My House of Horrors

As he stopped to help his friends, more and more students chose to follow behind Chen Ge. Most of them were doing it to save themselves, but from the moment they made that choice, something changed.

“So, this is the school’s approval?” The gaze from the painter made Chen Ge feel like he had fallen into ice, but a sense of warmth exuded from the students around him. It was a strange feeling, like he was wrapped in warm blood. It did not feel bad. “There is no telling what will happen when a living human like myself gains the school’s approval, but there is no better choice at the moment.”

Chen Ge turned his head around and forced himself to look away from the painter, and the chill slowly disappeared.

“He didn’t notice anything, did he?”

After running several meters away, Chen Ge looked out the window again. To his consternation, the painter’s black eyes were still looking his way, but not at him but at this shadow. The mirror in the sky was ravaged by the blood storm, but the painter did not move his brush. He could only paint a ghost, and the man in the storm was not a ghost. He had not told anyone about that before, not even Chang Wenyu. The mirror was getting more and more unstable. The reason the painter could face three people alone was due to the support from the school’s consciousness. He kept breaking the mirror that represented the school’s consciousness to gain the power approaching a Greater Red Specter.

“This is getting a bit too troublesome.” The painter wrapped the blood vessels around the ‘canvas’ that he had torn from his body. He dragged his wounded body toward the eye of the storm. The man in the storm did not know about what he was planning. When he saw the painter approach him, his attack on the mirror grew more aggressive.

This monster was scarier than anyone had anticipated, but to prevent himself from being seen by the painter, he had been holding back, hiding in the storm. Greedy yet cautious, he always placed his own safety first. That was probably the only way to survive in the blood city. The blood storm continued to blow, and it cut at the painter’s body like knives, yet the painter did not care about it. His dark eyes stared into the storm.

Those who were in his gaze would be shaken, and that included the man in the storm. A glance had ruined Kindness—the painter’s special power shook the man. Seeing the painter approach, he stopped hiding his real power. An arm crawling with black blood vessels reached out from the storm. The skin of this arm was not that different from a living person, but the black capillaries on it caused people to be cautious. His body was running with black blood, and he looked like a mix of a human and ghost. The arm gave a familiar feeling to everyone there, like they had seen it many years ago in nightmare but now they could not remember the details.

Initially, the man only showed an arm. As the arm reached outward, it also showed his shoulder and the patient’s garb that he was wearing. Instead of saying that he was wearing it, it was more like the patient’s outfit grew on his skin so that he was unable to take it off. Upon closer inspection, the patient’s outfit worn by the man was similar to the one worn by the ‘doctor’ at the school. They should have come from the same place, but one had run into the red city, and the other had run to the School of the Afterlife.

Chen Ge witnessed the changes outside the building with his own eyes. When the patient’s outfit showed itself, he had an ominous feeling. The man had probably come from the cursed hospital, a patient that had escaped. Just an escaped patient was that scary, so how scary could the hospital itself be?

Actually, Chen Ge understood it well. Even though they were both four-star scenarios, the cursed hospital and the School of the Afterlife were not on the same level. Just like how the Third Sick Hall and Underground Morgue were both three-star scenarios, but the underground morgue was much more dangerous than the Third Sick Hall. The door pusher for one was Doctor Gao, and the other was Men Nan. Put Men Nan and Doctor Gao in a match, and the result was clear. That was the case with the School of the Afterlife and the Cursed Hospital; one had a dead door pusher while the other had far reaching influence into every corner of Jiujiang. If Chen Ge arranged the known four-star scenarios on the black phone based on their difficulty, the simplest should be the School of the Afterlife, then the Ghost Fetus, and finally the Cursed Hospital.

I’ve already interacted with the Cursed Hospital. According to the non-smiler, the hospital will eventually come to get me. The ghost fetus knows that I’ve killed the shadow, so it will also come find me…

Chen Ge could not share this problem with others. A normal person might not even get a Red Specter’s attention, but Chen Ge was being targeted by two four-star scenarios at the same time.

What have I done to deserve this?

While Chen Ge reflected on that, the situation outside the building changed again. The man in the fog reached into the mirror. The black blood appeared to be some kind of toxin that worked on memories and emotions. The blood mirror cracked a lot. The man abandoned his arm, and the mirror almost fully collapsed. The memories fell like rain, and the cries of every students echoed everywhere. It sounded like the school was crying. The mirror shattered, and everything in the mirror crumbled, including the library and the education block.

The buildings collapsed, and the rooms disappeared, with only the last toilet on the fourth floor remaining. The dried blood vessels protected this room heavily. With the infiltration of the black blood, the layer of blood vessels peeled off. The cubicles in the toilet turned illusory, and the doors started to disappear until it reached the last cubicle. Chen Ge had been there before, and he remembered the last cubicle not having a door. When the last blood vessel dropped away, the cubicles that had doors all disappeared, and a door surfaced on the last cubicle that originally did not have a door.

The door appeared like it had always been there. This non-existent door on the western and eastern campus was the only thing that was real on the two campuses. When the illusion fell away, the real door appeared.

The last cubicle in the fourth-floor toilet, that was where the door pusher entered the School of the Afterlife. Without the protection of the mirror, everyone saw the door. It was covered in cracks like it had been broken before and was slowly pieced back together.