Chapter 39 The Cause of the Ghost in Room 106 (Bonus Chapter with 8,000 words of nutrient content) ...
The pregnant woman who died in childbirth in room 106 was among the first group of people to move into the Liwan Apartment complex. At that time, the complex had only been built for a short period of time, and no murders had occurred yet.
The tenant of room 106 is a veterinarian who works at a pet hospital.
She loves animals and not only keeps seven cats at home, but also frequently feeds stray cats near the Liwan Apartments.
Moreover, she not only feeds them, but also pays out of her own pocket to spay/neuter, deworm, and take them to the vet for the stray cats near her apartment. Thanks to her efforts, those stray cats are all doing well, and their numbers have not increased.
But besides people who love small animals, there are also people in this world who like to use helpless small animals to vent their emotions and satisfy their perverted and twisted desires.
The veterinarian was five months pregnant when she noticed a significant decrease in the number of stray cats around her apartment.
Because of her poor health and severe pregnancy symptoms, she took maternity leave and stayed home to recuperate.
Because she stayed in the apartment all day, she could go out at any time during the day to check on the stray cats, which is how she discovered where the stray cats that had disappeared near the apartment had gone.
She saw her beloved pet, whom she had always carefully cared for, turned into a bloody mess, carelessly tossed into an alley like trash... Its bones were all crushed, and on its head, which was missing half a piece, the only remaining eye was wide open, seemingly unable to understand why humans would harm it, even in death.
She nearly fainted after witnessing this scene.
After leaning against the alley wall for a while to recover, the veterinarian finally came to his senses. With tears in his eyes, he went home to get a small shovel and garbage bags, and buried all the dead stray cats.
In order to find the person who secretly abused and killed stray cats, she mentioned it in the residents' group chat and even paid out of her own pocket to buy many cameras and install them in the alleys that originally had no surveillance.
Finally, a week later, she caught the person who abused the cat.
It was an adult male wearing a mask. He didn't look like a tenant of Liwan Apartments. Judging from his clothes, he was probably an unemployed hoodlum who loitered around the nearby wholesale market.
When the veterinarian saw on the security camera that the man had caught another cat and walked into the alley, she found several apartment tenants who had pets. Together, they went into the alley and cornered the man.
The man was forced to release the stray cat and appeared somewhat embarrassed and angry because he was surrounded by people.
He originally intended to vent his anger on the pregnant veterinarian who was clearly defenseless, but luckily, one of the tenants who came with the veterinarian was a male tenant who owned three huskies.
The muscular male tenant punched the cat abuser to the ground, and then the others took him to the police station.
However, since the cat that was killed was a stray and did not involve damage to other people's property, the law enforcement officers at the police station only gave the scoundrel a verbal reprimand and told him not to do it again.
Later, the veterinarian felt indignant and exposed what the man had done on various online social media platforms.
Although the photos and videos were blurred, the man's true identity was still found after netizens meticulously analyzed the surveillance video frame by frame, and he became a pariah.
Under public scrutiny, the thug disappeared for a period of time, and the stray cats around Liwan Apartment were no longer persecuted.
This continued until the veterinarian was eight months pregnant.
That morning, she went to the hospital for a prenatal checkup.
The veterinarian's husband works in the oil industry. Due to the nature of his job, he needs to work away from home for three months before he can come home for a month of rest.
Her husband wouldn't be home for another week, so she had been going to the hospital for prenatal checkups alone during this time.
During her prenatal checkup that day, the veterinarian felt particularly uneasy. It seemed like every stray cat passing by on the street was meowing at her, and the cries of babies in the maternity ward sounded just like the howling of kittens.
As she walked out of the hospital and prepared to take a car back to Liwan Apartment, two stray cats suddenly appeared on the roadside and circled around her feet.
At the time, the veterinarian didn't notice anything wrong, simply assuming that she was just too stressed during her late pregnancy.
After shooing the two cats away with the cat treats she carried with her, she took a car back to her Liwan apartment.
In stark contrast to being surrounded by various cats outside, when she returned to her apartment in Liwan, none of the cats she had fed and who were already very familiar with her appeared.
The veterinarian grew increasingly uneasy and quickened his pace to get home.
The moment she pushed open the door to room 106, she saw more than a dozen blood-soaked cat skins nailed to the wall facing the entrance.
On the floor, her seven cats had also been dismembered; cat carcasses were scattered on the ground, and blood stained the floor and flowed to the doorway.
The veterinarian thought she was having a nightmare, or that she was just seeing things... She stumbled in disbelief, trying to prove that everything in the room was a hallucination.
But as soon as she took a step, she stepped on the cat blood that had flowed to the doorway, slipped, and fell heavily to the ground.
Her health wasn't very good to begin with, and this fall caused her water to break, with blood and amniotic fluid flowing out together, mixing with the cat's blood on the ground.
Despite the excruciating pain, the veterinarian struggled to crawl to the door, trying to reach the handbag that had fallen there, and took out his phone to call an ambulance.
However, at that moment, a familiar figure wearing a mask appeared at the door of room 106.
He picked up the veterinarian's briefcase and slammed the door shut.
Until her death, the veterinarian lay weakly by the door, calling for help, but because it was a weekday, no one in the apartment heard her cries.
In the photos in the case file, her body lay alongside the dismembered cat carcasses, her clothes stained crimson with blood beneath her. Her hands were pounding on the door, her fingernails curled outwards, leaving cat-scratch-like bloody marks below the door.
After the veterinarian died, her unborn child also suffocated in her womb, resulting in the deaths of both mother and child.
Zhou Fangdong finished reading the case file with mixed feelings.
Because the information did not mention the fate of the cat abuser or whether he was arrested, Zhou Fangdong vaguely guessed what was going on and quickly read through all the case files for the murders in room 106.
Finally, in a document in room 106, he found the death file of the cat abuser.
No one knows what the man's mindset was when he moved into room 106, but he only lived in the room for three days, and his death was extremely tragic.
Aside from his facial skin, his entire body was covered in festering sores, and numerous bluish-purple growths resembling cat heads had sprouted on the sides of his neck. His hands were deformed, with finger bones protruding through the flesh and twisted into the shape of cat claws. He also had a growth on his abdomen resembling a baby's face, but instead of human ears, it had cat ears.
Zhou Fangdong then reviewed the detailed files of the other tenants who died in Room 106 and found that only this man's death was so gruesome.
The other tenants' death photos only showed bruised skin, as if they had suffered a heart attack due to sudden shock.
Judging from the veterinarian's death records and the manner of the cat abuser's death, the ghost in room 106 is likely related to cats.
In the previous world, Zhou Fangdong had also heard of similar ghosts and monsters related to cats.
He had a colleague from Nanjing. When Zhou Fangdong attended his colleague's wedding, he heard his colleague mention a folk taboo circulating in the Nanjing area—"the cat ghost steals the wedding."
During the wedding ceremony, the wedding car should avoid Phoenix Street or places where large numbers of cat carcasses are buried.
The saying goes, "I'd rather take a three-kilometer detour than walk the Cat Ghost Path."
Legend has it that in the former residence of Ganxi in Nanjing, a wealthy merchant and his entire family were poisoned to death, and all the cats he kept at the Hundred Cats Pavilion were also cruelly murdered. The resentment of the people who died violently combined with the resentment of the abused cats to create cat ghosts.
Because this place is filled with resentment, the joy of a wedding will clash with the resentment, so weddings cannot be held nearby, otherwise the cat ghost will haunt the marriage and ruin it.
This cat ghost is more like a feng shui formation caused by resentment, rather than the work of an ordinary ghost.
"Is room 106 also in a similar situation to the cat ghost stealing happiness? Is it because the resentment of the cat and the person has merged into the house and become part of the room's feng shui, which is why no ghosts can be found?"
Zhou Fangdong frowned, completely at a loss as to how to clean the house.
Although they roughly knew what the ghost in room 106 was, they couldn't find any trace of the cat ghost in the room.
Without finding the cat ghost, one cannot use mind-reading to learn its killing patterns and create tenant rules.
Moreover, the grease in this room was caused by the cat ghost, so even fully automatic cleaning tools are ineffective, and ordinary cleaning tools are probably unlikely to work either.
This is so tricky...
"Young friend, do you wish to cleanse these cat ghosts in room 106?" A hoarse, aged voice suddenly rang out from outside the door.
Zhou Fangdong came to his senses and looked in the direction of the sound, only to find that Zhang Zhiwu had appeared at the door of room 106 at some point.
Zhang Zhiwu originally left the room to call Zhang Qingyang out for morning lessons, but as soon as he reached the door of room 107, he suddenly noticed that the door to room 106 was open, so he glanced inside.
Unexpectedly, at this glance, I saw the current landlord of Liwan Apartments standing on top of 'Cat Fat Calamity'.
"Yang" usually refers to disasters and calamities. In Feng Shui terms, it also means evil spirits. The last breath a person exhales after death is also called "Yang".
This 'cat-fat calamity' is a kind of earthly filth phenomenon formed by cat ghosts.
Because a large number of cats died in one place, the stench of their decaying corpses and their resentment before death drew out the earth's malevolent energy, forming a yellowish-black oil stain. This oil stain is essentially a tangible malevolent curse... In a damp environment, these oil stains will even sprout gray cat fur.
Judging from the Taoist priest's tone, he seemed to know how to deal with the ghost in room 106. Thinking of this, Zhou Fangdong quickly walked to the door: "Taoist priest, you know about cat ghosts? Then do you know how to clean this grease? Is this stuff harmful to humans?"
Zhang Zhiwu stroked his beard: "If we don't want to get rid of the cat ghosts, but only these cat-eating demons, that's simple. I'll go and call my apprentice over and have him recite the 'Supreme Chapter for Suppressing Cat Spirits' a few times in his room. He hasn't done his morning prayers yet."
"As for whether it is harmful to the human body... these things are indeed harmful to the human body. If a living person comes into contact with this grease, they will develop ring-shaped coin-shaped rashes. Over time, these coin-shaped rashes will spread all over the body until the skin ulcerates all over the body, as if being licked by a cat's tongue with barbs."
At this point, Zhang Zhiwu's gaze shifted to the grease still clinging to Zhou Fangdong's hands. He paused, then added, "Of course, such a curse is nothing to you, young friend."
"If you don't want this grease to accumulate in the room again, I can draw four talismans for you. You can stick them in the four corners of room 106."
Zhou Fangdong breathed a sigh of relief.
The Taoist priest's expertise is truly in the right place; the ghost tenant he rented out was incredibly valuable, he's practically a walking encyclopedia.
Just as Zhou Fangdong was about to ask how to find the Cat Ghost, a pop-up window suddenly appeared in the system:
[Beep—Room 102 tenant has successfully entered the Main God's Supernatural Dungeon! Dungeon Erosion Hidden Features Unlocked!]
[The host can also, based on the rental agreement, use the tenant and the key to room 102 as intermediaries to use the ghostly entity in the room to invade the copy and steal the main god system's energy!]
The map interface shared by the exploration function and the dungeon invasion function popped up.
On the map of Linjiang City, a small purple dot appeared, which could be clicked to see a live broadcast of that location.
Room 102... Isn't Duan Wenyu the tenant of room 102?
Zhou Fangdong's heart clenched as he thought of Duan Wenyu, who had excitedly told him yesterday that he was going out to work.
Good grief, what happened to the internship? Why did the Anomaly Surveillance Bureau send his tenant to such a dangerous place to investigate? Is this a place for intern investigators?
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A note from the author: The author has never been to Nanjing and has no knowledge of feng shui or metaphysics. All metaphysical information in this article is fabricated based on online rumors and ancient records. Do not believe or try it.
① *Qing Jia Lu*, Volume 3, Marriage (by Gu Lu)
"When the bride's sedan chair passed by the cat's grave, a cold wind blew up the curtain, and claw marks appeared inside the sedan chair... The bride would be widowed within three years, which was called 'the cat ghost stealing her happiness' in Wuzhong." (Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 1986 reprint, p. 121)
②《Baixia Suoyan·Volume 4》(Gan Xi)
"Many cat bone pagodas exist in the western part of Nanjing. When people get married, they must scatter money to ward off bad luck. In the year Renshen of the Tongzhi reign, there was a bridal sedan chair for which no money was scattered. When the bride was about to get married, she suddenly cried like a cat, tore her wedding dress, and went mad... This is proof that cats have brought misfortune to the wedding." (Jiangsu Guangling Ancient Books Printing House, 1997 reprint, p. 215)
③ Jinling Suishi Ji (Chronicles of Jinling: Wedding Customs) (Pan Zongding)
"When the bride passes the Cat Bone Mound, the sedan chair poles must be stained with rooster blood. It is said that the Gan family forgot to perform the ritual when marrying off their daughter, which led to the bride being cursed..." (Nanjing Publishing House, 2006 revised edition, p. 89)
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