Huya had said on the phone that she'd already left the haunted house — so who was standing at the door right now?
The wall lamp went out and darkness fell. The Tail curled up behind a cabinet, trembling — even a haunted house worker would have found it hard to bully her after seeing this.
Her eyes brimmed with tears. She bit her lip hard, arms wrapped around herself, not daring to let her breathing get too loud.
Huya's call ended. The phone screen returned to normal, and the room sank into dead silence.
A few seconds later, footsteps sounded. Someone entered.
The friction of shoe soles against grit — each footfall, the Tail heard with perfect clarity.
*BANG!*
The first morgue cabinet near the door was wrenched open with brutal force. A wave of disinfectant smell wafted out.
"Not in here." Huya's voice sounded different from usual — subdued, strained. God knew what she'd been through inside this haunted house. Her emotions were clearly on edge.
*BANG!*
The second cabinet door was torn open too. Their movements were savagely rough. Some of the cabinet edges were rusted, and the two of them had to work together to rip the doors free.
The sounds drew closer and closer to the Tail. She was hiding behind the last morgue cabinet — all they had to do was walk over and shift angles a bit, and they'd spot her.
"Let's go. This might be another trap. If she heard us calling, there's no reason not to answer — unless she's already unconscious." After opening four cabinets in a row without finding the Tail, Ah Nan and Huya finally gave up.
"Where could she have run off to?" Huya stared toward the back of the room. There was a gap between the last morgue cabinet and the wall — just wide enough for a slim person to squeeze into.
She took two steps toward it. Just as she was about to get close, her phone suddenly vibrated. A text message had come through.
"From the Tail?"
She tapped it open. The Tail said she was trapped in a narrow passage lined with red moss — a corridor located inside a room that contained a morgue pool.
"Don't be afraid. We're heading over right now." In Huya's memory, there was indeed a room like that in the mid-level area. She stopped walking, dialed the Tail's number, and turned to leave the room with Ah Nan.
The footsteps faded. The Tail still didn't dare come out. Undecided, she called Huya's number again.
But this time the call didn't go through. The system message told her the line was busy — Huya seemed to be talking to someone else.
"The person who looked so much like Sister Huya just now apparently made a call. Now when I try her number, it's busy. What on earth is going on?"
Clutching her phone, the Tail slowly made her way out of the room, following at a distance behind the two editors who had hurried away.
……
With both hands, he pulled open the heavy iron door. Chen Ge, dressed and ready, descended underground. He found a handcart in the storage room beside the entrance and wheeled it at an unhurried pace into the underground morgue scene.