of this story!
Horror filled both their hearts.
How many corpses, rotting and dissolving, would it take... to cover the floor of an entire story of a building?
"As I thought..."
Ning Qiushui's eyes narrowed.
Even he found the odor in the air revolting, but he felt no urge to vomit.
As for what the third floor held—he had already guessed the better part of it before coming in.
Treading through the sticky, sickening corpse-water, the two of them finally reached the first room that breathed out the smell of rot, and slowly twisted the doorknob. The sight that met their eyes shook them to the core!
That scene of horror would stay with a man for the rest of his life...
In the moonlit room, packed dense everywhere they looked, lay countless rotting corpses!
Among them, some were fresher—still masses of bloody flesh—while others had long since rotted down to heaps of dry bones, nothing left but skeleton and hair!
Yet every one of them, without exception, kept an almost intact head. On the faces of the bodies not yet fully decayed hung ghastly smiles, and they gazed at the two men in the doorway, as if extending an invitation...
Thud—
Liu Chengfeng clapped a hand over his mouth, stumbling back a step, his body shuddering without pause.
He looked toward the other rooms, seeming to understand something, and with violently trembling hands pushed the other doors open one by one.
"Holy fuck...!"
He very nearly screamed it aloud.
Sure enough.
Every room—every single one—was piled full of rotting corpses!
The organs of every corpse were gone, and their flesh was riddled with the wounds of knife and fork—proof that something had once feasted upon them, gorging itself...
And Wang Yuning's and Ya Mo's bodies... were right there among them!
Liu Chengfeng's legs had gone to jelly. Bracing himself against the wall, he sank slowly into a crouch, his face paler than the moonlight.
"So that's..."
"That's where the corpse-water above our ceiling comes from..."
"But where did all these bodies come from?"
"Unless..."
Ning Qiushui's gaze passed through the window, out to the black villa district in the distance.
"I'm afraid... every original resident of this district is inside these few rooms."
Liu Chengfeng swallowed hard; cold sweat streamed down his forehead.
The ghost-thing hiding on the villa's third floor... had eaten every resident of the entire district?
"And I'd guess we're not the first batch of caretakers to come here, either. All those rooms set up downstairs, each fitted with its own bathroom—those must have been prepared for the caretakers who came to look after the old woman..."
Every sentence Ning Qiushui spoke made Liu Chengfeng's heart slam against his ribs!
"Bro... maybe we should hurry back down..."
"If it comes back, won't we be..."
Liu Chengfeng was sounding the retreat, but Ning Qiushui showed no intention of leaving.
"We're very close to the truth now..."
"Big Beard..."
"Aren't you curious what the thing that devoured every resident of this district... actually is?"
Liu Chengfeng froze, and then the corner of his mouth twitched.
"No, seriously, bro—you truly aren't afraid of dying, are you..."
"Is the truth... worth more than your life?"
Ning Qiushui answered with a question of his own:
"Can you leave this floor? Can you leave the villa—leave the district?"
"Who knows what other killing rules it has?"
"For all we know, we triggered its killing rules the day we entered the villa, and our luck has simply held—our turn just hasn't come yet..."
"Besides, it's gone downstairs to feed. It may be gorging itself right next door to us at this very moment... And the more of us die, the more dangerous it gets for those who are left!"
Liu Chengfeng's face flickered through shade after shade, and at last he clenched his jaw:
"Fine!"
"I'll trust you this once, bro!"
They passed the other rooms and came to the innermost one.
It was a study.
There were no bloodstains at its door—it was clean, as if it didn't belong to this floor at all.
The two exchanged a glance, their eyes brightening.
"This must be the place!"
They eased the door open, and a dense breath of dust rolled out to meet them.
By its furnishings, it looked to be a study.
Neither large nor small—and inside lay a skeleton, long since decayed. From the size and detail of the bones, it had belonged to a girl of fourteen or fifteen.
In the skeleton's arms was a little teddy bear.
The teddy bear's eyes were black as pitch, as if scrutinizing them both.
Ning Qiushui stepped carefully up to the skeleton, examined it, and spoke:
"...This one wasn't eaten."
"There isn't a single mark of knife or fork on her ribs, her sternum, or the bones of her throat."
He had examined Wang Yuning's and Ya Mo's bodies before; although what had been eaten were their organs and some of their muscle, their bones had borne plenty of knife-and-fork wounds too.
This skeleton had none.
"Not eaten?"
"Then how did she die?"
Liu Chengfeng's confusion only deepened.
Ning Qiushui studied the remains for a long while.
"In all likelihood, she starved. Or died of thirst."
"The thing outside probably can't enter this room—but she couldn't leave it either. She was trapped in here... No water, no food; most people last three to five days."
"Look—this window's nailed over with steel bars, and the rust on them runs deep, unlike the bars in the old lady's room on the second floor. Which means these were nailed on long ago. Most likely when she was small—her family was afraid she'd climb out the window and fall. This is the third floor, after all. So they barred her window."
"But back then, her family could never have imagined that those very bars... would one day cut off her last hope of escape!"
Listening, an icy chill spread through Liu Chengfeng's heart.
He could imagine the despair of the girl these bones had once been.
Outside prowled a horrific man-eating fiend; inside, there was no other way out. In the end, all she could do was waste away in despair, trapped, until she died!
"Hey—bro, quick, look! Behind that skeleton, by its backside... I think there's something there!"