Strange Tree

Yang Jian quickened his pace and continued forward through the darkness.

"Tap, tap~!"

But the clear footsteps behind him remained unhurried, following closely.

No matter how much Yang Jian accelerated, he could never shake off those footsteps. As time passed, they seemed to be getting closer and closer.

At first, the footsteps had seemed five or six meters behind him.

But soon, they felt only about three meters away.

After walking farther, the footsteps were almost just one meter behind him.

Yang Jian clenched his phone tightly in his palm. He did not dare let the screen go dark, because he was ready to play that audio file at any moment.

If that ghost attacked him again.

The knocking from that audio file was his only means of staying alive.

Every muscle in his body was tense, ready to drive the ghost back at any time.

Yet things did not unfold as Yang Jian had expected. The footsteps behind him remained one meter away, neither leaving nor coming any closer.

Whether Yang Jian sped up or slowed down, those footsteps maintained that subtle distance.

"Could that thing be waiting for my phone battery to run out?"

Suddenly, Yang Jian's expression changed drastically. Looking at the less-than-ten-percent battery remaining on his phone, he felt increasingly uneasy.

If that was really the case, then dying at the ghost's hands was only a matter of time.

It would be impossible for him to leave this place alive.

He looked again at the battery display on his phone: 7%.

"If it drops below 5%, it could shut down at any time."

Yang Jian now regretted wasting his battery playing on his phone during the day.

"But now isn't the time to think about that. If I don't want to die here, then I have to run out of this hellhole before my battery dies. Otherwise..."

Gritting his teeth, he began to run.

He sprinted at top speed toward the source of the dripping sound.

"Tap, tap tap~!"

The footsteps behind him clung close, impossible to shake off.

Yang Jian could even feel the chilling cold seeping from behind him, along with a faint stench of corpses.

The ghost followed him like a shadow, relentlessly pursuing him.

As he ran with all his strength, the dripping sound drew closer and closer.

But then the screen of his phone lit up on its own.

Battery: 5%.

A message appeared above it: To prevent automatic shutdown, please charge your phone promptly.

"Damn it."

Yang Jian panted, sweat streaming down his body. One glance made panic surge in his heart.

Though he was already exhausted, he did not dare stop.

Stopping meant waiting to die.

He continued sprinting desperately.

Suddenly, a faint glimmer of light appeared in the darkness ahead.

The light was a pale red, especially distinct amid the darkness. Like a spark in the night, it was weak but extraordinarily eye-catching.

"That is..."

Yang Jian's eyes lit up, and joy flooded his heart, as though he had seen hope of survival.

But at that moment, the phone in his hand vibrated, and its screen lit up once more.

It displayed: Shutting down automatically.

Though there was still a little battery left, the phone had begun forcibly shutting down.

And just as the screen went completely dark.

Yang Jian felt an icy aura envelop him from behind. The footsteps rapidly closed in. That thing instantly moved from one meter away to right beside him.

It was directly behind him.

Though he could not see anything in the darkness, he could feel an icy, pallid hand reaching over, brushing past his ear as it grabbed for his neck.

No matter how he ran, he could not escape that hand.

"Am I going to die here?" Yang Jian could already feel those cold fingers touching the skin of his neck.

A chill like ice instantly spread through his entire body, raising goosebumps all over him.

A faint corpse stench filled his nostrils.

There was nowhere left to run.

The red light in the darkness became increasingly conspicuous.

Suddenly, the footsteps behind him stopped and vanished at once. The icy hand had just touched Yang Jian's neck, but it abruptly froze without tightening around him.

After running several more steps, Yang Jian sensed that the thing behind him had pulled away.

It seemed that the ghost was no longer chasing him.

"W-what just happened?"

After running a little farther, Yang Jian truly could not run anymore. He stopped and panted heavily, cold sweat pouring down his body as his heart still raced from the terror.

Thinking back to that perilous moment.

He was certain that he had survived not because he was lucky, but because the ghost had given up chasing him. But why?

He listened carefully in every direction.

The footsteps that had been following him had not appeared again.

He seemed to be safe for the time being.

"Forget it for now. Since that thing didn't follow me, it means I'm fine for the moment. No matter what, I still need to get out of here as soon as possible." Yang Jian caught his breath, raised his head to look toward the red light, and walked over.

Before long, he arrived at the place emitting the red glow.

"A light bulb? A glass bead?" Yang Jian froze. In the darkness, he truly could not make out what it was.

He tried reaching out to touch the source of the red light.

"Ah~!"

An intense stabbing pain struck him instantly, and Yang Jian quickly pulled back his hand.

"This, this isn't a light."

But what terrified him was that the red-glowing glass sphere had stuck to his hand. It writhed frantically, split open a gap, and burrowed into the back of his hand.

Cold and pain instantly engulfed his entire body.

Yang Jian collapsed to the ground. The pain made his entire body convulse, as if he were being cramped, flayed, and having his soul crushed.

But amid his agonized struggle, Yang Jian discovered that his surroundings were changing.

The darkness around him began rapidly receding.

He could see clearly.

He could see everything around him clearly.

It was as though he had suddenly gained night vision.

The pain came quickly, and it went quickly too.

Before he had struggled for even three minutes, Yang Jian felt the pain receding like a tide.

He lay on the ground, nearly drained of all strength, gasping heavily. The muscles throughout his body still twitched faintly from the pain.

"What exactly happened?"

Only after quite some time, when he had recovered a little, did Yang Jian struggle to sit up as though he had narrowly escaped death.

But when he clearly saw everything around him, his pupils suddenly contracted, and an expression of horror appeared on his face.

Before him stood a tree.

A pale tree that looked as though it had grown from bone.

Tattered human skins, filthy strips of cloth, mummified heads, and strange paper streamers hung from its branches. But what frightened him even more was that a four-meter-tall person lay against its trunk.

No, not a person.

It was a shadow, a human-shaped shadow, as though condensed from darkness.

The towering black shadow hung upside down from the tree without moving, its head facing the ground.

Looking closely, he saw that a thick iron nail, as thick as an adult's arm, had been driven through the black shadow's chest. No, more accurately, it was a coffin nail commonly used among the people. That coffin nail had been nailed to the tree for who knew how many years, rusted beyond recognition and seeming ready to snap.

"Drip, drip~!"

Black blood flowed from where the black shadow was nailed.

The dripping sound he had heard all along in the darkness had come from this.

But when Yang Jian saw the head of that enormous black shadow, a chill ran through his entire body.

The black shadow's head had no facial features, only a hollow indentation. That indentation seemed to be where its eyes should have been, and the thing that had emitted the red glow earlier seemed to have been its eyeball.

Yang Jian looked at the back of his hand.

"Gurgle~!"

The split flesh was forced apart, and a red eyeball rolled around before emerging. At the same time, a strange perspective appeared in his mind.

It was as though an eye had truly grown on the back of his hand, and the image from that eye could be transmitted into his mind.

It was eerie, grotesque, perhaps even some unknown ability.

But Yang Jian looked at the strange White Bone Tree, the human skins and mummies hanging from it, and the enormous black shadow nailed to its trunk.

"This place is too strange. No matter what this tree is, I should leave as soon as possible."

He vaguely felt that the enormous black shadow nailed to the tree was even more terrifying than that old man.

And he also seemed to sense that the empty eye sockets of the mummies hanging from the tree were secretly watching him.

It gave him a bone-chilling feeling.

He looked at the red eye exposed on the back of his hand, and a lingering gloom settled over his heart.

But now was not the time to worry about that.

The darkness around him seemed to have faded away, and Yang Jian could clearly see everything nearby.

This was a dim, endless space, empty of all things except this withered White Bone Tree.

It was like another world, not a place he knew at all.

But when he turned around, he could see a door in the direction he had come from. That was... the restroom door.

So the door had been so close to him all along, yet he had not noticed it before.

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