Having narrowly escaped death, cold water slid from the top of Chen Ge's head. He was still shaken, his chest heaving, his lips purple, both hands still gripping the kitchen knife tightly.
It took a minute or two before he calmed down and the grogginess in his head subsided somewhat.
He wiped the water from his face, then swayed as he climbed out of the bathtub.
Under the candlelight, the room appeared unchanged.
"That slash should have hit something. I even heard a crisp sound." Chen Ge followed the angle of his swing and found a mark left on the corner of the tub.
"Did I hit the bathtub? That doesn't seem right. I clearly felt someone pressing down on my head — that blade should have struck him." Chen Ge was desperate to know the truth. He stepped out of the tub and grabbed his phone, which was still recording.
He stopped the recording and played the video from the beginning.
"Got into the bathtub at three-thirty. Nothing unusual until three-forty-three." Chen Ge leaned against the wall, eyes fixed on the screen. At three-forty-four, he lay down in the tub. Water splashed outward, the surface level with the rim.
"Watching it like this really does look creepy." When he'd been doing it himself, it hadn't felt that terrifying, but observing it as a bystander through the video gave him a bone-chilling sensation.
Chen Ge cross-referenced the timestamps. Twenty seconds before he lay down, everything in the bathroom was normal — just the occasional drip of water.
After another ten seconds, Chen Ge's brow furrowed. He noticed something: the footage didn't match what he'd experienced in the tub!
By his own mental count, footsteps should have sounded in the hallway by now, but the recording showed nothing — calm, without a single strange noise.
Five or six seconds later, the banging on the door that Chen Ge remembered still didn't appear. The screen showed nothing but the dark, still water and the flickering candle flame.
"Could the footsteps and the banging have all been hallucinations?"
A full fifty seconds passed before bubbles began rising en masse from the previously still water surface. The Chen Ge in the tub was nearly at his limit.
And just then, something made his scalp go numb.
A palm-sized shard of mirror beside the tub slowly darkened on its surface, and a black shadow squeezed out from within. It crouched beside the bathtub — an utterly eerie sight.
By the silhouette, the figure looked very much like He Feng.
The bubbles on the water surface grew denser. Then came the most critical moment.
In the footage, Chen Ge's body and willpower had both reached their breaking point. He couldn't hold on any longer. His hands pushed against the bottom of the tub as he prepared to give up.
But just as his head was about to break the surface, the black shadow standing beside the tub suddenly thrust both hands forward and pressed his head down!
Unable to breathe, water flooding into his mouth and nose, Chen Ge thrashed desperately. He swung the kitchen knife wildly. The black shadow swayed and flickered — the blade seemed to have some effect on it, but a negligible one.