"Looking for you? Why would that woman be looking for you?" Chen Ge walked over to the window as well. The faceless woman with the red hair clip was deliberately approaching them.
"I don't know — I don't even know her!" Wu Jinpeng didn't look like he was lying. His eyes held nothing but terror when he looked at the woman, with no other emotion mixed in.
"Then why are you so afraid of her?" Chen Ge asked another question he couldn't make sense of. "Does she want to kill you? What happens if she catches you?"
Hearing Chen Ge's question, Wu Jinpeng turned that same peculiar gaze on him. "Isn't being chased by a faceless woman terrifying enough on its own, brother? If she actually catches me, do you think I'd still be alive to stand here and talk to you?"
"My point is we don't have to keep running from her. If we never try to understand her, we'll never be able to defeat her, and sooner or later she'll catch up." Before Chen Ge could finish trying to convince Wu Jinpeng, the faceless woman had already arrived downstairs. Her head, which had been hanging low, slowly tilted upward as she looked up.
That featureless face was aimed straight at Wu Jinpeng. The woman seemed to completely ignore Chen Ge standing right beside him.
The red hair clip looked as though it were about to drip blood, and the ill-fitting maternity dress she wore dragged along the ground.
"What are you standing there for? Run!" Wu Jinpeng grabbed Chen Ge and pulled him into a nearby room. "When she comes up, we'll jump from the second floor! As long as we get out of her line of sight, we can have some peace."
This wasn't Wu Jinpeng's first time doing this — his movements were smooth and practiced. His body, far stronger than it had been in reality, allowed him to pull off all sorts of difficult maneuvers. Jumping from the second floor wouldn't be much of a problem.
"Come on, hurry!"
Standing by the window, Chen Ge hesitated for a moment, but in that brief delay, the door behind them suddenly began to shake, as if something were slamming into it.
He had no better option. Hugging his backpack, he climbed out through the window.
Both feet hit the ground, and he rolled to absorb the impact. Chen Ge didn't have time to check whether the contents of his backpack had been damaged before Wu Jinpeng's urging voice reached his ears.
The two of them scrambled to their feet and sprinted at full speed toward the other side of the street.
"Where are we going now?"
"Who knows. No matter where we run, she'll catch up. We can only put as much distance between us as possible, and when she gets close, flee somewhere else." Wu Jinpeng didn't look back, his breath ragged as he ran at full tilt. He had no idea when the danger would end — the whole world seemed to be working against him. Monsters on every side, pursued by an inescapable faceless woman, and even catching his breath felt like a luxury.
Chen Ge watched the panting Wu Jinpeng ahead of him, the man's silhouette overlapping with the Wu Jinpeng he knew from the real world.
This man must have once lived through a stretch of time this aimless and desperate — scrambling through every day, carrying the weight of responsibility, chased forward relentlessly by life itself.
Perhaps the Wu Jinpeng of the real world had long since forgotten, but every detail had been recorded by Wu Sheng.
The boy was somewhat precocious. He understood a great deal, yet couldn't fully comprehend it all.
At the critical juncture when his worldview was still forming, he had been lured by the Nether Embryo and undergone some kind of change.
The world behind a child's door was connected to reality — everything in those scenes could be traced back to real people and real events. This was likely one of the defining characteristics of the nine children's door-worlds.
The countless threads linking the illusory door-worlds to reality seemed to foreshadow the Nether Embryo's gradual emergence from behind the door into the real world.
In Chen Ge's view, the doors of all nine children had been influenced by the Nether Embryo.
Carrying his backpack and following behind Wu Jinpeng, Chen Ge's mind raced. The evidence he had gathered so far more or less confirmed that each child corresponded to a single door — a door that would only appear when the child was asleep.
However, among the nine children, Chen Ge himself was an exception. If a door had appeared beside his bed while he slept, both Little Xiao and the white cat would have reacted immediately.
No door had appeared beside his bed when he slept, but that didn't necessarily exclude him from the group of nine — because he had a real Blood Door right beside him.
Compared to the other children's illusory doors, the one in the haunted house bathroom was a genuine Blood Door.
"Is the Nether Embryo really hiding behind that door?"
Chen Ge recalled a fleeting moment from the past. In a daze, he had seemed to see three doors.
"One should belong to the Nether Embryo, one might belong to the version of me that keeps being killed by the doctor — so who does the last door belong to?"
"Doors only open in the moment of deepest despair and agony, don't they? Did I push open the third door myself? Was the door in the haunted house bathroom opened by me?"
Even with several Red-clothed ghosts at his side, Chen Ge still didn't have the courage to enter that door. He remembered what Dr. Gao had said in the underground morgue.
"Whatever could frighten Dr. Gao like that must be hiding something truly terrifying." Chen Ge decided to save the door in his own haunted house for the very last night. If the Nether Embryo wasn't hidden among the other eight children, then this was the only remaining possibility.
He knew the odds of the Nether Embryo hiding behind his haunted house door were slim. The Nether Embryo's primary area of activity was the East Suburb, and every ghost that had come into contact with it had said it treated the West Suburb as a forbidden zone. Chen Ge didn't believe it would take the risk of entering his haunted house door under these circumstances.
"No clues, no leads." Chen Ge let out a soft sigh. "What kind of feelings did the very first person to push open a door carry with them?"
Driving those thoughts from his mind, Chen Ge glanced behind him. The faceless woman was still in pursuit, though not at a fast pace. From her appearance, she didn't seem to be consumed by hatred or intent on killing Wu Jinpeng.
Under Wu Jinpeng's lead, Chen Ge ran through every street in the surrounding area, growing ever more certain that this was the old city district.
"Wu Sheng must have lived in the old city district before. Something happened here that he never wanted to remember, and it was precisely because of that event that his family moved to the West Suburb." Wu Sheng's door-world consisted of several streets, roughly one-fifth the size of the real old city district, leaving only limited places to hide.
To escape the faceless woman, they had to duck into the houses lining the streets, but entering those houses only attracted the monsters inside. As they kept hiding, more and more monsters emerged from the rooms and began chasing them too.
"How are we supposed to get out of here?" The fear in Wu Jinpeng's eyes was nearly spilling over. His tall, powerful body had begun to tremble in the face of the countless monsters.
"We've about exhausted the streets to the east. Why don't we duck over to the west for a bit?" After following Wu Jinpeng in several loops, Chen Ge had noticed that no matter how dangerous things got, Wu Jinpeng never headed west — he deliberately avoided the streets in that direction.
"No way!" Wu Jinpeng refused outright. His answer was so immediate that it only deepened Chen Ge's suspicion.
"Fine, I'll follow your lead." Chen Ge could roughly guess why Wu Jinpeng wouldn't go west, and he could appreciate the man's intentions.
"As long as we hold out until dawn, we should be fine. Everyone will go back to normal." Wu Jinpeng kept reassuring himself. "I just have to survive the night. The sun will always come up."
"Yeah, the sun will always come up." Chen Ge patted Wu Jinpeng on the shoulder. "If west is off the table, I suggest we look for a way out in the eastern streets first."
"Okay." The moment Wu Jinpeng agreed, a frantic burst of barking erupted from the streets to the west.
Hearing the sound, Wu Jinpeng's face changed drastically. He abandoned all caution and immediately sprinted toward the western streets.
"What happened?" Chen Ge hurried after him. With his Yin Eyes, he could already make out several human silhouettes on the western streets from a considerable distance. "Don't go over there!"
Chen Ge's reaction was fast enough, but he still couldn't stop Wu Jinpeng. The man charged headlong into an alley off the west street.
At the end of the alley stood a decrepit storage shed. Its drafty wooden door hung half-open, and a small boy stood helpless in the doorway.
He was considerably thinner and smaller than children his age, wearing clothes that didn't fit properly. A pair of beautiful, bright eyes blinked ceaselessly, as if curious about everything in the world.
When Wu Jinpeng saw that the child was unharmed, he let out a sigh of relief. He called Chen Ge over, scooped up the boy, and ducked into the shed.
"Dad, Da Huang ran outside," the child said in a very quiet voice, as though he seldom spoke.
"You stay inside the shed. Dad will go bring Da Huang back." Wu Jinpeng patted the little boy on the head. Gone was every trace of fear from his expression — his eyes were calm and gentle, though his speech still carried a slight pant.
"Mm." The boy nodded obediently.
While the father and son exchanged words, a pitiful bark rang out once more, much closer this time.
In addition to the barking, the clamor of human voices in their ears gradually grew louder. All manner of grating sounds drilled into Chen Ge's mind.