chapter 16

He doesn’t live far from my house, so he must already be on his way here.

As long as the candle doesn’t go out.

I can hold on until help arrives.

I clutched the candle tightly and crawled into the wardrobe.

There was no wind inside the wardrobe. It felt safe here.

Soon, I heard the sound of fingernails scratching at the wardrobe door from outside.

Not finding me, the person outside started laughing again, a cackling sound.

The voice was neither male nor female, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, but I was certain that the sounds she made were no longer my mother’s.

I didn’t know who she was, or why she had entered my mother’s body. I just wanted Master Qingyun to come quickly and drive her out of my mother’s body.

Although she wasn’t my biological mother, she had always treated me as her own and was very good to me.

She never remarried, all for my sake.

My birth mother died in childbirth when I was born.

Aunt Lan was my father’s second wife, but not long after she married my father, he died in a car accident.

I grew up depending on Aunt Lan. Although she was strict with me, she was a responsible and good mother.

When I was little, I called her Aunt Lan, but before I knew it, I had started calling her Mom.

Saying she wanted to take my life-I really couldn’t believe it. She must have been possessed by something evil.

Seeing that I wouldn’t come out,

The thing outside changed its voice to Aunt Lan’s again.

She ran her fingertips over the wardrobe door and spoke gently from outside: “Shengsheng, come out. Shengsheng, come out. Where are you?

“Mom made your favorite sweet and sour ribs. Why don’t you come out and have a bite?”

I knew she was trying to trick me.

I held the candle and said nothing.

The candlelight formed a Barrier around me. She couldn’t get close, nor could she see where I was.

Holding my breath, I hid in the deepest part of the wardrobe.

I didn’t dare take out my phone.

Because the phone’s light would reveal my location to her.

A red candle takes forty minutes to burn down.

I watched the candle in my hand grow shorter and shorter.

My heart started pounding.

It was already 11:50. If the candle burned out before Master Qingyun arrived, I would surely die.

But I had no other choice. I could only pin my hopes on Master Qingyun.

“Hurry up, hurry up, why isn’t he here yet?”

I prayed silently in my heart.

I didn’t know how much time had passed.

It seemed quiet outside the wardrobe.

I pressed my ear to the door and listened carefully for a while.

All around was silent. Other than my own heartbeat, I heard nothing else.

Maybe, not finding me in the room, that thing had gone somewhere else?

No time to think.

I quickly took out my phone, wanting to check how far Master Qingyun was from me.

But as soon as I lit up the screen,

a deathly pale face appeared before me.

The thing in front of me wore Aunt Lan’s face, but her eyes had no whites-just a huge black pupil filling the entire socket.

Half of her lipstick was smeared, and she was grinning eerily.

Her neck was unnaturally long, craning right beside me to look at my phone screen together.

She said, “So you were hiding here.”

She said, “You’re not being good.”

And at that moment,

the candle in my hand

burned out completely.