Chapter 959. The Shrine

Complex patterns flowed along the walls, and Chen Ge slowly pushed open the deep black window.

A gust of yin energy blew against him. Chen Ge narrowed his eyes slightly, the muscles in his back tensing as he held the window open.

"Something's hidden in this scene!"

Chen Ge was very familiar with that feeling. His pupils contracted gradually as he began to survey the new scene before him.

On the other side of the window was a Japanese-style room, its furniture and décor all matching that aesthetic. Of course, none of that was the point — what truly caught Chen Ge's attention was the walls.

All four walls were covered in bloody handprints. The ceiling light flickered on and off, and beneath the rectangular lamp, he could make out the scattered corpses of moths. Beside them were scorch marks from candles, as if someone had stood directly under the light and burned away the moths' wings, one by one.

After the door to the new scene opened, the scene behind Chen Ge began to change.

Blood seeped downward from the ceiling, a door in the corridor was pushed open, and the sound of footsteps seemed to drift in from beyond.

Before the tourists could react, the door connecting the living room to the corridor slammed shut. Outside, a girl's laughter rang out, as though the child were standing right on the other side.

"Is she looking for her doll?" Chen Ge knew it wasn't exactly gentlemanly for a grown man to snatch a child's toy, but when he thought about how he needed to save her — help her escape her suffering — the weight on his shoulders lightened considerably.

"Chen Ge, I've been to this new scene before." The man had initially been hostile toward Chen Ge, but somewhere along the way his attitude had shifted. He hadn't even realized it himself — perhaps because he was genuinely afraid now.

"Anything I should know?"

"There's a curse inside the room, attached to three items. We need to find those three items while fending off ghost attacks, then place them on the shrine and use the statue inside to purify the curse." He wracked his memory. "On Hell difficulty, the challenge has to be amped up — this time we might need to find a dozen or more items."

"Finding a dozen items isn't the hard part. What worries me is that the entire room might already be wrapped in the curse, and everything and everyone inside is cursed." Chen Ge possessed the dark eyes, and in his field of vision, every object in the room was steeped in ill fortune. Any tourist who touched these items would have their own luck eroded.

This was what set Chen Ge's haunted house apart from the Virtual Future theme park. His haunted house could have its staff gradually absorb the negative emotions of visitors, but the Virtual Future haunted house was out of control — tourists were being steeped in malice, and they'd carry that malice home to their families.

"Curses are nothing like vengeful ghosts." Chen Ge recalled his experience in Liwan Town. The Shadow had been adept at curses, which seemed to be a common trait among the ghosts in the eastern suburbs.

Climbing through the window into the room, Chen Ge heard the sound of bells. It appeared out of nowhere, as if announcing to the house's owner that a guest had arrived.

"When you search through things, wrap your hands in your clothes. Don't touch anything in this room with your bare skin."

Hearing Chen Ge's words, the tourists exchanged confused glances, faces full of question marks.

To avoid tipping off Chen Ge, they didn't discuss it much, but following his and the youngest man's subtle hints, they all did as he instructed.

"There are bottles and trash piled in the corner, three different brands of cigarette butts crammed into the ashtray, and clothes and shoes of various sizes scattered around. It looks like someone had a gathering in this room not long ago. They all seem to have gotten drunk."

"That's right. When I visited last time, I found related materials in the bedroom. A group of people went to a friend's place in the countryside, but heavy rain triggered a mudslide. They couldn't get back, so they stayed at the friend's house." His words confirmed Chen Ge's guess, and he himself was stunned by Chen Ge's sharp powers of observation.

"The materials are in the bedroom?" Chen Ge entered the bedroom alone. As he pushed the door open, a little girl's singing reached his ears.

The voice was pure and ethereal, tinged with sorrow. Chen Ge couldn't quite make out the lyrics, only catching the words "moth" and "butterfly" here and there.

The Japanese-style scene contained six rooms, and the bedroom Chen Ge entered was one of the smallest.

A blanket was spread on the floor, and the cramped space was littered with all manner of objects — men's shoes and clothing, women's hair scattered about. But what drew the most attention was a DV camera strapped to a suitcase.

The reason it was fixed to the suitcase, Chen Ge guessed, was that the park was worried about theft, so they'd secured it that way.

"Who would steal something radiating ill fortune?" Chen Ge turned on the DV. Footage of four men and three women flickered across the screen. During the day they'd toured the surrounding village, marveling at the scenery and fresh air. At night, when they were about to drive away, the sky suddenly opened up. The village elder told them the road out had been blocked by a mudslide, so they had no choice but to stay in the village until morning.

"The village elder said the road was blocked? They just took his word for it and stayed without seeing for themselves?"

Chen Ge continued watching, and the other tourists gathered around.

Among those seven people, one was a local. He arranged for the other six to stay at the ancestral home.

The rain poured down without pause, but the group's spirits remained unbroken. They drank and played cards inside, carrying on well past midnight.

The DV footage darkened considerably at this point. The seven of them gathered in the main hall. The alcohol was nearly gone, when a bespectacled fat man got up to use the bathroom. At the far end of the corridor, in the deepest shadows, he noticed a shrine.

Normal shrines were placed on tables. A shrine sitting in the middle of a corridor like this — that was a first.

In the footage, the drunk fat man squatted in front of the shrine, tilting his head to peer inside, as if he'd heard some strange sound.

He reached out and grabbed the black cloth draped over the shrine, about to lift it, when someone behind him suddenly called out — the person who'd been filming.

The fat man jolted upright and scrambled to his feet. After returning from the bathroom, he sidled up to the ancestral home's owner and asked about the shrine.

The owner said he had no idea either. He lived alone in the city for school, and one day he'd suddenly received a phone call saying his parents and grandmother had been caught in a mudslide on their drive home — the car and everyone inside had tumbled into the river. Now he was the only one left.

At that moment, another man set down his glass and said in a hushed, mysterious tone to the rest: the shrines placed on tables house gods, but the shrines tucked away in dark corners — those are used to raise ghosts.