"I've definitely seen her somewhere before."
It wasn't that
He couldn't recall for the moment, but he wasn't about to let the person leave. He grabbed his phone and the iron hammer, then chased after her.
The white rice on the floor had been kicked apart. By the time Chen Ge stepped out of the employee break room, the shadow had already vanished.
"Where did she go? The front gate is shut — the girl should still be somewhere inside the haunted house."
He turned on the lights and walked over to the scattered white rice, following the sparse grains that had fallen along the way until he reached the far end of the first-floor corridor.
The wooden planks covering the ground had been pried open, and a whistling wind could be heard blowing from below.
Chen Ge pushed the planks aside, switched on his phone's flashlight, and descended into the Muyang Middle School set.
A few grains of rice were still visible on the stairs, which confirmed for Chen Ge that the girl had run into the Muyang Middle School area.
"Her escape route was very deliberate — she headed straight for this direction." The set was large, but the rice grains left on the ground pointed the way.
The horror attraction had been installed inside the underground parking garage, but it hadn't altered the terrain of the garage itself. The white rice grains finally disappeared beside a load-bearing pillar.
"Could she have hidden inside the pillar?" This pillar sat directly beneath the haunted house, supporting the entire weight of the structure.
He patted the pillar, and Chen Ge recalled stories the elders in his family used to tell when he was young — that every household was home to a spirit. Most were benevolent spirits, but there were also malicious ones.
Benevolent spirits protected the home, stabilized fortune, and kept the neighbors at peace. Malicious spirits, on the other hand, disrupted order and wrecked a family's feng shui.
Usually the spirit living in a house was a deceased ancestor, but there were exceptions. For example, the place where
This matched the description in the black phone's mission briefing — a guest who had never been seen before, residing in the home. It might harbor ill intent, or it might mean well.
"The girl who was hiding behind me just now — could she be the spirit protecting the haunted house?" The more Chen Ge thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. He circled the pillar and discovered a cloth doll discarded behind the concrete — and it was the very first doll he had handmade himself.
"That can't be right! I've been carrying my doll with me this whole time." Chen Ge reached into his pocket — the doll that had been tucked inside was long gone. "Was it you living with me in the haunted house all along?"
Chen Ge reached down to pick up the doll, and as he lifted it, he spotted a manually made hole in the bottom of the doll's body.
He peered into the hole with the light from his phone. Inside the opening — barely wide enough for four fingers — sat a bracelet and a paper crane.
Neither was worth much. The bracelet was a cheap plastic thing that looked like a little girl's toy, and the paper crane crammed at the bottom had been severely crumpled.
He pulled the items out. At the end of the bracelet, Chen Ge saw three crookedly written characters —
"Why would a girl's toys be in the underground parking garage?" He held the bracelet up in front of his eyes. "If this bracelet belonged to that shadow just now, then these three characters on it should be her name."
The surname Luo, the guardian spirit of the haunted house, a little girl's toys found in the underground parking garage…