Chapter 12 Blood Orchid of the Breath of Life (10) - The Story Comes True: You'll Meet the King of Hell at Midnight...

Who would knock on the door so late?

Lan Shuyin's heart skipped a beat, and she subconsciously sat up in bed, looking warily toward the door.

Hotel staff will not knock on the door without reason at this time. Even if they have something to say, they will identify themselves after knocking.

However, she held her breath and waited for a moment, but there was no sound from outside the door.

After the three clear knocks, there was only deathly silence, as if it had just been a hallucination caused by her over-excitement.

Lan Shuyin hesitated for a moment, then threw off the covers, stepped barefoot onto the cold floor, and tiptoed to the door.

She held her breath, hesitated for a moment, and then leaned closer to the cat's eye—

The area outside the door was empty.

In the dim light of the corridor, the carpet pattern stretched out all the way, but there was no one in sight.

There was no grotesque face suddenly appearing in the cat's eyes like in horror movies.

Just as she relaxed slightly, an extremely faint, almost imperceptible sound drifted in from somewhere far away in the corridor, as if through a heavy door.

The voice was faint, like a woman humming an off-key melody in the distance, the fragmented words barely discernible:

"Grandma Moon...don't look at it..."

The eerie humming made Lan Shuyin's expression harden. She gripped the tactical pen she had just picked up tightly with her right hand, and gently placed her left hand on the doorknob, silently opening the door a narrow crack.

She peered out through the crack in the door.

This time, she saw it.

At the end of the dimly lit corridor, in a place where the light could barely reach, stood the silhouette of a woman.

The most glaring thing was the pair of unusually bright red high heels she was wearing.

—A woman wearing red high heels.

Suddenly, Lan Shuyin remembered the story she had made up not long ago to scare Wu Yang.

At that moment, the previously faint singing gradually became clearer and drifted over.

With a chilling, almost tender tone, she hummed:

[See that, the shadowy figure laughed]

Seeing the black weasel beckoning

Its blood was scalding hot.

You can meet the King of Hell at midnight

Grandma Moon, don't look at it...

The eerie melody of the nursery rhyme struck her nerves with every word.

—Standing with his back to me at the end of the corridor, humming an off-key nursery rhyme…

Her description from that time still rings in my ears.

So next...

Lan Shuyin shivered involuntarily, immediately slammed the door shut, and locked it from the inside.

Then I picked up the room phone and called the front desk.

However, all that came through the receiver was a long, unanswered busy tone, echoing in the deathly silence.

With her mind racing, Lan Shuyin gritted her teeth and decisively dialed the police number on her own phone!

"Hello? This is the third floor of the Guoting Hotel!"

As soon as the call connected, she complained in an angry and impatient tone, speaking very quickly, "I don't know what's going on in the hallway, but someone's been making a ruckus in the middle of the night, singing and dancing like they're at a disco, it's so noisy I can't sleep at all! Can't you guys come and deal with this right away? The front desk of this lousy hotel is like they're sleepwalking, I can't get through to them on the phone no matter what!"

After quickly explaining the address and situation, she hung up the phone, gripped the cold tactical pen tightly again, and retreated to the center of the room.

She didn't go back to bed, but leaned against the wall, like a fully drawn bow, alertly listening for any subtle, unusual movement outside the door.

Time passed slowly.

About ten minutes later, a sudden burst of noise finally came from the corridor outside the door, growing louder as it approached—it seemed to be footsteps, muffled conversations, and the crackling sound of a walkie-talkie.

After a while, footsteps stopped in front of her door.

This time, the knocking was firm and precise. Lan Shuyin quickly stepped forward and opened the door.

A young male police officer stood outside the door, the body camera on his shoulder glowing a faint red light.

"Did you call the police?" he asked, his voice steady with professionalism.

Lan Shuyin was prepared to be scolded for making a false report or questioned for overreacting. After all, in the ten minutes or so after the call was made, there were indeed no more strange noises coming from outside the door.

She even felt that the worst possibility was that she had actually seen something unclean.

However, the young police officer was surprisingly calm. He even sighed slightly and explained, "We checked. It was a tenant living on the other side of the corridor. She's a cosplayer and was just practicing imitating a character's movements and voice. It's fine now; we've given her a verbal warning."

Coser?

Lan Shuyin closed the door in a daze, leaning against the door panel, her mind a little confused.

The image of the woman she had just seen at the end of the corridor, a woman in bright red high heels with a blurry figure, flashed through her mind, and she fell into deep self-doubt.

However, Lan Shuyin didn't know that after she closed the door—

The young policeman's calm expression vanished instantly, replaced by a coldness and composure beyond his years.

He strode to the corner of the corridor, removed the body camera from his shoulder, and then ripped off his outermost police uniform.

Beneath the police uniform was a completely different set of uniforms—a red and white stand-up collar windproof fabric with an exquisite gold badge embroidered on the chest, the badge featuring a Bagua (eight trigrams) encircling a paulownia leaf. At first glance, it even resembled the uniform of a courier or food delivery company.

As soon as he turned the corner at the end of the corridor, two sharp-looking men, also dressed in red and white uniforms, came to greet him.

"Captain Yao," one of them said in a low voice, "the detector detected a slight lag at the end of the corridor, but no substantial findings were made."

Another person immediately followed up with, "Is it possible that this 'Yinyin's Iron Fist' had already noticed that we were monitoring her and was deliberately playing us for a fool?"

The young man, referred to as Team Leader Yao, had sharp eyes. After a moment of contemplation, he shook his head. "It doesn't seem like it. I observed her reaction up close just now. The shock and subsequent self-doubt were very real. It was a state of 'firmly believing she had encountered a ghost' yet trying to convince herself with reason, not a pretense. She must have actually seen something that the instruments couldn't detect."

"If only we actually had any 'goods'," the first team member said, unable to hide his disappointment. "That's a real achievement, worth so many scarce resources... It was all for nothing."

"Don't let your guard down." Team Leader Yao's expression turned serious as he glanced at the two men. "Qinyang has been unusually lively lately. All sorts of people are rushing to that desolate and gloomy place like Qigu Village, like vultures that have smelled blood. There must be some extraordinary treasure about to appear. Those guys have a much better nose than we do."

His voice was deep and cold as he continued, "Increase surveillance manpower. Implement Level Two Deep Surveillance on all targets active in the area, especially lone explorers. Packs of hyenas are nothing to worry about; the real threat is lone wolves. If any valuable treasure is lost right under our Third Team's nose..."

He paused, his unfinished words chillingly cold: "At that time, it won't just be the Qinyang branch that loses face."

"Also, have Yang Hao go see Chen Bin again. It's true that his brother died a violent death, but he can't keep hiding from us."

...

Lan Shuyin fell asleep while listening to patriotic songs.

This unconventional calming melody had an immediate effect, not only forcibly pulling her out of the terror brought on by the eerie corridor, but also preventing even a single nightmare from haunting her.

The next morning, she was awakened by the sunlight, reached for her phone, and found that Wu Yang had forwarded her a video half an hour earlier.

Lan Shuyin clicked on it and noticed that the video, which was posted in the early hours of this morning, had already gone viral, with the number of likes exceeding an astonishing one million and still growing rapidly.

The video was actually filmed in that eerie ancestral hall in Qigu Village.

However, the legendary armchair that was said to be "suitable for ghosts, not humans" has disappeared.

Where the chairs were originally placed, on the ground about the size of a stool, dozens of strange flowers, each about half a foot tall, suddenly sprouted out of nowhere!

These flowers have no leaves, and their petals are long and slender, resembling orchids, but their color is as rich as congealed blood, making them eerily striking.

Perhaps due to the lighting during the shoot or the effect of post-processing, the surface of the petals has an unnatural, metallic matte finish.

The most chilling part is the flower's center—instead of a stamen, it's a small, slowly writhing, dark red, gelatinous mass, seemingly alive. It rises and falls slightly as if breathing on its own, and you can vaguely see a viscous "juice" flowing slowly inside, exuding an ominous and bewitching eerie beauty.

The video was posted by a completely new account with no history. The video caption was only one sentence, yet it was enough to ignite the entire internet:

"The legendary 'Blood Orchid of the Breath of Earth' has truly appeared in Qigu Village!"

This video, released in the early hours of the morning, unsurprisingly climbed into the top three of the platform's trending list due to its astonishing content!

The comment section below was already in an uproar, with all sorts of bizarre and mysterious opinions:

[Holy crap! It really is the Blood Orchid of the Breath of Life! It's a miraculous medicine recorded in ancient books that can cure all poisons and restore flesh and bone! I never thought I'd see it with my own eyes in my lifetime!]

[This woman is so alluring... I feel like my soul is being sucked in if I look at her too much!]

[This blogger is incredibly bold! They dared to get so close to this thing to take a picture? Aren't they afraid of shortening their lifespan? It's said that such extremely yin treasures are guarded by something...]

[Haha, which team did the special effects again? The props department deserves a bonus! But next time, remember to make it more realistic; that wriggling flower looked so fake, like cheap special effects.]

[The person upstairs knows nothing! That metallic sheen and gelatinous texture are impossible to replicate! My family genealogy records that the Blood Orchid of the Breath of Earth, born from the yin energy of the earth, has a flower heart containing the essence of life and death—that's exactly what it looks like!]

[Location: Qinyang, already bought tickets! Anyone want to team up and try our luck? If we manage to pick one, we'll be financially independent!]

[I advise you not to court death. Seventh Aunt Village is a very haunted place. Whether this thing is a treasure is debatable, but it's definitely not meant for ordinary people.]

[Share this to pray for good fortune! Everyone who sees it will receive a share! I don't ask for immortality, I just hope I don't fail my final exams!]

Lan Shuyin casually refreshed the comment section, and a popular comment that had just been liked by the video creator immediately caught her eye:

[Could the blogger be one of those legendary "treasure hunters"? How could they pinpoint such a rare and precious item so precisely? Please reply to my private messages! If this flower is indeed genuine, I'm willing to offer a seven-figure sum to purchase it!]

Treasure hunter.

Lan Shuyin narrowed her eyes slightly, and the image of that handsome young man with mysterious and unpredictable manners flashed through her mind almost immediately.

Could it be him?

However, she had personally set foot in that gloomy and dilapidated ancestral hall.

There was nothing there except decay, dust, and that eerie empty chair.

How could such a strange and illogical flower grow out of thin air overnight?