Jiang Li Appears Again

If he let go and allowed the Person-Hiding Ghost to disappear a third time, the curse of certain death would erupt immediately. Then he would face ten deaths and no chance of survival.

The man and the ghost faced each other in a stalemate, neither making another move.

The only thing moving was the pale severed hand.

As time trickled by, the severed hand's index finger slowly curled inward. According to the note, once the finger curled all the way down, it would mean one chance to suppress a fierce ghost had been used up.

Would the severed hand let go again then?

Jiang Li swallowed hard, not daring to think any further.

A few minutes later, the index finger had curled halfway down.

The Person-Hiding Ghost opposite him also seemed to be affected by some rule and began to stir restlessly.

According to its killing pattern, it had to disappear from this target's sight as quickly as possible and trigger the curse of certain death.

But under the severed hand's influence, it had no ability to think and could not break free and get away from Jiang Li.

The Person-Hiding Ghost's killing pattern had been forcibly halted and interrupted by the severed hand.

Jiang Li was not faring well either. Using the severed hand had caused intense aches throughout his body, and even his consciousness was gradually growing hazy.

He did not know how much time had passed.

Dazed and groggy, Jiang Li suddenly felt the pulling force in his hand vanish. He immediately lost his balance and fell backward.

Thud.

With a muffled thump, Jiang Li fell flat on the ground, his head striking the floor.

The sharp pain in his head brought Jiang Li back to his senses, and he sat bolt upright.

He had thought the severed hand's suppression had ended and let the Person-Hiding Ghost escape. But when he looked down, its index finger had not yet curled all the way down, which meant the suppression had not been used up.

Apparently, the severed hand's time had not run out.

He clearly had not let go either, so why had the Person-Hiding Ghost disappeared in the end?

Besides, since it had successfully disappeared, its killing pattern dictated that the curse of certain death should have killed him by now, yet he was still perfectly unharmed.

Why was that?

Jiang Li touched his face instinctively, only to find, inexplicably, that his fingers felt strangely cold and unnatural.

By the faint light filtering through a nearby window, Jiang Li got a clear look at his hands.

They were deathly pale and withered, with every knuckle sharply defined.

"Are these... my hands?"

A thought suddenly occurred to Jiang Li. He immediately crawled over to the window and looked at his reflection.

It was still his face, all right, but the faintest hint of a smile hung at the corners of his mouth, giving him an expression identical to the Person-Hiding Ghost's.

Feeling the chill emanating from within his body, Jiang Li ventured a bold guess.

The Person-Hiding Ghost's own pattern had been suppressed and disrupted, and he had accidentally taken control of it. It was now inside his body.

And apart from feeling a little cold, his body showed no other obvious signs of discomfort.

Maybe... the conflict and suppression the Person-Hiding Ghost had suffered had been so severe that it had shut down.

If that was true, he had definitely won this gamble with his life-and won a complete victory.

Jiang Li pressed a hand to his forehead and got back up, then went alone to the blocked-off escalator.

The hunger ghosts downstairs were still wandering aimlessly, waiting for someone to trigger their killing patterns.

But in Jiang Li's eyes, every hunger ghost he could see here had already triggered the killing pattern of the Person-Hiding Ghost inside him.

Jiang Li leaned against the railing beside the escalator and murmured to himself:

"I can feel it."

"Ordinary ghost controllers and derivative ghosts will die without fail once they see me three times. Even fierce ghosts with a higher level of horror will be suppressed by me to some extent."

"The time I have left doesn't seem like much. If the Hunger Ghost Incident follows its original course, the Hunger Ghost is wandering around the city right now. If I don't meet up with Yang Jian soon, there's a good chance I'll run straight into the Hunger Ghost."

"Even if I wait for Yang Jian to hang himself in the seven-day ghost mirror, I can't get into the safe house during that time. My chances of survival would be one in ten."

"Even if it changes how things unfold afterward, I have to wade into these muddy waters to stay alive."

Chapter 4: Jiang Li Appears Again

"Y-you're still alive?"

The three survivors on the second floor all jolted at the sight of Jiang Li's return, finding it hard to believe.

Wang Shan's reaction was the most exaggerated of the three.

The cigarette he had kept between his fingers all this time, too afraid to smoke it, fell to the floor again.

"Maybe... he was lucky, and the ghost didn't find him?" Yao Xiaoting said timidly, a hint of joy in her eyes.

"That's impossible! Without a ghost controller's help, an ordinary person couldn't possibly survive an attack from the Person-Hiding Ghost!"

Wang Shan stepped on the cigarette and stared fixedly at Jiang Li, as if trying to read something from his face.

Of everyone still alive, no one understood how terrifying the Person-Hiding Ghost was better than Wang Shan. He simply could not figure out how Jiang Li had survived.

"Don't get so worked up. That bunch of ghosts downstairs will hear you."

Holding the small box in one arm, Jiang Li gestured for everyone to be quiet and said to Wang Shan:

"You're right. The Person-Hiding Ghost really is tricky. If other ghost controllers ran into it without any information, they might well be killed on their first encounter."

"As for how I survived, that's simple enough."

As he spoke, a ghastly, gaunt dead man's face emerged from Jiang Li's neck, looking eerie and terrifying.

It was the Person-Hiding Ghost's face.

Sensing the chill emanating from Jiang Li, Wang Shan immediately understood everything.

"I see. You'd already taken control of a ghost yourself, and you had information on the Person-Hiding Ghost, so you suppressed it before it disappeared a third time and managed to take control of it. Looks like there's much more to you than I thought."

"Just luck," Jiang Li replied calmly. "I'll clear out the ghosts in the supermarket next. After that, you can keep living off the supplies here and wait for this disaster to end."

"Young man, well done. Once we get out, I'll have my son arrange a job for you at his company. The pay and benefits are excellent. Work there a few years and you'll be able to buy a house and take a wife."

The old woman had been listening for some time, and the more she looked at Jiang Li, the more she liked him.

Even Wang Shan showed a hint of a smile. As long as he could get back to the first floor, he could smoke again.

Only Yao Xiaoting looked deeply worried. With a complicated expression, she said:

"You're wearing a school uniform, just like me. You must still be a student too. Aren't you afraid you'll die if you take a risk like this?"

"I don't have a choice. I think this is the best choice I could make."

With that, Jiang Li went alone to the escalator, looking ready to jump straight down.

"Wait, I'll get the hemp rope," Wang Shan said hastily.

"There's no need."

The moment the words left his mouth, Jiang Li leaped from the second floor.

He landed in the middle of the first floor with a soft sound. Taking control of the Person-Hiding Ghost had made his entire body incredibly light, like a wisp of air.

The sound was not loud, but it still caught the attention of quite a few hunger ghosts nearby. A host of figures turned their heads in unison.

In the pitch-black supermarket, all they could make out were Jiang Li's eyes, clouded with a white film.

A killing pattern was triggered: kill anyone they saw.

Several blue-black ghost children immediately set off, pattering toward Jiang Li.

But the next moment, they stopped.

The target that had triggered their killing pattern had disappeared.

Jiang Li now moved like a ghost, walking slowly among the crowd of hunger ghosts around him.

The Person-Hiding Ghost's supernatural power made his entire body indistinct and elusive, concealed within an invisible mist.

That was the key to the ability to disappear and then reappear out of thin air.

Even when Jiang Li showed himself again, the barefoot ghost children still could do nothing to him. They could only watch him appear somewhere and then vanish again.

When Jiang Li appeared a third time, he emerged directly in front of a group of hunger ghost infants, with nothing whatsoever blocking their view.

The ghost infants were stimulated again and continued to follow their instincts, reaching out with their little hands and lunging at Jiang Li, only to miss once more.

With that, the condition for disappearing a third time had been met.

Within Jiang Li's field of vision, countless sinister black marks erupted over the bodies of all the ghost infants.

Smack.

With just a light touch, one ghost infant's head caved in. In an instant, it rotted beyond recognition, and its small body fell limp.

Immediately afterward, the other ghost infants fell one after another.

Jiang Li remembered that the hunger ghosts' killing patterns differed at each stage.

The first-stage ghost infants could not be allowed to see you.

The ghost children of the second and third stages, meanwhile, could not be allowed to touch you or hear you, respectively.

Each time one of those patterns was triggered, it would attract ghosts from only one stage.

Their numbers did not put much pressure on him, and he no longer had to worry about a fierce ghost reviving, so dealing with these ghost infants and ghost children became easier and easier.

And so Jiang Li kept appearing and disappearing, moving back and forth through every corner of the supermarket's first floor.

The number of ghost children in the supermarket rapidly dwindled. As derivatives of the source ghost, the Hunger Ghost, they did not possess the characteristic that made ghosts impossible to kill. After suffering severe supernatural attacks, they dissolved into wisps of blue-black mist and dissipated.

In the end, Jiang Li even found the light switches on the first floor and turned on some of the lights.

At last, the dark supermarket welcomed back the light it had been without for so long.

"There isn't a single ghost left downstairs. He really did it."

Wang Shan hurriedly slid down the hemp rope to the first floor and excitedly searched everywhere, until he found the mangled corpse in the freezer.

"So controlling one ghost really is on a completely different level from controlling two..." Wang Shan lifted He Lin's body out of the freezer and fell into thought.

The two of them had merely been passing by and had brought their immediate superior Jiang Shangbai's grandmother to the supermarket to buy groceries. They had never expected the Hunger Ghost Incident to break out so suddenly.

In the chaos, Wang Shan saw that there was no way out, so he took Jiang Shangbai's grandmother up to the ghost-free second floor and moved a large pile of clutter to block the escalator leading up.

But He Lin had been unable to hold on. On the first floor, he had struggled to use the Person-Hiding Ghost's supernatural power to fend off the ghost children pouring in, but before long he could no longer endure, and the fierce ghost revived.

Even a moment before the revival, He Lin had still been worried that after his death, the revived Person-Hiding Ghost inside him would kill Wang Shan upstairs. So, with his dying breath, he had sealed himself inside the freezer, even though it had not done much good.

Now, seeing his late close friend's Person-Hiding Ghost display its power again and wipe out all the ghost children that had driven He Lin to his death, Wang Shan was overwhelmed with emotion, so choked up he could scarcely speak.

Afterward, Wang Shan straightened He Lin's suit and gently laid him back in the freezer.

"I've confirmed that all the ghosts in the supermarket have been dealt with, and the front doors outside are shut too. You can all come down now."

Accompanied by a gust of cold wind, Jiang Li suddenly appeared beside Wang Shan and called up to the second floor.