The bed was spread flat. The sheet was not wrinkled at all. There was no sign of fighting inside the main bedroom. Everything was the same as before.
“Where are they?” Bai Xiao lowered his body. Everything was normal inside the main bedroom, but he felt oppressed. It was like someone had pressed his head underwater. He couldn’t find anything for purchase, no matter how hard he struggled. All the lights had been switched off. The dresser was nothing more than a silhouette in the dark. It was like a coffin standing upright or a Pandora’s Box.
The note was squeezed into the corner of the door. Do Not Open crawled in his gaze. When Bai Xiao came to, his hands were already on the dresser.
“No. I mustn’t open it!” His strong constitution snapped Bai Xiao out of it. He wanted to move away from the dresser, but as he turned around to leave the bedroom, he felt something was wrong. The gap between the dresser doors widened. There was an eye inside the dresser looking at him!
A glass fell to the ground. Bai Xiao turned to the kitchen. The black liquid flowed among the shattered glass. He then realised a lot of black mould had grown on the walls. These things portented the arrival of worse things. The black mould spread very quickly. Bai Xiao tried to leave, but the door to the living room suddenly closed. Something under the sofa grabbed Bai Xiao. Bai Xiao kicked the sofa over, but there was nothing underneath.
The danger level of the old home rose rapidly over a few seconds. Various anomalies occurred. This was very abnormal.
“Once No. 4 disappeared, the temperature started to plummet, and more people disappeared. Have they really been sacrificed?”
The way to leave had been blocked. The clock in the living room chimed. The second hand carved a smiling face of death. The wind blew in through the window. Knocking came from the woman’s room. A bitten live fish flopped on the ground. A bird missing a wing was grabbed by something. Nothing at this old home was normal!
Something unknown controlled everything. Ghosts were waking up everywhere!
“Come out. Why are you afraid of a human if you’re a ghost?” Bai Xiao dared to enter a Level 3 Anomaly even when he was unarmed. At that moment, he had a blade that could injure ghosts. It was not that he was not afraid, but he knew how to transform fear into power. Static came from the television. Several seconds later, it switched on on its own.
The static screen was like a pair of blinking eyes. Then, the faces of investigators surfaced on the screen. They stared at Bai Xiao with their dead eyes. Their lips moved as if summoning him to join them…
The sound of grinding teeth came from the bedroom. The black mould continued to spread. Bai Xiao tried to chop the door, but it was pointless. He was trapped inside the room. The grinding sound turned insidious. The walls started to close in. The black mould tried to grow on Bai Xiao’s skin.
“There’s only one path forward.” Bai Xiao raised the knife, entered the main bedroom and stood before the dresser. “Everything you did is to force me to open this dresser. Do you wish to die again?”
With a slash, the tapes fell away. Oppressive laughter and dim breathing sounds came from the dresser. Endless malice materialised into tentacles that reached out from inside the dresser.
Murmurs of different investigators appeared in the dark. The moment the dresser opened, the entire home felt like it had been drawn into another world.
“Why didn’t you save us? Why were you the only one who survived?”
“You killed us, right? Who gave you the right to join the test with a weapon?”
“You can’t leave. You have to stay with us!”
The voices sharpened. Their idiocy led to their downfall, but they blamed everything on the survivor. In the rising malice, the investigators’ bodies were glued together like a pile of mud. They had lost their sense of humanity. Malicious tendrils grew out of them.
“You can’t leave! Stay with us!”
The tentacles dripped with black liquid. The spots contaminated by the liquid would be overgrown with black mould. The mould spread the malice further.
“The ghost here can control the malice in human hearts. To kill it, I have to deal with these people with malicious intent.”
The investigators inside the dresser were technically not humans anymore. Their conjoined bodies dragged each other down. They were joined by their combined malice. They hated everything around them.
“I’ll give you solace.” Bai Xiao never thought about escaping. When he was first dragged into an anomaly, he was ready to die. However, he hoped his death would be more valuable, like killing a powerful ghost before he perished.
The tentacles slammed down. Bai Xiao didn’t evade. He even closed his eyes. He held the hilt and submerged his mind into the blade. Traces of shadow crawled on the blade until the blade was fully covered.
When Doctor Lu and Situ An made this blade for Qing Ge, they only focused on one property: sharpness.
Wielded by the living, it was used to kill the ghosts in the shadows.
Bai Xiao showcased a fighting style completely different from Qing Ge. Using the wind, he determined the direction of his enemy. He charged at the dresser. The tentacles were cut off. The blade flashed by the investigators’ necks. Two heads rolled to the ground.
The heads on the ground kept on cursing. More malice oozed out of their wounds. The malice spread like roots as they crawled towards Bai Xiao.
“I should have five more seconds.”
With a calm smile on his face, Bai Xiao sliced and diced for a few more seconds. Meat and flesh burst everywhere. A giant wound appeared on the dresser door. The bodies of the mutated investigators were destroyed, but the malice didn’t dissipate. If anything, it intensified.
A tiny tentacle curled around his ankle. When Bai Xiao pierced the last monster’s chest, he realised he was already inside the dresser.
The dresser looked tiny from the outside, but inside, it was like a dark tunnel. The tattered uniforms of dead investigators and twisted corpses strung along the path.
The old home had been the venue for the test many times. The researchers had been using this method to feed the unfortunate entity inside the dresser.