Happy Birthday!

Covered in blood and wounds, his left eye gone, Gao Ming held up his phone. He placed his last hope in Ghost Dad and Ghost Mom.

Shadows gathered in a frenzy. Gao Ming made a wish as earnestly as he had on his birthday, but this time, he did not say it aloud.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

As shadows engulfed the Torture Room, someone knocked on the pitch-black metal door in front of Gao Ming!

Someone was knocking from outside!

At the same moment, the call connected. Amid the crackle of static, Mom's voice rang out. "Gao Ming, are you missing home again?"

The knocking grew more insistent, while fewer and fewer images of Dad and Mom remained in the Posthumous Photograph.

The pitch-black metal door began to warp slightly. Red threads wound around Gao Ming's wounds again as the enormous chair tried to drag him back.

Hooking his fingers around a protrusion in the floor, Gao Ming shouted into the phone. When the last figure vanished from the Posthumous Photograph, shadows completely covered the bloodstained metal door. Its hinges twisted, and the entire door was forced open!

His eerie parents wore eerie smiles, carrying his favorite kind of cake. Even with their bodies twisted together, the cake remained perfectly intact.

"Happy birthday!"

"Yeah, happy birthday." Gao Ming raised his blood-soaked hand and grasped his eerily smiling family. "Let's eat the birthday cake once we get out."

Dad and Mom seemed to know he would always return. The door to their home was always open to him, and they were always waiting by the phone.

The chair pursuing Gao Ming knew nothing of the warmth of home. It was merely a chair without feelings. Even with its belly full of human hearts, it still could not understand familial love.

Strands of