The light in the stairwell seemed to dim slightly. A cold draft blew down from overhead, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. The Nightmare Academy's back-end control room must have cranked the air conditioning down to its lowest setting.
When
"Locked? Are they planning to trap me in the stairwell?" Chen Ge stopped at the door and peered through its glass window into the corridor.
Dim shapes flickered along the long hallway—figures of varying builds, each carrying some kind of tool or another.
While his attention was drawn to those silhouettes in the corridor, footsteps echoed in the stairwell once more.
"Someone's following me?"
Chen Ge wasn't in any hurry. After a moment he realized the footsteps were accompanied by a child's voice—the little one seemed to have gotten separated from his father and was calling out through tears.
"That voice sounds strange. It doesn't quite sound like a child, yet it's much sharper than an adult's voice—as if the vocal cords never fully developed."
Chen Ge closed his eyes and patiently tried to pinpoint the child's location.
"On the upper floor the child's voice is laced with a faint electrical hum—probably coming from a machine. The sound from downstairs, though just as eerie, feels a bit clearer. That child should be somewhere on the ground floor."
The further down he went, the darker the lights became. The walls turned mottled, covered in large stains and strange markings that made for a deeply unsettling sight.
Chen Ge also noticed something peculiar: at the corner of every floor sat a black incense burner with three broken sticks of incense thrust into it. Whether this held some special significance, he couldn't say.
"The incense has gone damp—it won't light, and it's snapped to boot…" Chen Ge crouched beside one of the black burners and lifted it into his palm. Beneath it he was startled to find a photograph.
He picked it up. It showed a man in his thirties wearing a mask, his head bowed, apparently worried someone might see his face.
Letting his gaze drift lower, Chen Ge saw that the man's left hand appeared to be holding someone else's—though the left half of the photo had been cut away.
"Daddy…" A faint, eerie voice drifted from behind Chen Ge, startlingly sudden.
"Are you calling me?" Chen Ge spun around. There was nothing behind him.
Pupils contracted, Chen Ge headed toward the source of the voice. Hidden within the mottled peeling paint on the wall, he found a miniature audio player.
"So they deliberately designed the walls to look like this—making it easy to conceal all kinds of devices and traps." Chen Ge ran his finger across the front of the player. "A device this sophisticated must cost a fortune. My haunted house doesn't even have anything like it. There's a reason the Nightmare Academy has grown so big—they combine technology with urban legends. That's the real winning formula."
Chen Ge was not an arrogant man. Staying humble at all times was one of the keys to how far he had come.
"I haven't checked my bank account in a while. I should have saved up a decent sum by now. Once the four-star scenario is unlocked, I'll go ask
Clutching the photo, Chen Ge picked up his bag and descended another floor.
The footsteps and the child's crying were closer now. The Nightmare Academy appeared to be building an atmosphere of a ghost gradually closing in. Through the multiple miniature audio players installed throughout the stairwell, combined with precise back-end control, they had pulled it off perfectly.
For any ordinary person trapped inside, discovering that the longer they lingered in the stairwell the closer the footsteps and crying became—their psychological defenses would steadily crumble. Unfortunately for the academy, today they had run into Chen Ge.
Rather than panicking when he sensed the sounds drawing nearer, Chen Ge charged straight toward them, eager to catch sight of the ghost's true face as soon as possible. This threw the back-end controllers into a complete tangle.
They scrambled to coordinate with the actors on the ground, desperately trying to make sure the horror scene was ready before Chen Ge came barging in.