"Four, before you begin, I need to remind you of something."
The man sitting first on the right side of the dining table turned his head to look at Chen Ge. "Everything you tell here must be true. We have our own ways of verifying it. If you're making things up, you'll face the appropriate consequences."
"I know the rules."
"Go ahead."
Chen Ge thought for a moment, then prepared to tell his first story.
"This is a true event that happened to a friend of mine."
"My friend's surname is Wang. He loved his wife very much, but she mysteriously disappeared several months ago."
"He reported it to the police, searched the streets for her everywhere, and plastered missing-person flyers across every corner of the city."
"Everyone felt sorry for him. The police who helped investigate also discovered that he doted on his wife almost to the point of spoiling her, so they understood his behavior."
"But sympathy is one thing — how many fairy tales are there really in this world?"
"After searching for half a year, his wife still hadn't turned up. The police had long since given up and classified her as a missing person, but he kept searching. It seemed to be the only thing keeping him alive."
"He would leave the house early every morning with missing-person flyers in hand and wouldn't return until deep into the night."
"This went on for a long time, until one day, persistence finally paid off — he suddenly received a message from his wife's phone."
"Save me…"
"It was sent from his wife's phone, just three words, but they filled him with unimaginable fear!"
"Buried in his heart was a secret he had never told anyone. The truth was, his wife's disappearance was his own doing — he had killed her and hidden her body."
"Every day he went out searching, exhausting himself, simply to numb his mind and ease the guilt gnawing at him over his wife."
"But he never expected that his already-dead wife would actually send him a message."
"In a panic, he retrieved his wife's body from behind the partition panel in the old house, drove it out, and buried it in a remote area on the outskirts of the city."
"He thought that would be the end of it, but then something far more terrifying happened."
"Every time he woke from sleep, his wife's clothes from when she was alive would appear beside his bed — as though his wife had come to visit during the night!"
"How could the person he had buried with his own hands possibly come back?"
"After waking up, he grabbed his tools and drove back out to the suburbs to move his wife's body even farther away."
"But no matter what he did, every time he woke up, his wife's belongings would inexplicably appear once more."
"It was as though his wife had come back to life, waiting until he fell asleep before coming to his side."
"He grew more and more terrified. His phone was constantly receiving messages from his wife, but he had no memory of any of them — they were all sent while he was asleep."
"The situation was getting worse. Some mornings when he woke up, he would even find himself wearing the very clothes his wife had died in."
"He was on the verge of a breakdown. He decided the problem still lay with his wife's remains, so he drove to where she was buried and moved her one last time."
"To prevent his wife from coming back to him at night, he came up with an incredibly insane plan — he entombed his wife's body inside the wall of an abandoned old house."
"Watching his wife merge into the wall, he finally breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that she would never come back to find him again."