“Shall we enter it together? Aren’t you guys curious about the manager’s secret?” Han Fei asked while holding Rest in Peace.
“No, it’s too dangerous!” The bride spoke. Han Fei had to be one of the few who would force a ghost to speak.
“You’re right, it’s dangerous, so how about we find someone to scout ahead for us?” Han Fei took out the cursed chain from the pet store. It was stuck with animal fur. “As the guard, I have the responsibility to protect the tenant here. But we can capture ‘someone’ who is not a tenant, tie this around her and send her into the dresser.” Han Fei didn’t explicitly mention the old lady in black but she had a feeling Han Fei was talking about her. If she remembered correctly, Han Fei did say that she wouldn’t be a tenant here after she walked out of Building 1.
“That should work. But why would you carry a chain around with you?” The madman squatted beside the bed and wrapped the bedsheet around him. He was seen as mad by the other ghost tenants but he was not dumb, “A normal chain wouldn’t be of any use. I’ve entered that dresser before. You’ll faint after taking a few steps for no reason. When I woke up, I was already lying in bed outside of the dresser.”
“You’ve been inside the dresser?”
“Random broken body parts would appear inside Room 1144. At the start, I had no idea where they came from, but I was afraid, so one day, I crawled into the dresser to hide. It was only then that I realized the dresser was connected to somewhere else.” The madman tried to think back to it. “It is very hard to describe. It’s like there’s a nightmare living inside the dresser. Once you fall asleep, all kinds of stuff would crawl out from it, to inspect whether you were really asleep. They would wander around the bed and sometimes even crawl into the bed with you. If you feel a chill beside you, do not look under the comforter, I was given the fright of my life once before.” The tone used was easy but the scene described was horrifying.
The madman sat cross-legged on the bed. He looked at Han Fei and the other ‘people’ inside the room. After a long time he said, “The dresser would only open at 4 am but for the past 2 days, there has been something wrong with it.”
“What do you mean?”
“From the day you arrived as the new guard, the dresser door has been unable to close fully.” The madman’s words reminded Han Fei of something. The madman was the back-up body the Manager prepared for itself and the dresser was the shortcut used to access this back-up. After Han Fei arrived, the path door had been left open, which meant that the Ziggurat Manager felt threatened enough that it had the need to keep the passage open for a quick escape.
‘The day I arrived, the Singer entered Ziggurat as well, the threat probably came from it. Now that I think about it, it was wise for me to lure Singer here with me.’ Han Fei wanted to know the inner workings of the dresser. If possible, he wanted to set up an ambush inside it as a way to eliminate the heavily injured manager. Han Fei was brave, he was not afraid of any manager, in fact, the reason he was here was to find a new manager for Ziggurat. His eyes wandered subconsciously towards the old lady. The chain in his hands rattled, “Now who shall be our first volunteer?”
“This is not the Manager’s only backup. There is more than one such dresser in the neighbourhood. Even if you enter it, you might not encounter the Manager, if anything, you might expose yourself to extreme danger.” The old lady had figured out how to communicate with Han Fei. The man was not afraid of danger and death, only by speaking facts could he be persuaded.
“Haven’t you been meaning to leave Building 1?” Han Fei narrowed his eyes at the old lady, “So why haven’t you left?”
“Even in my dreams, I wish to leave this place but not in this kind of manner.” The old lady touched the butterfly pattern on her neck. “After what you’ve done here, you’re completely capable of becoming Building 1’s security guard or even its new building manager. However, we are different from you. You are a complete soul, we are just pots used to cultivate seeds.”
Han Fei was not an unreasonable person. Since the old lady was willing to share the building’s secrets, he listened patiently.
“I’ve lived here a long time already and have seen too many things, things that you might not even believe.” The hunchbacked lady sighed, “Every single room at Ziggurat represents a heart, these heart rooms trap the tenant’s memory and pain. It’s not that we’ve moved into the Ziggurat but we are part of the Ziggurat. The previous manager of the Ziggurat was an old man. He had no more hope within him, it was his rotten heart which became the foundation of this place. One day he walked deeper into the city and was never seen again.
“About 10 years ago, a new Manager arrived at the Ziggurat. No one knew where it came from and no one understood where its heart was hiding. No one was able to really kill it. From that night onwards, the rules at Ziggurat changed, all the hearts and memories became the Manager’s toy.
“It never kills and would not use its power to destroy any of the spirits, but don’t take that as its kindness. Those who fell into its grasp all wished for a quick death.” The old lady shivered as if remembering something awful.
“Do you know why it never kills?” Han Fei was curious. The Butterfly in real life was someone like that too, it had done all the bad things possible but it would never bloody its hands.
“There’s a legend about this manager, but I’m not sure whether it’s true or not.” The old lady hesitated before saying, “The last Pure Hatred at the Ziggurat left behind this hint before it perished. The manager’s talent has to do with dreams. It saw its own death in a predictive dream.”
“A predictive dream?”
“Yes, the manager dreamt that it was chopped into pieces by a knife. The blade was very unique. The bloodier the target’s hands, the sharper it would be.” When the old lady said that, no one in the room reacted to it. But different from others’ non-reaction, Han Fei had to use his masterful acting to suppress the emotions in his heart. The blade in the manager’s dream sounded like Rest in Peace!
“The manager has been searching for that blade but it is to no avail.” The old lady’s eyes filled with pain. “Perhaps because it had foreseen its own death, its action became even more inexplicable. It started to conduct crazier experiments. He turned all of the tenants into fertilizers to cultivate a different version of itself, so that its replacement could die on its behalf.”
The old lady helped Han Fei understand many times, previously unrelated things were now connected. Things like why the Butterfly never personally murder anyone and why Spider’s Cattle Alley was filled with so many butcher’s knives.
