As Ding Xiaolong finished speaking, he nervously hugged the dog even tighter.
“Are you saying that my room is haunted…” Then he heard Yang Siguang ask, “What does the ghost look like?”
Ding Xiaolong was instantly stunned. He looked up at his half-brother with great fear. The first thought that surged into his mind was: His brother must be sick.
Shouldn’t Yang Siguang be just as terrified as him right now? Why did he look not only unafraid, but also unusually serious?
“I… I can’t remember,” Ding Xiaolong said, staring at Yang Siguang’s calm face. Somehow, it made him feel even more unsettled than when he had encountered the ghost. “Wait, you don’t think I’m lying, do you? I’m not making this up! I really saw a ghost in your room! It… it just stared at me… and suddenly, I heard a voice in my head telling me… telling me to leave… That ghost must have been really fierce; I could tell the moment I saw it…”
As he spoke, the black dog in Ding Xiaolong’s arms started to whimper loudly.
It was because Ding Xiaolong had unknowingly tightened his grip, nearly choking the dog.
The next second, the black dog found an opportunity, and with a quick movement, it jumped out of Ding Xiaolong’s arms. Ding Xiaolong immediately let out a loud “Aah!” and jumped up as if his bottom was on fire, chasing after the dog that was supposed to ward off evil.
Only Yang Siguang remained standing still for a few seconds.
Mother Yang, hearing the noise of the dog and Ding Xiaolong running around, impatiently turned and yelled a few words toward the living room.
Afterward, her gaze fixed on Yang Siguang, and her face darkened even further.
“Your brother just has a dog. Who doesn’t have a pet these days? It doesn’t cost much. Why are you scaring him? You’re an adult, and you’re bullying a little kid and a dog… How did I end up with such a cowardly son? I worked so hard to get you into university, but I haven’t seen you find a good job. Other people are already interning in their senior year, and you’re still just hanging around at home…”
Yang Siguang expressionlessly turned and walked toward his room.
His head was getting heavier.
Yang Siguang thought back to Ding Xiaolong’s terrified face and trembling recount and was somewhat surprised to find that upon hearing about the ghost in his room, he felt not the slightest bit of disturbance.
After closing the door, he turned around and opened his backpack, carefully placing the eyeball that had been preserved in formalin on his desk.
He stared at the eyeball with obsession.
“… Xiaolong probably wasn’t lying.”
A moment later, Yang Siguang quietly spoke to the eyeball of Li Chen.
“That guy isn’t very bright, and he’s not good at lying. He must have really encountered a ghost in the room.”
He paused, then suddenly smiled.
“Is it you again? Are you not happy?”
He asked.
“…”
The golden-brown eyeball inside the glass jar spun lightly, its gaze wandering.
It remained silent.
Yang Siguang slowly got up and opened the window.
Warm air rushed into the room, carrying a gentle breeze.
Looking outside, all he saw was the dilapidated, crowded residential area. The sunlight was harsh and bright, with no trace of any ghostly presence.
Yang Siguang struggled to move his eyeball around, scanning outside for a while.
Then he slowly sat back down in front of the eyeball.
“If you want to come in, then come. There’s no need to scare Xiaolong. You can just come directly to me.”
Yang Siguang recalled the scenes from the morgue earlier in the day, and his voice became softer.
In contrast, his eyes were even emptier and darker than the dead eyeball in the jar, devoid of any light.
“… After all, I did steal part of your body, didn’t I, Li Chen?”
“You hate me so much; that’s why you’re so angry and came to haunt my room, right?”
“Li Chen?”
“Li Chen… are you still here?”
…
Yang Siguang murmured to the corpse in front of him, unaware that as he spoke, the temperature in the room had begun to drop.
The coldness rooted deep within his body began to spread, causing his fingertips to turn slightly blue. As he spoke, faint white mist started to form around his mouth and nose.
The jar containing the formalin also began to fog up.
Everything in Yang Siguang’s view started to grow dim and distorted.
He was getting colder and colder.
No… something’s… something’s wrong…
It must be the cold making him delirious, right?
By the time he vaguely realized something was off, it was already too late.
Yang Siguang had planned to lie down on the bed for a while, but as he passed the mirror, the reflection in his peripheral vision jolted him awake from his daze.
In the mirror, he was not wearing any clothes.
His pale skin, tinged with a slight blue, was marked with deep, fresh red rope marks.
Light streamed in from the window, casting a glow on him, making him appear as though he were enveloped in a veil of light.
His reflection had hollow eyes, but his cheeks were unnaturally flushed with a deep red.
At this moment, “he” was staring at him through the mirror with an unfamiliar, hungry, and lascivious expression.
Yang Siguang’s breath stopped.
“Brother, there really is a ghost in your room!”
Ding Xiaolong’s bloodshot eyes, filled with fear, flashed through his mind. For a moment, Yang Siguang thought he had encountered the legendary ghost himself…
But in the next second, he realized something was wrong. He looked down in shock and discovered that his body was just like the reflection in the mirror—completely naked.
What was going on?
He didn’t know when, but he was now naked, holding Li Chen’s eyeball, pressed against the mirror.
Outside, his mother’s scolding continued without interruption. Yang Siguang wanted to scream, wanted to run, but he felt as if he were compelled by the actions in the mirror, following them step by step, starting to touch himself methodically.
The glass jar quickly became sticky.
When he lowered his head, it seemed as though Li Chen’s eyeball was staring at him.
That eyeball, the eye of a dead person, had completely shed its original calm and gentleness. Its gaze was burning, bright, and greedy.
Yang Siguang shuddered.
No—this wasn’t right—
Just then, he saw his reflection in the mirror again.
He saw a pair of pale hands, still stitched up, reaching out from behind him. The worn fingertips were dark red, and the skin had already withered, exposing the white bones, which were now tightly gripping his wrist, forcing him to move.
As for the glass jar…
In the mirror, it was a head that had already been severed from its body, its shape distorted.
The corpse seemed to be immersed in an unprecedented dream, its eyes slightly closed. But in the gap of its left eyelid, Yang Siguang saw cotton stuffed beneath the eyelid.
Li Chen’s head had already become shriveled due to the cold air of the morgue. As the skin contracted, his gums became more prominent, and his lips curled upward, as if smiling.
Pearl-like mucus and foam leaked from his lips, which could no longer close.
Finally, Yang Siguang saw “himself” like a marionette, holding up the head.
Then he pressed his lips to it.
He tasted his own flavor, along with the cotton stuffing in Li Chen’s mouth, the rusty taste of blood, and the unique sweet, rotten smell of a corpse…
For a few seconds of pure terror, he felt something crawl out of Li Chen’s throat, wrapping around his tongue.
__
[I’m here.]
[I’ve always been by your side, Sisi.]
__
Yang Siguang let out an unprecedented scream.
He jumped up and fell directly to the floor from his chair.
The glass jar was knocked to the ground with a sound that made his heart stop.
Fortunately, after a dull thud, the jar didn’t break; it simply rolled under his bed.
And he…
It seemed like he had just had a nightmare.
__
“Woof woof… woof…”
The sharp barking of the black dog came again from outside the door.
Mixed with his mother’s impatient scolding.
Yang Siguang, drenched in cold sweat, stood in the room, pressing hard on his throbbing temples.
His headache was so intense it felt like his head might split open.
He was cold and terrified, his shirt soaked through, and he didn’t even dare open the wardrobe to get a fresh shirt because opening it would mean passing by that mirror.
Although he was reluctant to admit it, Yang Siguang was indeed frightened by that dream, which seemed so real.
He didn’t even dare look at the mirror because he had a strange delusion, a feeling that when he looked again, the reflection in the mirror might be staring at him just like in the nightmare.
“Woof woof—woof woof woof—”
And the black dog outside seemed to have gone mad. Just moments ago, it was trembling in fear, but now it was barking pitifully, scratching at the door furiously.
The noise, which he would have ignored at any other time, felt like torture to Yang Siguang at that moment. He pressed his temples, his mood growing more and more restless and uneasy.
Finally, he angrily yanked open the door and shouted at the outside.
“Stop barking! Stop it! Be quiet—”
…
However, almost the instant he opened the door, the deafening barking and scratching stopped abruptly.
In fact, after opening the door, Yang Siguang didn’t see the crazed black dog at all.
His stepfather was still at work and hadn’t returned home. The faint sound of a TV drama came from the living room.
When Yang Siguang, pale-faced, looked in the direction of the sound, he met his mother’s astonished gaze, and Ding Xiaolong, curled up in the corner of the sofa with the dog, was looking at him strangely.
Yang Siguang froze in place.
Clearly, before he opened the door, the others had been in the living room and hadn’t been lingering by his door… but where had the barking and scratching sounds come from?
Was it Ding Xiaolong’s prank?
Or…
At that moment, Yang Siguang’s mother seemed to have snapped out of her shock. Her face quickly turned from red to pale, then to white—her shouting was even louder than usual, a few decibels higher.
“I’m making noise?! Damn it, Yang Siguang, are you itching for a fight? Dare to curse at me?! All day, I’ve had to look at your ghostly face, and now you’re complaining about the TV being too loud—damn it, if you had the guts, you’d move out of my house and buy your own place!”
A series of fluent curses poured out of her like a flood, directed at Yang Siguang.
But Yang Siguang didn’t pay any attention. He just stared at the door with a pale face.
He saw the scratch marks.
Very clearly, deep scratch marks were imprinted on the surface of the old wooden door, the ugly, cheap orange-yellow wood with rough splinters.
Yang Siguang’s breathing became rapid. He tentatively touched the fine scratches, feeling a slight pain in his fingertip as a splinter of wood directly pierced into his skin. When he pulled the splinter out, a small drop of blood formed at the wound.
It was like Ding Xiaolong, after encountering the ghost, realizing too late that his house was on the fourth floor and there shouldn’t be anyone able to press their face against the glass window from the outside.
Only at that moment did Yang Siguang, still slow to react, realize that these deep, incredibly fresh scratch marks were positioned very low.
So low that even a dog’s paws wouldn’t reach that height. Instead… it seemed like a “person” who had suffered severe injuries from a car accident, with broken bones all over their body, crawling on the ground with a broken body. If they struggled to drag themselves, this would be the place they could reach.
__
That day, Yang Siguang finally couldn’t take it anymore and slammed the door, leaving the house.
Perhaps it was because his mother’s insults were so sharp that they made his headache unbearable.
Or maybe it was because, after leaving the house, he could temporarily stop thinking about the scratch marks on the door.
He suspected it was Ding Xiaolong’s prank—after all, Ding Xiaolong had just told him there was a ghost in his room, and with Ding Xiaolong’s personality, it wasn’t unusual for him to deliberately create something to scare him, right?
Yang Siguang explained to himself in his mind, but even he knew how poor this explanation was.
In any case, after he finally managed to regain a little clarity, he realized that he had forgotten to take many things when he left home.
Like his wallet, his ID card… and Li Chen’s eyeball.
When he thought about the last item, for some reason, Yang Siguang suddenly shuddered.
He had thought he wasn’t afraid of Li Chen’s ghost, but after what happened in the dream… he suddenly wasn’t so sure anymore.
__
The most important thing was, could it really be Li Chen’s ghost?
That cold, proud person who utterly despised him… could it really be possible that he would do such indecent things to him?
