After setting everything up,
"That should take care of it."
He turned off the lights, plugged his phone into a charger and set it on the cabinet to record, then grabbed the absurdly shaped iron hammer and hid under the bed.
The candle flame flickered, casting the room in alternating light and shadow. Every time Chen Ge closed his eyes, his mind conjured all sorts of horrifying scenes, and there was no way to suppress them.
He kept his senses tuned to every sound around him, his body curled up, the top of his head pressed against the bed leg.
From this angle, he could just see through the half-open door to the pair of slippers placed in the hallway.
"The slippers are still in position. The white rice scattered around hasn't been touched. I still don't know why the black phone made me prepare all this."
The candle burned shorter and shorter, and Chen Ge's eyelids grew heavier by degrees.
Night spread through the haunted house. After days without proper rest, Chen Ge held out under the bed for a stretch of time before slipping unknowingly into sleep.
……
His calves felt cold. Chen Ge groggily opened his eyes. The candle had gone out. The room was pitch black, and deathly quiet.
"What time is it?"
Chen Ge tried to check his watch, but suddenly realized his body wouldn't move at all.
"Sleep paralysis?" His eyes widened, but he didn't struggle too violently. Instead, he adjusted his breathing rhythm. The respiratory system was governed by the heart, lungs, and other internal organs — it wouldn't go numb the way skeletal muscles did.
Once he had that under control, he began trying to bend his fingers, concentrating all his willpower on a single point.
Throughout the entire process, he didn't look in any other direction. Even if he saw something terrifying right now, his body couldn't respond to it — it would only amplify his fear and strip away his composure.
After roughly two or three minutes, his pinky was able to flex ever so slightly. A very promising start.
He had intended to push through and shake off the paralysis in one effort, but when his gaze swept across the slippers in the hallway, a question flickered through his mind.
"When I placed the slippers earlier, which way were the toes pointing?"
A normal person walking toward the hallway would have the toes facing outward. But what Chen Ge saw now was a pair of slippers with the toes pointed directly at his bedroom.
"Did I place them wrong?" A deeply uneasy feeling settled over him. He hurried to keep working his fingers.
The candle in the room had long since died. From the darkness came a faint rustling sound — the white rice scattered across several rooms of the haunted house seemed to be being disturbed by something.
His eyes locked on the slippers in the hallway. Right before Chen Ge's gaze, one of the slippers took a step forward.
A stiff, halting step — like someone walking for the very first time.
"It moved!"
Nothing ever goes smoothly. The more anxious Chen Ge became, the worse things grew.
After that first step, the pair of slippers in the hallway suddenly shuffled forward several more steps, as though someone had slipped them on.
"A guest has arrived? So why can't I see it?"
While Chen Ge was wrestling with this, the slippers had already reached the door to the monitoring room. They stopped abruptly, then the door swung open on its own for no apparent reason. A moment later, it drifted shut again.