"You go on ahead. I heard this haunted house uses a fear-difficulty system — it's not every day I get into the highest-difficulty scene, so I want to look around a bit more." Ye Xiaoxin didn't leave the director's office.
The static from the recorder grew louder, and buried in the electrical crackle, other sounds began to emerge.
Like someone gasping. Or perhaps weeping.
Han Qiuming glanced at the time — just over two minutes left. He didn't press the issue. "All right, be careful then."
With that, he grabbed the recorder and sprinted out on his own.
Watching Han Qiuming's retreating figure, the composure Ye Xiaoxin had maintained this whole time finally cracked. Those pretty eyes of hers slowly widened.
"There seems to be someone crawling on his back?"
She was a staunch atheist, and it was precisely that conviction that allowed her to walk into any haunted house without fear and write her reviews. She firmly believed it was all fake.
But just now, she had seen something that her years of experience simply could not explain.
"Who is that person on his back? It's a person, right?"
…
Han Qiuming ran at full speed with the recorder in hand. "Two minutes left!"
His body was growing colder by the second. He had no idea what had gone wrong — the chill was radiating from his back, seeping through his flesh and burrowing toward his heart.
"It hurts…"
A voice drifted to his ear, faint and wavering, as though a woman were lying on his shoulder.
"Who?!" Han Qiuming whipped his head around and looked behind him. His shoulder was empty — nothing there.
"I heard wrong?"
He pushed himself faster. Right now there was only one thought in his head: get out of here, now.
"I've got the item — once I'm outside, I win. I'll reclaim every bit of face Tianteng Hospital lost!"
Han Qiuming threw caution to the wind and sprinted forward like a madman.
"It hurts so much…"
The voice had drawn closer — from his shoulder to his ear, as if trying to worm its way inside.
"It hurts!"
"Ah!" Swinging wildly at the empty air, Han Qiuming lashed out with both hands. "Get off! What are you?!"
No one answered. In the pitch-black corridor, the only sounds were his own echoing voice and the soft hiss of static.
"Is this recorder behind it?" He was the only thing here that could make a sound — aside from the recorder itself. Han Qiuming thrust it before his eyes. The tape was still spinning, and the indicator light had switched from green to red at some point without him noticing.
"Is it the recorder?"
He racked his brain but couldn't figure out the mechanism behind any of this. The clock kept ticking down. Gritting his teeth, he raised the recorder and kept running.
"The recorder is definitely the problem, but it's also the key to clearing the stage! I finally found it — how could I just toss it away? That would throw away all my previous effort!"
In his mind, Han Qiuming cursed Chen Ge black and blue. "Shameless! Absolutely despicable!"
All he had to do was carry the recorder outside and he'd clear the stage — but that was exactly what made it so agonizing. Tossing the recorder felt like a waste he couldn't bear. Keeping it meant facing the horror it brought head-on.
There was no way around it. For an ordinary person, this scene was practically an unsolvable puzzle stage!
"Screw it!" Han Qiuming clenched his teeth. To clear Chen Ge's haunted house, he was truly putting his life on the line.
He ran and ran. His shoulders grew heavier, something pressing down on his back, the bone-deep chill sinking straight into his marrow.
"It hurts…"
The voice behind him grew clearer, shifting from a vague male tone into a woman's voice.
It sounded rather mature, laced with a trace of helplessness and despair.
"Wait a second!"