Chapter 101 Human Skin
Drops of water fell from the cracks in the gray ceiling and landed in the Tiffany glass with a broken handle, which was already half full.
Tu Lanxun lay on the cramped wire bed, stiffness and pain coming from her back. She had been sleepless for six hours, or rather, she had not had a good night's sleep since moving into this low-rent house.
The thin wall panels provided poor sound insulation, and the sound of crying came from somewhere, interspersed with broken whispers. She curled up, sincerely hoping that it was a living person crying, not a dead person.
In this world, the dead really do cry.
Six years ago, large-scale supernatural events began to occur on Earth.
It started with someone posting that he was scared because a strange colleague appeared at the next workstation. He was also mocked by netizens, and "office giant baby" and "extreme i is a mental problem" became hot searches.
But the real climax was a white-collar murder case that made headlines. The victim was found dead at his workstation, with blood soaking the keyboard. When he was found, his eyes were still open, and the light from the computer screen where he had been working overtime the night before was reflected in his eyeballs.
The victim was the poster of the message, and the "strange colleague" he claimed to be was confirmed by the company to be not an employee of this office building at all.
As the investigation continued, the government’s citizen archives and facial information database showed that the murderer did not exist!
It literally means that there is no one in the world who is alive or has ever lived who has the face of the murderer.
The surveillance camera confirmed that the non-existent murderer looked like an ordinary person wearing a tie and a shirt. He disappeared into thin air after committing the crime.
He is a ghost.
The white-collar incident seemed to have opened a certain curtain. Bloody incidents with supernatural elements occurred in various places, and people began to be wary of strange faces appearing around them.
It could be an old man who suddenly appears in the community to pick up rubbish, or it could be a boy with a mask who chats up people on the subway. No one knows whether he is a living person or not.
This type of incident is collectively referred to as "mysterious invasion."
“Boom boom boom!”
“Boom boom boom!”
There were six consecutive bangs on the door, like a funeral annoyance, and even the glass began to shake. This had become commonplace over the past week. After waiting for a long time without the door being opened, the roars were mixed with the sounds of picking the lock.
Tu Lanxun closed his eyes, got up from the gap between the bed and the wall, took five steps, and unlocked the door. "Who are you looking for?"
Five burly men stood outside, the leader a fierce-looking villain. He spread his hands and said, "You are Miss Tu Lanxun, right? Chairman Tu still owes our boss five million. Pay up!"
"My mother is in the hospital," Tu Lanxun said. Thinking she was being evaded, she grew even more furious. Unexpectedly, she slowly pulled out a small notebook from behind her back, unscrewed the cap, and began to write down her debt. "What's your boss's name? When is the due date? Do you have an IOU or receipt?"
The debt collector was stunned and looked Tu Lanxun up and down. She was holding up the notebook, revealing a thin and white wrist, which seemed out of place in the gray air. Her black hair was slightly curly, and her expression was too gentle, like a black-haired lamb.
She doesn't look like the rumored daughter of a consortium, nor does she look like a poor person living in the slums.
Innocent, soft, and with a certain intelligence that is not animalistic.
Doesn't she know what they do?
A social worker with a gray background, with a knife on his waist, can cut a hole in her white skin, so that if she can't make money, she will bleed.
Tu Lanxun remained submissive, but the leader, with a look of impatience on his face, quickly waved a crumpled piece of paper in front of her eyes and slid a leg through the crack in the door, ready to force his way past Tu Lanxun and into the room. Before he could even get past her, he was already looking over her shoulder, searching the room for anything valuable.
The doors of the neighbors were tightly shut, and the debt collectors were huddled together. Suddenly, the lights in the corridor flickered wildly, and they all shrank back, stammering to the leader:
"Big, big brother, something's wrong! Has the house next door been invaded by something strange?"
Before he could finish his words, the door next door suddenly vibrated "dong dong dong". The big man in front of the door shrank back, "It wasn't me who knocked!"
It was knocked from inside the house.
There are a lot of payment reminders on the door. The top one shows that the water, electricity and gas were cut off half a year ago. How could anyone live there?
The leading man had already squeezed out of the door, but returned with nothing. He threw the broken-handled Tiffany glass on the mat and said, "There's nothing valuable here. Even a thief has to throw two dollars. Pah!"
"I will pay you back." Tu Lanxun stiffened his neck.
"Then I'll give you a month to borrow the money. If you don't pay it back, I'll drag your mother out of the hospital!"
After saying this, the debt collectors fled without looking back, saying as they fled, "Go back and tell the boss that I'm afraid the money won't be returned. Living in a place like this, I don't think this little girl will survive the weekend. What bad luck!"
Tu Lanxun picked up the copy of the IOU, closed the door and went back to the house. She could no longer maintain the calmness on her face. Her knees went weak and she sat on the ground with her back against the door, trembling uncontrollably. She hugged herself tightly.
She is most afraid of ghosts.
Nowadays, upscale residential communities have installed facial recognition systems to prevent strangers from entering. But Tu Lanxun lives in a run-down, tube-shaped building filled with temporary tenants who can't even pay for utilities, let alone security.
Fortunately, she had seen her next-door neighbor once, a woman with a sick face, so she should be alive.
Tu Lanxun breathed a sigh of relief and was about to lock the door, but the knocking sound did not stop and still echoed in his ears not far away.
Could it be... a distress signal?
For example, during an acute asthma attack, you can't shout, you crawl on the ground and curl up, and can only knock on things, just like being buried in an earthquake...
The knocking sound of the female neighbor saved Tu Lanxun once. No matter what, she couldn't just wait for the other person to die.
Tu Lanxun pressed the emergency number and after confirming that there was no one outside, he tiptoed back to the door next door. Without knocking rashly, he quietly listened through the crack of the door.
"Are you okay? Can you open the door from the inside?"
There was dead silence inside the door, with only the dull "dong dong" sound that hit her auditory nerves accurately through the door panel.
Sure enough, something happened.
Tu Lanxun stumbled forward and found that the door was not locked. She walked carefully into the neighbor's house next door. The floor made a dull creaking sound. She felt a little regretful and was ready to escape at any time.
The small space, barely enough to be called a living room, was empty. The knocking sound became clearer, coming from the direction of the bedroom, which was only separated from Tu Lanxun's bed by a wall. She walked over.
"Hello?" the female operator's voice rang out as the emergency line was connected. "Excuse me, is there anyone who needs help?"
No, not anymore...
Tu Lanxun's whole body was tense, saliva accumulated in her mouth, and her throat had lost even the instinct to swallow.
There was indeed someone in the bedroom next door. The human figure was flowing in an incredible manner beside the bed, and the shriveled thighs were bent and hanging along the edge of the bed, like a pair of green and yellow stockings draped there.
On the floor, the fierce black that spread all the way to the edge of the blue-painted Xun shoes was the scattered long hair, with a flat face embedded at the bottom. The slight bulge in the middle was the nose that had lost its support, and the narrow slits like buttonholes on both sides were the eyelids.
Dead, completely dead.
The slits of his eyes, which had lost their eyeballs, were slightly closed, as if he had just woken up from a nap, and the next second his leathery lips were about to move in a smile.
The neighbor had been dead for a long time, and the cause of death was definitely not human, because only a complete piece of human skin was left.
It was dry and moist, covered with a layer of glossy corpse wax. It was early winter, so it did not attract mosquitoes or flies, but Tu Lanxun still heard a buzzing sound in the void. She covered her chest and wanted to vomit but was interrupted.
"Dong, dong, dong..." The knocking sound continued in this empty room.
There was clearly no one knocking, as if the room was naturally noisy. Tu Lanxun took a step back, and her returning consciousness told her that she was involved in a strange incident and was standing at the crime scene.
Moreover, the lingering knocking sound indicated that the thing that killed the neighbor had not gone away.
……etc.
Tu Lanxun's breath hitched, and her gaze shifted to the human skin. On the other side of the wall was her residence, but the voice sounded even more muffled than before, as if there was a layer of separation. Could it be...
It came from her own home, which she had just left.
The murderous thing was hidden in her house.
Fortunately, she only stood at the door for a while and did not go back to lie on the bed. Perhaps when Tu Lanxun mustered up the courage to go out for the second time, the thing was less than five steps behind her, peeping at her with a gaze as cold and damp as the bottom of a lake.
If I didn't leave home in time...
A moment of compassion saved her life.
"Boom boom boom boom boom boom!" The sound suddenly became amplified, like the sound effects of passing a level in a quiz show.
Congratulations, you guessed it right. The reward is turning into a human skin.
Tu Lanxun turned and ran. Although her whole body was trembling, her speech became more nimble, and she fluently recited her name, address and building number. She tried hard to call for help from the operator on the other end of the phone, but the person on the other end suddenly shut up and didn't say another word.
The malicious silence was met with only a burst of electrical noise, as if the connection had been suddenly severed. With only a few signal bars remaining, the outside world unilaterally rejected Tu Lanxun's call for help.
She rushed out of her neighbor's house, without even looking at her own door, and ran straight downstairs. The cup with a broken handle suddenly began to roll on its own.
After turning two floors, the muted phone was reconnected and a noisy sound hit Tu Lanxun.
The call page was still frozen, but the person speaking was not the female operator.
A voice rang out simultaneously from the phone and in Tu Lanxun's ears. It was a male voice, distorted by the channel, with a rough edge. Every word was slightly hoarse, cold, and clear:
"Look back, I'm behind you."
The male voice's articulation was excessively precise, its tone cold and slightly uplifting, like a clip from an old news broadcast. Due to its excessive standardization, it felt more like a program generated, with a distinctly inhuman quality.
It was like a blade of grass soaked in dew from a lonely grave, cold and icy, brushing across Tu Lanxun's ears.
Tu Lanxun's chest heaved violently, and she dared not look behind her. She only felt a layer of numbness crawling up her spine. This was probably a psychological effect, and not that there was really something sticking to her back.
She ran so fast that she almost flew, afraid that the sound would happen again, and even forgot to throw away her cell phone.
The rusty unit door is right in front of me, and the bright light means safety. Even if there is a ghost sticking behind me, the possibility of shouting for help in a public place has become a straw worth holding on to.
Tu Lanxun jumped down the last half of the stairs, ignoring the pain in his ankle, and rushed outside without looking back.
The pale sunlight enveloped her from head to toe, and her blood gradually returned. Tu Lanxun stood there for two minutes before reacting. The mischievous cell phone was still in her hand.
The screen was cracked and not repaired, and it took a long time for the brightness to change according to the environment. The emergency call timed out and automatically hung up, so she turned off the phone.
Fortunately, there was no one around and she was safe.
"Ding-ling-ling-ling-ling—"
At the same second, his phone vibrated. Tu Lanxun almost threw it out like it was a cockroach, but only picked it up after seeing clearly what was going on. The caller ID showed a pile of feces emoji.
"Hey, Tu Lanxun, we agreed that if you dare to stay in that haunted house for one night, I will pay your mother's medical expenses for one day. What are you waiting for? You are not really that afraid of death, are you?" The young woman on the other side said sarcastically.
"I know. I'll be there soon." Tu Lanxun lowered his eyes, his voice soft and cold, without any emotion. "Yeah, yeah, I'll take pictures. I won't fool you."
The female voice laughed, then suddenly became malicious. "Well, if you die there, I promise to cover all of Aunt Tu's subsequent medical expenses. Come on."
Tu Lanxun hung up the phone and walked towards the exit of the community, which was actually just a shabby alley. His calves were trembling slightly, but his back was straight.
If she turned around at this moment, she would see a tall figure suddenly emerging from the empty frame of the unit door, his gaze following her direction. It was a pair of dusty peach blossom eyes, his eyeballs shattered like glass beads, and even his gaze was disordered.
The figure took a step towards her and then disappeared from the spot, leaving only an empty gray darkness.
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