Don't Open the Door

There was always a slight gap between the bottom of a carpenter-made wooden door and its frame.

It was a small detail Zheng Wuyou had noticed when the old man shut the door with a torch in hand.

The torch had cast the old man's shadow onto the ground, and some of its light had seeped in through the gap.

Crouching beside the bed, Zheng Wuyou thought of this and released her hand from over Wansi's mouth, though her eyes remained fixed on the bottom of the wooden door.

Beyond the gap was pitch-black, with no light source to cast a shadow.

If it was Miao Laisheng, would he really come knocking without bringing a candle?

Come to think of it, he really might.

Nothing that man did would surprise her.

The knocking stopped abruptly the moment the words left her mouth.

It was as though the person outside was giving them time to react.

"Come out, quickly! It's dangerous in there!"

Miao Laisheng's urgent voice rang out from the doorway again, and Zheng Wuyou looked uncertainly toward the window.

There was still no signal from two rooms over.

What danger was there inside?

Had he encountered something over there?

She could not worry about that now. Ignoring the numbness in her legs from crouching, she raised the candle to send a signal first.

The candle flame flickered in the wind.

Zheng Wuyou had no choice but to lean half her body out, shielding the flame with one hand while holding up the candle with the other.

But after waiting for a long time, there was still no response from across the way, while urgent knocking had already begun outside the door.

Something was wrong...

Watching the firelight fall upon the half-open wooden window opposite her, Zheng Wuyou calculated the distance between the two windows in confusion and sucked in a sharp breath.

This room's wall was roughly three meters long, so the distance between her and Miao Laisheng should have been around nine meters.

Miao Laisheng was in the fifth room...

Yet this window was only three or four meters away from hers...

From the start, the candle signal had been wrong.

It had not been a signal from Miao Laisheng.

The nursery rhyme now echoed endlessly in her ears. Even with its childish voice, it was still full of eerie horror.

So was the person outside really Miao Laisheng?

Zheng Wuyou swiftly pulled herself back inside, her candlelit eyes still lingering outside.

She did not know whether it was a hallucination or merely her imagination.

In her field of vision, something black slowly emerged from that half-open window.

A woman's head, draped in long black hair...

The candlelight did not reach far enough for her to see the woman's face clearly.

She only knew that the woman's hair was thick and straight, hanging down by the window.

Little Girl Wansi hugged the bedding and curled herself into a ball, trembling in the corner beside the bed.

Whether from cold or fear, no one knew.

This time, Zheng Wuyou was truly thrown into confusion in front of the drafty window.

The window signal had been fake, and she had nearly let a wolf into the room.

As for the danger outside the door, she had no idea whether it was real or not.

Zheng Wuyou looked down at the candle in her hand, her face illuminated orange-red.

The person outside kept urging them. Irritated and restless, Zheng Wuyou held up the candle and crept quietly to the door.

Her hand was already on the doorknob.

The knocking outside traveled through the knob and vibrated against her hand, sending a tingling sensation through it.

Noticing the light moving inside the room, Wansi gathered her courage and raised her head.

She saw Zheng Wuyou pull her right hand back from the doorknob just centimeters from the door, then slowly bend down and use the candlelight to illuminate the narrow gap beneath it, barely three or four centimeters high.

The candlelight shone through the doorframe, illuminating only the white-painted corridor outside. There was nothing else.

It was as though he was deliberately hiding in a blind spot to avoid someone.

"Are you all right? I saw your candle was still lit. The second floor isn't safe. We need to go to the Main Hall!" Only then did Miao Laisheng outside begin to suspect that something had happened inside.

Having received no response for a long time, he stopped knocking.

The faint rustling sounds made Zheng Wuyou begin to wonder whether he had discovered something.

Zheng Wuyou stared intently at the gap beneath the door, wanting to know who exactly was playing tricks.

The nursery rhyme echoed throughout the village, as if accompanying the scene.

Suddenly, a pair of scarlet eyes emerged from the corner and accidentally met her gaze.

Half... half a head?

Zheng Wuyou could not believe what she was seeing. Startled, she shot up from the ground.

She rubbed her eyes.

Half a head had appeared... on the floor outside the door?

What the hell was that thing?

That half-head did not seem to notice her. It wriggled forward across the floor, making faint rustling sounds.

Instinctively, Zheng Wuyou backed away from the door and returned to the bedside.

She puffed out her cheeks and blew out the candle in one breath.

[Remember: do not listen to or look into the other rooms.]

[Remember to close the door when you enter a room.]

From the very beginning, the old man's words had warned them not to open the door. She had nearly treated them as empty words.

Zheng Wuyou was grateful that she had come to her senses at the last moment and had not unlatched the door.

Perhaps because the moonlight grew dimmer late at night, the wind blowing in through the window became increasingly cold.

It swept over Zheng Wuyou's face as she sat by the bed. Instead of the stifling heat from when she had first arrived, there was now a chill.

Do not listen to or look into the other rooms...

Then when she had leaned out earlier... did that count as looking or not?

Sensing a gaze in the darkness, Zheng Wuyou mechanically turned her head toward the window she had forgotten to close.

Without candlelight in the room, the moonlight outside seemed brighter instead.

It made the black shadow, backlit by the moon and clinging to the window, with half its body already inside the room, stand out all the more.

It was the woman next door...

She truly had no shadow...

Zheng Wuyou's mind went blank in an instant. Not daring to make any sudden movements, she could only follow the shadow's slow movements and have Wansi lie down, using her own body at the bedside to conceal most of Wansi's body.

At the same time, under Wansi's startled gaze, she nodded faintly and covered Wansi's mouth.

She wanted to tell Wansi to trust her, but in the darkness, neither of them could see the other's eyes.

Zheng Wuyou did not even dare to swallow.

In the silent darkness, any sound would be magnified several times over.

With her eyes closed, she listened as the shadow walked barefoot around the room, seemingly searching for something in the completely exposed space.

Half an hour passed like this. Just as Zheng Wuyou felt her body was about to go numb,

it finally stopped moving.

Zheng Wuyou cautiously opened one eye, and all she saw was darkness.

Only when she opened both eyes did she realize... the moonlight was still there.

It was just that the shadow had blocked the view of her other eye.

The long-haired woman from next door had been standing right in front of her all along...

She had not left...

Her face was only a short distance from the woman's abdomen. Realizing this, Zheng Wuyou did not even dare breathe too heavily, afraid that her breath might brush against the woman and draw her attention.

So the chill constantly drifting in from the window had been coming from the shadow itself. Zheng Wuyou's hand, gripping the edge of the bed, unconsciously tightened.

Zheng Wuyou had no way of knowing whether the woman standing before her was looking at her, but one thing was certain: she had been here for a long time.

Like an elegant woman dressed in a black gown, she had held the same pose for perhaps over ten minutes.

Until she made her next move.