Chapter 2

Chapter 2

My name is Han Yuanshan.

I’m a small-time internet celebrity with a bit of money to my name.

Most of the content I make is outdoor exploration videos and live streams – things like copying down tombstone inscriptions in the middle of the night, or test-sleeping in supposedly haunted houses.

Back before restrictions got so strict, I even crossed the Aotai Line in winter.

Actually, all that stuff I said earlier on stream about the “Cursed Cabinet,” “not living past ten days,” and “numbers carved with fingernails”…

Heh.

I completely made it up.

But the “College Couple Double Homicide Case” was real.

Three years ago, a young couple who had just graduated from university rented a place near their school. They were preparing together for the postgraduate entrance exam and the civil service exam.

Who would have thought their landlord was a complete bastard?

He had installed pinhole cameras inside the rental apartment to secretly film them.

When the girl discovered it, she wanted to call the police.

Her ghoul of a boyfriend stopped her.

The exams were coming up, and the boy didn’t want to make a huge scene. He wanted to settle it privately by having the landlord destroy the videos and pay compensation.

But the negotiation fell apart, and a conflict broke out.

The landlord murdered the couple, hid their bodies inside a cabinet, and fled.

The case was solved very quickly.

That vicious landlord also ate a bullet soon after.

Originally, I had planned to make a true-crime commentary video about this case.

While searching for information, I unexpectedly found out that the girl’s mother had uremia and was crowdfunding her treatment expenses online.

It was heartbreaking.

A single mother had worked so hard to raise her daughter, only to end up with an illness like that.

I quietly donated twenty thousand yuan to the auntie.

Afterward, I thought about it and decided to give her another hand.

So I bought a cabinet online that looked very similar to the one from the case. It was delivered within the same city – I placed the order in the morning, and it arrived that afternoon.

In truth, the cabinet used to hide the bodies back then was actually just an imitation antique and wasn’t worth much.

But the one I bought was a genuine antique cabinet from the Qing dynasty.

It cost me eight thousand yuan.

…

I opened the creator dashboard on my phone and took a look.

Well, damn.

I had actually made it onto the platform’s trending list!

“What Exactly Did Blogger Young Master Han See?”

“Does the Cursed Cabinet Really Exist?”

I read the trending topics aloud, the corners of my mouth lifting.

Not bad.

This was exactly the effect I wanted.

I turned on my computer and worked overtime to put together the explanatory video on the “College Couple Double Homicide Case.”

After pulling an all-nighter, I finally finished it at nine in the morning.

I clicked publish.

At the end of the video, I deliberately added a photo of the girl’s mother lying sick in bed.

I also pinned the crowdfunding link in the comments section.

What I could do, what I could help with, only went this far.

I stretched, then flopped face-first onto the bed.

Back when I was in school, my teacher once said I had a chivalrous streak.

So after all these years of outdoor exploration, I’d encountered plenty of dangerous situations, but I’d never been afraid.

Sleepiness gradually washed over me.

My eyes closed beyond my control…

…

In a daze, I felt as if I had floated up into midair.

What came into view was a very small bedroom.

A calendar poster hung on the wall, showing the year 1993.

Against the wall stood a mahogany cabinet.

It was exactly the same as the antique cabinet I had bought online!

Just then, the bedroom door was pushed open.

A young girl walked in from outside.

Good heavens.

She might have been the most beautiful person I had ever seen in my life.

It was a clean, gentle kind of beauty.

Her watery eyes were bright and clear, the black and white sharply defined.

There was nothing intimidating about her at all, yet when she smiled at you, it left you stunned, and your heart would skip two beats.

The girl smiled as she walked toward me.

Then she reached out her hand first.

“Han Yuanshan, nice to meet you.”

I wanted to take her hand.

But the next thing I knew, my leg kicked out.

I woke up.

So it had been a dream.

And a beautiful one at that.