"None of the people who answered the phone were Gao Ming?" Luo Dong turned those words over and over in his mind, feeling his skin crawl.
"There was something even stranger." The middle-aged man tilted his head slightly and looked at Luo Dong. "The voice on the phone was unfamiliar at first. But each time we called, it sounded a little more like Gao Ming, until it sounded exactly like him. Even then, certain inflections and little habits still told me that whoever answered wasn't Gao Ming!"
"It was becoming more and more like Gao Ming?" The idea of something unknown slowly replacing a loved one struck Luo Dong as deeply unsettling, yet he had no way to stop it.
"That's right. That was one of the reasons we came looking for him."
Luo Dong fell silent at the middle-aged man's words. Even knowing there might be a ghost where their child lived, his parents had still chosen to come without hesitation.
"I don't know how you wandered in here. After we finished our calls and went downstairs, we noticed that the world outside had changed somehow. It was as if we'd stumbled into some other place. The distant lights grew blurry, and there seemed to be shadows crawling in the corners. But we were so worried about Gao Ming that we didn't pay much attention. We went looking for him at the address we remembered." The middle-aged man slowly lowered his head, revealing a trace of blood around the neck of his raincoat. "Are you here looking for your child too?"
"I was trapped in an Anomaly Event. My wife and daughter's souls were destroyed, and my only son went missing inside the building." Luo Dong did his best not to look at the blood.
"Don't be afraid. This