Horror

Three months after I moved into Old River Bend, the old lady next door died. While I was helping clear out her belongings, I found a diary.

The first page read: “My daughter died three years ago. The person living next door to me is a ghost.”

But I knew there was something wrong with her daughter from the very first day, because I’m a ghost, too.

My husband jumped from a building and died in a pool of blood.

The police quickly cordoned off the scene.

A few days later, the autopsy report came back: the cause of death was a massive intracranial hemorrhage, and his body bore numerous signs of a struggle.

The police told me he had committed suicide and that there was no killer. I didn’t believe them.

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.

I can see the final moments of the deceased through their eyes, a gift that has helped the government solve countless cases.

Everything changed when the body of a drowned man was brought in.

Looking into his eyes, I saw him strangling me just before he died.

And on those hands, he was wearing the Jade Bracelet that had been buried with me.

I was livestreaming in the Dormitory when viewers noticed that the Ceiling was leaking.

Everyone urged me to call a School Worker to fix it, but there was one Danmaku that said:

“This Dormitory is a Coffin Room. No one who lives here can leave alive.”

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.”

Do you know about the Uncanny Valley Effect?

This sense of dread originates from ancient times.

Back then, our ancestors had already seen these things! They appear similar to humans, yet are distinctly different.

Today, they hide within modern society.

They might even be our family and friends.

The question is, how do we tell them apart…?

In ancient, remote places, many eerie and terrifying things are bound to happen.

And these things happen right around Hua Jiunan.

In fact, Hua Jiunan is a part of these events himself.

For instance, he is a Corpse-Born Child!

On the day my boyfriend and I got our marriage license, the lottery ticket I bought won fifty million.

Double happiness had come knocking.

Who could have known that very night, he would brutally murder me?

As I lay dying, I heard him call another woman, practically giddy with excitement.

“Baby, we’re rich! Get over here and help me cut up the body.”

“Can you believe she actually asked me before she died if I’d ever loved her? Of course I loved her. Loved using her as an ATM and a fuck buddy, hahaha.”

I died. My body was dumped into a pit latrine and a garbage dump, left to be gnawed on by maggots, mosquitoes, and flies.

When I opened my eyes again, I had been reborn on the day I won the lottery and got my marriage license.

My boyfriend was opening the door. He looked back and smiled at me. “Honey, tonight is going to be very exciting. Are you ready?”

I transmigrated.

Straight into a run-down brothel.

The lowest, dirtiest corner of Tongzhi Alley.

When I first arrived, my immediate thought was to kill the madam.

Then escape with my life.

But I soon realized the hard part wasn’t killing the madam.

The real challenge was figuring out how to stay alive after I did.