Nightmare Apostle

Chapter 293: Chapter 254: The Person in the Mirror

No one would have thought that Qu Yi’s corpse would appear here; this was Cheng Ya’s room, yet Qu Yi was supposed to have gone to Room 5042 last night, which was the room of the novelist, Mr. Wen.

"How could Qu Yi be here?" Li Qingxuan was stunned. He leaned in to confirm over and over again that the shattered face was indeed Qu Yi’s. The corpse was in tatters, as if it had been burst by a giant hand.

Yang Xiao knew that Qu Yi was experienced and wouldn’t abandon a mission for no reason. She must have run into some trouble to end up in Cheng Ya’s room.

Of course, there was another stranger matter: where was Cheng Ya, who should have been in this room?

"Could she be in Qu Yi’s room?" Li Qingxuan suddenly speculated.

The group did not delay any further and decided to go to Qu Yi’s room to investigate. But as soon as they stepped out of the room and back into the hallway, Yang Xiao, who was at the back of the group, suddenly stopped, "Wait!"

Fu Xuechang turned around impatiently, "What’s up?" The successive events had made everyone’s mood irritable.

Yang Xiao took a few steps back, distancing himself from the room door, and as he did, everyone else tensed up, "I thought I heard something inside just now." Yang Xiao wasn’t sure.

They had rushed in and out without conducting a thorough search of the room. After Yang Xiao’s remark, they returned to the room. Indeed, after holding their breath, they really heard a slight rustling sound, like something was slowly wriggling.

What made everyone’s hair stand on end was that the sound was actually coming from the bedroom.

Li Qingxuan picked up a mop pole from the corner of the wall and led the way into the bedroom. But this time, the rustling sound disappeared again, as if playing hide-and-seek with the group.

Li Qingxuan took a deep breath, poked the corpse with the mop pole to confirm it was thoroughly dead and didn’t move at all.

The rest searched the bedroom: they opened closet doors, looked under the desk, checked behind the curtains, and even tapped the ceiling with the mop pole to see if there was a cavity behind it, covering every possible hiding spot until only one place remained.

All eyes converged in the same spot: beneath the bed, which was covered in blood and had the corpse lying on it.

For a moment, no one dared to move, not knowing if there was someone—or something—hiding underneath. The prospect of a ghost suddenly jumping out was too thrilling.

The bedsheet was quite large and hung over the edge of the bed to the floor. To inspect underneath, one had to either crouch and lift the bedsheet to peek inside or flip the entire bed over along with the corpse on top of it.

Li Qingxuan, holding the mop pole, was also feeling nervous, unsure what to do next until someone patted his arm. He turned his head sharply to see it was Yang Xiao.

Rather than lying down to look or flipping the whole bed over, Yang Xiao chose a more conservative approach. He tiptoed to the side of the bed, squatted down, and then, under the horrified gazes of everyone, jabbed the mop pole hard under the bed.

The next second, a scream came from under the bed; Yang Xiao was so scared that he jumped up and ran off. Before the others could react, he had already dashed out of the bedroom.

Li Qingxuan hadn’t expected Teacher Yang to be so agile. Despite being in the worst position, the furthest from the bedroom door, he was the first to run out.

Soon after, a frenzied figure covered in blood crawled out from under the bed, wailing incessantly: it was none other than Cheng Ya.

Tong Han immediately stepped forward, pulled her out, and gave her two sharp slaps.

"Slap!"

"Slap!"

Cheng Ya, having been slapped, became noticeably more lucid. Although her eyes were full of fear and her body still shook, at least she stopped screaming.

Mo Daidai, whose heart had finally settled down, gave Li Qingxuan a grateful smile, "Please call Chu Xi back."

Yang Xiao had already run to the safety passageway at the end of the hallway. Seeing Li Qingxuan beckoning to him, he cautiously made his way back. freewebnøvel.com

Upon examination, Cheng Ya was unharmed; the blood on her was all Qu Yi’s. It had seeped down through a gap in the bed.

"What in the world is going on, how did Qu Yi die in your room?" Fu Changxue, who had a fiery temper, interrogated Cheng Ya fiercely.

Cheng Ya, who had been fiddled with by the Resentful Eye, was originally not very clear-headed, and on top of being frightened, she was in a poor state, repeatedly muttering, "Mirror... mirror..."

"What mirror? Clarify!"

Cheng Ya shakily raised her hand, pointing outside the bedroom door with a look of sheer terror on her face, "Mirror... bathroom... Ball-slapping Ghost. The Ball-slapping Ghost is there!"

Hearing the words Ball-slapping Ghost triggered unease in everyone’s hearts. They only knew that a ghost hitting a ball would appear in the apartment after midnight, but what was this Ball-slapping Ghost?

Although it was daylight and they were numerous, when they kicked open the wooden door of the bathroom, the scene before them caused them to tense up.

The dimly lit bathroom was fairly clean, but the mirror stuck on the washstand was spattered with blood, and the glass was covered in layers of handprints—a few dozen in total, suggesting that someone drenched in blood had been desperately hitting the mirror.

Mo Daidai walked up alone and touched the mirror’s surface. The next second, his brows furrowed involuntarily, as he stared at his fingertips, which had no trace of blood on them.

The bloody handprint was not on the mirror’s surface, but inside the mirror.

"Look here!" Tong Han’s sharp eyes immediately noticed the bottom right corner of the mirror, where a character was written in blood.

The handwriting was skewed and twisted, clearly left in haste.

"That’s not the character for ’eye’, it’s Qu Yi’s surname Qu, but she didn’t manage to finish writing it before the ghost killed her."

Combining the current clues with Cheng Ya’s intermittent recollections, Yang Xiao roughly deduced what had occurred last night.

Cheng Ya was resting in her room when she suddenly heard the sound of something slapping the bathroom mirror. Knowing Cheng Ya’s bravery, she definitely wouldn’t dare to look, so she hid under the bed until dawn when they came looking for her.

Gazing at the mirror, Li Qingxuan appeared contemplative, "Qu Yi entered the Mirror World, but how did she manage that?"

"We should ask Mr. Wen from room 5042." Mo Daidai spoke up, "I think it must have been a deviation in Qu Yi’s assigned task that got her locked inside the Mirror World, where she then encountered the most terrifying ghost in this apartment." free𝑤ebnovel.com

"The Source Ghost?" Fu Changxue blurted out. Now, that was hardly a secret anymore.

"Right," Mo Daidai nodded.

"I think Qu Yi might have had the chance to escape last night, but no one saved her," Yang Xiao analyzed. "If Cheng Ya had run into the bathroom then and pulled her out, perhaps... she could have survived."

"How did you all deal with the mirrors in your rooms?" Yang Xiao suddenly asked.

"This thing looks weird. Whenever I’m on a task and there’s a mirror in the room, I either take it down and place it upside down or cover the surface with something if it can’t be taken down," Fu Changxue was the first to reply.

All of them were experienced players; their methods for dealing with mirrors were nearly identical. This made it clear to Yang Xiao that only Cheng Ya’s room lacked a covered mirror last night, which was likely why the trapped Qu Yi sought her out.

"So you’re saying someone trapped behind the mirror can see through it to the outside, and if the mirror is covered, that thing won’t be able to find you," Li Qingxuan understood perfectly.

The group searched the room and found nothing but a grisly corpse, with no other clues to be found. They helped the terrified Cheng Ya leave.

Back in the security room, the new task assignments were already posted on the wall, along with an envelope with bloody handprints on it, delivered by the male manager.

More importantly, the photo under the glass of the security room table had changed; the previously blurry and yellowed old photos had suddenly become clear.

When Yang Xiao saw one of the photos, he couldn’t help but pause; the photo showed a family of three smiling together in harmony, the child in the middle, but the more one looked at that smiling face, the more uncomfortable it felt, stiff as if it were painted on.

Most crucially, Yang Xiao noticed a small mirror with a bronze-colored casing hanging around the child’s neck, its surface so blurred it looked as though it was veiled in mist.

He immediately thought of the words Teacher Zuo Qiu Shude had told him the night before; this photo must be the family photograph the old physician mentioned.

And this small mirror with a bronze casing was the Resentful Eye that triggered the supernatural events. They had to find it, as well as the missing child.

At this moment, the married couple had identical bronze-wide rings on their left hands, and to everyone’s amazement, when they looked closely, they could make out the pattern on the rings.

It was a dragon and snake intertwined at the tail, the dragon’s head roaring up to the sky while the snake’s head spat out its tongue, exactly like the tattoo on the man who had died on the first night.

Yang Xiao knew this was a symbol of an evil cult. Following this line of thinking, the middle-aged man from earlier was a cultist who had infiltrated this task.

But Yang Xiao felt that things weren’t that simple; the man seemed more like a distraction thrown out deliberately, a decoy. The real cultists were hiding among the remaining people.

From the clues known so far, Yang Xiao had a bold guess that this task was far from simple. He was unsure how these cultists infiltrated the group, but their purpose must be for the Resentful Eye.

If anyone asked Yang Xiao to give an example, he would say that Zuo Qiu Shude’s child was like a human-shaped culture dish; the evil cultivators aimed to cultivate the Resentful Eye with the child’s flesh and blood, and now was the time for the fruit to ripen, so these guys came along.

Stabilizing his mind, Yang Xiao looked unobtrusively at the second photo, which featured a yellowed piece of paper, or more accurately, a handwritten letter, with rather messy writing.

The letter stated that the couple had done everything they could, planning to burn their child together with the evil ghost using gasoline, as it was the only way to save them.

But it was too late; the evil ghost had descended and taken the child, hiding it where no one could find it.

At the end of the letter, the writer left an important piece of information: to eradicate the evil ghost, one must retrieve the child and burn it with gasoline in the bedroom of their home.

The emotional writer repeated three times not to hesitate, not to hesitate, not to hesitate!! This was no longer their child; the real child was already dead, this was an evil ghost using the child’s shell to be reborn!

The signature was Zuo Qiu Shude.