"Do you live here?" Zhu Xiaojin asked.
The other person pointed his phone at them and looked them over. When his gaze landed on the little girl in the red dress, he immediately stammered, "That's... that's not a person... And there's a woman beside her..."
"Stop shouting. We all know," Zhu Xiaojin said, lifting the rope in his hand. "Or take a look at how she ended up tied up."
The young man eyed them warily for a while, then gritted his teeth. "Fine. You wait here!"
After a clatter of things came from inside the room, the young man emerged a moment later with a bulging pack on his back. Besides some tools for driving out evil spirits, he had things like axes and cleavers. He approached, fully prepared. "Are you trying to leave this neighborhood too? Why are you going upstairs?"
"We're looking for someone," Xu Huo said. "A companion of ours went missing after coming in. This female ghost said he was here, so we came to take a look."
The young man glanced at the female ghost, then swallowed. "I'd advise you not to go up there. Yesterday, I overheard people upstairs talking. They said they wanted to turn this neighborhood into a corpse-raising ground, keeping corpses in every building and waiting for a dead person with enough murderous energy to set everything off... I heard there was a murderer living upstairs. He died a few days ago, and after midnight tonight, it'll be the seventh day after his death..."
The more he said, the more frightened he became. He couldn't help edging closer to Old Cai. "Big brother, you look like someone who can keep me safe. Can I stay behind you?"
Old Cai ignored him and instead asked, "If you knew it wasn't safe,