Horror

The couple living across from me fought until midnight every single day, while their child wandered around scavenging for trash to eat.

Anyone who dared to give the boy food was met with a barrage of verbal abuse at their doorstep, or even targeted with malicious sexual rumors.

One day, as I was passing through the stairwell, I spotted the boy hiding in a corner, too afraid to look at me. “Hey kid, want something to eat?” I asked.

He claimed he wasn’t hungry, but his stomach was growling like thunder. “Big sister, just leave me alone,” he sobbed. “My mom isn’t a good person.”

I leaned down and looked him in the eye. “Well, neither am I.”

On the night of my wedding, the Queen ordered her guards to pin me down and force those Glass Slippers back onto my bleeding feet. She said that if the shoes were not sated by my blood before the thirteenth bell toll of midnight, she would carve out my heart to feed the mirror. The entire hall waited for me to become a Princess Consort, but only the groom, Su Zhichuan, leaned in and whispered into my ear, his voice trembling and hoarse. He said, “Don’t believe in fairy tales. Kill me before dawn, or you’ll be the one who dies.”

At three in the morning, the funeral home’s Morgue was only supposed to have five registered bodies, yet I found a sixth, unregistered, nameless female corpse in locker number six.

A slip of paper was pressed against her chest with nothing but my name written on it.

Even more terrifying was the moment my hand brushed her wrist; I saw the last seven seconds of her life and heard her raspy, blood-choked voice whisper: “Shen Nian, don’t trust your father.”

That was the night I realized that sometimes, the dead don’t come to say goodbye-they come to reopen a case.

At one o’clock in the morning, I counted the Eleventh Step on the western staircase of my office building.

Resting on that single step was a white sneaker, its laces tied into the same blue dead knot my missing best friend always used.

Five years ago, a woman had died in this building.

Now, the security guard who holds the elevator for me every day looked up and flashed a smile.

“Miss Tang, you shouldn’t go around counting stairs.”

While sorting through my mother’s belongings, I found a crumpled notebook tucked under her pillow.

Four words were scrawled unevenly across the title page: “The Kill List.”

The first name on the list was the obstetrician who had delivered me.

The date noted beside it was the day I was born.

The second name was my father’s.

The date was the day he died in a mining accident.

The third name belonged to a stranger.

The date noted was yesterday.

The police told me that this person really did die yesterday, but my mother was buried over a month ago.

A friend of mine worked at the Egyptian Mummy Museum.

She said something had happened there and asked me to come take a look.

Out of curiosity, I unwrapped the mummy’s bandages.

Beneath layer after layer of linen was my friend’s face. “Lu Lingzhu-“

In 2016, I was working as a security guard in a residential complex.

A homeowner’s ten-year-old daughter vanished from her bedroom under bizarre circumstances.

On the rumpled bedsheets, all that remained was a pair of bloodstained underwear.

The police and all of us searched for her with everything we had, but we found no leads at all.

Then I remembered a fairy tale the girl had once told us about when she was playing in the complex.

It was called the “Tooth Fairy.” Years later, I got married and had a child of my own.

When my kid reached the age of losing baby teeth, my wife told her a bedtime story.

And once again, I heard the words “Tooth Fairy.” Startled, I asked, “Is that how the story goes?”

“Yeah.”

That night, after lying awake until dawn, I contacted the officer who had been in charge of the case back then.

“We were wrong all those years ago.”

Spending the night in an abandoned temple, I found a thin gauze handkerchief wreathed in fragrance. After nightfall, someone murmured beneath the window:

“My lady, have you perchance seen the handkerchief this humble scholar left behind?”

Through the crack in the door, the figure outside looked so ethereal that it seemed he might drift away on the wind at any moment.

At his words, I couldn’t help recalling the rumors about this place.

They said this temple had been abandoned for ages, and that seductive ghosts haunted the area. Any traveler who got entangled with them would either have their essence sucked dry or be dragged into another world, vanishing without a trace.

With that in mind, I hurriedly cracked open the window and tossed out the piece of cloth I had used to wipe the floor, the windowsill, and my stinky feet.

The other party caught it with lightning-fast reflexes.

Then he stared down at the gauze scarf in his hand, now crumpled and ruined like dried pickled greens, and fell into deep contemplation.

I am a newly appointed NPC in a horror instance.

On the third night after successfully starting work as a Maid in the Ancient Castle,

I sneaked into the room of the instance Boss with a little tail trailing behind me.

The Vampire Boss, who had been waiting for a long time, had his shirt collar wide open, faintly revealing the metallic sheen of a chain underneath.

I raised my hand to cup his handsome face as he tried to lean in and kiss me, but I only rubbed noses with him affectionately:

“Darling, our secret has been discovered.”

“If you want a reward, you’ll have to deal with those rats first.”

I was trapped in the company building, dying in a loop ninety-nine times.

The ways I died were varied: the elevator falling, electrocution from the copier, a pen tip piercing my brow…

Each time I opened my eyes, it was nine o’clock sharp on the same morning, just as I sat down at my desk.

After seeking help multiple times, my Physics Professor Husband finally believed me.

Following his instructions, I searched step by step for a way to escape the cycle of death.

But on the hundredth time, I saw the Jade Bracelet my husband had secretly bought, worn on the hand of an Aloof Female Colleague beside me.

…

On the 101st attempt, I decided to face the desperate situation head-on, determined to leave the building alive!