Chapter 9

Chapter 9

The moment I opened the door, I couldn’t help shivering.

A gale was howling outside, and the air was bone-chillingly cold. Everything was a murky gray, as if covered in a thin veil of fog. It was just like one of Beijing’s smoggy days, with visibility so low you could barely see.

Fortunately, Jiang Yan’s pink dress was still pretty eye-catching. I chased after her retreating figure. She didn’t seem to be moving fast, but for some reason, no matter how hard I ran, I always stayed three or four meters behind her. I just couldn’t catch up.

We ran all the way to a shabby old house before Jiang Yan finally stopped.

The door was tightly shut. The gray cement on the walls was cracked, exposing broken red bricks underneath. A wooden window covered in spiderwebs creaked and groaned in the wind.

Jiang Yan stood in front of the window, staring intently inside.

I was panting from the chase as I reached out to grab her shoulder.

“Yanzi, what are you doing? I’ve been calling you this whole time, why didn’t you answer?”

Jiang Yan turned her head.

It was a face sewn from cotton cloth. Its mouth had been painted bright red, its two eyeballs were made of black buttons, and its eyebrows had been drawn on with charcoal, set so far apart they made it look like a flounder. It should have been funny.

But I couldn’t laugh. An icy chill spread from my spine through my entire body, and goose bumps rose all over my arms.

This was the doll from Jiang Yan’s house.

The kind of doll every household in Mang Village had. It had put on Jiang Yan’s dress and deliberately lured me here.

I had chased it the whole way and never realized it wasn’t human.

That was practically impossible. Dolls like this, just like paper effigies, were easy for ghosts to possess. But I was born with Yin-Yang Eyes. I could see the baleful energy inside them at a glance.

Yet this doll’s aura was completely clean, no different from a normal person’s.

The doll let out a strange laugh. Then it suddenly grabbed my shoulders with terrifying strength and flung me toward the window.

It was shockingly strong. I couldn’t break free at all, so I twisted my wrist and used a bit of leverage to drag it through the window with me.

The two of us crashed to the floor at the same time, but the pain I expected never came. It was soft beneath me, and it felt as if my whole body had sunk into a pile of cotton.

I looked down, and my scalp instantly went numb.

The room was packed wall to wall with cloth dolls. I was lying on a mountain of them.

Most of the dolls were missing arms or legs, or had been sewn with two heads. They were all bizarrely shaped, clearly discarded failures.

The light inside the room was dim, and the dolls were all sorts of colors. After the Jiang Yan doll fell in, it stopped moving completely. I narrowed my eyes and scanned the room, but for a moment, I really couldn’t find it.

As I stared at the dolls, it felt as if they were staring back at me.

Those black button eyes seemed to flicker with an eerie light, but when I looked closer, it felt like nothing more than my imagination.

A chill crawled through my heart, and I started wanting to retreat. The unknown was what bred fear. I couldn’t figure out where these dolls had come from, and I would rather go outside and fight a vicious ghost than stay here.

I braced my arms and pushed myself up, wanting to leave.

But as soon as I took a step, my foot sank into the pile of dolls. At the same time, a piercing pain shot through my ankle.

“Fuck! What the hell was that?!”

I screamed, formed a hand seal, and slammed a Palm Thunder downward.

“Five Thunder Command!”

A flash of purple lightning burst out. Beside my foot, one doll’s arm turned black on the surface and gave off a burnt stench.

I yanked my foot out from under it, lifted the hem of my skirt, and saw a bite mark on my ankle.

It was a very clear row of teeth marks, but the area wasn’t large. Judging by the size, it seemed to belong to a child.

I flung aside the dolls on top and dug downward. Soon, I found the child-sized doll.

Unlike the other cloth dolls, this one was made of wood. It was only half a person’s height, painted in bright colors, and there were two slits beside its mouth that could open and close.

Furious, I slapped it across the face.

“Was it you who bit me just now?”

“If you ate big sister, then you can’t eat me.”

“If you ate big sister, then you can’t eat me.”

A burst of terrifying background music suddenly rang out in the room. The doll opened its mouth and mechanically repeated the same sentence.

I jumped in fright and flipped the doll over. Only then did I discover there was a wind-up key on its back.