The stench in the corridor had grown even thicker. The three medical students huddled together, all of their attention fixed on the puppet standing in the middle of the passage, none of them hearing the strange sounds coming from the dormitory room behind them.
"Why don't we retreat back into the room?" Yang Chen's suggestion was cautious. He didn't even know why he was so afraid of a puppet.
"Since we've already given up on the tour, there's no point in toughing it out," Wang Yan said, throwing caution to the wind. "Let's just find a camera and get the staff to lead us out."
"I checked when we came in — there don't seem to be any cameras installed in this hidden scenario," Li Xue said quietly, staring at the puppet standing in the middle of the passage far ahead.
"Xiao Xue, and you didn't think to tell us something as important as no cameras?" Wang Yan had been able to stay calm largely because he knew that when visitors wanted to give up during a haunted house tour, all they had to do was shout at a surveillance camera or make a specific gesture, and staff would come to escort them out.
Since they could leave at any time, he had felt secure enough to carry on.
"You never asked," Li Xue shot Wang Yan a look. "Relax. A professional haunted house like Boss Chen's definitely has cameras installed — they're just the kind you can't easily spot, micro-cameras, so they don't ruin the atmosphere."
"Atmosphere is the least of our problems right now!" Wang Yan pressed himself against Yang Chen's side. "That puppet appeared out of nowhere right in the middle of the corridor — it must have followed us out!"
"Something's off." Yang Chen furrowed his brow. The stench inside the haunted house was growing heavier by the second, and the unease in his chest kept deepening. "According to the notes, the boy who was abused by his father was fat, but the person hanging in the first room was very thin."
"For crying out loud, we're about to die and you're still analyzing stuff?!" Wang Yan was an impatient man. He kept muttering and urging them on. "Why don't we all just rush out together? That puppet only has two hands — it can't possibly block all three of us."
"Quiet down." Yang Chen shrugged off Wang Yan's arm. "The abused boy was fat, which doesn't match the puppet's build. That means there's another theme in the hidden scenario! The whole scene is made up of two stories!"
"Two?" Li Xue grasped Yang Chen's meaning right away. She turned, her gaze thoughtful, toward what lay behind them.
When her eyes settled on the dormitory room not far from where they stood, they slowly widened, and her face drained of color in an instant.
"Xiao Xue? What's wrong?"
Li Xue seemed to have temporarily lost the ability to speak. A breath of air lodged itself in her throat, and it took a full second or two before she finally let it out.
"Behind us!"
Yang Chen and Wang Yan spun around at the same time. The corpse wrapped in plastic cling film was standing right at the doorway of the dormitory room, its body twisted and contorted as though it were trying to tear itself free from the wrapping.
What was even more terrifying was the mass of pitch-black, stinking smoke that loomed behind the corpse — the haze ultimately coalesced into a shadow shaped like a grotesque ball of flesh.
"What the hell… is that?"
Wang Yan, who had been hiding at the back of the group, was the closest to the cling-film corpse. When he turned his head, his face and the corpse's face were barely half a step apart.
He never expected something like that to be right behind him. Before he even had time to turn his head back, his arms and legs were already propelling him forward. He had sprinted over a meter before the scream finally ripped out of his mouth.
"Run!"
Yang Chen and Li Xue snapped out of their shock as well, hot on Wang Yan's heels, not caring about anything anymore.
They fled in blind panic — but the worst was yet to come.
Blocking the other end of the corridor stood the hanging puppet. It suddenly jerked its head upward, revealing a face the color of dark soy sauce, encrusted with dried bloodstains.
Moving faster than the three medical students, it pushed off the ground with both feet, bounding toward them in a series of hops!