His skull felt as if it had been struck by lightning. The ice of his memories cracked open, and images that had never appeared before flickered through
"Mingtai…"
Two nearly identical faces stared into the mirror at the same time. Each saw the other reflected in the other's eyes.
Chen Ge's body trembled harder and harder. His entire body went numb, losing control from head to toe. His heart felt as though it had been viciously stomped on several times, and even breathing became an excruciating task.
In the blurry mirror, the sunken-eyed child gripped the other child's throat. He tightened his grip little by little, and in those eyes full of sin and despair, there lingered other emotions — something like sorrow, or something like pain.
"Chen Ge!"
Xiao Sun and Wen Qing finally noticed something was wrong with him. They rushed into the bathroom, trying to support him, but Chen Ge's condition didn't improve in the slightest.
Every nerve in his body was wound taut, every muscle was quivering, blood surged wildly through his veins, and his mind kept flashing with all manner of horrifying, cruel images.
These newly surfaced images — he had no memory of them, and even after seeing them, he would instantly forget.
He couldn't recall the specific scenes, but he knew that every single one of them contained two children.
Those were the memories of the Underworld Fetus — or rather, they were memories shared between the two of them.
"The… the mirror…" Through gritted teeth, Chen Ge's mind was now completely blank. He had absolutely no control over his own body, as though in this very moment his body no longer belonged to him.
His fingers, gripping the edge of the washstand, slowly loosened. Chen Ge's body tilted backward. He stared at the two children's faces in the mirror, and one final image surfaced in his mind — in a pitch-black city, three blood-red doors were pushed open simultaneously!
Crack!
The shards of the mirror sliced across Chen Ge's cheek. Glass fragments scattered in every direction, and his body crashed heavily to the ground.
He slowly came back to his senses. The mirror on the wall had been smashed. On the fractured surface, the two children's faces were no longer visible.
"Chen Ge!" Having thrown aside the wooden chair, Wen Qing shattered the mirror and then crouched beside him. "Feeling any better?"
"I can only say I'm not dead yet." Chen Ge lay on the ground. He wasn't merely weak — he could distinctly feel someone wrestling his body away from him. "I was also one of the nine children the Underworld Fetus chose. What it wants to take from me is my body."
Before, when he had helped the other children, the sensation hadn't been this intense. Now that it was his turn, he finally understood how agonizing this forced stripping away truly was.
The building was still shaking. Strange sounds echoed ceaselessly through the complex. The black mist had already seeped up to the top floor. The situation had reached its most critical moment.
"Let me help you up." Xiao Sun carried Chen Ge onto the bed while Wen Qing went to pick up Chen Ge's backpack from the floor. The moment she touched it, an invisible force yanked her aside. Both Chen Ge and Xiao Sun witnessed this.
"What the hell is in this bag?" Xiao Sun lifted the backpack. He only meant well, trying to return it to Chen Ge, but the instant his hand made contact, bright red blood threads crawled up his arm, as though ready to绞 kill his body and soul alike.
"Don't be reckless!" Chen Ge shouted with every ounce of strength he had left. "Give me the bag."
Xiao Sun was terrified. He didn't dare keep holding the backpack and hurriedly placed it — along with the Skull-Breaking Hammer — beside Chen Ge.
"Bro, your bag is bleeding." Xiao Sun didn't dare ask any more questions. He stood obediently by the bed, gripping the bed frame with both hands to keep himself from falling.
People were fighting somewhere in the complex. The building lurched as though something had slammed into it. Without holding onto something, it was nearly impossible to stand steady inside.
"I get the feeling this place could collapse any second! Can you two at least say something?" Xiao Sun looked at Wen Qing, whose face was deathly pale, and Chen Ge, who was sprawled on the bed. He never imagined the day would come when he'd become the core of the team. "Looks like it's all on me now!"
Chen Ge ignored Xiao Sun. He exerted every bit of his strength to place his hand on the backpack. The moment his fingertips touched it, his heart gradually calmed.
A gentle crimson light wound itself around his arm. Chen Ge's body gained a measure of strength, but his temperature continued to drop.
"Are the Red Dress employees helping me?"
The Underworld Fetus wanted to seize Chen Ge's body, and on his own he absolutely could not stand against it. But with the employees, the situation was entirely different.
The Red Dress employees were still bound by the rules of the world behind the doors and couldn't use their full power. But the Underworld Fetus was far from its peak either — its body was split into multiple parts, having to simultaneously maintain stability behind the doors while fending off other intruders.
His body regained sensation, and Chen Ge discovered that as the cracks in the building grew more numerous, the constraints the world behind the doors placed on the employees grew weaker.
Everything has two sides. Without the cloth doll's head shielding them, the black mist had begun entering Building Two of Jiuhong Community.
But equally, without the cloth doll's head suppressing them, the effect on Chen Ge's employees was gradually diminishing too.
Chen Ge thrust his hand into the backpack and pressed the repeater's switch. The tape turned, but there was no static hiss.
He took out the blood-soaked comic book and flipped through it page by page. When he reached Xiao Bu's page, he finally received a response.
Blood threads coiled around his hand like a dancing blood sprite. The image, which should have been terrifying, somehow felt warm and tender.
"Xiao Bu is helping me." Xiao Bu was immensely powerful, but the fact that she could aid Chen Ge without fully breaking through the constraints of the world behind the doors surprised him somewhat. "My parents once made an agreement with Xiao Bu — they wanted her to be my shadow. Did they see some special ability in her?"
According to Chen Ge's parents' plan, the one who should have been by his side at this moment was Xiao Bu. But nothing ever goes entirely as planned.
He set down the comic book and looked at the other items in the backpack. Zhang Ya's storybook was the same as before. The ballpoint pen and various small props hadn't changed either.
"Is something missing?"
Chen Ge's expression didn't change at all. His hand continued reaching deeper into the backpack.
At the very bottom, Chen Ge's fingers found the pair of red high heels.
The shoes were damp, as though they had just been pulled from a pool of blood.
The red high heels were on the verge of breaking through the constraints of the rules behind the doors?!
Suppressing the excitement in his heart, Chen Ge didn't say a word. He maintained his posture and didn't glance into the backpack even once.
The high heels had been hidden beneath all the other items, quietly breaking through — as if avoiding someone's gaze.
The Underworld Fetus's true body was within Xiang Nuan's world behind the doors. In other words, this world behind the doors belonged to both the Underworld Fetus and Xiang Nuan. Because a Malevolent God had intervened, the restrictions this world placed on other Red Dress ghosts were extremely severe — but there was one "person" who was an exception.
The red high heels had devoured all the curses from the Underworld Fetus's first few doors. In terms of curses alone, the red high heels were the being closest to the Underworld Fetus, and the Red Dress ghost who understood it best.
She may have sensed the Underworld Fetus's presence, and so she didn't want to reveal herself.
The red high heels were hidden deep inside the backpack. Chen Ge understood it instantly — surprised in his heart, but his face betraying not the slightest change.