A haunting that wouldn't end

This was bad.

Li Xijiu really was the sort of guy who could get beaten up just for watching a commotion. Even when he ran into a restroom to hide, he somehow picked the very stall someone had died in.

Qin Manjiang ducked under the police tape and stepped onto the ruins of the Threshold Cinema.

The cinema wasn't large, but it was a two-story building. The first floor handled ticket sales and snacks, while the second housed the screening rooms. After the fire, only its basic frame and scattered debris remained.

The smell of burning still lingered in the air, along with plenty of water left over from the firefighting.

In the darkness, the charred remnants of walls looked, from a distance, like people twisted into grotesque poses.

As he entered the first floor, an unmistakable sense of oppression washed over him. The blackened ceiling could collapse at any moment. In some places, it already had.

"Whatever it takes, get out of that restroom. Now."

Qin Manjiang spoke.

"Someone's coming! Brother Qin..."

Li Xijiu abruptly hung up.

Qin Manjiang's heartbeat suddenly quickened.

Something had gone into the restroom looking for him.

The restroom... where was the restroom?

Rubble and blackened walls lay everywhere. There was nothing that could really be called a path.

Unable to find any signs, Qin Manjiang could only guess based on the cinema's layout. Li Xijiu had been watching a movie on the second floor. Even if he'd escaped the screening room and hidden in a restroom, it should still be the one upstairs.

As for getting upstairs...

The elevator was completely destroyed, but the stairs were just barely usable.

Shining his powerful flashlight ahead, Qin Manjiang clambered up with his backpack on.

Jutting rubble and wire kept scraping his calves. Soon the skin was broken, though fortunately he wasn't bleeding.

At that moment, Qin Manjiang was the only person in the deserted cinema.

Even he felt uneasy in a place where a disaster had just killed so many people, especially knowing that something supernatural was going on.

Ever since he stepped into the cinema's ruins, he'd had the faint sense that something was watching him. No... it had started earlier. The feeling had been there since he got into the taxi.

Every so often, he abruptly stopped and shone his flashlight behind him, but he never found anything.

After a moment's thought, he took a cross and a Guanyin pendant out of his backpack and hung both around his neck. Last-minute prayers were better than last-breath prayers.

Either of you will do. If something happens, work a miracle.

He lit up his phone and checked the time. It was nearly ten at night.

His intermittent contact with Li Xijiu had lasted about ten minutes altogether.

That meant it was ten forty last night on Li Xijiu's end, leaving a little over an hour before the fire broke out at midnight.

Rumble-

The sky had looked wrong since morning. Sure enough, by nightfall, thunder had come.

The night grew darker. Wind sweeping through the city blew inside, carrying fine strands of rain.

The damp chill swept into the cinema's ruins, struck Qin Manjiang's back, and brushed past him toward the depths of the building, as though the wind, too, was searching for something.

The charred rubble strewn across the floor made the second story especially sinister. The entire corridor was dark and silent, with screening rooms on either side. At least the way to the restroom was obvious now: straight to the end.

Yet just as Qin Manjiang was about to head there, he suddenly stopped mid-step!

Wait...

Something was wrong.

The morning news had shown firefighters carrying several charred bodies out of the cinema's ruins. That meant they must have searched the whole building more than once. Otherwise, they couldn't have withdrawn tonight.

In other words, even after a fire, the cinema couldn't possibly still be this chaotic. The firefighters would surely have cleared at least a few paths. So...

Why did this place still look as though the fire had only just been put out?

A creeping horror crawled up Qin Manjiang's back. Then-

Bzz-

His phone screen suddenly lit up.

It was Li Xijiu.

Qin Manjiang took several deep breaths before he managed to suppress his unease and answer. "Are you all right?"

"I nearly died of fright! That freak was opening the stall doors one by one. He was almost at the one next to mine, but then he suddenly stopped and left. Brother Qin, do you think heaven's looking out for me?"

If heaven were really looking out for you, you wouldn't be trapped there right now...

Qin Manjiang stopped dwelling on why tonight's cinema still looked like an uncleared ruin. Old Qin had once told him that when he decided to do something, he shouldn't overthink it. Otherwise, the more he thought, the more worries he'd find, until all his confidence and drive were gone.

"Which stall are you in?"

Qin Manjiang asked.

"The last one, obviously. Isn't that where people always hide in movies?" Li Xijiu said as though it were only natural.

"What kind of movies do you watch?"

"Horror movies."

"..."

The rain outside grew heavier. Qin Manjiang swept his flashlight around. The restroom was right in front of him. As he crossed the charred rubble toward it, an indescribable stale smell hung in the air.

Shining his flashlight inside, he found that almost all the stalls had burned away. Only the last one, the one Li Xijiu had mentioned, still stood, crooked and warped.

For an instant, he felt a strange force pushing against his back.

It was the wind.

A gust of wind.

His eyes stayed fixed on the last stall.

He was certain now that this was not the fire scene the firefighters had cleared during the day.

So... if Li Xijiu had been trapped in that stall all along, Qin Manjiang might very well find his corpse inside it now.

His heart pounded. For someone who lived in an ordinary world, the shocks he'd experienced that day were already more than enough.

In the nighttime ruins, there was only the wind and the soft patter of rain. The white noise did nothing to soothe him. Instead, it made the silence all the more chilling.

It would have been a lie to say he wasn't afraid. But was he afraid of some unknown, murderous ghost? Or of opening that stall door and finding the body of his only friend?

Qin Manjiang couldn't tell.

To outsiders, Qin Manjiang was taciturn and cold. Those who knew him understood that he was genuine. He might not be a paragon of virtue, but he was certainly not cruel.

"Whew..."

Let's do this.

Li Xijiu was still on the line. His quiet rambling sounded especially clear in the darkness. He talked about his good luck and how they should go out for a late-night meal once he left the cinema. Qin Manjiang simply listened, occasionally nodding and murmuring, "Mm."

With his phone in one hand and flashlight in the other, he slowly walked down the restroom aisle. When he reached the final stall, his heartbeat suddenly accelerated, and goose bumps sprang up on his arms.

He couldn't control it.

Every muscle in Qin Manjiang's body slowly tightened, and he swallowed instinctively.

Standing here made him profoundly uncomfortable.

Qin Manjiang gathered his strength and kicked the stall door hard.

Bang!

The door broke open. Flying dust stood out sharply in the High-Intensity Flashlight's beam. An indescribably strange smell drifted out of the stall: old and rotten, the smell of a place sealed away for a long time without any circulating air.

"Where's your body?"

The stall was open, and there was nothing inside.

As relief washed over him, Qin Manjiang blurted out the question.

"Huh?" Li Xijiu sounded bewildered and a little aggrieved over the phone. "Come on, man. I can't just drop dead on demand."

"Cut the crap. Hurry up. You've got about an hour left to live." Hearing Li Xijiu's voice gave Qin Manjiang a little reassurance.

"Huh?"

"Stop saying 'huh.' Why did you come here? Didn't you know this cinema was haunted?"

Qin Manjiang stepped into the stall and shone his flashlight all around, above and below. It was a bizarre feeling. The person he was speaking to was in this very stall as well, except Qin Manjiang was in the present, and Li Xijiu was in the past.

"I knew. It's a game!"

"A game?" Qin Manjiang didn't understand.

"Huh?"

"What are you saying 'huh' for now? Every time you do, you lose another second. Get to the point."

"No, man, didn't I send you a link a few days ago? Didn't you open it?"

"A link?" Something suddenly occurred to Qin Manjiang. "Hold on."

"Huh? My life is ticking away here!"

Qin Manjiang opened his earlier chat history with Li Xijiu.

"Brother Qin, come play a game!"

"I'll be waiting for you here!"

Below that was a link.

He checked the timestamp. It had been sent two days ago.

At the time, Qin Manjiang had been working his part-time job. He had indeed seen both the messages and the link, but it didn't take a genius to work out whether someone who skipped classes to earn money would have the spare time to click a link and play games.

So he'd quite naturally ignored Li Xijiu's nonsense.

Could this so-called game be the source of everything strange that had happened?

Qin Manjiang found it hard to believe.

The link, too, seemed to possess some sort of magic, drawing him to tap it.

That feeling was strangely familiar.

Qin Manjiang suddenly realized something...

His heartbeat surged. In all his twenty years, he had never been this panicked.

No... that wasn't possible.

His finger trembled slightly as he tapped the link. The screen instantly went black.

As Qin Manjiang watched, a blood-red slit gradually appeared in the black screen. Like a mouth splitting open, it cracked and spread toward both sides.

Then a pair of hollow, spiraling eyes appeared above the blood-red slit. Together, against the dark background, they formed an utterly grotesque smiling face.

The face was deeply unsettling. Although it existed on a phone screen, it had a three-dimensional quality, as though it were about to burst out.

But however eerie and terrifying it looked, that wasn't what Qin Manjiang found hardest to bear.

What truly filled him with panic, guilt, fear, and regret was...

He had opened this game before!

Two years earlier, during summer vacation after the college entrance exams.

Certain that he'd secured a place at Fucheng University, Qin Manjiang had bought a new phone. While he was fiddling with it, a strange link appeared.

When he opened it, this same screen had appeared-a grotesque smiling face made up of a blood-red slit, spiraling pupils, and a pitch-black background.

"Boring."

Qin Manjiang's expression hadn't changed. He wasn't interested, but he couldn't close it either. Assuming it was rogue software, he was about to restart his phone when his younger sister came over.

"Are you playing a new game?"

"Let me see!"

Qin Manyi snatched the phone away and eagerly began exploring it.

Seeing how engrossed she was, Qin Manjiang went off to do other things.

By the time she returned his phone, the link was gone.

He hadn't given the incident another thought.

Yet now, at this very moment, when the same link and the same screen appeared again.

Qin Manjiang felt an inexplicable surge of fear and anger.

It came for me. Right from the start.

Dad, my sister, even Li Xijiu...

Qin Manjiang stared fixedly at the phone screen. This time, he pressed his finger onto that horrifying, nauseating smile.

You deserve to die...

(End of chapter)