The black fog concealed unknown monsters within, but perhaps bound by the rules behind the door, it had not spread into the building. Inside the apartment complex, at least, it was safe.
The compound beyond the building felt like an entirely different world to the residents trapped inside. Everything of theirs had been left behind within those walls—as though stepping out would invite disaster.
Dr. Li closed the window, seemingly oblivious to the bloodstains on the frame.
"Only the landlord can freely enter and leave the building. If tenants want to go out at night, they must be accompanied by the landlord." Dr. Li gazed out at the thick black fog. "He must have had a guilty conscience—that's why he broke the rules and tried to escape through the window."
His words caught
If tenants needed the landlord's company to leave at night, what happened when the landlord was dead? What if this place was shrouded in perpetual darkness? What if it was nothing more than the same nightmare repeating itself, night after night?
Many worlds behind doors existed frozen in a single moment in time—because that moment had inflicted upon the doorknoker a despair that would never fade.
"We've already identified the person who killed the landlord. Now we just need to go all out and catch the one who murdered Qu Gui." Dr. Li's voice sounded cold and calm, laced with a thread of killing intent. He seemed to have turned this building into his personal hunting ground.
Now that a new predator had entered the territory, his natural instinct was to track the other down and eliminate him.
"I suggest everyone search this room thoroughly. If he really is the landlord's killer, there must be other clues in here. The keys the landlord lost are probably here too." Qu Ying didn't care about anyone else's life or death—he only needed his own keys. In his view, the only safe place in this building was his own apartment. If even that wasn't safe, he'd never sleep peacefully again.
"Um..." Xiao Sun seemed about to say something. He looked at the people around him, his gaze freezing on the bloodstains along the window frame. "Aren't we being a bit too hasty? We've pinned the killer down based on just a letter and a few teeth? And I just have this feeling something's off. I searched the bathroom too—the drain down there..."
"We only wanted to force the truth out. He made his own choice. He had a guilty conscience, that's why he tried to run." Dr. Li swept a glance over Xiao Sun, then quickly moved past him to look at Chen Ge. "What do you think?"
Of everyone present, Chen Ge was the only one Dr. Li couldn't see through. He sensed something deeply unsettling about the man—a presence that made his skin crawl, as if he were looking at his own kind.
That was an extremely dangerous person. Dr. Li had formed this impression the moment he first laid eyes on Chen Ge.
"I agree with your assessment. The top priority right now is catching Qu Gui's killer. None of us have an alibi, so the killer must be someone outside our group. If we turn on each other, the only one who benefits is the killer." Everything was unfolding according to Chen Ge's plan. By using these residents to search the building's other occupants, he would expose their secrets and naturally drive them into opposition against one another. While they focused on attacking each other, he would slowly seize control. Once the tenant count dropped to a certain level, Chen Ge would finally bare his fangs.
Chen Ge and Dr. Li saw eye to eye—both believed they could be the last one standing. The difference was that Chen Ge knew the killer was an outsider, while Dr. Li had no idea what lay beyond the door.
One was deducing purely by the rules behind the door; the other was designing his strategy with knowledge of both sides of the door. That asymmetry in information was destined to put Dr. Li at a disadvantage.
On the surface, everyone maintained a fragile stability. In truth, each harbored ulterior motives. Xiao Sun was the sole exception.
That earnest young man was still playing detective, eager to uncover the truth and working hard at his deductions.
He didn't realize that searching for truth was something you could only do under sunlight. When night fell and every person around you had gone mad, nobody cared about the truth anymore. All anyone thought about was how to survive.
They found no keys in the middle-aged man's apartment. They turned the place inside out before finally giving up.
Leaving his home, they started from the third floor and worked their way through each room one by one.
When the people inside refused to open their doors, they found ways to break the locks and force their way in.
The building was a cesspool, its accumulated years of darkness now sliced open by an even darker blade.
Behind each door lurked a twisted soul, guarding their filthiest secrets, little by little losing every trace of humanity until they became grotesque monsters.
Chen Ge had glimpsed the very bottom of human nature in Xiang Nuan's world behind the door. Those people were hidden right among the ordinary folk—perhaps in some fleeting moment they had even brushed shoulders with us.
From the third floor all the way up to the eighth, the search for the killer met with fierce resistance.
Once their secrets were exposed, most of the twisted tenants chose the most extreme means of resistance. Some of them didn't care who the killer was at all—they only wanted to protect their own secrets.
Dr. Li hadn't expected things to escalate this far. During the search, Da Tou was stabbed by a fugitive criminal, and Dr. Li himself sustained minor injuries.
Cornered beasts fight back hardest. Those tenants, desperate to keep the human skin they wore from being peeled away, gave it everything they had.
Some used honeyed words to deceive, others resorted to brute force to drive the searchers away. Some tried to bluff their way through, and a few even contemplated killing everyone present—if they eliminated all witnesses, their secrets would be safe.
Of the entire group, only Li Granny, Wen Qing who trailed behind them, and Chen Ge remained unharmed. He watched with cold detachment, his Yin Eyes fixed upon the darkness within human nature.
Returning at last to the ninth floor where the landlord had lived, the group gathered before the door of Unit 901.
The killer hadn't been found. The landlord's missing keys were nowhere to be seen. Everyone dragged themselves forward with exhausted bodies.
"As soon as that corridor door opens, I'm moving out." Xiao Sun's face was deathly pale, drained of all color. His worldview had been shattered in a single night. The blood-soaked, horrific scenes he had witnessed in the past hour dwarfed everything he'd seen in twenty years of rated movies.
The high-intensity, high-frequency shocks had left deep psychological scars. He seemed to have developed a phobia of opening doors—he no longer even had the courage to push one open.
"If we can't find the keys, the lock on the iron corridor door won't open, and none of us are getting out." Chen Ge carried his backpack in one hand. He had been conserving his energy the entire time, periodically calling out the names of his "employees" but doing nothing else beyond that.
"But we've already searched most of the rooms. With so many keys, where could the landlord's killer have hidden them?" Qu Ying and his girlfriend were thoroughly shaken as well. Compared to the most depraved monsters they'd encountered tonight, the two of them could only be classified as scum.
"I've only searched some of the rooms. There are still rooms in this building we haven't visited." The moment of truth had arrived. Chen Ge was in excellent condition—he'd been coasting the entire way.
"You mean the rooms below the third floor?" Qu Ying nodded. At this point, all their hope rested on the first and second floors.
"No. I mean our rooms." The moment Chen Ge finished speaking, Dr. Li and Da Tou's expressions shifted. "The killer knows he's been exposed and will likely try to frame us—for instance, by planting unimportant evidence in our apartments."
That was exactly what Dr. Li and Da Tou themselves had been planning. The tenants in this building were dead, injured, or tied up and rendered immobile. Chen Ge no longer feared any of them.
The building was full of scum and beasts. Had they banded together, the physically weakened Chen Ge would have been finished. But their selfishness and darkness had given him an opening—allowing him to find a near-impossible "path" through the cracks.
Dr. Li had minor injuries. Da Tou was severely wounded. Aunt Ding was holed up in her own room. Qu Ying was too despicable and shameless to lift a finger. That left Dr. Li as Chen Ge's only real opponent.
Showing his hand had already become one of Chen Ge's options. But he still hadn't torn the mask off in front of the building's tenants. If they were going to tear each other apart, why should he get his hands dirty?
When ordinary people entered a building like this, their first instinct would naturally be to stay alive, then use whatever clues they could find to locate the keys and escape. Plenty of movies and games on the market followed this exact formula.
But Chen Ge's approach was different. He wanted to eliminate every last piece of trash and pervert in this building. When everyone was rendered powerless to resist—even if he hadn't physically escaped the building—it would count as clearing the stage in a sense.