"A false alarm." Gao Ruxue's chest heaved as her heart hammered wildly. It had been ages since she'd lost her composure like this.
Eerie music drifted through the air. By the dim light, she stared at her reflection in the mirror, her pupils slowly contracting to pinpoints.
In the mirror, the curtains behind her were unfurling on their own! A paper figure's face was slowly pushing through, and from the mirror she could clearly see that paper face grinning at her.
"Who's in there?!"
Under extreme fear, people become irritable and impulsive. Gao Ruxue spun around and grabbed both ends of the curtain, determined to investigate, but the curtain was designed in a remarkably complex fashion — layer upon layer of gauze drapes and bed canopies interwoven with each other. After struggling with it for a long while, not only did she fail to see what was inside, but her arm ended up tangled up in it.
To make matters worse, at that very moment, footsteps echoed through the room.
"I haven't moved — where are those footsteps coming from?" Between her junior's disappearance, the atmospheric set dressing, and the aid of Black Friday, Gao Ruxue's psychological defenses had long since been riddled with cracks. She had already been pushed to her limit, and the sound of footsteps inside the room became the final straw that broke her.
Her legs went weak, refusing to obey. Fear was like a beast let loose from its iron cage, beginning to devour her sanity.
Gao Ruxue twisted her body, trying to break free of the curtain's entanglement. The footsteps drew closer and closer, but she couldn't find their source.
"Impossible! This room isn't that big — if someone were approaching, I'd spot them in an instant!" Her mind was completely unraveling. The simple set of this room was delivering a terror so vast it defied description.
The white lantern outside the window began to sway, casting the light even dimmer. The figure in the bronze mirror also started to blur. Gao Ruxue's pupils trembled, and her beautiful eyes fell upon the bronze mirror — where, at some unknown point, her own reflection had vanished entirely, replaced by a strange woman wearing a wedding gown!
No color could match her timeless beauty; a pleasing sight was this fair maiden.
That pale, almost unreal beauty was enough to make one's heart skip a beat, like gazing upon some long-sealed work of art.
Staring at the woman in the mirror, Gao Ruxue's shoulders trembled, and for the first time, an expression of terror appeared on her face.
She had dissected many corpses. She was intimately familiar with the feeling that woman in the mirror gave her — it was the kind of feeling one only ever had when facing the dead!
"There's a real corpse hidden inside this haunted house!"
The moment that thought surfaced, fear crashed over her like a tidal wave. She desperately tried to back away from the bronze mirror, but in her retreat, she bumped into something.
At the same time, the footsteps inside the room finally stopped. Gao Ruxue's thoughts froze in that instant — she stopped questioning why, and simply on pure instinct, in the midst of that eerie background music, slowly turned her head.
Their eyes met. Standing behind her, a woman dressed in a wedding gown, her face made up in funeral cosmetics, was smiling at her.
"AHHH!!!"
A scream shattered the haunted house's silence, loud enough to be heard clearly even from outside.
With her arm still entangled, Gao Ruxue's legs buckled and she collapsed to the ground.
Her face drained of color. The suppressed fear erupted as tears that streamed uncontrollably down her cheeks. She didn't dare open her eyes for a long time, tear tracks still glistening on her face, mouth slightly agape, coughing dryly and unconsciously.
"Xiao Wan, get her out of here quickly!"
"Got it." The female ghost across from Gao Ruxue removed a Bluetooth earpiece hidden in her hair, crouched down in front of her, and said: "The tour ends here. Take a breath, and I'll lead you out."
A dozen seconds later, the door to the ghost marriage set burst open and
He hadn't been able to find Heshan on the surveillance feeds either, and fearing that something might have happened, he had hurried inside.