Fu'an Apartment

Wang Qi kept urging Chen Ge to leave. Considering he was a stranger, Wang Qi was being far too helpful.

Chen Ge didn't agree right away. After hearing Wang Qi's story, he had the vague feeling that the man was hiding something.

"I've told you everything I can. You can still leave now. After midnight, this Apartment Building will become a completely different place." With that, Wang Qi brushed the dust off his clothes and turned to leave the building.

Only after Wang Qi's figure disappeared into the night did Chen Ge come to his senses. He had originally planned to ask the tenants about the place, but now he had even more questions than before.

"There's something seriously wrong with that man. Is he really insane?" Chen Ge recalled Wang Qi's cloudy eyes and felt uneasy. The weariness and pain in them couldn't have been faked. "Looks like he must have loved his wife very much."

Chen Ge headed back. When he passed the woman's room on the first floor, he hesitated, then tried knocking on her door.

"Hey, new guy." The woman's door didn't budge. Instead, the door behind Chen Ge opened halfway, and a Tall Thin Man leaned against the doorway.

He looked to be in his thirties, unkempt, with hair and beard almost blending together. A peony was tattooed on the back of the hand he had exposed.

"Who are you?" Chen Ge turned around warily.

"That guy handing out Missing Person Notices just now isn't a tenant in this building. There's something wrong with him." The Tall Thin Man tapped his temple. "Don't believe a word he says. Getting too close to him will only cause trouble."

This was Chen Ge's first time meeting the Tall Thin Man. Though the man looked scruffy, he sounded more normal than the others Chen Ge had met. "His behavior was definitely strange, but maybe his wife's disappearance hit him too hard."

"Did he tell you his fiancée went missing near this Apartment Building?"

"Yeah."

"Did he also say the police told him that, which is why he keeps coming here to look for her?"

"That's right."

"Heh." The Tall Thin Man chuckled. "I've lived here for nine months and I've never seen the police come by. That lunatic's lying to you. And all that talk about ghosts and Grievous Souls? Utter nonsense."

He took a cheap cigarette from his pocket and put it between his lips. "How could there be ghosts in this world? At most, someone's pretending to be one. Anyway, it's getting late. You'd better get back to your room."

Chen Ge thanked him and turned to leave.

As he climbed the stairs, he couldn't make up his mind. One of them must be lying. But which one?

Perhaps he had been too absorbed in thought. By the time Chen Ge came to, he had already reached the third floor.

The peeling floor number was printed on the landing. The Voice-activated Light overhead cast a dim glow. Chen Ge looked down both sides of the floor. It hadn't been renovated: the ground was filthy, burn marks were everywhere, and the walls were badly flaked, like they were covered in crisscrossing scars.

"Why is the third floor the only one that hasn't been renovated? Was there not enough money, or is there some other reason?"

The Voice-activated Light soon went out, plunging the entire Apartment Building into sudden darkness.

Chen Ge had worked at a Haunted House for years, so he was fairly used to the dark. He didn't panic. He took out his phone and was about to switch on the flashlight when he saw a figure hurry through the dark hallway.

"Who's there?" The flashlight lit up the third floor, but the figure had vanished.

Chen Ge wanted to search the place, but footsteps sounded from downstairs just then.

"Is it the Landlord?" If the bad-tempered, lame Landlord caught him wandering around the third floor, Chen Ge would surely get an earful. He thought it over, put away his phone, and quietly slipped back down to the second floor.

Coming down from the landing, Chen Ge saw a short, plump, middle-aged man emerge from a room on the second floor, carrying a washbasin. The man had been humming to himself in a fairly good mood, but when he saw Chen Ge, his face immediately stiffened, and he hurried past with his head lowered.

"What's that supposed to mean? Do I really look that scary?" Back in his room, Chen Ge lay on the bed with his Backpack in his arms. "There doesn't seem to be a single normal person in this Apartment Building. Everyone looks like a murderer..."

At that thought, Chen Ge sat bolt upright. "The task on my phone only asked me to find the killer, but it never said how many killers there were. If I think about it that way, there really could be more than one! It involved a Massacre Case, after all. There's a good chance it was a group effort. No, I need to look up the case from back then right away."

Chen Ge took out his phone. His conversation with Wang Qi hadn't been a complete waste; at least he had learned one thing: Ping An Apartment had once been called Fu'an Apartment.

He typed "Han Jiang Fu'an Apartment" into the search bar. After scrolling through a few pages, one shocking headline after another caught his eye.

"A Family of Four Slaughtered! Did the Killer Vanish into Thin Air?!"

"An Accident or Murder? What Caused the Fire at Fu'an Apartment?"

"Bodies Hidden in the Building Uncover a Case Within a Case!"

Chen Ge read everything he could find about Fu'an Apartment and felt a chill run through him. Reality was often more terrifying than fiction, because it had really happened—and something like it could happen to him one day.

Five years ago, villagers saw Fu'an Apartment on fire and called the fire department.

After the firefighters put out the blaze, they began investigating its cause and assessing the damage.

It should have been routine work, but as the investigation progressed, more and more suspicious details came to light.

The concrete had cracked, the window glass had broken into small pieces, and the cracks showed little smoke damage. This meant the fire had burned fiercely, reached a high temperature, and spread quickly.

There were several unrelated points of origin at the scene, a typical sign of deliberate arson.

The nature of the case changed at once. The local police got involved, and later found four bodies in the building's remains—the family of four who had run the Apartment Building.

The case caused quite a stir at the time, and the police went all out. But the fire had destroyed the scene. They searched everywhere and found no trace of a fifth person, let alone the killer.

The Apartment Building was sealed off for a whole year. Later, in accordance with the relevant laws, it was handed over to the father of its original owner. That was when Fu'an Apartment was renamed Ping An Apartment.

"A family of four burned to death, and the killer is still at large. No wonder people say this place is haunted." Now that he understood the case, Chen Ge had a better idea of the situation. He stared at the webpage on his phone, then suddenly noticed a detail. "The report says the original owner of the Apartment Building was forty-one when he died. The building was later handed over to his father. Judging by his age, the current owner should be in his sixties or seventies."