"Help me."
"I'm here, behind you."
"Take me away, please help me…"
A woman's voice was tangled into the crying, and
He only had a passing memory of it. There was absolutely no way he was going to look back right now. He still hadn't figured out what the black fog was, and the best response to the unknown was to find a safe spot and observe it, not plunge deeper and gamble with his life.
The voice behind him drew closer. Chen Ge quickened his pace, but the faster he ran, the more urgently the voice pursued.
Just as he was about to reach the iron gate, the woman's voice shifted. Every word dissolved into a shriek that pierced through the black fog like an arrow, stabbing straight at his body.
"Get out of the way!"
Chen Ge abandoned everything else and sprinted at full speed. The moment he stepped inside the building, that terrifying voice vanished.
He looked back. Everything in the black fog had returned to normal, as though the voice had been nothing more than a hallucination.
"Wen Qing, did you hear a woman's voice inside the building?"
"No." Wen Qing shook her head. "I only saw you disappear into the fog. Something was there, faintly—something tiptoeing right behind you. I shouted to warn you, but you didn't react at all."
"This black fog seems even more dangerous than the city shrouded in blood. That city drives people to despair and madness, but this black ocean can make you lose yourself completely." Staring at the shadows bobbing in the dark mist, Chen Ge pressed a hand to his chest. For some inexplicable reason, he felt as though he had lived through that scene before.
"Lose yourself? Is that how Xiang Nuan got lost in this fog?" Worry filled Wen Qing's eyes.
"As long as he hasn't left this residential complex, we still have a chance to find him." Chen Ge closed the door leading to the rooftop and stuffed the headless clay figurine into his coat pocket. "Time to go."
Back on the ground floor, Chen Ge had just reached Old Man Huang's door when the security gate swung open.
The severely hunched old man stood in the doorway. He seemed to have been standing behind it the whole time, having waited for Chen Ge for quite a while.
"You knew I was coming?"
Old Man Huang said nothing. He turned and walked back inside. Passing the dining table, he picked up the kitchen knife resting on it.
Bones showing through his skin, he raised the knife and brought it crashing into the wall beside the bedroom.
The blade sank into the wall, and blood seeped out. A wound appeared simultaneously on the wall and on the old man's body.
With chop after chop, the plaster crumbled, and his own body became covered in gashes.
His skeletal hands had no more strength to swing the knife. Old Man Huang collapsed to the floor.
"What the hell is going on!" Xiao Sun set down Jia Fu and rushed over, but the old man already seemed close to death.
"Keeping secrets for someone else, enduring the torment inside—that wall was practically made from his own flesh and blood." Chen Ge stepped inside with his bag. "Now that the killer is dead, there's no need for him to keep the secret anymore."
He walked to the bedroom wall and stopped for a good few seconds before moving on.
There were two bedrooms in the room. One was occupied. The other's door had been bricked over with flesh and bone, and inside lay piled corpses.
"In the beginning, only the landlord's family lived in that room. He couldn't bear to be apart from them, so he'd come visit from time to time. But I never expected the 'people' he brought to keep multiplying." Old Man Huang's voice was barely a whisper, squeezed out with his last ounce of strength. "Maybe I should never have agreed to keep his secret from the start."
The scene inside the bedroom was hell on earth. This was where all the evil in Building A of Jinhua Residential Complex had begun—the very first secret in this building.
Chen Ge pushed the stunned Xiao Sun aside, entered the bedroom, and squeezed his way into the "crowd."
"You instinctively assumed the landlord was a good man, but have you ever considered this possibility—what if his family members didn't die by accident?"
Chen Ge located the landlord's family's corpses. Unfortunately, there was nothing distinctive about them, and they weren't the source of the stench.
"That smell that's been haunting me for so long—what exactly is it coming from?" Chen Ge stood alone among the "crowd." His behavior terrified everyone around him.
He focused, closed his eyes, and activated the Spirit Nose talent he had obtained from the Black Phone. Following his instincts, he groped his way through the bedroom, gradually narrowing in on the spot where the stench was strongest.
He opened his eyes. Before him lay the arm of a rag doll.
The arm was caked with blood and filth, and inside it had been stuffed not with the normal filling you'd find in a store, but with all manner of garbage and dead birds.
"What is this thing?"
The moment Chen Ge reached to pick up the severed doll arm, a rush of extreme danger surged through his mind. Then, as if an earthquake had struck, the entire building trembled slightly.
"The severed doll arm is the source of all that stench?" Before Chen Ge could even process the thought, he heard a heavy *thump, thump, thump*—the iron gate out in the corridor was being struck from the outside.
He stood up without touching the arm again. The pounding outside and the tremor vanished instantly.
"Whatever it is, it can affect the whole complex. When I was about to pick it up, I felt something in my mind beginning to wake up. This probably doesn't belong to Xiang Nuan—more likely, it's the Dark Fetus's."
None of the other doors had produced this reaction. Chen Ge had to be cautious.
"Back in Liwan Town, the Shadow split Xiao Bu's body apart and distributed it across several buildings, using Xiao Bu to carry out his scheme. Everything is too similar. This severed doll hand might be just like Xiao Bu back then—the Dark Fetus has divided it among different buildings as a cornerstone to stabilize this residential complex."
Chen Ge memorized the location of the severed hand. He decided to leave immediately and check the other buildings.
Stepping back out of the "crowd," Chen Ge's body had absorbed the stench. It would probably linger until he left through the main door.
"Someone was knocking on the building from outside just now. What if they've noticed something wrong inside?"
"We'll know when we go check." Chen Ge picked up his bag and looked at Xiao Sun. "Are you coming with me to find the truth? Or would you rather stay in this building and wait for the neighbors from the other buildings to pay you a visit?"