My House of Horrors

“There are no outsiders now, so there’s no reason to worry. Tell me everything you know.” Chen Ge placed both diaries before Shang Guan Qing Hong.

“Where did you find this?” Shang Guan Qing Hong had not recovered from the shock. From what he saw at Nightmare Academy, even though Chen Ge might not have been scarred permanently from his experience, he should have fainted at least. However, the Chen Ge before him was not only very well, he radiated a very dangerous presence around him.

“Your Haunted House is truly haunted, and the origin of all the tragedies began with this diary.” Chen Ge pulled open the zipper of his bag. If Shang Guan Qing Hong wished to play dumb any longer, he would summon the few doctors to give the man a thorough examination.

After a moment’s silence, Shang Guan Qing Hong suddenly laughed. He moved his neck around with difficulty to look at Chen Ge. “Even if I tell you now, it is useless because the thing inside this diary has already left. Now, it’s nothing more than an empty shell.”

“Empty shell?” That only piqued Chen Ge’s interest even more. “Looks like you know many things.”

“I will not lie to you. I bought this diary from a mother. Her child unfortunately fell into a coma after a car accident. She took care of her child for five whole years, and one midnight, her child suddenly awoke. However, the world around the child seemed to fall into a very deep terror, and he seemed to be living inside a long, long nightmare.” Shang Guan Qing Hong’s words deeply aroused Chen Ge’s interest.

“A coma patient waking up? Where is the child now?” Chen Ge did not think that Shang Guan Qing Hong was lying. He wished to find the child himself.

“He’s dead now, happened not long after he woke up.” Shang Guan Qing Hong’s voice was strange. It sounded like he had to hesitate before he decided to say the words. “During the period when the boy was awake, he kept rambling about strange things, and he was afraid of everyone around him, including his mother. After about two days, the boy finally put his guard down around his mother. He told his mother that he had hidden a diary inside the room and wished that his mother would take good care of it. The mother naturally promised to fulfill her son’s wish, but that night, the boy passed away, and the cause of death for the boy was sudden cardiac arrest.”

“The boy passed away after telling his mother the secret?” Chen Ge felt that there was something bigger hidden in this story.

“The mother refused to accept the truth. The boy that she had looked over for five long years finally awakened but left her forever on the midnight of the second day of his resuscitation. She was severely traumatized, and her mental health deteriorated. Even after a long period of treatment, she still had trouble walking out from the trauma.

“Finally, at the suggestion of her doctor, she sold everything that was related to the boy. This was an effort to act like the boy had never been in her life.” Shang Guan Qing Hong knew a surprising amount of the details; he had clearly done his research on the diary. “I met the mother and her attending physician at a secondhand market, and it was around then that I made the purchase of this old diary.”

“How is the boy’s mother now? What is her current address? Is she still in treatment?” Chen Ge’s brain was already spinning. He could ‘sniff out’ the unnaturalness surrounding this whole story.

“Unfortunately, the treatment was not that successful. Selling the items did not mean that she could forget about the past. Due to extreme sadness, the mother eventually collapsed under the mental pressure and left this world one quiet night.” Shang Guan Qing Hong tried his best to sit upright. “That is all that I know.”

“Then, what about this empty shell that you mentioned?”

“When the diary was first taken back to the Haunted House, every night at midnight, there would be the sound of children laughing and crying. This is one of the main reasons that our night tours were so popular and scary at the beginning. But later, the diary suddenly turned back to normal, so I suspect that it is just an empty shell.” Shang Guan Qing Hong acted very normal. Chen Ge was not sure whether Shang Guan Qing Hong was lying to him or not, but one thing he was certain. There was indeed no longer any spirit lingering inside the diary, which had been confirmed by Ol’ Zhou and Xu Yin.

“Everything that I told you is the truth.” Shang Guan Qing Hong’s voice softened. “I know that Jiujiang is your territory. Since you have the power to transfer me from Xin Hai to your territory, I have no choice but to admit defeat.”

Shang Guan Qing Hong had just woken up from his coma, and he still had not caught up to speed. When he first opened his eyes, he found himself inside a strange sickroom in a hospital of an unfamiliar town, and his nemesis was just outside the door.

A normal person would have filled in the blanks, much less someone who was as paranoid as Shang Guan Qing Hong. Thus, naturally, he had come to some misunderstandings.

“Stay here and recuperate. It was the police who made your transfer; it had nothing to do with me.” Chen Ge felt like there was nothing else to be gained from staying there. He shoved both of the diaries inside his backpack and stood up to leave.

“The police?” Shang Guan Qing Hong was left alone inside the room. He was still trying to digest what Chen Ge had said.

…

Once he stepped through the gate of New Century Park, Chen Ge noticed the difference to the decoration around the park. There were many new things. “The holidays are coming.”

All the workers had left the park, so Chen Ge sat inside the haunted house’s staff breakroom alone. He locked the door from the inside, closed the window, and pulled down the curtain. Then he placed the black phone on his desk.

Scrolling down the screen, Chen Ge turned to the page with the mission details. He looked at the words written in blood on the screen.

“The four-star Trial Mission School of the Afterlife will expire in twenty-seven hours. Warning! After the mission expires, said scenario will be locked forever!”

“After twenty-seven hours, I will not be able to obtain this four-star mission anymore, and School of Afterlife will never be unlocked.” Chen Ge raised his head to look at the clock on the wall. “In twenty-seven hours, in other words, tomorrow night, the mission will disappear.”

His finger dangled over the screen, but Chen Ge did not have the confidence to press accept. After experiencing the 3.5-star Li Wan City, Chen Ge could only imagine how dangerous and scary four-star scenario would be. That kind of terror would be far beyond his current imagination.

“Zhang Ya is hibernating. No matter how much I call her name, there is not even a single response. Even though Xu Yin is now a Red Specter, the curse on his body hasn’t been cleansed, and that seriously dampens his strength. The remaining employees are not good in a fight, so they won’t be of much help in dangerous situations.” Chen Ge scanned through all the employees in his mind, and he felt a heaviness in his heart.

When he went to challenge the 3.5-star scenario, the cooperation of all the Haunted house workers barely managed to help him survive the scenario, and now, he was going to challenge a four-star mission while the best of his employees were damaged and unavailable. So, how was he going to clear this mission?

Whenever the timer on the black phone dropped down, the conflict in Chen Ge’s heart deepened. His finger floated above the phone. He tried it several times, but in the end, he did not press the accept button. “For the sake of security, perhaps I should ask the Pen Spirit first.”

Chen Ge took out the ballpoint pen covered with cellophane tape and used the Pen Spirit’s fortune telling power. “Pen Spirit, Pen Spirit, will I walk out of the School of Afterlife alive?”

Chen Ge was merely referring to the Pen Spirit for a sense of internal consolation. He did not even dare ask whether he would be able to clear the scenario successfully. Several minutes later, the ballpoint pen that Chen Ge was holding started to move on its own, and it wrote its response on the piece of white paper.

“If you want to bring me to the School of Afterlife, I would choose to kill myself. Compared to going to that place, suicide is a much happier ending.”

“Did you understand the meaning of the word happiness? Plus, is the place really that scary?” He frowned while he read the words on the white paper. Chen Ge was surprised by the Pen Spirit’s determination of destroying herself rather than being dragged into this mess with the School of Afterlife.

“My prediction only gives me a vague understanding of the situation, and the feeling I got from that prediction led me to this conclusion.” After leaving behind that second passage, the Pen Spirit did not respond to Chen Ge anymore. If Chen Ge did not know that a normal Specter could not leave their object of possession for long, he would probably have believed that the Pen Spirit had escaped.

“The Pen Spirit has a fifty percent chance of getting her prediction wrong. This is probably the instance where she got it wrong.” Chen Ge picked up the black phone and rushed hurriedly down into the underground parking lot. He went to find the crying statue.

“I have a question to ask you.” Standing inside the dim bedroom, before Chen Ge even asked his question, with just the mention of the term School of Afterlife, the eyes of the statue started to cry endless tears of blood like it had seen something incredibly scary.

“The standard of level is too different.” Chen Ge had two employees with prediction powers in his Haunted house, but they were both normal Specters, so they were not that powerful. “If the Pen Spirit can evolve into a Red Specter, she will become another central core of power at my Haunted House.”

Looking at the broken old ballpoint pen, Chen Ge shared his idea with the Pen Spirit, but he did not get a reply.

“Is giving up my only choice?” The mission was due to expire the following night. Seeing such an important four-star mission disappear just like that, Chen Ge’s heart was practically bleeding. Actually, there had been instances before when Chen Ge would ask Pen Spirit for her opinion when he had no idea how dangerous a Trial Mission would be. She would most often say things like there was a ten percent chance he would survive or it would be very dangerous, but this was the first time that Chen Ge had seen the Pen Spirit write something like she would rather commit suicide than go on the mission.

“I mustn’t act to recklessly.” He repeated that to himself and eventually moved his finger away from the phone screen. He slid the page down further, and Chen Ge chanced upon an ongoing mission—the story of the Left Oculus.

“I’ve only completed the first part of the mission related to Chang Gu—the Private Viewing Theater of the Dead. The remaining two parts still have not been completed.”

Before going to Xin Hai, to help Zhang Wenyu fulfil the wishes of the suicide victims, Chen Ge had gone in search of a film crew. He had run into Chang Gu in a total accident and obtained a valuable piece of information from him—Chang Gu’s young sister had once been a student at School of the Afterlife, but she had managed to escape.

Unfortunately, it was where Chang Gu’s sister’s soul currently was. Her left eye was now transplanted into Chang Gu’s skull, but due to complications during the surgery, Chang Gu’s normal eye had been affected, and he was practically blind.

“Chang Wenyu went inside the School of Afterlife before, and she had a student pass from that school. I should be able to find more information from her.” Chen Ge found a new opening, and he decided to deal with this mission first. “There are only twenty or so hours left—I must not waste time anymore.”

Chen Ge packed his backpack. He did not rest for long before leaving the haunted house again. After climbing into the taxi, Chen Ge took out his phone to call Chang Gu’s number, but strangely enough, even though he called multiple times, there was no answer.

“Did something happen to the man?”