Weak, panicked, timid, pitiable—the man hiding in the wind chime looked like a small animal being abused by its owner.
Wang Yan didn’t know why he had this feeling. Seeing a face appear in the wind chime, his first reaction wasn’t that it was a ghost, but that he felt sorry for it.
“This shouldn’t be so simple.” Wang Yan held the wind chime in his hand. After pondering for a moment, his eyes slowly widened. “A self-injury ploy? Damn it, I almost fell for it!”
He thrust his hand into the inner wall of the wind chime and poked the man’s face hard. His fingertip passed straight through the center of the face. “Just as I thought. It’s only a projection.”
“Save me! Don’t leave me here alone! Take me with you! Please! Take me away!”
The man’s miserable cry reached his ears. Wang Yan shook the wind chime, examining it carefully. “I can’t tell at all where the sound is coming from. This wind chime is quite high-tech.”
“Stop shaking it! Stop shaking it! You’ll attract that big dog!”
“Big dog?” Footsteps echoed from the stairwell leading down to the second basement level. A pungent, foul odor tainted the air, so strong that even all the air freshener sprayed earlier couldn’t mask it.
“Run! Take me with you! That dog is coming!” The man’s face inside the wind chime turned extremely pale, twisted in sheer terror.
Wang Yan himself wasn’t that scared initially, but under the man’s urgent urging from within the wind chime, he began to have second thoughts.
“This house is the only one in all the scenarios that has a dog kennel. It must be connected to a dog. Could there really be a vicious dog kept inside?”
A real animal was nothing like a living human actor. Once they went mad, they were completely uncontrollable. Wang Yan felt that even
“The dog might have some other meaning.”
Before Wang Yan could figure it out, the foul odor hit him directly. At the far end of the corridor, a man’s figure appeared.
Medium build, sinister expression, exuding a strange smell.
“Run! Run!” the man shrieked in panic.
“It’s the dog?” Light streamed in through an open window, and Wang Yan got a clear look at the face. It was identical to the man in the wind chime.
“Even the face is the same. This is definitely a trap. One sets the mood, the other waits for its chance—they work together from inside and out to finally corner the visitor!” Wang Yan tried to analyze the situation, feeling he had finally grasped the patterns of
“What the hell are you talking about? I just want to leave! Get out of here!”
“The guy in front of me isn’t alive. He seems to be just a mannequin. In other words, the truly terrifying part isn’t that ‘dog.’ Its existence is just to create pressure on us. If I do what the man in the wind chime says, I’ll probably walk step by step into the trap woven by the haunted house owner!”
Wang Yan’s thoughts stunned the man inside the wind chime. It had pinned its hopes on the visitor, but the other party seemed to have completely misunderstood its intentions.
“I…”
“I’m not as easy to fool as before. This time, I’m going to walk out of here with my head held high!” There was no time to hesitate. After finishing his sentence, Wang Yan grabbed the wind chime and turned to run.
As he moved, the mannequin in the corridor placed both hands on the ground and lunged toward him like a starving wild dog!
If he hadn’t decisively left the room earlier and had ventured further inside, he would most likely be done for by now.
Wang Yan and his girlfriend sprinted down the corridor with the half-man, half-dog mannequin in relentless pursuit behind them.
It darted through the shadows, chasing them straight out of the room. This monster seemed entirely unbound by the scenario’s restrictions, able to move freely throughout all of Liwan Town!
“It’s chasing us!” The terrified male voice echoed once more in Wang Yan’s ears.