The air was thick with decay and rot. As he walked deeper and deeper, the dryness made his skin tighten with discomfort.
With his vision compressed to almost nothing, Fang Shenyan could only make out a few blurry shadows.
It felt as though he were in a school corridor late at night. Hard floor tiles lay beneath his feet, and something seemed to brush against his arm.
A faint sound of something breaking drifted over. It was a pot of flowers that had long since withered.
Even stronger than the stench of rot was the extremely dry air, as if some invisible netherfire had scorched the place and made the environment unfit for habitation.
"Thud... thud..."
From far away came an unclear, strange knocking sound.
It did not sound like a school bell. Instead, it carried the cleansing, solemn stillness of a wooden fish being struck in a temple.
But it had appeared somewhere it should not have, so what it brought could not possibly be purification—only an eerie sense of wrongness.
From the moment he handed over those ten gold coins and entered the Haunted House, Fang Shenyan had been observing everything.
His vision was too severely restricted, so he relied on his sense of smell and hearing. Yet this environment was even more complicated than he had expected.
Most bizarre of all, although he had been the first to enter the Haunted House, Chang Sheng, Li Guanqi, and the others had been following behind him all along.
Starting half a minute ago, the disorderly footsteps behind him had grown fewer and fewer. Now, he could hear only one set of footsteps—his own.
Walking alone through a pitch-black corridor, he felt no fear, but he treated the situation with unprecedented seriousness.
His extensive Mission Experience and senses far sharper