“Benefactor, you are obsessed and unrepentant. In the end, you cannot escape this…”
Although Jiang Wei was doing a live stream for the very first time, she had after all undergone a few years of professional conservatory training and had recently watched a mountain of horror movies. She got into character instantly, her tone calm yet carrying a hint of eeriness, her expression nervous yet tinged with curiosity. She pulled the viewers right in all at once.
Perhaps because her heart wasn’t entirely devoted to being a streamer, she didn’t actively interact with the bullet comments, which inadvertently created a marvelous sense of detachment—making it feel as if a direct survivor of the events were recounting a sorrowful past.
As he filmed, Shen Yang secretly admired her in his heart: “This Classmate Jiang really has some tricks up her sleeve. She’s so calm on her very first stream, not nervous at all! But with her looks and talent, she ought to be quite famous around campus. How come I’ve never heard her name before? That’s unscientific. Wait… does our Jianghai Film Academy really have someone like this? No, stop overthinking it, stop overthinking it!”
Shen Yang hurriedly reined in his stray thoughts and refocused on the filming. As an elite major in film and television photography, his camera movements were extremely professional. Following Jiang Wei’s narration, the lens pushed in from time to time so viewers could clearly see her face, then pulled back to display the desolate scene of the entire abandoned building.
What they were putting on wasn’t really a spirit-exploration live stream; it felt more like a high-end spirit-exploration program from the television era, giving people a refreshing and sophisticated experience.
Some viewers in the bullet comments even marveled: “Do we really need to go this professional for such a niche genre like spirit exploration?!”
Seeming to receive algorithmic promotion from the platform, the live stream’s popularity steadily climbed.
After finishing the horror story, Jiang Wei circled the abandoned building once, peering through one window after another—all of them revealing scenes of utter ruin.
Once the stream’s audience gradually gathered, she walked back to the pitch-black stairwell entrance and said to the camera, “Alright, we’re going to head inside the building now.”
With that, she took a deep breath and stepped step-by-step into the darkness.
Arriving at the stairwell entrance, she suddenly stopped in her tracks, turned back to the camera, and announced, “Since this place is simply too terrifying, the anchor has decided to call off this adventure and take everyone out for hot pot!”
The bullet comments instantly flooded the screen with question marks:
“???”
“I already took off my pants, and you’re showing me this?”
“Heh, can we negotiate a truce?”
“Surely you aren’t joking right now?”
“Benefactor, pull back at the brink of the precipice and turn away from the lost path. Amitabha, well done!”
“I want to watch hot pot! I want to watch hot pot! I want to watch hot pot!”
Even Shen Yang, who was concentrating on filming, was taken aback. Is she really going to eat hot pot? Yet a strange sense of relief washed over him.
At that moment, Jiang Wei smiled faintly. “Just kidding, just lightening up the tense atmosphere.”
“Haha, the streamer is so playful!”
“The streamer must be scared!”
“Little sister, I support you. If you’re scared, don’t go in.”
“No way, I want my hot pot!”
“Drag the one who mentioned hot pot out and beat them to death!”
“Benefactor, you are obsessed and unrepentant. In the end, you cannot escape this calamity. What a pity, what a pity.”
The viewers guessed correctly: Jiang Wei was indeed a little scared. But being scared was precisely the point!
Being scared meant money; being scared meant power!
Jiang Wei took another deep breath and resolutely walked into the stairwell. The reflected ambient light of the city’s night sky vanished entirely, and she was completely swallowed by the darkness.
Her heartbeat seemed to skip a beat, and her breathing grew noticeably heavier. She gripped the flashlight in her hand tightly, illuminating the dilapidated stairs right in front of her.
The walls were crawling with mildew spots, and the smell of mold mixed with dust rushed into her nostrils, making her want to sneeze.
Jiang Wei first walked over to push open the ground-floor doors, but they all remained completely immovable—they were sealed shut. Without further hesitation, she ascended the narrow, cramped staircase, heading up toward the second floor.
The rooms on the eastern side of the second floor were accessible. The inside had been almost completely cleared out, leaving behind only sparse traces of daily life: old newspapers scattered on the ground, bottles and jars in the kitchen, and a ruined, battered sofa.
The rooms were empty, carrying a rather eerie ambiance.
Jiang Wei wandered around the empty rooms for a bit, confirming the layout of the apartment to prepare for the subsequent live stream.
Her primary objective for this trip was the room on the western side of the third floor—the origin point of the fire where a family of four lost their lives.
Some people online insisted adamantly that on certain rainy days, they had seen four ghostly figures standing in a neat row right on that room’s balcony, claiming that overcast and rainy days carried heavier yin energy, making it easier to spot ghosts.
After a brief exploration, just as Jiang Wei was preparing to leave, rain suddenly began to patter outside the window, drumming crisply against the leaves and sounding exceptionally clear in the quiet environment.
The sudden sound of rain caused Shen Yang, who was filming, to shudder slightly.
Jiang Wei gasped inwardly. They aren’t actually coming for real, are they?!
Composing her mindset, she spoke to the camera:
“It just started raining. New viewers might not have heard the introduction, so I’ll recap: it’s said that on certain rainy days…”
She recounted the horror story of the four ghostly figures all over again, and then said:
“Next, we are going to head up to the third floor—right to that room where the ghostly figures can be seen.”
Stepping out of the room and returning to the stairwell, Jiang Wei faced the cramped, elongated stairs and felt a slight reluctance to walk up. Taking another deep breath, she put one foot in front of the other, heading up toward the third floor.
The flashlight illuminated a small patch of darkness ahead. Carefully avoiding the dust-covered stair railing, Jiang Wei walked upward step by step. Suddenly, she heard heavy panting coming from right behind her, and she thought:
“This Classmate Shen looks so robust, yet his stamina is shockingly poor. He’s only walked a few steps and he’s already panting like this—how can he even play basketball? Wait, don’t tell me he’s scared?!”
Just as she stepped onto the very last step and arrived at the third-floor landing, Jiang Wei pulled out her phone and checked her [Fear Value].
The [Fear Value] had actually gone up by 19 points.
Jiang Wei was overjoyed inwardly: “Well, well, well, Shen Yang. You look big and burly, but your courage is this tiny. Truly… truly wonderful!”
Though she had felt a bit of fear herself during the process, it wouldn’t have surged by this much—at most seven or eight points.
In other words, the cameraman Shen Yang behind her had contributed at least ten fear points to her. Translated into gold prayer beads, that was worth over three thousand RMB, while the labor fee she was paying him was a mere two hundred bucks. And this spirit exploration had only just begun!
Regardless of how well this live stream performed, she was going to make roughly ten thousand RMB—that was a regular urban white-collar worker’s monthly salary right there!
And she didn’t have to squeeze onto the subway for overtime, nor did she need to grovel and beg or suck up to big-spending patrons in a live streaming room. All she had to do was randomly select a generous patsy—oh wait, a cutie—and walk around an abandoned building for a bit to make this much money. Was there any job in the world more comfortable than this?
Thinking of this, every shred of fear vanished from her heart, replaced entirely by boundless joy. She couldn’t help but turn her head and flash a smile at Shen Yang.
A moment earlier, as Shen Yang followed Jiang Wei upstairs, he was quietly getting cold feet. After hearing Jiang Wei’s deeply immersive horror story, he didn’t want to go up to the third floor at all.
Right at that moment, he felt like the foolish protagonist in a horror movie—instead of staying safely at home, he had traveled thousands of miles to a dangerous place just to throw his life away.
Suddenly, he saw Jiang Wei standing motionless at the top of the stairwell. Inside the pitch-black, cramped landing, her head was slightly lowered, and her long black hair hung down like a waterfall, hiding any expression.
Jiang Wei didn’t move, so he didn’t dare move either.
One second, two seconds… five seconds… ten seconds…
Shen Yang’s heart sank straight down. He recalled how, right before entering the abandoned building, Jiang Wei had stood with her head tilted upward, staring unblinkingly at a certain spot upstairs—and the direction she had been gazing at seemed to be precisely that haunted house on the third floor!
That question resurfaced in his mind: Does a “Jiang Wei” like this really exist at their school?
He retreated a step, descending a single stair.
Inside the live stream room:
“Huh, why did the streamer stop moving?” did the stream freeze?”
“That silhouette looks just like a ghost!”
“Did she find something?!”
“Standing completely still is so creepy.”
“You’re killing me with suspense, cameraman, go up and take a look! Cameraman, stop backing up!”
At that moment, Jiang Wei suddenly turned her head around and smiled at Shen Yang.
Shen Yang shuddered all over, his heart plunging to rock bottom. That smile was so intimate, as if greeting a lifelong friend, yet it simultaneously concealed a trace of chilling malice—it was eerie to the extreme.
In the live stream room, the image jerked violently:
“Ah, that scared the living daylights out of me!”
“Holy crap, her smile gave me the chills!”
“Damn it, this place is not somewhere to linger, cameraman run!”
“Freedom, equality, justice, the rule of law…”
“It’s over, the streamer is possessed by a ghost. No hot pot for us.”
“Nooo, my female college student!”
“She acts so convincing, just like the real thing.”
“I bow down to the streamer’s acting skills. How did she pull off something so warm yet so creepy?”
Shen Yang threw all professional ethics of a cameraman out the window. With a trembling voice, he asked, “What… what are you smiling at?”
Jiang Wei instantly felt embarrassed. I just made a tidy little sum of several thousand bucks, why am I so lacking in poker face?
With an innocent expression, she replied, “Nothing. Did I smile?”
“You did smile! You definitely smiled,” Shen Yang pressed anxiously.
“You must have seen wrong!” Jiang Wei said with absolute certainty. “What’s so funny about this place?”
“Uh…” Shen Yang was rendered speechless, beginning to doubt himself. For a moment he wondered if he had misseen, and the next moment he wondered if Jiang Wei was just pulling off a stage effect for the broadcast.
If it was a stage effect, then fair enough—they were doing a live stream after all. On the contrary, it made him look like an unprofessional cameraman for interrupting Jiang Wei’s “performance.”
Inside the live stream room:
“666, even the cameraman got spooked. That voice could never be faked.”
“Cameraman run! She really smiled. This chick is not human.”
“The streamer really knows how to set a mood. Is she going to perform a scream next?”
“So scared.”
“What’s there to be scared of? This batch of viewers has no guts at all!”
Jiang Wei couldn’t care less whether Shen Yang speaking up ruined the live stream effect. Joke’s on you, how much money can a live stream even make anyway? Ruin it all you want!
The longer she looked at Shen Yang now, the more pleasing to the eye he became—just like a landlord lady gazing at her sturdiest ox and horse.
With an intensely gentle expression, she said, “Let’s keep going!”
Shen Yang gasped internally: “It changed! Her attitude has definitely changed!”
From the moment they met until just now, although her attitude wasn’t cold, it certainly wasn’t warm either. But the moment she stepped onto the third floor, she suddenly acted like a completely different person—it was way too bizarre!
Inside the live stream room:
“That smile is too pretty.”
“Cameraman, hurry up and get a close-up.”
“The streamer suddenly got so gentle!”
“Big sis, I’ll follow you anywhere.”
“Does anyone else feel like the streamer’s persona just changed? It’s kind of creepy.”