"Why did the sounds stop?"
He peered through the gap that had been hacked into the door by the cleaver. The cook was nowhere to be seen. All he could make out in the eerie corridor was a little girl clutching a cloth doll.
This child had also appeared in the movie theater. The doll in her arms had half its face burned away, which was deeply unsettling.
Chen Ge used his Yin Sight, but it yielded nothing. There was nothing about the little girl that made him uncomfortable either.
"Did you see anything?" the police officer whispered to Chen Ge. At that moment Chen Ge was pressed against the door, his eye glued to the gap the cleaver had made. He was worried the cook might take another swipe from the other side.
"The cook is gone. This scene is probably part of the haunted house's setup," Chen Ge said. After making that observation, he glanced at the reactions of the others. Even the "visitors" inside the room hadn't expected something like this.
Putting his arm into it, Chen Ge was about to try the door when the police officer stopped him. "The cook wanted to come in just now, but he seems to have encountered something terrifying outside the door. If you open it now, whatever the cook ran into will come into the room."
"But if you don't open it, you'll never find out what he ran into." Chen Ge was the polar opposite of every other visitor here.
"We're a team now. You can disregard your own safety, but you can't drag the rest of us down with you." The police officer grew anxious and grabbed Chen Ge's arm. The grip was forceful in that instant — it was clearly not an act.
Through the accumulation of various small details, it was only at this moment that Chen Ge became truly certain: the haunted house at the Virtual Future amusement park really did conceal something. The police officer knew about it, but he hadn't told anyone else in the group.
"Fine, then let's keep solving the puzzle." Chen Ge glanced up at the wall. The clock had reverted to 11:56 the moment the blood-clothed projection had charged into the bathroom.
The clock's hands had rolled back, but the lights hadn't come on, and the weeping and the little girl's laughter in his ears hadn't stopped.
"Each cycle makes things worse. Let's hurry up and find the body parts. Who knows what new monsters will show up when the next twelve o'clock rolls around."
With that lesson fresh in their minds, all the visitors threw themselves into the search for the doll's body parts. Chen Ge demonstrated astonishing skill — putting himself in the haunted house designer's shoes, he located the majority of the body on his own. Many pieces had been hidden in extremely obscure places, such as beneath floorboards in the cracks, behind the toilet's rear panel, inside clogged drains, and so on.
His professional methods and sharp instincts sent an inexplicable chill through the "visitors" around him.
At 11:59, everyone placed the body parts they had found on the coffee table.
The sight was horrifying. The visitors kept their distance, leaving only Chen Ge on the sofa.
"Organs, spine, limbs, skull, and skin — this doll body was designed with impressive craftsmanship. The only problem is the texture is awful; nothing like real human skin."
The difficulty of a Hell-level scenario was truly extreme. If not for Chen Ge, they would have spent an enormous amount of time just finding the body parts, and even longer reassembling them in this kind of environment.
In less than a minute, Chen Ge had nearly finished putting the body together. At that moment the clock on the wall sounded again — the second midnight had arrived.
The television erupted in static, pots and pans clattered to the floor in the kitchen, and the cabinet doors slowly swung open. Everyone saw a man covered in wounds curled up inside.
His face was twisted with terror, a sharp knife clutched in his hand. The instant the group spotted him, he crawled out of the cabinet and rushed toward Chen Ge at a speed far beyond what a normal human could manage.
Sitting on the sofa, Chen Ge didn't even flinch. He let the man pass right through his body.
"Another projection?"
Although it was their second time seeing a dead person's projection, it still startled them all.
The time on the clock returned to 11:56 once more. The second cycle didn't seem all that terrifying — it had simply repeated the scares from the previous cycle.
"Each cycle adds another projection. As long as we can get used to it, this stage should be pretty manageable," the bespectacled man said with a few dry laughs.