By the time
The Shadow didn't know how many Red-clothed ghosts Chen Ge still had. As long as Chen Ge was given the chance to awaken them, the Shadow's odds of winning would be very slim.
Even if Chen Ge was lured into a trap, with a top-tier Red-clothed ghost protecting him, he wouldn't necessarily die.
So under these circumstances, the Shadow would likely resort to a different method to kill Chen Ge.
Not relying on the power of ghosts, but using some other means — for instance, Li Zheng's service pistol.
If Chen Ge had absolutely no guard against Li Zheng, he would never summon a Red-clothed ghost to protect himself the moment Li Zheng approached.
At that point, the Shadow only needed to conceal his malice so the Red-clothed ghost wouldn't detect it, then draw the pistol, gently squeeze the trigger, and Chen Ge would be dead.
Compared to spending an enormous amount of time crafting a trap that might not even work, this was the simplest and at the same time most effective method.
The Shadow knew that the higher one went in the building, the more severely the Red-clothed ghosts were suppressed.
Those black substances must have come from an existence above the Red-clothed level, capable of having a significant impact on them. With this interference, his chances of success would be even greater.
In fact, everything was unfolding according to his expectations — it was just that the final result caught him off guard. Before he could produce Li Zheng's pistol, Chen Ge had already sensed his true identity.
In the pitch-black stairwell, blood mist drifted through the air, and the cries of children echoed everywhere.
The dark figure stood only a few meters away from Chen Ge. Its silhouette was slowly changing — its body growing taller bit by bit until it became an exact copy of Chen Ge himself.
"It seems you haven't quite prepared yourself to meet me." Chen Ge stared at the dark figure, feeling a very strange sensation, as though he were standing before a mirror in the dead of night talking to his own reflection.
"You're wrong. From the moment you discarded me, I knew this day would come. It's just that it didn't go quite as I'd planned." The Shadow's voice was gradually changing, sounding more and more like Chen Ge's own: "I thought that when we met again, I would be the one living as a person, and you would be the one living as a shadow."
"You want me to be your shadow that badly?" Chen Ge stood his ground without moving. The Shadow had been able to fight
"A person without a shadow doesn't live long. I hope you'll become my shadow. Then I can try every method of death I've ever experienced on you, one by one." His intonation adjusted until the Shadow's voice became an exact match for Chen Ge's. "Do you hate me that much? What did I ever do to you?" Chen Ge felt that he had never lost any memories, nor did he recall doing anything particularly cruel as a child.
"It seems you really have forgotten. But that's all right — in time, I'll make you remember everything. Inside the door, outside the door, you and me, you inside the door and me outside." With each word the Shadow spoke, his body grew taller by another fraction. He was standing at the bottom of the staircase, yet he was already taller than Chen Ge: "You never did anything to me. You lived under the sunlight, wrapped in warmth, surrounded by laughter and hope. You enjoyed all the beauty of the world — but every curse, every insult, every ounce of deep-seated malice from others that you suffered was transferred onto me!"
"All my negative emotions are inside you?" Chen Ge's brow arched.
"'Negative emotions' — those four words can't even begin to describe the slow descent into the abyss of despair. I watched myself sink lower and lower, but I couldn't make a sound. My throat was being crushed, my body was being torn apart, I couldn't open my mouth, I couldn't breathe — I couldn't even die!" The Shadow's voice grew louder: "At first, I didn't want to hurt anyone. Even when countless curses clung to me, even when I was tossed about in an ocean of despair, even when I endured suffering you could never imagine, the thought of harming another person never once crossed my mind."
The dark figure's body swelled and warped grotesquely. The patterns on the walls to either side came alive — inside them, the black stick figures died over and over again in horrific ways.
"Until one day, desperate and broken, I saw a door in your home!"
The Shadow's words instantly put Chen Ge on high alert. He knew there was a door in the haunted house's bathroom, but he had never been able to figure out who had opened it: "You opened it?"
"When I was suffering under those curses, that door already existed. My despair wasn't enough to push it open — but in my desperation, I heard the voices behind it." The oppressive force emanating from the Shadow intensified: "There was someone behind the door calling your name. You couldn't hear them, but I answered on your behalf."
The Shadow's chilling voice sent goosebumps crawling up Chen Ge's neck: "And it was from that moment on that I realized — why can't I become you? Why should I have to hide in the shadows and weep while you bask in sunlight? I am your shadow, but that doesn't mean I have to bear all your suffering!"
As he spoke the last word, an arm suddenly burst from the Shadow's chest and lunged toward Chen Ge's throat. It was entirely unexpected — everything the Shadow had done before this was merely a distraction.
The Shadow had been injured in his battle with Doctor Gao, and his form had grown faint, but the arm extending from his chest was solid as anything made of flesh. Even the fingerprints on every finger were etched in with threads of blood.
The Tunnel Female Ghost had stepped in front of Chen Ge the instant the Shadow struck, but she had underestimated the horror of the Shadow.
The arm passed straight through her body, dragging blood threads from within her, and kept reaching for Chen Ge!
*Crack!*
The comic book inside Chen Ge's backpack let out a soft sound. One page shattered completely — but in that very instant, the black hand hesitated!
The Tunnel Female Ghost, her body pierced through, let out a piercing scream. Having died in a car accident, her body had already been badly deformed.
She seized the arm that had passed through her torso with both hands, ignoring the limb completely — she simply hung herself on the Shadow and began attacking him frantically.
The Tunnel Female Ghost was different from other Red-clothed ghosts. Beneath her red clothing was a mangled corpse containing fractured bones, and her special ability was tied to those broken bones.
The blood-soaked bone fragments pierced into the Shadow's body as the Tunnel Female Ghost's form continued to shift and twist, as though she were trying to use her own body to swallow the Shadow whole.
"Just now, I suddenly slowed down — what kind of ghost's power is that?" The Shadow turned to Chen Ge: "How many more ghosts do you actually have?"
"Guess?" Chen Ge wanted to figure out what exactly was going on with that door in the haunted house — that was why he hadn't attacked the Shadow himself.
"Even when facing death, you can still smile. Everything you're capable of right now is only because of me." The Shadow's voice turned frigid. Under the Tunnel Female Ghost's relentless assault, his body had grown even weaker.
But he didn't seem to be in any hurry. He merely radiated his hatred for Chen Ge: "This place has already been compromised, so there's no need to stay any longer. The children I've been sending to the Nether Fetus are more than enough for it to be born smoothly."
The black patterns on the walls began to change. Every black stick figure that had been killed within the drawings stepped out of the paintings one after another and merged into the Shadow's body.
"How many people did you bury in the eastern suburbs?" The door behind Chen Ge had undergone the most dramatic transformation. The dark silhouette matching Chen Ge's appearance had grown faint, and one by one, small black figures — limbs missing, dominated by resentment and hatred — stepped out from within.
Each of them bore two faces. One was their own original face; the other bore an eighty or ninety percent resemblance to Chen Ge.
The scene was utterly terrifying, yet the Shadow was savoring it: "The Nether Fetus carries far too much resentment — it simply cannot be born. So I had to let these children share the Nether Fetus's resentment. You can see for yourself, can't you? It took this many children to offset even a fraction of the Nether Fetus's hatred. Imagine, then, how much suffering I bore for you!"
One by one, the small black figures poured into the Shadow's body. His faded form grew solid once more. Deep black curses coursed across his skin, forcing out the bone shards the Tunnel Female Ghost had just driven into him.
Curses were something even ordinary Red-clothed ghosts were unwilling to touch. The moment the black figures appeared, the Tunnel Female Ghost's body deformed again, and she retreated away from the Shadow.
"My reason for never coming to find you was that I was waiting for the day I could turn you into my shadow. I never expected you'd come running to interfere with my plans on your own." The faces of children surfaced across the Shadow's body — all of them having lost their sense of self, all wearing eerie smiles: "A person without a shadow is incomplete. I will make you my shadow!"
Just as the Shadow was preparing to strike at Chen Ge, a series of thunderous booms erupted from outside the apartment building. Looking toward the windows, row upon row of chains were attacking the building with inexplicable, frenzied fury.