"Phobia"

The temperature inside the building plummeted, but faced with fear of the unknown, the rookie investigators did not panic too badly.

They strictly followed the Investigation Bureau's internal Investigation Rules, assembling the various devices in their backpacks as quickly as possible.

Each device had its own corresponding serial number. The Investigation Bureau was constantly trying different ways to deal with Anomaly Events, and the equipment the rookies had brought in served as their "weapons."

"Does this stuff work?" Gao Ming asked curiously.

"Ninety-nine percent of the time, no. But as long as there's even a one percent chance, we'll keep trying until we develop something that can affect those unknown things." The burly driver clenched his fists. "Humans became human because they could use tools."

"Communications cut out when we opened the door to apartment 405. That boy and his parents used to live in this room." Bai Qiao picked up her flashlight and walked toward apartment 405.

Without any weapons capable of fighting the horrors, or any effective protective measures, Bai Qiao walked toward apartment 405 despite knowing the danger.

"Let me do it." Gao Ming stepped ahead of her. "You're the core of the team. Leave the scouting to me."

Stimulated by the shadows, fine chains appeared around Gao Ming's wrist like moving tattoos. He reached out with his left hand and gently pushed open the door to apartment 405.

A strange smell hung in the roughly ninety-square-meter rental apartment. Five enormous black plastic bags were piled beside the living room entrance, filled with yellowed bedding and children's clothes.

"Be careful." Bai Qiao raised her flashlight to light Gao Ming's way.

There seemed to have been a fight in the living room. The dining table had been overturned, chairs lay on the floor, and dried food scraps and shards of broken porcelain bowls littered the concrete floor.

"This wasn't one-sided domestic abuse. Both people fighting lost their minds." Gao Ming spotted a small piece of scalp with short hair attached in a corner. It probably belonged to a man. "This is worse than I imagined."

Running his fingers along the wall, Gao Ming touched the mold growing on it. He looked around. Despite the tightly shut doors and windows, the apartment was extremely damp. Large patches of mold covered the inside of the wardrobe, the space beneath the sofa, and the area behind the television.

"If I rented a place like this, I'd probably be miserable too." The burly driver divided the rookies into three teams: one followed Gao Ming inside, one guarded the doorway, and one stayed ready to provide support.

"It's normal to feel upset, but hurting the people close to you to vent your anger is wrong." Gao Ming walked to the other side of the living room. This apartment could hardly be called a home. It was filthy, cluttered, and filled with the stench of decay.

Like the smashed furniture scattered through the apartment, this family was already broken.

"The father and mother both had violent tendencies. They argued and fought, attacking each other hysterically like two monsters." Gao Ming picked up a broken vase from the floor. A trace of blood and several strands of long hair still clung to the edges of the fragments. "Did the Anomaly Event make them this way, or were they already like this deep down?"

"According to the elderly residents in the building, they fought regularly even before the Anomaly Event arrived." Bai Qiao did not interfere with Gao Ming. She also wanted to see just what this ordinary man who had resolved a Level Three Anomaly Event was capable of.

"Even without an Anomaly Event, a tragedy might still have happened..." Gao Ming wanted to understand the relationship between the games and reality. "So the Anomaly Event didn't seek them out. Their family was attracting it."

Passing through the living room, Gao Ming reached the only room that could be considered clean. It appeared to be the boy's bedroom.

The small room contained a desk, a wardrobe, and a single bed. Strangely, although autumn had not yet arrived, the bed was piled with thick winter quilts and assorted blankets.

The bedding surrounded the bed like fortress walls in the child's imagination.

He opened the wardrobe. A few pieces of children's clothing hung inside, while newspapers lined the bottom compartment, where a flashlight and a box of crayons lay.

"The space at the bottom of the wardrobe is just about big enough for a child to hide in. When the boy in 405 was scared, he might have chosen to hide in here and draw." Gao Ming crouched down. "An enclosed space can make a child feel safe, as though he's back inside his mother's womb."

Gao Ming grabbed the crayon box. Just as he moved it, an arm made of fabric suddenly pressed down on it.

Bai Qiao and the other rookie beside her tensed up, but Gao Ming did not react at all. He pulled out the crayon box along with the arm.

"What an ugly Cloth Doll."

A handmade Cloth Doll had been hidden deep inside the wardrobe. It was only barely recognizable as human-shaped, its body covered in mended seams and stained with various paints.

"The neighbors didn't see the couple take their child away, and the police couldn't find him on the fourth floor. Do you think the boy might have turned into this Cloth Doll?" Gao Ming pinned the Cloth Doll by the neck and bound its hands together.

"Now isn't the time for Ghost stories." Bai Qiao frowned slightly. Gao Ming had not received the Investigation Bureau's internal training and was not following the Investigation Rules at all.

Gao Ming pressed his fingers over every inch of the Cloth Doll's skin but felt nothing strange hidden inside. Then he opened the crayon box. A crooked sentence was written on the lid—I really wish I could hide somewhere no one could find me.

"Looks like the Anomaly Event helped this boy fulfill his wish." Thinking of his own birthday wish, Gao Ming suddenly felt that Anomaly Events seemed quite eager to help. Whenever they found a gap in someone's heart, they did everything they could to fill it. Their methods were simply a little bloody and terrifying.

With the inspection of apartment 405 more or less complete, the rookies following Gao Ming took out their equipment to collect items from the apartment. They would even take samples of the mold on the walls back for testing.

"Be careful. The Anomaly Event we've been caught up in this time might not be a level one Anomaly Event." After quietly warning them, Gao Ming sat on the boy's bed and pondered in silence.

He had made a game about finding a missing child called "Hide-and-Seek." Seven Ghosts and one child played the game, and finding the real child was all it took to clear it. But that game did not match this Anomaly Event. Here, the shadows haunting the child had come not from Ghosts, but from his parents.

"The parents frequently got into conflicts and violent fights. Sometimes they even took their anger out on their child. A child living in a family like that is bound to develop all kinds of psychological problems."

Gao Ming had encountered such cases while providing psychological counseling in a Maximum-Security Prison. Some inmates had frequently suffered brutal treatment from their parents during childhood.

"In a family environment like this, a child's personality will tend toward one of two extremes: either severe insecurity and timidity, or an unusually volatile temper and extreme behavior. Judging by the scene, the boy in 405 probably fell into the first category."

Everyone liked obedient children, but there were different kinds of obedience. If a child was constantly forced to behave, his inner world would gradually become warped.

The most direct manifestation was timidity. He would be afraid of making mistakes in everything he did, and because he feared angering others, he would want to hide himself.

Looking at the "quilt walls" around the edges of the bed, Gao Ming curled up and tried lying on the boy's bed.

"The parents smashed things in the living room, beat each other, and hurled filthy abuse. Not only could the child find no protection from either parent, he also had to stay constantly alert to avoid becoming an outlet for their anger."

"Under these circumstances, the emotion most likely to arise is—fear."

Gao Ming thought of the drawings on the hallway walls. When the figures representing the father and mother began arguing, many little red figures crawled out of their bodies. Those figures pulled off parts of their own bodies and all ran toward the child.

"Maybe those little red figures were the child's way of expressing fear." Another game gradually surfaced in Gao Ming's mind. That Omen-level game was called "Phobia."

It had no specific Ghosts or particularly bloody scenes, but its destructive power and the threat it posed far exceeded even those of ordinary Strange Tales!

The game's premise was simple. One day, "Phobia" suddenly broke out, spreading contagiously throughout the city and plunging everyone into fear.

(End of chapter)