"It came again today, still standing at the door. I don't know what it's doing — it seems like it wants to come in."
"It looks like my dead child. At least from behind, it looks just like them."
"My family saw it too. It's not a hallucination — it really exists. But why does it always stand with its back to us? Whose child is it? Why does it only appear in the hallway in the middle of the night?"
"My husband said he'd go out and check, but once he left, he never came back. He abandoned me and ran away."
"What am I supposed to do? It's getting closer to me. It's always crouching by the door, pressing against the window. It will definitely get in!"
"When I woke up, I saw it in the living room. It didn't seem to notice me. It stood in the middle of the living room with its back turned to me."
"I saw its face clearly. Why is a rag doll walking around my house? What is it looking for? Why does it keep staying here!"
"This is disgusting. I've never seen such an ugly doll. Its arms are stuffed with garbage and dead birds. Its belly hides a rotting heart. Its face is pieced together from different patches of skin. Its legs are bent and stuffed with collected bones. It reeks all over, and its pathetic appearance is all the more horrifying for it!"
"I noticed something strange about this rag doll — its shadow isn't a doll's shadow. When light falls on it, the shadow it casts is that of a boy much taller than itself."
"Everyone hates it. Doesn't it know? Why won't it leave? Why does it keep trying to ingratiate itself with me? It's completely insane!"
"It seems to have made this place its home. This damn doll!"
"I'm not its mother! I'm not its family!"
"I have to drive it away — by any means necessary!"
"I tore it apart, stuffed it into a garbage bag, and buried it in the ground. I thought I could finally get a good night's sleep, but when I woke up, it had appeared in my house once again!"
"I don't have a family anymore. Why won't this freak leave me alone!"
"I sent it away again and again, but it started appearing everywhere in my house — inside the wardrobe, under the bed, inside the covers, beneath the desk. It could be hiding anywhere!"
"What on earth do I have to do to get rid of it?!"
The blood-written text grew increasingly distorted toward the end, with traces of blood and nail fragments embedded in the characters. The person who wrote this must have been on the verge of a mental breakdown.
Slowly, Chen Ge reached the final blood-stained bedsheet. The words on it made everyone's blood run cold.
"I finally figured out what it wants."
"I'm not its mother, and it doesn't want me to become its mother. It just wants to crawl inside my belly."
"When I half-woke in the middle of the night and saw the smiling face on my stomach, I knew I could probably never send it away again."
The blood-written text on the bedsheet ended there. Just looking at it made Wen Qing beside him feel deeply unsettled — perhaps because, as a woman herself, she could better understand the apartment owner's anguish and despair.
"Are these blood-written messages warning us that the real monster in this building is a rag doll?" Xiao Sun often misspoke, but he wasn't stupid. Especially in dangerous situations, his mind worked fast.
"Something like that." Chen Ge stared at the blood-written words, his gaze fixed on one particular sentence — the rag doll's shadow wasn't a doll's shadow at all, but a boy much taller than itself.
Reading those words, a hypothesis surfaced in Chen Ge's mind: "The ghost attached to the rag doll might be my shadow. After it escaped from me, it became the rag doll's shadow. And the rag doll itself has no consciousness — he might have built that doll as a body for himself."
In Building A of the Jinhua Residential Complex, that severed rag doll arm had been the source of the foul stench throughout the entire building. Perhaps precisely because of that severed arm, the building had not been invaded by the black mist.
"The rag doll must be the body the Netherborn once used. Judging from what the blood text describes, it didn't have an easy time creating this stitched-together, hideous body."
In Fang Yu's door-world, Chen Ge had glimpsed a small portion of the Netherborn's memories. The Netherborn in those memories was nothing like what it had become.
The shadow had gradually become a malevolent god, evolving to this point — it had long since lost its original face, becoming something entirely different from what it once was.
The blood text made it clear: the rag doll had not harmed the building's residents at first, but its very existence was a kind of "sin."
In the process of constantly discarding it, the apartment owner had ultimately brought about the rag doll's retaliation. It was almost an inevitable outcome.
"Jinhua Residential Complex recorded Xiang Nuan's story. What lies buried in this Jiuhong Residential Complex might be the Netherborn's past."
The first time Chen Ge's shadow had changed was at the Western Suburb Horror House. What it had experienced afterward — perhaps traces of that journey could be found within these buildings.
Without closing the wardrobe doors, Chen Ge pulled out all the clothes inside but saw no sign of the creature. It was as though it had already left the room.
"There are children's clothes in the wardrobe, and three pairs of slippers in the shoe cabinet — two large and one small. Everything points to a boy having once lived in this room." Chen Ge spread the blood-written bedsheets on the floor: "The tenant in 204 once had a child. From the blood text on the sheets, it's clear that this strange rag doll only appeared after their child died. At first, the doll didn't harm them — it seemed to cling to a sliver of hope, wanting to live with them."
"Does that sound possible to you? From the descriptions, that rag doll is a complete horror. Who would want to live with that thing?" Xiao Sun couldn't understand what Chen Ge was saying.
"You and the apartment owner both see the rag doll as a monster, but have you ever considered things from the rag doll's perspective? Would it think of itself as a monster?" Chen Ge pointed to the blood-written text: "Legs stuffed with bones, a belly holding a heart, and a face pieced together from different pieces — this rag doll was trying its hardest to become human, following its own idea of what that meant."
"How come what you're saying sounds even more terrifying?"
"The rag doll wanted to become human. What it craved was a human life — it longed for a family, for love. Unfortunately, it underestimated how difficult it is to be human." Chen Ge was remarkably composed. "It didn't know what humans truly are, and it had even less understanding of what it represented to others. In a way, it was also a child — just one that had been lured by a demon and become the most terrifying kind of child."
"Regardless of all that, it still killed the apartment owner in the end. I don't think it was trying to express itself — it had bad intentions from the very beginning. I even suspect the apartment owner's child was killed by the rag doll." Wen Qing's complexion had recovered somewhat, but she didn't dare look at the blood-written bedsheets.