Staring numbly at the girl’s still bleeding arms, Huang Yin felt the air slip out from his lungs. The girl lost not her gloves, not her handkerchief but her arms!
The blood almost splattered on Huang Yin’s face as the girl waved her arms around. Since he was a doctor, he knew that only a fresh cut would cause such copious bleeding. He felt his knees buckled. This was not at all what he imagined. He thought the girl wanted him to help her find her lost pet or something, not her bloody chopped hands! He had never encountered this kind of mission before!
The surprise was so out of the left field that Huang Yin’s mouth gaped open but no words came out. When he came to, he quickly scurried back into his room. ‘Help a neighbour locate her missing arm? This hidden map’s mission is a bit too much for me.’ After forcing himself to calm down, Huang Yin ran towards the bathroom, ‘I came here through the bathroom door, so I should be able to go back via the same way... hopefully’
He stood inside the bathroom and stared at the door that swung noisily from the absent draft. However, no matter how hard he stared, the miracle did not happen. “How do I leave this place?!”
The smell of blood in the room thickened. Huang Yin realized some red threads had fallen and gathered on his body. They looked suspiciously like blood capillaries. “What are these things? They seem to be falling from the ceiling…” He tried to brush them off but they stuck stubbornly to his clothes. They made him feel very uncomfortable due to the smell that they emitted. Huang Yin eventually removed his shirt and opened the shower. The chilling water caused the inner tee to stick to his skin. He felt constricted as the fabric stamped against his skin. “This game really is as real as it can get.”
He stood under the shower for a half minute but to his consternation, the blood threads multiplied in numbers instead of being washed away. “No way…” He squeezed the shampoo on his head to try to clean the strange threads off. However, as the shampoo lathered up, another series of knocking came from the front door.
Bang! Bang! Bang! “They do know how to pick their timing.” The knocking reverberated inside Huang Yin’s heart. He closed his ears to them but the knocking only became louder and louder. His fingers clawed at his scalp with frustration and agitation. He closed his eyes to prevent the bubbles from stinging his eyes. Just as he was about to lean his head under the shower, the knocking suddenly stopped. ‘Huh? The person left?!’ With a head covered with bubbles, Huang Yin peeled his eyes open for a slither. But what he saw instantly froze his heart! There was a woman covered in bruises and blood standing on tiptoe inside the living room!
“What the fuck!” The bubbles slid down his forehead and stung his eyes. Huang Yin’s eyes blinked from the strain. He heard rapid footsteps, it sounded like the woman was running towards him! Waving his hands madly, Huang Yin wiped away the bubbles from his face. But when he opened his eyes again, the woman had disappeared. ‘How, how did she get in here?’
Huang Yin did not dare to close his eyes again. He resisted his fear and stood under the shower. Everything returned to normal in the living room. The woman felt like a part of Huang Yin’s imaginations. His heart pounded heavily. Huang Yin kept his gaze on the living room. He reached his hand to close the shower but he felt something restricting his movement. When he turned and saw his palm, the man shut down. His palm was bound with shed hairs. Each of them was uniformly about 20 cm long. Clearly, they did not belong to him. ‘Wait… That woman… Is she above me?’
Huang Yin’s muscle locked into place!
The water carried the bubbles down his cheek. Huang Yin waited for a long time. Other than the sound of rushing water, there was nothing out of place. He summoned some courage and slowly raised his eyes to the mirror above the sink. The mirror was very clean. It did not reflect anything supernatural but strangely enough, it did not reflect Huang Yin’s image either.
‘This hidden map is not for me, I am just a casual player…’ Huang Yin was about to pull up the menu when something dripped on the back of his neck. A chilling feeling curled around his heart. He turned slowly around and saw a curtain of dripping hair dangling above his neck. A bruised woman was attached to the ceiling like a spider. Her skull was turned 180 degree, a feat that was impossible for a normal human.
“Fuck my life!!!!” Huang Yin shouted loudly. He tripped on the slippery bathroom tiles and crawled out from the bathroom. When he returned to the living room, things only got worse!
Bloody black hairs fell from the gaps in the ceiling. A strange cackle echoed inside the house. His brain was blank as he used his last bit of strength to run through the living room and out the door.
“Help, help!” The cackle chased after him. Huang Yin cried as loud as he could while he stumbled down the stairs. He had never moved that fast in his life!
Footsteps rang inside the stairwell, they pressed against Huang Yin’s heart. He ran down 2 flights of stairs. He saw the door to Room 2021 was open. The open door was like a sign. Without thinking about it, he ran inside it to seek refuge. “I want to quit! I want to quit!” Huang Yin soon discovered something despairing when he opened the menu!
The menu said that he was currently unable to quit because he was in an abnormal state. Reading the system statement, Huang Yin’s face twitched. He almost fainted. Hearing the echoes of footsteps from the corridor, Huang Yin hurried towards the bathroom. In his mind, he entered this horrible place through the bathroom door so the bathroom door was his only hope. He opened and closed the bathroom again and again. Desperation tears filled the man’s eyes. “Please, please let me go back!”
Suddenly, the front door creaked open a gap and a bloodied face reached into the room. As Huang Yin shared a look with the face, his heart almost jumped out of his throat. He hurried into the bathroom. He locked the door. The man was at his limit already.
After so many surprises, Huang Yin felt his brain buzzing from a lack of oxygen. He saw the toilet and thought to sit down on it to rest. But halfway through the motion, he felt a pair of hands grab his butt. A male voice said with deep annoyance and abhorrence, “Sir, can’t you see that this seat is occupied?”
An unknown voice rang out inside the supposedly empty bathroom. Huang Yin’s heart skipped a beat. He apologized profusely and then blasted out from the bathroom screaming for his life.
…
Standing at the entrance of Apartment 1, Han Fei had on an embarrassed smile as he listened to the continuous screams that came out from the opposite building, “I didn’t act like that when I first entered the game, did I? But this is good news, at least it proves that Brother Huang is still alive.”
With Xu Qin’s help, Han Fei opened the front door of Happiness Neighbourhood Apartment 1 and looked at the world covered in darkness.
