The video on the DV camera was still playing. Whether it was due to the lighting or some other reason, the footage was growing increasingly blurry, as if shrouded in a creeping shadow.
The man's words in the video sparked the interest of the others, and under their persistent questioning, he shared something that had happened to him personally.
When he was a child, his family had kept a shrine at home. The shrine was placed directly opposite the living room door, covered by a thick black cloth.
Before his grandfather passed away, the old man told the family that after his death, no matter what happened, they were never to open the shrine. When he was buried, the shrine was to be sealed inside his coffin directly.
Because of an inheritance dispute, the family fell apart after the grandfather's death. The argument quickly escalated into physical altercation, and in the scuffle, the shrine was knocked over.
The adults were red-faced with rage, and nobody paid any attention to the toppled shrine. But the youngest grandson, curious, leaned over and peeked inside.
What happened next was something nobody had anticipated — the little boy called out to the shrine: "Grandpa."
That voice terrified the adults, who had been brawling over the inheritance. They all stared at the boy, while the young grandson simply crouched in front of the shrine, his eyes fixed unblinkingly upon it, as though his grandfather were hiding inside.
In the countryside, there was always the belief that small children could see ghosts. The adults assumed the old man had grown angry, and they hurriedly set the shrine upright again. In the end, they followed the will, sold the old house, and buried the shrine together with the old man's ashes.
The story should have ended there. But the man's tone shifted — on the day the grandfather was buried, the little grandson who had looked inside the shrine also vanished.
He simply evaporated from the face of the earth. No one knew where he had gone, and no one knew what he had actually seen inside the shrine.
In the video, the group of friends heard the man's story and, rather than being frightened, they began egging on the owner of the ancestral home to open his own shrine and take a look.
Fueled by alcohol, the group hooted and hollered as they made their way down the corridor.
Some carried glasses in hand, some had their phones out, and one was recording with the DV camera.
Outside the old house, a heavy rain poured down. The noisy group came to a stop beside the shrine.
The fat man who had passed by the shrine earlier stood at the front. He reached out and lifted the black cloth draped over the shrine, then wrapped his plump fingers around the shrine's door.
As the fat man slowly applied force to open the shrine, a bolt of lightning flashed outside the window, and every light in the house suddenly went out.
At the same moment, just as the visitors were engrossed in watching the DV footage, the lights in the real room went dark too!
Reality and the recording were in sync. Screams erupted from the video, and the visitors in the room screamed as well. Everything was as if the scene were being replicated and replayed.
In the darkness, the sound of the shrine door being opened echoed through the room. After a few seconds, the lights in both the video and reality came back on at the same time.
In the recording, the seven friends were gathered in the corridor, mouths agape, discovering that the shrine's door had already been opened.
The seven of them looked at one another, and in the end, every gaze fell on the fat man. The fat man looked bewildered, insisting he hadn't used any force at all — it wasn't him who had opened the shrine.
Seeing this,
He looked toward the end of the corridor, where in the dim corner, the solitary shrine had been thrown open!
"When did it open?"
"I don't know!" The police officer looked even more exasperated. "There was no part like this when I came here last time."