Time passed, one second after another.
The chilly wind was still blowing, and the moisture filling the air had not dissipated.
But there was no longer any movement at the doorway.
No one knew whether the Vicious Ghost who seemed to be "Teacher Ma" had already left, or was crouching at the doorway, watching the three of them.
As the second person forced to ask the Ouija a question,
Jiang Yi was under the greatest pressure.
The unknown was the most frightening thing, and the moment before the answer was revealed was the most agonizing.
For some reason,
Jiang Yi remembered a story he had heard from a classmate back in middle school.
That classmate had always been a little strange.
He was always claiming that he could see things other people couldn't, and hear sounds other people couldn't.
According to him,
when he was little, he had lived in an eight-story apartment building.
Because the corridors were poorly soundproofed, the noises neighbors made going up and down the stairs, along with the sounds of doors opening and closing, could all be heard clearly.
And because his family happened to live on the Fourth Floor,
all those sounds entered his ears without distinction.
But everyone had lived in that kind of environment back then, so they had long since grown accustomed to it.
They didn't consider it noise.
Occasionally,
he would hear crisp footsteps coming from the stairs—"click, click, click"—sounding like someone was wearing high heels.
There was nothing strange about that.
The truly strange part was that the sound would suddenly vanish.
There would be no sound of a door opening or closing at all.
It was as if someone had walked up the stairs and then stopped on one of the floors, neither going farther up nor entering