Records of the Halls of Ten Thousand Affairs: Chapter 79: The Hopeless Romantic (Part 9)

The moon was unusually bright that night. Xu Wei’s mother stood at the entrance of Wan Shi Zhai, feeling a strange premonition in her heart, a peaceful one. She felt as if she could sense that Xu Wei’s soul was about to find peace.

She grabbed Chen Jiu’s hand, solemnly: “Little Boss Chen, please be careful. Your own safety comes first.”

“Auntie, don’t worry.” Chen Wu patted her own chest and said with full confidence: “My shimei, ever since she was little, could take on ten people at once!”

“…” Chen Jiu said to Xu Wei’s mother: “Don’t worry. If things go smoothly, everything will be over tonight.”

A dark and windy night, perfect for murder and arson.

Zheng Kai drove all the way to the small house where he had imprisoned Xu Wei’s mother, only to find the chain had been violently broken and the bed was completely empty. There was no sign of that woman anywhere.

He flew into a rage on the spot, punched the iron bed, and then pain shot through his knuckles, making him groan low in his throat.

“Damn it… damn it, who the hell was it?!” Zheng Kai roared: “Show yourself!”

He called that number back repeatedly, but no one answered. It was like punching cotton, no one there to take his rage, which made his anger climb even higher. At the peak of his fury, he grabbed things around the room and started smashing them again.

“Playing ghost tricks, I’ll kill you, don’t let me catch you…”

This was the first time Zheng Kai had felt the discomfort of everything slipping out of his control, especially when the other party was a woman.

Right when his anger was burning hottest, the only light source in the old house suddenly went out. The house had old wiring, so power outages and tripped breakers were normal. The sudden darkness didn’t scare Zheng Kai, it just added more fuel to his fire.

“Damn it!!”

He cursed wildly, walking toward the breaker box, but in the darkness he tripped over something and fell hard, landing face first in a pathetic heap.

Then, in the pitch black where you couldn’t see your own hand, a familiar female voice suddenly rang out, mixed with some eerie static, coming from somewhere unknown.

“Honey, I’m so scared. I want to die, but I’m also afraid of pain, afraid of heights. I don’t want to die like this. You’ll stay with me forever, right?”

This voice was too familiar. Back then it had practically rung in his ears every day. They had once been so loving, so intimate, so inseparable, so tightly bound together.

Zheng Kai’s heart thumped heavily, his nerves instantly tightening, not from joy, but from fear.

“Who are you…” His eyes widened, still bloodshot from lack of sleep.

He scrambled up from the floor, covered in who knows what dirt, stinking to high heaven, but right now Zheng Kai had no time to care about that. He just pressed his back against the wall in a defensive posture, looking around everywhere: “Who are you?! Are you human or ghost!”

“Honey, honey, I’m so tired.”

The voice came again, surrounding him from all directions like a 360 degree speaker, finding its way into his ears from every corner, stabbing at his nerves.

“You are absolutely not Xu Wei!” Zheng Kai was breathing wildly from extreme tension: “Who the hell are you?! Come out! Stop playing ghost tricks! I’m very sure there are no ghosts in this world!”

The female voice paid him no mind, just whimpered: “Are you going to keep watching me like this? If you keep doing this, I feel like I’m not even a person anymore. People can’t live like this, can they? No, right? No, right, honey.”

Zheng Kai was almost going mad. He covered his ears, only hearing his own heart pounding like crazy.

Back in those days, Xu Wei had said so many similar things, so many that he couldn’t even remember what she had begged for or refused. But he knew Xu Wei was definitely dead. She had died right in front of him.

He had clearly seen her corpse. There was absolutely no way she could appear before him again.

This had to be some other trick… right… what was it? Recording? Video?

Zheng Kai figured out this connection and finally calmed down a bit. He swallowed hard with difficulty and carefully inched his steps toward the door.

“Useless, you can’t fool me!” He practically bluffed when he shouted this out, and then in the next instant, his hand touched something ice cold and soft.

It seemed to be a human hand.

He froze in terror on the spot, every muscle in his body going stiff. For a long time he turned his head mechanically, and you could practically hear his teeth chattering through the wall.

When he turned his face, because the distance was so close, he could clearly see every pore on the woman’s face. A beam of ghostly light from somewhere illuminated her long hair and her upside down, twisted face, and even purple black blood was flowing from her nose and mouth.

A female corpse had silently hung upside down beside him. The hand he had touched was her arm that had drooped down during her fall.

In this moment, Zheng Kai’s mind went completely blank. A giant hand named fear gripped his throat tight, not allowing him to make a sound.

In nearly thirty years of living, he had never faced such a horrifying scene. No one had taught him how to deal with this. This wasn’t something you could train for by watching a few horror movies or playing escape rooms a few times.

And in the next instant, the corpse’s eyes suddenly opened, a pair of almost completely black pupils, staring at him quietly. No one knew what would happen next.

Zheng Kai’s heart nearly stopped. He couldn’t hold on any longer. His legs went soft, his eyes rolled back, and he actually fainted dead away from sheer terror.

Seeing him silently slide down from the wall to the floor, the “corpse’s” expression changed. She flipped down to the ground, went to the breaker box, and turned the lights on.

Chen Wu, hiding in the corner, crawled out with a pained grin: “This dog of a man, he almost hit me just now… Why did he faint? Fainted or dead?”

Chen Jiu tied her long hair back up, crouched down, and checked Zheng Kai’s breathing: “Still breathing. Scared unconscious.”

“Whoa, and here I thought his mental fortitude was so strong. That’s it?” Chen Wu said proudly: “If we had really brought Xu Wei here, he would’ve died of fright.”

Chen Jiu wiped the fake blood off her face: “Dying like this would be too easy on him. He has to suffer through some mental torture too.” She thought about it and then held up one finger: “At least a month.”

Chen Wu: “Yay! Little Jiu Jiu! You always have the best ideas!”

Chen Jiu smiled, neither confirming nor denying, and dragged Zheng Kai to the iron bed like a dead dog.

The next day, Zheng Kai woke up on the iron bed, his head spinning, his whole body aching like he had been run over by a big truck.

He only remembered having nightmares all night, and his body was covered in something that stank to high heaven. As soon as he woke up, the smell made him dry heave.

By the time he dragged his broken body home, showered, and got back in bed, his health bar was practically at zero. He suddenly came down with a high fever for three days. When he recovered his senses, he had become a bit neurotic.

Specifically, when he looked in the mirror he would suddenly see a figure that wasn’t his own. When he went out at night he always felt like something was following him. When he woke up thirsty in the middle of the night he didn’t dare go out to get water, afraid there might be someone with long hair sitting on the couch out of nowhere. When friends spoke even slightly louder it would startle him.

These kinds of symptoms lasted less than half a month before his closest lover felt he had become a bit manic.

Before, Zheng Kai had always been gentle and considerate toward her, practically the perfect lover. But recently he had become jumpy, his temper had inexplicably turned awful, and during intimacy he was always too rough, to the point where people might think he was on drugs.

So after one argument, the woman had had enough. She packed up everything she had left at his place and took it all home, saying both sides needed some time to cool off.

Zheng Kai was already at the point where seeing a few strands of long hair on the floor that weren’t his would make his heart jump. Seeing the woman leave on her own initiative, he immediately took back her key.

Now it was safe. Now only he himself could enter this house. No one could hurt him anymore.

Zheng Kai wrapped himself in his blanket, grinning neurotically, not knowing who he was talking to in the empty air: “Shh… if it’s too loud she’ll hear. Don’t let her catch you. It’s terrifying.”

In the middle of the night, he tried his hardest to coax himself to sleep early, but for some reason he woke up again from the heat.

Sweating all over, he lay in bed but didn’t dare open his eyes, because he heard light footsteps outside the door.

Thud, thud, thud, someone was coming up the stairs! Someone was walking up from the first floor! They were coming for him! He had to hide!

Zheng Kai’s eyes snapped open, looking everywhere for somewhere to hide. The instant the doorknob turned, he dove under the bed.

The footsteps continued walking around the room, even, methodical.

The woman’s voice asked quietly: “Where are you hiding? Where are you hiding, honey?”

Zheng Kai held his breath, hands pressed together at his chest, eyes closed, praying over and over that she wouldn’t find him.

The room suddenly went quiet. The footsteps didn’t sound anymore.

Zheng Kai slowly let out a breath and opened his eyes.

Gone?

That voice suddenly spoke right by his ear: “Found you, honey.”

“AHHH!”

A scream tore through the night. Zheng Kai woke from his dream, drenched in sweat, gasping for breath.

It felt too real. Way too real. The ice cold touch, the resentful voice, all way too real.

He had definitely been haunted by something, yes, definitely. He had to go out.

This time when he went out, he still didn’t forget to arm himself to the teeth. A few small flyers on the utility pole by the door quickly caught his attention.

“Wan Shi Zhai…”

He tore off that flyer and stuffed it into his pocket like a thief with a guilty conscience.