After the villa's mistress left, everyone returned to the hall, made brief introductions, and began discussing how to care for the old woman.
Yan Youping, the short, skinny girl with the twin ponytails, timidly raised her small hand.
"Um... so, how did you all end up on the bus?"
"I—I was on the high-speed rail, got sleepy playing on my phone, and... dozed off for a bit. When I woke up, I was on the bus."
"Same here. I was working overtime at the office when I suddenly felt exhausted..."
Everyone spoke up in turn, and comparing stories, they found they had all arrived on the bus in exactly the same way.
The eeriness of it made their already frightened hearts even more terrified!
"Goddamn it... we're well and truly hexed..."
Liu Chengfeng swore.
Yan Youping was silent a moment, then said weakly:
"What if... what if this is some production crew, and this is how they invite people onto a reality show?"
"I mean, I've seen on TV before..."
Before she could finish, Liu Chengfeng cut her off with a cold laugh:
"Forgot about the fat guy already?"
"A TV show that kills a man and skins him?"
Yan Youping's heart lurched, but she glared:
"What if... what if that was just a prop?"
"And the blood was a prop too?"
"Who knows—maybe it was chicken blood, or dog blood..."
Yan Youping was still lying to herself, but Ning Qiushui's abrupt words beside her crushed the last line of defense in her heart:
"It wasn't animal blood."
Everyone looked at him.
He seemed to have already accepted all of this, and appeared remarkably calm.
"I used to be a veterinarian. I'm especially sensitive to smells. The blood of cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, cattle—chickens, ducks, fish, geese, pigeons—smells distinctly different from human blood."
"Sheep's blood, for instance, is gamey, while human blood carries an unmistakable rusty-iron smell..."
"I can tell you with absolute certainty: the blood on that traffic light was one hundred percent human."
"And it was... the freshest human blood there is!"
When he finished, Yan Youping shuddered in terror, hugged her knees, and began to quietly sob:
"Stop..."
"Please... stop..."
Seeing her like that, Ning Qiushui softened his tone a little.
He couldn't blame the girl for being terrified.
Any normal person from ordinary life who had witnessed that earlier scene would probably carry the scar of it for a long, long time.
Only someone who dealt with corpses regularly could bear it a little better.
After all... the scene had simply been too gruesome!
"Let's think about how to get through these five days first..."
The speaker was a plain-looking man, around 170 centimeters tall, with gloomy eyes.
His name was Xue Guize.
"There are seven of us, and this task is to care for the bedridden old woman for five days. How do you all want to divide the work?"
They looked at one another. Seeing no one speak, Ning Qiushui said:
"How about this—the three women handle the cooking and laundry, and we four men look after the old woman..."
He had barely finished when Wang Yuning, the beauty with the gold earrings, said in a snide sing-song:
"Oh my, so women exist to cook and wash clothes for you stinking men?"
"You lot sure know how to slack off. The moment the mistress said that old thing can't even move in her bed, you volunteered yourselves to 'care' for her... Do you take us for idiots?"
"'Caring for' the old thing—I'll bet there's nothing to do at all. You'll just be lazing about, won't you?"
Hearing this, Liu Chengfeng couldn't take it. He lifted his chin and drawled:
"Whew, what a stench... Such a nice-looking girl—how come every word out of her mouth smells like shit?"
Wang Yuning's face darkened too:
"Who the fuck do you think you're cursing at?"
Liu Chengfeng was about to fire back when Ning Qiushui cut him off.
"If you don't want to cook and do laundry, I'll trade with you. You look after the old woman—say, from nine in the morning to ten at night. After ten it'll be dark anyway, and we'll all wash up and rest."
Wang Yuning glanced at Ning Qiushui and gave a cold hmph.
"Well... thanks, then."
She said the words, but there wasn't a shred of gratitude in her tone.
Only pure mockery.
"Oh, right—it's past five already, and I'm hungry. Weren't you going to cook? Get to it."
Ning Qiushui gave Wang Yuning a long look, said nothing more, and turned to the other two women:
"Do either of you want to trade?"
The girl who hadn't spoken at all—Ya Mo—raised her hand.
"I..."
"Sorry. I genuinely can't cook."
Compared to Wang Yuning's obnoxious manner, Ya Mo was far more sincere.
These days, plenty of children grew up pampered; men and women who couldn't cook were everywhere. It was nothing strange.
"Any of you gentlemen know how to cook?"
The remaining three men were silent for a moment, and then Liu Chengfeng said impatiently:
"Ah, fine, fine. I'll go cook and do the laundry with you!"
"What a bunch of useless trash—can't even cook or wash clothes!"
Wang Yuning said icily:
"Keep your mouth clean, you uncouth lout!"
Liu Chengfeng's eyes bulged as he jabbed a finger at her:
"If I weren't a man who doesn't hit women, we'd see whether you lived through today!"
Wang Yuning gave a cold laugh and clacked her way upstairs in her high heels.
The kitchen was on the first floor and the old woman on the second. The villa was large, and as everyone got busy, they split up.
Liu Chengfeng, cursing and grumbling, followed Ning Qiushui to the kitchen.
With them came the girl who couldn't stop sniffling, Yan Youping.
"Enough. Curse a little less."
Once in the kitchen, Ning Qiushui, thoroughly sick of the noise, cut Liu Chengfeng off.
"No, seriously... how can you just swallow that attitude of hers?"
Liu Chengfeng glared.
Ning Qiushui opened the refrigerator and began taking out ingredients.
"You really think looking after that old woman... is the easy job?"
At that, Liu Chengfeng's breath suddenly caught.
"Bro, what do you mean by that?"
Ning Qiushui slowly turned his head, looking at Liu Chengfeng and Yan Youping beside him.
"Remember what the suited man in the black villa told us?"
"Only if we come back from the Blood Door alive will they answer our questions."
"Which means the world behind the Blood Door... holds unimaginable danger!"
When he finished, Yan Youping's thin little frame shuddered again!
She quavered:
"Wh-what danger?"
Ning Qiushui shook his head.
"I don't know yet... but since the task on the Blood Door is to care for the old woman, the danger most likely has something to do with her."
"In any case... be careful."
Hearing his warning, Liu Chengfeng's eyes rolled around; he furtively pinched his fingers in divination, the gloom sweeping from his face, and chuckled:
"Bro, I reckon you're talking sense. I'm sticking with you."
Ning Qiushui gave him a somewhat surprised look and shook his head, but said nothing more.
He took the vegetables out of the refrigerator first, then looked toward the freezer.
Just as the villa's mistress had said, there was plenty of meat.
She had cut it into portions and packed them into separate bags.
Ning Qiushui took out a bag labeled 【Beef Tenderloin】 and dropped it into a pot over low heat to thaw.
As he was closing the refrigerator, something caught the corner of his eye. He pulled a rock-hard frozen piece of meat out from deep inside.
Inside the bag of meat were quantities of some black, unidentifiable substance.
But there was too much crushed ice covering it, and the bags were all vacuum-sealed; there was no telling what the black stuff was.
This bag bore no label—presumably the mistress had forgotten it.
Ning Qiushui stared at the meat for a while, until Liu Chengfeng, that bushy-bearded roughneck, leaned in again.
"How come this meat's black?"
He asked, curious.
Ning Qiushui shook his head and stuffed the meat back into the refrigerator.
"No idea. Maybe it's been frozen too long and gone bad."
The three of them busied themselves in the kitchen. To Ning Qiushui's surprise, Liu Chengfeng—who looked every inch the aging street thug—turned out to be a superb cook!
The way he washed, chopped, and stir-fried marked him as an old hand at a glance.
"Food's ready!"
Liu Chengfeng carried the stir-fried meat and vegetables to the table and bellowed up the stairs.
Then, without caring whether anyone upstairs came down or not, he picked up his steaming bowl of rice and began wolfing it down.
Watching him eat like a starving ghost reborn, Yan Youping couldn't help asking:
"Shouldn't we wait for the others?"
Liu Chengfeng said gruffly:
"Wait for what?"
"Eat!"
And he went back to devouring his food.
Tap, tap, tap—
Four sets of footsteps sounded from upstairs. Still on the staircase, Wang Yuning caught sight of Liu Chengfeng burying his face in his food and couldn't resist a jab:
"Look at the way you eat—like a starving ghost reincarnated..."
Before, Liu Chengfeng would have hit back hard, without fail.
But he seemed to devote himself entirely to his meals; Wang Yuning's mockery went in one ear and out the other.
Wang Yuning took it as him backing down, and started in on her own meal.
At the table, everyone kept silent.
No one knew what to say.
Only, they found their vision growing darker and darker, until toward the end they could barely make out the beef in their bowls.
Not until Ning Qiushui stood up and switched on the light did they finally realize... night had fallen.
"What the hell!"
"How is it dark already?"
"It's not even seven!"
The man called Bei Dao let out a strange yelp. That jumpy, theatrical manner of his left everyone feeling distinctly uncomfortable.
"What are you screeching about?"
Xue Guize, whose face had been ugly to begin with, furrowed his brow high.
"Didn't you hear the villa's mistress say the rainy season is about to arrive?"
"Of course it gets dark early... Making a fuss over nothing."
He berated Bei Dao with a heat that was rather excessive, but everyone knew why, and by tacit agreement said nothing.
The atmosphere inside the villa... was simply too suffocating.
"Hey, hey, hey—is this how you look after an old woman?"
"Stuffing yourselves while a paralyzed old lady goes hungry upstairs. You call that right?"
"Don't tell me someone actually believed caring for the old woman meant doing nothing at all?"
Having eaten his fill, Liu Chengfeng set down his bowl and chopsticks and picked at his teeth while needling Wang Yuning across the table in a snide sing-song.
The latter clenched her fists, her gaze growing colder still.
"Hmph. You think everyone's a crude rice-bucket like you?"
"What a disgusting maggot of a man."
She tapped her high heels in disdain, went and filled a bowl of rice, haphazardly picked some leftovers onto it, and clack-clack-clacked her way upstairs.
They watched her figure vanish into the pitch-dark stairwell, and for some reason, everyone's heart beat a little faster...
"Were you all on the second floor just now?"
Ning Qiushui set down his own bowl and chopsticks at this point, addressing the three who were to care for the paralyzed old woman.
Xue Guize gave an "mm."
"We covered the whole second floor. Apart from the paralyzed old woman, there's no one else."
"Our rooms are across from hers—all along the same corridor."
Ning Qiushui asked:
"Did you notice anything unusual?"
Xue Guize shook his head, hesitated a moment, then replied:
"There's a... very strange smell in our rooms. I can't say what it is, but it isn't pleasant."
"In all seven rooms?"
"Mm. All of them."
At this point, the girl called Ya Mo added softly:
"There's another strange thing..."
"The rooms the mistress prepared for us—every single one has its own bathroom."
Bei Dao snickered:
"What's strange about that? They're rich. Didn't want to trek down the hall to use the toilet, that's all..."
Ning Qiushui frowned.
"No... it is strange."
"Only the mistress's family lives in this villa. Even with the husband home, that's four people at most. Why prepare this many bedrooms and bathrooms?"
"Wh-what's so strange about that? Maybe they just love having guests?"
"Throwing parties at home all the time—don't rich people love that sort of thing?"
Bei Dao's voice carried a faint edge of panic.
No one took up his words.
They lapsed once more into eerie silence.
Until...
A piercing scream from the second floor tore through the dreadful stillness—
"Aaah!!!"