chapter 7

Cheng Miao stammered incoherently, as though she could see the disemboweled Liu Xue slowly rising behind Doctor Xu. Her body was already poised to run.

Terror flashed in Doctor Xu’s eyes. Half crazed, he wheeled around and hacked wildly behind him with the cleaver.

Now!

Cheng Miao turned and sprinted. The moment she entered the bedroom, she slammed the door and grabbed the folding stool from beside the wall. She took up position next to the doorway, ready to give Doctor Xu a particularly warm welcome when he came through.

She suppressed her panting. The only sound in her ears was the violent pounding of her heart. Cheng Miao swallowed. Something was wrong… Why was there no noise at all?

Unease rose within her. As she hesitated over whether to open the door, she suddenly heard the rush of displaced air beside her ear. A blade whistled through the air toward her head.

Cheng Miao’s heart clenched. Acting on instinct, she rolled forward and barely dodged the cleaver aimed at the back of her skull.

She looked at the savage figure that had appeared before her. The ghost story she had told Doctor Xu had snapped the last fragile thread of his sanity. He had gone completely mad.

So the ghost in this instance attacked people with a knife, but neither walls nor doors could stop him… Weren’t ghosts in ordinary horror stories always held back by doors?

Wonderful. How original. How unexpected, Cheng Miao thought calmly.

“Heh, heh, heh… A ghost! There’s a ghost!” Doctor Xu muttered crazed nonsense. When he looked at Cheng Miao, malice filled his eyes, along with a trace of fear difficult to detect.

Tightening her grip on the folding stool, Cheng Miao swiftly surveyed the bedroom and searched for a way out.

Surely she could not beat a ghost to death with a folding stool.

Doctor Xu advanced one step at a time. Cheng Miao’s shoulder bumped one of the anatomical skeletons behind the door.

A bone-deep chill seeped into her shoulder. The skeleton did not feel like ordinary plastic. In a flash of insight, Cheng Miao realized that Doctor Xu might have skinned and stripped the flesh from his final two victims, Liu Xue and Aunt Li, then fashioned their bones into anatomical specimens!

What a psychopath!

Before Cheng Miao could think further, Doctor Xu, who had been advancing slowly, suddenly lunged. He raised the cleaver and brought it down with vicious force.

Cheng Miao gritted her teeth and lifted the folding stool as a shield.

Clang!

The impact felt like being struck by a speeding car. The web of her hand split open from the shock, her chest tightened, and the metallic taste of blood rose in her throat.

Pain ignited Cheng Miao’s ferocity. With the resolve of someone staking everything on a final stand, she released one hand, drew the paring knife hidden in her clothes, and drove it into Doctor Xu.

It was a desperate attack with little hope behind it. After all, her opponent was a spirit who could enter a room without using the door.

To her surprise, Cheng Miao felt the blade sink into soft flesh. Doctor Xu cried out in pain. Before she could stab the scum several more times, the force of the earlier blow sent her toppling backward.

Everything happened in an instant. Cheng Miao crashed into the icy, painfully hard skeleton behind her, but she did not strike the wall as expected. Instead, her body tore through something like cardboard, and she tumbled headlong into a pitch-black hidden room.

Cheng Miao landed atop a pile of bones, every part of her aching. The scorched odor she had faintly smelled from the beginning, but had never been able to locate, now overwhelmed even the dust in her nose and mouth.

She struggled to her feet. With no time to examine the hidden room, she slipped deeper into the darkness.

She waited a long while. Outside, all remained quiet. Doctor Xu, the crazed murderer, did not appear.

Cheng Miao cautiously poked her head out. The bedroom was spotless. There was no blood on the floor, and even the paring knife she had stabbed into Doctor Xu had vanished. Only the folding stool that had saved her life lay on the ground.

Cheng Miao relaxed slightly. She walked out, picked up the folding stool, and sat against the wall while trying to bring her wildly disordered breathing under control.

Whether it was because she had broken into the hidden room during the fight or because she had wounded Doctor Xu with the paring knife, that thing, neither human nor ghost, had vanished from the clinic as though it had never appeared.

After taking a moment to recover, Cheng Miao glanced into the dim hidden room, where she could barely make out the contents. She opened the bedroom door and poked her head out. “Er Gou, give me your flashlight!”

The three children, bored senseless outside, saw Cheng Miao appear from behind the door with disheveled hair and a dust-smeared face. Only her dark-brown eyes remained alarmingly bright.

“Sister Miaomiao, what happened to you?” Er Gou handed over the flashlight and peered curiously inside. “Is there something in that room?”

“A ghost.” Cheng Miao took the flashlight and closed the door, utterly unconcerned by the chaos her two words caused among the children outside.

A beam of snowy white light entered the hidden room. Only after repeatedly confirming that it was not another murder scene did Cheng Miao step inside.

Doctor Xu appeared to have built the hidden room himself. He had partitioned off a small chamber with a paper-thin wall, then placed the skeletons in front to conceal it… How Doctor Xu normally entered and exited was impossible to know.

Cheng Miao crouched to examine the two skeletons she had knocked over. Sure enough, beneath the various markings made in permanent ink, she could faintly discern cut marks.

At last, every part of the hint was clear.

Humans are not human required no further explanation. Things are not things referred to the skeleton specimens. Everyone had assumed they were merely medical objects, when in truth they had once been living people wrapped in flesh and blood.

As for dust returns to dust, earth returns to earth, that was probably the method for clearing the instance. As Doctor Xu’s final victim, Liu Xue had not even been allowed to keep her remains. Her bones had been displayed as decoration.

All Cheng Miao needed to do was give the boss of this instance a proper burial. Then she could escape the courtyard and clear the beginner stage.

But… Cheng Miao hesitated as she looked deeper into the hidden room, unsure whether she should continue exploring.

So far, there had been no sign that Doctor Xu was a pedophile, and she still had not learned why he had abducted and murdered so many children. He could simply be a deranged serial killer, but Cheng Miao’s instincts told her there was another reason for his actions.

Though the way to clear the instance was already laid out before her, failing to uncover its complete backstory left her strangely dissatisfied.

Estimating how much time had passed between Liu Xue’s previous appearances, Cheng Miao decided she still had a little while. She stopped hesitating and began searching the hidden room as quickly as possible.

The flashlight illuminated only a limited area. Fortunately, the room, though concealed, was not completely sealed. Several small square windows in the outer wall admitted thin shafts of light.

The hidden room was small, with enormous bookcases lining two walls. They were filled with ancient medical texts and folk prescriptions, interspersed with obscure anecdotes about the healing traditions of ethnic minorities.

It would be impossible to read two entire bookcases in the short time available. Cheng Miao firmly believed the Game would not set up such a tedious plot.

She examined the shelves closely and suddenly noticed an empty space in one inconspicuous corner of an otherwise packed bookcase, exactly where one book should have been.

She would never have spotted it without checking each volume in turn. A thin layer of dust covered the empty space, which suggested the book had been removed long ago…

Cheng Miao looked around. What book would Doctor Xu have taken out of his secret room…?

In a flash, she remembered the medical text beside Doctor Xu’s pillow, the one wrapped in a paper cover.