Wang Yan stared at the hidden passage behind the cabinet, his heart hammering. Those doctors had given him a strange feeling — friendly and warm at first, but the moment they'd heard he'd skipped class, their tone and expressions had shifted noticeably. "Did I say something wrong? Skipping class isn't a big deal, is it? Every senior I've met says a university experience isn't complete without cutting at least a few classes."
He stopped at the entrance to the passage and took one step inside. The temperature was noticeably warmer than outside. He hesitated for a long while, then backed out again.
"What's wrong?" Xiao Li stood right behind him, already itching to leave. "Nothing. I just thought those doctors reminded me a bit of our dean." Wang Yan's feelings were a tangled mess. "This is ridiculous. I figured I'd run into all sorts of horrifying things in here, but the one scenario I never imagined was bumping into school faculty while cutting class. Could it be that too many people from our school have visited Boss Chen's haunted house, and the teachers came in personally to drag us back because they're worried about our grades?"
"Alright, alright — is this your first time skipping? Of course you're nervous. Cut class a few more times and you'll get used to it." Xiao Li urged Wang Yan to get moving. "We both passed out at the same time, and you got put on a hospital bed with two layers of bedding underneath, while I was just thrown on a bare wooden board. You can tell from how they treated us that those doctors must be people you know. They wouldn't lie to you."
"I got the feeling they were familiar too, but I can't remember a thing about them."
Bubbles kept rising from the hole in the center of the morgue pool. The wall-mounted lights flickered on and off. Iron doors along the corridor emitted faint creaking sounds, as if someone were pushing them back and forth.
In these circumstances, Wang Yan didn't dare linger. He was terrified the wall lights would go out and those things would come chasing after them again.
"Come on. If you're scared, I'll walk in front — you just guide me." Xiao Li had been working for years, steady and sharp-witted, the boldest employee at Virtual Future Paradise. Now he bravely stepped forward.
Wang Yan didn't refuse his kindness. He stepped aside and watched Xiao Li enter the passage. "Be careful."
"Got it." Xiao Li pulled out his phone and switched on the built-in flashlight. "Let's go already. I don't want to open my eyes next time and see those doctors again."
The two crawled into the passage one after the other. It grew narrower the deeper they went, and the walls were plastered with patches of something that looked like blood-red moss.
"Why haven't we reached the end yet?" The further Wang Yan went, the more anxious he became. The passage was barely wide enough for a person to squeeze through sideways, and his clothes inevitably brushed against the "moss" on either side. His clothes grew damp, and his skin prickled with a faint itch. Trailing behind Xiao Li, he felt a rising sense of unease.
"This must be the way out," Xiao Li said, far more confident than Wang Yan. "Have you noticed? The smell of formaldehyde in the air is practically gone. There's a fresh, pleasant fragrance in this passage."
Wang Yan flared his nostrils. He did smell something floral — but he wasn't nearly as optimistic as Xiao Li. "Is it coming from the moss on the walls?"
He reached out and touched the wall. The cold, hard surface was coated in moss, which felt surprisingly soft under his fingers.
"Finally, no more of that horrible smell. This tunnel probably leads straight outside. I'm guessing the passage exists so visitors can bail — after all, most people can't handle his haunted house. It's like a hidden bonus, just like right now." Xiao Li bent down as the tunnel dropped even lower. The ground grew softer, as though layered with thick carpet.
"I think I actually prefer the smell of formaldehyde," Wang Yan said. The fragrance swirling around his nostrils was making him queasy. "This isn't a normal scent, and it doesn't smell like synthetic chemicals either. It's… strange."
He racked his memory, then finally recalled. "I once read an ancient text on postmortem investigations. It described something called 'corpse fragrance,' and the description sounded just like this."
"Corpse fragrance?" Xiao Li shuddered — this was something he'd never heard of before.
"Corpse fragrance comes in many varieties. One of the most famous is made by rendering oil from a beautiful woman's corpse and using it to make candles. After a special process, you light them and place them in a room…"
"Stop! Don't say another word!" Xiao Li quickened his pace, putting distance between himself and Wang Yan. Ordinary people still had their taboos about corpses — they couldn't just casually discuss such graphic topics like students from a forensic medicine school.
The Virtual Future Paradise employee Xiao Li bent forward and pressed on. Wang Yan had no choice but to follow.
After another ten or so meters, Xiao Li suddenly froze.
"What do you see?" Wang Yan shone his phone ahead.
Xiao Li stood rooted to the spot, and after a long pause managed to squeeze out: "There's no road."
Both of them were hunched over, nearly crawling on the ground. The passage was so narrow they could barely turn around. Red "moss" surrounded them on all sides. Their clothes were soaked through, and the air was thick with that eerie fragrance.
"So… do we turn back?"
"Wait." Xiao Li was genuinely bold. He raised his hand and pressed it against the blood-red moss in front of him.
He pushed with his fingers, and his palm slowly sank in.
"There's empty space behind this." Xiao Li cursed the designer under his breath for being cunning — to set up a test right at the exit. "Good thing I tried. If I'd just turned back, I would've kicked myself for sure."
He was rather pleased with himself and turned to share the good news with Wang Yan. His body pressed against the wall as he strained to twist his neck around. "The moss was deliberately placed as camouflage. The exit is right ahead. We'll be out in no—"
Mid-sentence, Xiao Li's gaze swept past what was behind him. He saw Wang Yan, and behind Wang Yan he saw a row of figures crawling on the ground!
Soundless. Faces sloughing off as they crawled. All of them were following right behind!
"What are you looking at?" Wang Yan shone his phone at Xiao Li's face. Before he could make anything out, the phone's light swept across and a pale arm dropped down from the moss above his head.
The dangling arm swung right in front of Wang Yan's face. He stared blankly upward. One by one, arms were dropping from the ceiling.
The narrow tunnel, swathed in soft red moss — and beneath the moss, one after another, the freshly prepared, warm, and welcoming "corpses" from the night before.
……
At the edge of the middle zone, Yang Chen, Li Xue, Lao
"Three people have vanished, and you two are perfectly fine — why is that?" Yang Chen's voice was tightly controlled. He had seen through the haunted house owner's tricks and understood exactly who these two editors really were.
"What does their disappearance have to do with us?" A'Nan thought Yang Chen was losing it. "When the lights went out and the footsteps started, I even called out to warn them not to run off. But they wouldn't listen. Now they're missing, and you come blaming us?"
"Still putting on an act?" He had caught the screams from deep in the corridor earlier — Wang Yan and Xiao Li's agonized cries, and through them he'd made out fragments like "I'll never skip class again." Raw, desperate, heart-rending — absolutely not something anyone could fake.
It was precisely because he'd heard Wang Yan's screams that Yang Chen had panicked. He was done hiding his suspicions. It was time to lay everything bare.
"We're putting on an act?" Hu Ya furrowed her brow. "Have you misunderstood something?"
"Drop the act. I've seen through your little scheme. Gotta say, you really are committed to your roles." Yang Chen stepped forward, shielding Li Xue and Lao Zhou behind him. "You're haunted house actors, aren't you? Arranged in advance by Boss Chen — am I right?"
Hu Ya's and A'Nan's mouths twitched. In the end, A'Nan couldn't hold back and murmured at Yang Chen: "Are you out of your mind?"
"Getting defensive? Didn't expect that, did you — I figured it out in only nineteen minutes." Yang Chen stood with Lao Zhou and the others, his voice turning cold. "The three of you editors, plus the chef who disappeared at the beginning and his brother — you're all haunted house actors. Those five victim photos probably have your faces on them! You're ghosts who snuck into the tourist group. You're the dead victims!"