"Three entries and three exits, main hall and side rooms, east and west wing rooms, winding corridors, pendant curtains, ruyi gates, inverted lintels, thunder god pillars… This haunted house has impressive detail. It's modeled after an ancient siheyuan — really immersive." Gao Ruxue wandered through the scene, stopping here and there, her expression relaxed. She tossed out a comment every now and then.
"Senior, we're in a haunted house, not strolling through a Suzhou garden. Could you maybe consider my feelings for once?" The empty courtyard was drenched in yin energy, with soul banners drifting and paper money fluttering through the air. To He Shan, this haunted house looked nothing like the leisurely sightseeing tour Gao Ruxue was treating it as. He crept along cautiously, terrified something would suddenly burst out from the shadowy corners. "Can we just hurry up and find the exit? I've got a bad feeling about this."
"Since we're here, we might as well enjoy the tour. We're here to play the haunted house — don't let the haunted house play you."
"Don't you remember what the owner said before we came in? He told us to find the exit within fifteen minutes. I just get the sense that guy's scheming. If we can't escape in fifteen minutes, something terrible is definitely going to happen!" He Shan tried to convince Gao Ruxue, but she couldn't care less.
"Haunted houses only have a handful of tricks, at most they send staff in costumes to chase us around. We don't even fear the dead — why would we be afraid of the living?" Gao Ruxue wandered aimlessly along the corridor and casually pushed open the door to the side room on the left.
The Ghost Marriage venue was built as a standard siheyuan. The main hall was where the elders and head of household lived, the wing rooms were for the eldest son and younger generation, and the side rooms flanking the main hall were where the servants and maids resided.
She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Chairs and tables lay overturned, quilts on the bed had been torn apart, cotton stuffing scattered everywhere, and hanging right from the center of the roof beam was a long strip of white silk.
"Senior, I'll wait outside for backup. You be careful—" He Shan's words were cut short as Gao Ruxue yanked him into the room. He wore a bitter expression as he stared at the white silk swaying gently in the absence of any breeze, his body going stiff.
"Interesting. The white silk is one and a half meters off the ground — that height can't kill anyone. The furniture is overturned, and there are signs of struggle on the floor. The haunted house is deliberately creating the illusion of a forced suicide. The side room was for maids, and the vengeful spirit won't even spare servants with no blood ties to the family — looks like it's planning to torment everyone in this mansion to death." Gao Ruxue's expression remained calm, though a hint of excitement flickered in the corner of her eye. "The haunted house is very meticulously designed. There might even be other easter eggs hidden in here."
She rummaged through chests and cabinets, then flung the quilts off the bed in one sweep. Beneath the tattered bedding lay a paper-mache doll of a woman.
"A paper doll lying on a living person's bed?" Gao Ruxue tossed the paper doll aside and lifted the bed board. Nothing but empty space beneath.
"The bigger the expectations, the bigger the disappointment. I overestimated this haunted house. Let's go — the exit isn't in this room." She waved her hand dismissively and strode back outside.
Left alone in the room, He Shan stared at the paper doll on the floor, his teeth chattering. Perhaps it was the angle, but he could have sworn the paper doll was smiling at him.
"Blood flowing from a bronze rooster, paper dolls opening their eyes… Wait for me! Senior!"
The side room door swung shut again, and the white silk inside stopped swaying.
"Can you keep it down? What are you screaming for? A grown man acting all timid like some girl." Gao Ruxue shot He Shan a look and halted at the edge of the corridor.
"It's not me being timid! This place is really getting to me. The longer we stay, the stronger that uneasy feeling becomes, like something I fear most deep down is being dragged to the surface!"
At He Shan's words, Gao Ruxue froze for a moment. She had noticed something was off too.
The most important thing for a forensic examiner was a steady mind and steady hands. But when she'd just scolded He Shan, her tone had clearly grown impatient — something that had never happened before.
"Am I afraid? I know everything in this haunted house is fake — so why would I be afraid?" A crack appeared in Gao Ruxue's psychological defenses. Neither of them could identify the source of their fear, and under the weight of self-doubt and psychological suggestion, the seeds of terror were taking root and sprouting.
"You don't think there's something actually unclean lurking in here, do you? This haunted house is built on a mass grave, and it's converted from an old hospital building…"
"Shut up! Isn't the underground morgue at our school scarier than this? You're supposed to be a medical student — how are you this cowardly?" Gao Ruxue brushed it off on the surface, but her speech was getting faster and faster. She sat down on the corridor railing and looked around at the ancient mansion, the mourning hall, the dead trees, the paper money scattered across the ground. None of it was particularly frightening. "What exactly am I afraid of?"
Both of them had been drawn in by the eerie atmosphere and hadn't paid attention to the background track that had been playing on repeat the entire time.
This forbidden piece, titled "Black Friday," had already insinuated itself into the two of them through its subtle, creeping influence — like a dark river eroding their very souls, pulling them step by step toward a bottomless abyss.
"Xiao Shan, how long have we been in here?"
"I don't know, but I'm telling you, there's no way we're getting out in fifteen minutes!"
"Don't panic. Let me think about this carefully." Gao Ruxue didn't bother brushing off the dust. She walked briskly toward the other end of the corridor. "There's nothing actually scary about this haunted house. The owner has been feeding us negative psychological suggestions the whole time. From the moment we entered, he kept emphasizing words like mass grave, buried alive, female ghost — he wants us to scare ourselves. And the really cunning part is that he set a time limit without telling us what we'd encounter. That way we put pressure on ourselves and let our imaginations fill in the blanks with the most horrifying things possible."
"So what do you suggest we do? This haunted house just feels different from other ones." He Shan was an honest young man — whatever the senior said, he believed.
"Your instinct is right. In a normal haunted house, professional actors play the ghosts, and they use a ton of equipment to create bloody, terrifying set pieces. Then we experience everything on a set path. But this haunted house doesn't do that. It sets up the scenes and lets us explore freely, with no guidance and no constraints. Nobody knows what's going to happen next."
"I get what you mean now. The unknown is the most terrifying thing of all." He Shan looked as if he'd just had an epiphany.
"At this point, that's the only explanation." Gao Ruxue furrowed her brow almost imperceptibly. "All right, let's head to the next room."
The side room was adjacent to the main hall, where the head of the household lived. She pushed open the wooden door. Inside, mourning garments made of hemp lay strewn about, and in the center of the hall sat a lacquered wooden coffin.
The coffin was painted red, with a large double happiness character pasted in white paper across its center. Neatly arranged on either side, a row of paper figures knelt in silence.
Names were written on their backs, elaborate makeup painted on their faces. Their eyes seemed almost alive, each wearing a different expression — as though they were secretly watching the two people standing at the door.