"I was terrified. I ran all the way home in a panic—I didn't even remember to close the security door behind me." Even now, recalling the scene, Gao Ruxue still felt uneasy.
"You made the right choice. The person following you definitely had bad intentions."
The phone ghost had amplified Gao Ruxue's fear to the maximum, forcing her into all kinds of hallucinations. No matter what happened, she would always jump to the worst possible conclusion—but that, ironically, was what had saved her life.
More than ten minutes later, Chen Ge received a call from Doctor Gao, asking him to come to the residential complex's security monitoring room right away.
He helped Gao Ruxue to her feet. Her condition still wasn't stable, and he wasn't comfortable leaving her alone.
The two of them went downstairs and entered the monitoring room, where Doctor Gao and two security guards were crowded around a computer screen.
"Did you find anything?"
"Come look." Doctor Gao had the guard replay the surveillance footage, and a chilling scene appeared on the monitor.
Not long after Gao Ruxue had entered the emergency stairwell, a figure wearing an oversized dark raincoat had followed her into the corridor.
He pursued close behind her, like a ghost.
When the camera switched to the next surveillance point, Gao Ruxue had already reached the thirteenth floor. She sprinted to her front door, hands trembling as she fumbled for her keys and opened the lock—you could feel her panic just from watching the footage.
The raincoat-clad figure drew closer and closer. When he appeared on the thirteenth floor, Gao Ruxue still hadn't made it inside.
He quickened his pace. As he ran, the sleeve of his raincoat blew open in the wind, and from the surveillance footage it was clearly visible that he was gripping a peculiar metal implement—the front end stained with blood.
The distance between them kept shrinking. At last, with fewer than ten meters separating them, Gao Ruxue finally managed to unlock the inner door and dart inside.
The door slammed shut, and the hallway fell quiet again.
But the strange figure in the raincoat didn't leave. He stopped right in front of Gao Ruxue's door and slowly crouched down, hiding in the blind spot beyond the peephole's view.
At that moment, if Gao Ruxue had mistakenly assumed the man was gone and opened the door, the consequences would have been unimaginable.
The timestamp on the surveillance footage kept advancing, but the image seemed frozen—the raincoat-clad killer remained hidden at her doorstep.
"Could this be the killer from the eye-gouging case? That sharp-pointed thing in his sleeve—could that be the murder weapon?"
While the group was watching the footage, the security room door was pushed open and two police officers walked in.
"We're from the city branch criminal investigation unit. Where's Doctor Gao?"
Chen Ge recognized the officer leading them—it was Li Zheng, the one he'd met at the Fanghua Yuan residential complex, a trusted right-hand man under Captain Yan.
The moment Chen Ge recognized Li Zheng, Li Zheng spotted him too. He could barely contain himself and blurted out: "There's been a murder in the complex?"
"Almost." Chen Ge hadn't expected to run into Li Zheng here, let alone that he and Doctor Gao apparently knew each other.