Surging Peril

"Knock, knock knock."

At this moment.

Inside an apartment building in Kobe City, in a dark, unlit corridor, suppressed and heavy knocking echoed out. There was no echo to it, making it exceptionally eerie. Each knock seemed to strike directly against one's heart, leaving one almost unable to breathe.

The one knocking in the darkness was an old man dressed in an old-fashioned long gown. He had been dead for quite some time. His flesh was shriveled and thin, covered in livor mortis. His eyes were hollow and numb, devoid of the slightest emotion.

"Knock, knock knock."

The knocking continued. The door to the rental apartment before him had already opened, yet the old man did not enter. He continued knocking on the door.

"Ah!"

A scream came from inside, but it abruptly stopped. Something then crashed heavily onto the floor with a dull thud, and at last, everything returned to silence.

The terrifying old man in the long gown mechanically lowered his arm. He turned and continued forward. Wherever he passed, the building seemed to age—the walls peeled away, mottled and blackened, as if they had suffered the ravages of time. It was an incomprehensible sight.

And as the Door-Knocking Ghost left.

Inside that rental apartment, two corpses lay on the floor. One was male and the other female. Both had their eyes wide open, their expressions frozen in unwilling death. There were no wounds anywhere on their bodies, and all their bodily functions had been perfectly healthy, yet they no longer showed any signs of life. It was an eerie phenomenon medicine could not explain.

Killing through knocking was just that bizarre and strange.

The old man continued onward. It still wandered through the building, clearly having other targets in its sights.

The old man did not move