Chapter 197
Chapter 197
When I woke up, I was already in the hospital.
It was the morning after Seventh Master had rescued us.
When I opened my eyes, I found there were four beds in the ward. Anning, Meng Yifan, Song Xiaotian, and I were lying in them.
Meng Yifan and Song Xiaotian had woken up before me. Anning was still unconscious.
“You’re awake.”
Seventh Master was sitting there with a book in his hands.
The moment he saw me wake up, he came over at once. “How do you feel?”
“Hungry…” I was so hungry my head felt muddled, and my whole body was weak.
Song Xiaotian tossed me a piece of bread and came over too.
As I gnawed on the bread, I asked, “What date is it today?”
“The thirteenth.”
“The thirteenth?”
I was startled and could hardly believe it.
When Anning and I went to Liu Jing’s house, it had been the twelfth. If today was only the thirteenth, didn’t that mean we had gone there just yesterday?
But how was that possible?
We had been trapped in there for so long and had nearly died. How could only one day have passed?
I pulled out my phone, only to find that it was dead.
Seventh Master took out his own phone and handed it to me.
I looked, and it really was the thirteenth!
“How is this possible?” I asked.
“This is the principle behind a Ghost Wall.”
Seventh Master explained, “A Ghost Wall is an Illusion cast by a Ghost. It uses a magnetic field to affect the human brain and make people hallucinate. Inside that hallucination, everything you see is unreal, including time.”
“Once you fall under an Illusion, it’s the same as being hypnotized. A Ghost can’t alter time, but it can hypnotize you and distort your perception.”
A chill ran through me as I listened, but I argued, “But objectively, less than a day passed. That means we only went without food and water for one day. How could it feel like we hadn’t eaten for several days?”
Song Xiaotian said, “All I know is that hypnosis really can do that. There’s a famous bloodletting experiment. They blindfolded a death-row inmate, then used the back of a knife to draw a line across his wrist. In reality, that cut didn’t injure him at all. But if they told him the knife had sliced open his wrist, and then let him hear the sound of water dripping, he would hypnotize himself.”
“He would believe the dripping was his own blood falling. Then, within a few hours, that death-row inmate really died. The cause of death was hypoxic shock from excessive blood loss.”
Meng Yifan sighed as he ate. “Damn, that’s freaking insane. I really thought we’d been trapped for days. I still feel hungry even now.”
I was curious. “How did you two get trapped too?”
At the mention of this, Song Xiaotian got angry. He said, “The two of us thought that male deceased, Feng Gang, would be easier to persuade. We figured if we talked to him, we could talk him into leaving. Who knew that dead bastard wouldn’t listen to reason at all? He even attacked us and trapped us in his home.”
Only after listening to Song Xiaotian did I learn what had happened after they went over.
Like us, the two of them had initially succeeded in summoning Feng Gang’s Ghost, and at first, the conversation had gone smoothly.
Feng Gang’s cause of death had also been suicide. He had slit his wrists in the bathroom at home.
The reason he couldn’t see a way out was because he was the pillar of his family. He had to support two children, pay for his elderly mother’s medical treatment, and cover both the mortgage and car loan. The pressure on him was anything but small.
In truth, he had been barely able to shoulder those expenses, because he was a corporate executive and his income was naturally decent.
Unfortunately, he was laid off by his company this year. With his source of income suddenly gone, the pressure became too much for him to bear, so he committed suicide.
After Song Xiaotian and Meng Yifan summoned his Ghost, they tried reasoning with him at length. Sure, we were doing this as a business, but we still hoped these pitiful Ghost souls who had suffered in life could find peace after death and go where they belonged.
At first, the conversation was going well enough. But then Feng Gang told Song Xiaotian and the others that he had not killed himself because he could not take the pressure. Someone had told him that after he died, he could reincarnate into the body of an ultra-rich man. That way, he would have more money than he could ever spend.
And originally, he had planned to kill his family first before killing himself, so he could bring them along and have them all be reborn into a wealthy household together, where they could live the good life.
But he could not bring himself to do it. So he decided to kill himself first, wait until he had reincarnated into a billionaire, and then send people to kill his family.
What he had not expected was that after he died, not only did he fail to reincarnate, but his family also moved out and planned to sell the house.
Why did his family have to sell the house? Because they no longer had the money to keep paying for it. On top of that, the child had to go to school, and his elderly mother had been frightened to death by him. Her funeral had cost a lot of money. His wife had no choice but to sell the place.
None of this went the way Feng Gang wanted. Unable to accept it, he decided his wife and child should go down and keep him company too, so the whole family could be reunited below.
To Song Xiaotian, that explanation was naturally complete nonsense, and absurd to the extreme.
Reincarnate into a billionaire first, then hire people to kill your own family? That was not something a normal person could come up with.
Of course Song Xiaotian refused to go along with him. He tried to persuade him that dust should return to dust, and earth to earth. Since he was already dead, he should stop harming his own family.
As a result, Feng Gang flew into a rage. Just like Liu Jing, he trapped Song Xiaotian and Meng Yifan inside that house.
Naturally, Song Xiaotian and Meng Yifan, like Anning and me, also thought they had been trapped for a very long time. They were even wondering why I had not gone to save them.
The reason the four of us were able to get out was thanks to Xie Peng back at the shop.
Yesterday, when we left the shop, Meng Yifan had casually said one extra thing to Xie Peng. He told him that after we finished the job, we would definitely come back to the shop that same day. If we did not, he should call Seventh Master and tell him that something had probably happened to us.
So Xie Peng stayed at the shop the whole time. Even after closing, he did not go home. He waited until ten o’clock at night, and when he saw that we still had not returned, he called Seventh Master.
That was why we were rescued around eleven last night. Seventh Master first came to save Anning and me, then went to save Song Xiaotian and Meng Yifan.
In reality, we had only been trapped inside for a few hours.
“A few hours, and it reduced us to that state…”
Even now, I still had not recovered. I could hardly believe we had only been in there for a few hours.
Besides, how could a ghost that had only been dead for two months be that powerful?
“The yin energy in those two houses was extremely heavy, and there were problems with the Feng Shui layout as well.”
Seventh Master said, “To put it simply, once those two houses are occupied by a Ghost, anyone who enters will hallucinate. And those hallucinations are not easy to break. But for the yin energy to be that heavy, Feng Shui alone is not the only reason. There are also external factors at work, such as a Yin Gathering Talisman.”
Seventh Master looked at me and said, “The Talisman you sent me a picture of yesterday was a Yin Gathering Talisman. The house Xiao Meng and Xiaotian went to should have had a Yin Gathering Talisman as well.”
Song Xiaotian froze for a moment, then suddenly pulled three Talisman slips out of his pocket. “You mean these, right…?”