Yang Siguang heard his counselor muttering a few words to someone from the academic affairs office.
But soon, that person was pulled out of the room.
Only the remaining person stayed in the office, and without the counselor’s nagging, the entire office seemed much quieter. The tall man stood at the door for a few seconds, seemingly sizing him up, before slowly walking forward and sitting in the seat previously occupied by the counselor.
“Are you okay? Yang Siguang?”
Yang Siguang heard a familiar voice.
The voice gradually brought him back to his senses. He slowly raised his head and met the concerned eyes of the person in front of him.
“Li… Bo…”
Yang Siguang mumbled, calling out the person’s name in a daze.
Li Bo looked much the same as when they last met.
However, Yang Siguang felt that the other person seemed a bit more haggard in just a few days. Of course, this might be related to the bandage on Li Bo’s wrist—indeed, the man’s entire arm was tightly wrapped in white bandages, which extended deep into the sleeve of his suit.
Instead of the scent of men’s cologne, there was the smell of disinfectant and medicinal ointment.
Clearly, Li Bo was not lightly injured.
Noticing Yang Siguang’s gaze, Li Bo shrugged and gave a faint smile.
“A little accident,” he explained, pausing for a moment before adding, “A lighter exploded and burned my hand. According to the doctor, it will take some time to heal.”
When mentioning his injury, Li Bo’s tone was very calm, but there was a slight darkness in his eyes for a brief moment.
Yang Siguang’s lips moved slightly. According to social etiquette, he should at least say “take care” to Li Bo, but after the terrifying ghost encounter he had just experienced, he was completely overwhelmed by exhaustion.
His mind was blank, his consciousness was hazy, and even thinking had become difficult, let alone speaking.
Of course, Li Bo didn’t seem to mind his silence.
“The school told me someone broke into Li Chen’s dormitory, so I came to take a look… I didn’t expect it would be you.”
Li Bo sighed.
“Don’t be too nervous, it’s fine. What we mentioned about punishment was something we asked the school for. As family members, we really didn’t want anyone using Li Chen’s death as a hot topic for sensationalism. But I believe you wouldn’t do that. You didn’t go to Li Chen’s dormitory for such a trivial reason… You have a reason, right?”
Upon hearing the last implied question, Yang Siguang’s body trembled slightly.
“I took…”
He murmured, his voice barely audible, low and almost like a whisper.
“What?”
Li Bo’s gaze grew heavy as it fell on him.
“…I took Li Chen’s eyeball.”
Yang Siguang hoarsely and painfully confessed, speaking each word with difficulty under Li Bo’s intense gaze.
He felt both exhausted and broken, and the burning pain deep in his eye sockets almost drove him mad.
“So, he’s been haunting me.”
God knows how he managed to gather the courage to confess all this to Li Chen’s family.
But in the end, Yang Siguang said it.
He raised his head, staring blankly at Li Bo with bloodshot eyes, his gaze empty.
Li Bo looked equally shocked.
“What eyeball?” he asked, confused.
So, Yang Siguang told Li Bo everything—from how he found the eyeball in his backpack when he got home, to how he identified it as Li Chen’s, and how he preserved it with formalin and carried it with him.
“I couldn’t let him be buried whole, I disturbed the peace of the deceased, he must be so angry… I… I must have gone mad…”
“Impossible.”
Before Yang Siguang could finish, Li Bo directly interrupted his almost delirious mumbling.
The man stared at Yang Siguang for a long while with a strange expression, then spoke firmly, “After all, he was our family. When we sent him to the funeral home, we checked his body. Although it was severely damaged, one thing is certain: Li Chen’s body was complete. When he was buried, he was whole. I can guarantee that—”
Yang Siguang froze.
“No…”
A faint and weak refusal slipped from his pale lips.
“I saw it with my own eyes, I even touched it. That was Li Chen, there’s no mistake…”
He feared that in Li Bo’s eyes, he had become a complete lunatic.
Otherwise, the man’s furrowed brows wouldn’t be so tightly knit.
“Hey, Siguang, calm down.”
Li Bo gently patted Yang Siguang’s shoulder with his uninjured hand.
“Think about it. Even if we take a thousand steps back and say Li Chen really lost his eyeball in the accident… how could it have crawled into your backpack by itself? This doesn’t make sense—”
“It’s not my illusion.”
Yang Siguang interrupted urgently before Li Bo could speak. After a sleepless night and being terrified, his lips had cracked open, and blood was slowly oozing from the wound.
“That’s Li Chen’s eyeball. I’m sure of it. I wouldn’t mistake it, I can’t mistake it. I can prove it to you, I can!”
With the hurried whispers, Yang Siguang fumbled to find his backpack. However, halfway through the motion, he suddenly froze, remembering something.
He hadn’t brought the eyeball, the one that had haunted his mind and was now entangled with a vengeful spirit, when he left home earlier.
Yang Siguang’s voice became choked and broken.
“I really can… I can prove it…”
When Li Bo raised his hand to gently pat his shoulder again, Yang Siguang grabbed Li Bo’s hand.
“It’s at home.”
He said to him.
“I can go home and bring it to you. I should have… I should have returned that eyeball to you.”
Li Bo’s lips moved slightly. Yang Siguang could feel that Li Bo had something he wanted to say, but in the end, Li Bo seemed to have thought of something else. His expression changed, and finally, he let out a long sigh.
“Okay.”
He said.
“Let me see… let me see that eyeball.”
*
Li Bo took Yang Siguang to his car.
As they got in, the driver seemed to glance at him several times through the rearview mirror. The prying gaze made Yang Siguang feel intensely irritated. His sense of “reason” was on the verge of collapse. He felt extremely agitated, yet his chest was hollow.
A few seconds later, he heard Li Bo lightly cough beside him.
Immediately, the eyes in the rearview mirror shifted away from him.
Yang Siguang felt a faint sense of gratitude sweep through him.
Before long, the car stopped downstairs at his home. As they got out, Yang Siguang vaguely felt that something was off, then realized that he had never told Li Bo where his home was after getting in the car… But considering the Li family’s vast influence in City A, it wasn’t surprising that the man knew where he lived.
This small doubt quickly vanished, leaving no trace behind.
Yang Siguang hurriedly led the man to his home.
They passed through the narrow, dim corridor, opened the pig-liver-colored security door covered with various small advertisements. As always, Yang Siguang’s home was quiet and lonely.
It was already morning, and his parents were probably at work. Even Ding Xiaolong, who always liked skipping class, was probably still in his room, catching up on sleep after a long gaming session.
At this moment, Yang Siguang had forgotten the man behind him. He rushed straight into his room—only to find the door, which he had locked, slightly ajar.
Yang Siguang immediately felt a surge of anger and pushed the door open.
However, his roar was cut short, and all the sound choked in his throat.
There was no one else in the room.
At least, there was no Ding Xiaolong who always stole his things.
There was only a dog.
*
The black dog, which Ding Xiaolong had brought home, was now quietly standing in the center of his room, staring at Yang Siguang without blinking.
The whole room was filled with the strong smell of formalin.
At the dog’s feet was a broken glass jar.
The jar was empty, and Li Chen’s eyeball was nowhere to be found. Only the remaining formalin liquid had spilled all over the floor.
The black dog’s lips were bubbling with white foam, and its slightly purple tongue was sticking out from between its lips. Upon seeing Yang Siguang, the dog, instead of showing fear, began wagging its tail enthusiastically.
When it opened its mouth, Yang Siguang could vaguely smell a strong, rotten odor coming from deep in the dog’s throat.
*
The dog ate Li Chen’s eyeball.
The dog ate Li Chen’s eyeball.
The dog ate Li Chen’s eyeball.
The dog ate Li Chen’s eyeball.
The dog…
Ate…
Li Chen’s eyeball.
*
Yang Siguang stood at the door, and in that instant, he even forgot to breathe.
Even his mind went blank, leaving only the thought “The black dog ate Li Chen’s eyeball” swirling in his body, like a broken meat grinder relentlessly shredding his internal organs, veins, and blood vessels.
“Give it back to me…”
When his reason finally returned with great difficulty, Yang Siguang realized he had already lunged at the black dog.
Without hesitation, he shoved his fingers into the dog’s mouth, which was full of saliva and sharp white teeth.
He forcefully dug into the dog’s throat, as if doing so would retrieve what the dog had swallowed.
“Spit it out! Spit it out!!”
Then he heard a hoarse scream, the sound sharp and familiar. A few seconds later, he realized the scream had come from his own throat.
The dog was trapped in his arms, whining, but strangely, despite the rough handling, the dog neither struggled nor resisted.
On the contrary, the dog seemed unusually docile. It let out a few muffled murmurs from deep in its throat, sounding vaguely like someone laughing.
[Si Si…]
At the same time, Yang Siguang felt something lick his fingers, which were still inside the dog’s mouth.
The thing that licked him had a smooth, soft, cold texture, like a corpse. It wasn’t the dog’s tongue.
More importantly, Yang Siguang’s fingers were deep inside the dog’s throat.
What was it?
The cold sensation snapped Yang Siguang out of the nightmarish collapse he was experiencing.
He suddenly let go of the black dog and staggered backward.
But even after he released it, the dog’s jaw remained unnaturally open, like it had dislocated. It slowly tilted its head and aimed its wide, gaping mouth at the terrified human in front of it.
[Si Si…]
Yang Siguang heard a vague human voice coming from deep within the dog’s body.
Then, he saw something flash in the dog’s dark throat.
It was an eyeball.
Bright and clear, its gaze pure, as fresh as if it had just been removed from a corpse.
However, the eyeball was now wrapped in a mass of bloodied, shredded flesh, with faint outlines of other organs still visible within the mess.
A crooked nose, deformed lips, and teeth scattered in the blood vessels and meridians due to the dog’s throat squeezing…
After a few seconds, Yang Siguang vaguely recognized that it was a person.
A person slowly crawling out of the black dog’s body.
The dog’s fur quickly became soaked with crimson blood. As the “person” crawled out, the dog’s body began to tear apart from the inside out. The wet, tearing sound of flesh and bones being forced apart filled the air, and the heavy smell of blood soon overtook the strong stench of formalin in the room.
Yang Siguang screamed, using his hands to push against the floor as he retreated to the farthest corner of the room.
[Si Si…*&%##…]
But the ghostly figure crawling out of the dog’s remains had already crawled up to him.
It clung to his ankle and slowly moved up. As soon as Yang Siguang lowered his head, he would see the creature’s bloody face. It now looked like the most horrific car accident victim, its skull completely deformed, with only its left eye still bright and embedded in the hollow eye socket, staring directly at Yang Siguang.
Then it raised its cold hands and cupped the young man’s face.
[My… Si… %#@…]
Yang Siguang heard the murmuring voice.
It was “Li Chen’s” voice.
But Yang Siguang had never realized so clearly before that this was not Li Chen.
At that moment, the words that Xu Lu had ominously said to him the night before suddenly flashed in his mind…
When a living person dies and turns into a ghost, they are nothing but the lingering obsession of the person who once lived. They are completely different from the living person.
A ghost and a human are not the same.
“Li Chen…”
Yang Siguang cried.
The ghostly figure’s wet tongue pressed against his neck and cheek, constantly rubbing against him like a snake covered in mucus.
Tears streamed from Yang Siguang’s eyes as he let out a painful whimper. He hugged himself tightly, desperately trying to avoid the ghost’s wet, sticky licks.
Coldness began seeping into his body.
His limbs quickly grew numb.
“I’m sorry… Li Chen… I was wrong…”
He murmured, repeating it without any rationality.
“I’ll return the eye to you.”
“I’ll give it back to you, okay…”
*
At that moment, he inadvertently glanced at the mirror in the corner of the room.
In the mirror, there was someone pressing against him.
But it wasn’t the hideous ghost; it was Li Bo.
The man, with one injured hand, looked particularly disheveled. He was trying to protect Yang Siguang from harm while also attempting to stop the frantic, screaming young man from moving.
“Yang Siguang—Yang Siguang! Wake up! Calm down—”
Li Bo, using his uninjured hand, gripped Yang Siguang’s wrist to prevent him from gouging his own eyes out, shouting at him.
…
Yang Siguang froze for a moment.
*
The next second, everything around him began to spin, melting and distorting.
Yang Siguang felt dizzy, and in an instant, the ghostly figure in front of him turned into Li Bo’s terrified, anxious face. The blood-red light that had filled the room and the black dog’s corpse suddenly vanished. He looked at the mirror, and the reflection of himself was also looking back at him.
The young man in the reflection had a face as pale as paper, his pupils dilated, and his eyes appeared like two bottomless wells, devoid of any light.
In the brief moment of eye contact, Yang Siguang seemed to see “himself” lightly part his lips and say something very softly.
But unfortunately, before he could make sense of it…
“Yang Siguang—”
Li Bo’s voice exploded directly in his ear, and Yang Siguang suddenly snapped awake.
*
It was like a drowning victim who had just been revived with artificial respiration. Yang Siguang let out a long, gasping breath.
He trembled violently, collapsing into Li Bo’s embrace.
*
There were no more ghosts in his room.
No more blood-soaked light.
However, when he turned his head, he saw the black dog’s corpse, limp and wedged under his bed. Its slightly parted mouth leaked a small pool of pitch-black blood, and its already murky eyes seemed to be staring at him without blinking.
Next to the dog’s mouth was a glass jar that had long been emptied.
…
Yang Siguang screamed again.
*
Twenty minutes later, the ambulance blared as it carried Yang Siguang to a private hospital operated by the Li family.
Under the effect of the sedative, the completely broken young man finally calmed down.
Li Bo sat by his bedside, looking at the man’s face, pale and devoid of any color, and the deep claw marks around his eyes, which had been treated but still looked horrifying. He sighed softly.
“Ugh…”
At that moment, the unconscious young man let out a soft cry.
Li Bo’s gaze tightened, and he looked at him anxiously.
Fortunately, after a few seconds, under the effect of the medication, Yang Siguang fell into a deep sleep again. However, from the slight furrow in his brow, it was clear that even with the sedative, he still couldn’t have a peaceful dream.
Li Bo instinctively raised his hand, intending to wipe away the single tear that had formed at the corner of Yang Siguang’s eye. But as soon as he moved, a sharp, excruciating pain surged from the palm of his hand, which had been burned by the lighter.
The man paused, his expression darkening. After a moment, he slowly withdrew his hand.
At that moment, there was a soft knock at the door.
With Li Bo’s permission, the doctor in charge of Yang Siguang’s treatment entered.
“Mr. Li.”
The doctor flipped through Yang Siguang’s medical records, his expression serious.
“How is he?”
Li Bo shifted his gaze from Yang Siguang to the doctor and asked.
The doctor cleared his throat, paused, and then spoke in a low voice.
“Mr. Yang’s condition is currently stable. His previous symptoms are suspected to be a panic attack. In theory, after being removed from the stressful environment, there shouldn’t be any major issues. However, from my personal perspective, I still recommend taking him to a public hospital for more detailed examinations, such as…”
“Such as psychiatry?”
Li Bo sneered, interrupting the doctor.
He turned around and stared directly at his subordinate, with whom he had worked for many years.
“What if I tell you that his mental state is actually fine? He just encountered something… that science can’t explain, which caused him severe shock. That’s all…”
As he spoke, another wave of searing pain surged from the wound in his palm.
Li Bo remained calm, but a cold sweat broke out on his back.
At that moment, he had been following Yang Siguang into the room. However, as soon as the door opened, he saw the body of a black dog in Yang Siguang’s room.
It was at that moment that Yang Siguang seemed to completely lose control. The young man became extremely distraught and frantic, crying and trying to gouge out his own eyes.
Li Bo immediately stepped forward to stop him. He didn’t know what Yang Siguang had seen in that instant, but he could imagine it must have been something terrifying. After all, the chilling coldness that had surrounded them at that time was also something very familiar to him.
…
But after hearing his words, the doctor’s expression became somewhat strange.
“Uh, shock? But…” He hesitated for a moment before continuing, “But I think, if it was just a mental shock, it’s hard to explain the physical injuries on Mr. Yang, don’t you think?”
The doctor said.
Li Bo froze.
“Physical injuries?”
He repeated in confusion.
“Yes… actually, I personally suggest calling the police.”
The doctor lowered his voice as he looked at his boss.
Before the doctor could stop him, Li Bo seemed to realize something. He suddenly turned around and rolled up the loose sleeve of Yang Siguang’s hospital gown.
What he saw was the dense, overlapping scars on Yang Siguang’s arm.
*
A City.
Old District.
Yang Siguang’s home.
Ding Xiaolong, who Yang Siguang thought was napping after finishing his game, was actually not sleeping.
He was curled up in his room, pressing his hands to his ears, desperately trying to ignore the knocking sound that kept echoing in his ears.
“Bang—”
“Bang—”
“Bang—”
…
The sound outside the window was incredibly restrained, soft, and difficult to hear unless one listened closely.
But for Ding Xiaolong, the sound was deafening.
“I can’t hear anything, I can’t hear anything!”
Ding Xiaolong nearly buried his head in his knees, muttering to himself, trying to hypnotize himself.
He didn’t know how much time passed, but suddenly, the sound outside the window stopped.
Ding Xiaolong’s breath caught in his throat. After a long pause, he slowly lifted his head and looked out the window in terror.
The sunlight outside was dazzling, the sky was clear.
“Ha…”
Ding Xiaolong slowly let out a sigh of relief.
Thank goodness.
Thank goodness.
He had finally avoided it this time…
Then, he heard a vague, cold whisper behind him.
“Why… %￥@* didn’t you open the window…”
“You’ve already… %￥#@&* taken the money…”
*
[You’ve already taken the money.]
[As agreed, you should open the window for me, shouldn’t you?]
