Death Is Life

"You knock once, it knocks back."

Fang Shenyan's voice held no emotion as he described the simple, terrifying reality.

Ji Li's hand froze above the door. He scrutinized it once again.

It was a perfectly ordinary iron door. With age, nearly all its paint had peeled away, exposing bare gray metal.

If there was anything unusual about it, it was that nothing had been pasted onto the door. It was clean.

Ji Li instinctively glanced down at his shadow again. The fourth change had not occurred.

"What is it responding to?"

"However you knock, it knocks the same way."

Fang Shenyan was telling him that the thing behind the door was also tapping out that nursery rhyme.

Ji Li could not hear anything. He could only imagine what was happening from Fang Shenyan's description.

In the late-night corridor, the man outside tapped on the old iron door, playing a familiar nursery rhyme.

And behind the door, something answered with the same song, yet refused to show itself.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are..."

As Ji Li imagined the scene, it filled his mind, the opening line echoing through his thoughts.

Something's wrong...

If the person inside Room 1301 was Teacher Liu, he should not have been answering each knock with another.

What was happening now was more like the thing behind the door imitating Ji Li's rhythm.

"Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are..."

The lyrics were still looping in his head, just that opening line.

When Ji Li knocked, he had not limited himself to the opening line. He had tapped out the entire nursery rhyme.

Yet now, after imagining the scene, only the opening line kept repeating in his mind.

He finally realized something was wrong and instinctively took two steps