Chen Ge peered through the crack in the door. Even with his Yin Eyes, he couldn't see anything clearly inside.
He strained his ears — there wasn't a sound from within. The entire building was terrifyingly silent.
"What a creepy feeling."
Bowl after bowl of plain white rice sat in an empty residential building. Anyone who saw it would feel deeply unsettled.
"This building doesn't seem to be meant for the living." Chen Ge pulled his gaze back. He was well-traveled and experienced enough to make that deduction.
"Not for the living? Then is it meant for the dead?" Xiao Sun clutched his lower back and squeezed in between Wen Qing and Chen Ge, glancing nervously in other directions as though something horrifying might emerge at any moment.
"There are houses for the living, and there are houses for the dead. There's nothing strange about preparing a place for the dead to stay." Chen Ge turned to Wen Qing. "We're currently inside Jiuhong Residential Complex. In your memory, what's the difference between Jiuhong Complex and Jinhua Complex?"
"Nothing much, really. Jinhua Complex was built a few years later than Jiuhong Complex — that's about it," Wen Qing recalled.
"Think harder. Don't leave anything out." The problems with Jiuhong Complex were clearly far worse than those of Jinhua Complex. Jinhua was dangerous, but at least people still lived there. Jiuhong's residential buildings were essentially dead silent.
"Jiuhong Complex is the oldest neighborhood in the old city district. The buildings have been around for a long time, and there are constant issues with the structures themselves. Almost nobody rents here now. I rarely even bring anyone over to view the apartments."
"Constant issues with the structures?"
"Leaks, poor lighting, noise, things like that."
"There are hardly any tenants left — so where's the noise coming from?" Chen Ge's question left Wen Qing speechless.
"Well… our company isn't sure either. The boss went to investigate at the time but never found the source of the noise, and the matter was just dropped."
"Your company really has some nerve. I'm wondering if you handle business for the dead too?" Chen Ge had visited the real Jiuhong Complex. Even in broad daylight, the place was drenched in yin energy.
"Don't joke about that — we're a legitimate agency." Wen Qing's face had gone pale. Something seemed to suddenly come to her mind. "The original owners of Jiuhong Complex have all moved out. The company doesn't know the exact reason — many of them left without any notice, and we couldn't reach them at all. That's why most of the apartments in Jiuhong are still empty, and it's also why there are so few tenants."
"None of those owners who moved away ever came back?"
"No. Many of them left in the dead of night. They didn't even take the furniture."
"Does that sound like normal moving to you?" Chen Ge was exasperated.
"Once word got out about the strange happenings, who would dare rent their apartments? At the very least, I certainly wouldn't!" Xiao Sun was still holding his back. He was one of the victims, after all.
"I'm actually getting a bit curious about your agency's boss now. What kind of person would take on both Jinhua Complex and Jiuhong Complex? I recall your company is called Jiuhong Agency — does he have some connection to Jiuhong Complex?" Chen Ge wanted to get to the bottom of things before proceeding with the exploration.
"Our boss is very impressive. His surname is Jiang, and he has many businesses — not just in Hanjiang, but also in Xinhai. Jiuhong Agency was founded by him a long time ago, and it's basically been left to run itself. He only injects money when the company is about to collapse." In Wen Qing's eyes, their boss was a very capable person.
"Jiuhong Agency has been losing money this whole time — so why does he insist on keeping this place running? Does he know some kind of secret?" Chen Ge looked at Wen Qing. "What's your boss's name?"
"Jiang Jiu. He's also one of the major shareholders of the Eastern Suburb Virtual Future Theme Park. He collaborates with a lot of companies."
"Jiang Jiu?!" Upon hearing the name, Chen Ge understood. The so-called Jiuhong Agency was a conspiracy between Jiang Jiu and the Unborn. Over the past decade or so, they had likely been continuously screening tenants and placing selected ones in specific rooms.
Thinking about it this way, the owner of Jinhua Company might also be connected to the Unborn. That landlord had gradually become twisted under the Unborn's influence.
"Boss Jiang is a wonderful person. He was the one who got me this job, helped me find housing, and gave me a home of my own." Wen Qing had a very favorable impression of Jiang Jiu, but she didn't understand that every gift in life had long since been priced.
All the threads came together. Jiuhong Complex had been prepared for Xiang Nuan. This place was meant to cultivate the child best suited to become the Unborn.
"That old fox — did the Unborn also instruct him to build the Virtual Future Theme Park in Hanjiang? Or did he learn certain secrets through the Unborn and decide to build a theme park on his own initiative?" Chen Ge filed Jiang Jiu's name away. He had no intention of doing anything to Jiang Jiu — he simply wanted to befriend him after leaving this door. "Since the other party can cooperate with the Unborn, there's a possibility he could cooperate with me as well. One way or another, I have to give it a try and hear what he has to say."
Now that he had pieced things together, Chen Ge saw the residential complex in an entirely new light. Xiang Nuan was different from the other children — at least in the Unborn's eyes.
"We've lingered here long enough. Time to head upstairs."
The stairwells had no locks, yet the black fog outside couldn't seep in. It was as though every building was protected by some special force.
"There must be remnants of a doll's body here, too."
Chen Ge led Wen Qing and Xiao Sun to the second floor. This level looked even more dilapidated. Joss paper was scattered sparsely across the ground, and a white inverted fu character was pasted at the stairwell corner.
"It's not like every household is holding a funeral — so why is there a bowl of white rice at every door? Who is this rice meant for?"
Chopsticks were stuck straight into the center of each bowl, perfectly centered, offering no indication whether the rice was meant for the people inside or the people outside.
Compared to the first floor, the second floor differed only in having an extra fu character in the stairwell. Even the scratch marks on the doors were nearly identical.
As a precaution, Chen Ge still tried pushing each door in turn.
The doors in Jiuhong Complex were all wooden. Some of the locks had loosened, leaving wide gaps between the door panels and their frames.
Reading from left to right, the apartment numbers on the second floor were 201 through 204.
Chen Ge didn't notice anything unusual when he pushed on the door of 201, but when he reached 203, he sensed something was off.
When he pushed hard against the door, it didn't budge an inch. After he stopped pushing and waited a moment, the door trembled ever so slightly.
It was as though someone inside was pushing back against the door with equal force, and only after he stepped away did that person slowly release their hold.
Chen Ge pulled the skull-crushing hammer from his backpack and reached for the doorknob of apartment 204.
This door was extremely worn. The surface was covered with small muddy handprints and faint scratch marks. There was a two-centimeter gap between the bottom of the door and the floor, and the entire door was loose — it clearly couldn't close properly.
"You two stay back and watch the stairwell. Don't let anyone cut off our retreat."
After speaking, Chen Ge slowly walked up to the door. He reached down and slid the bowl on the floor to the side, and halfway through the motion, he suddenly dropped flat against the ground and peered through the gap beneath the door!
A pair of eyes flashed by — whites filling the sockets entirely — before a mane of black hair vanished beneath the door gap.
"There's someone in there!" Chen Ge couldn't be sure whether it was a tenant of the building. His instincts told him that what he'd just seen wasn't human, and wasn't even something woven from memories.