Chapter 17

He played the game of mole with the groom's corpse all night last night, and was face to face with the bride through a cheap white wreath in the morning. Now he was grabbed by the ankles by an unknown thing and hugged back to back by a paper man. The last string of reason in Yu Tu's mind was broken.

Instead of being afraid of internal friction, it is better to go crazy and hurt others!

Yu Tu struggled desperately in the paper-stitched man's confinement. He freed one hand and roughly grabbed the red paper on the paper-stitched man's arm and tore it apart. Amid the paper-stitched man's screams, Yu Tu's voice was louder than his: "Shut up!!"

"What is the use of shouting for something without vocal cords? Are you a scientist?!"

His voice was even more righteous and powerful than the scream of the paper-studded man. For a moment, it even overwhelmed the man's momentum. Yu Tu decided to go all out and tore off all the red paper on the paper-studded man's arms, leaving only the bamboo skeleton.

Then he stomped on the paper-bound man's feet, and the sound of bamboo breaking was heard. The paper-bound man seemed to be able to feel the pain, and the restraints loosened. Yu Tu took the opportunity to escape from the paper-bound man's arms.

After being rescued, the first thing Yu Tu did was not to run away, but to take out a lighter from his pocket with his right hand and light the red paper torn from the paper-studded man in his left hand.

As soon as the faint flame appeared, the paper man who was about to pounce on him retreated repeatedly. Although there were only two red dots where his eyes should be and his expression was stiff, one could still see a hint of fear on his simple head.

Yu Tu held the red paper in his left hand and waved it around wildly. Wherever he went, the black waves quickly retreated. The paper-studded people ran around in panic, and a group of ghost-like creatures were driven around by him.

"If you have the guts, stop and don't run———" Yu Tu shouted very loudly, "Weren't you very proud when you caught me just now? Your laughter made my head hurt!"

No one paid any attention to him. The paper-made man, with its two bamboo arms exposed, ignored Newton's laws and ran along the wall to the beam. It lay on the beam, lowered its head and looked at him grimly.

The black wave had been forced to the corner by the flames on the red paper used by Yu Tu, and shrunk into a ball, which looked a bit pitiful. When Yu Tu took a step forward, the black retreated a little, and it seemed that the roles were reversed, and Yu Tu was the evil one.

The amount of red paper torn off the paper man was limited after all. When the last bit of red paper was about to burn his hand, Yu Tu threw it to the ground. Seeing that the faint spark was about to go out, the black in the corner was ready to move, and the paper man on the beam above his head also cast a glance over—

Yu Tu sneered under their gaze. When he was chasing the man with the burning red paper, he deliberately went to a corner and pulled down a long white cloth strip. Now that the red paper was burned out, it was time for the white cloth strip to appear.

Yu Tu turned on the lighter with a click and held the white cloth in front of the flame: "Come on! Keep going!"

Anyway, after today, he has no idea what the two missions will look like after they intersect, and he is not sure if he can survive until the end of the mission. He might as well vent his anger now!

"I think this house is also made of wood! Why don't I just burn it down!" Yu Tu's expression was even more deranged than the paper man. "If you kill me, I will burn you to death! Those who can't be burned to death will be killed by the sun!"

"We will perish together!" Yu Tu said forcefully, "The main goal is to leave no one alive!"

His words fell with a thud, and silence spread silently in this dark space - perhaps no ghost had ever seen such a battle.

The lighter kept making a "click, click" sound, and the flame lit up and went out, and then lit up again, as if challenging the ghost's psychological endurance limit.

The two sides were in a stalemate for a while, and the black wave huddled in the corner of the wall was the first to compromise. They slowly dispersed along the cracks in the wall, merged into the floor tiles, and disappeared without a trace.

The paper-strap man was still lying on the beam, still in that strange posture, but the malice emanating from it was much less. It was estimated that the thing controlling the paper-strap man had temporarily left.

Yu Tu finally made up his mind to move the flame of the lighter away from under the white cloth. The moment he took back the lighter, there was an illusion that this area breathed a sigh of relief.

Anything that could pose a temporary threat to him disappeared, and Yu Tu quickly began to search the old building. If he came here tomorrow, things might not be as smooth as today.

The old building has two floors. The first floor is paved with square stone bricks, and the load-bearing column in the center is built into the shape of a tower. After the black wave dissipated, the light became brighter and it could be seen that the tower had eighteen floors. The distance between each two floors was very short, and there were black holes as big as fists on all sides. Yu Tu used a lighter to shine at the entrance of the hole. It was pitch black inside and nothing could be seen clearly.

In addition to the tower-shaped load-bearing columns, the beams on the first floor are also built in a particularly strange way. I don’t know how the load-bearing function is designed. Anyway, standing underneath and looking up, it looks like a net laid from top to bottom, and people standing underneath are like prey in the net.

After walking around the first floor, Yu Tu found the stairs leading to the second floor. The stairs were extremely narrow, and people could only lean against the wall sideways and climb up like a sideways crab. However, the stairs were very high, with each step nearly half a meter. Yu Tu leaned against the wooden stairs, as if he was leaning on a piece of ice, and in front of him was a rotten wooden handrail, which made a creaking sound when his hand touched it.

In such an environment, Yu Tu even lost his focus for a moment. Those black things were still inexperienced. If they attacked when people were climbing the stairs, it would be like catching a turtle in a jar, killing them indiscriminately.

Fortunately, they and the paper-made people seemed to be harmless, and Yu Tu climbed to the second floor smoothly. The second floor was actually a narrow staircase built along the beams of the house, which circled above the old building to form a closed circle.

It seemed as if the staircase was built without any consideration for its users. In some places one could still stand upright, but in others one could only crawl over with a bent back, otherwise one would hit one's head against the beams.

Yu Tu had only walked halfway around the narrow staircase when spider webs hung all over his head. From where he was standing, he could already see the paper man lying on the beam. The paper man's head was resting on the beam, with a pair of bare, bamboo-like arms hanging down. No matter when he looked at it, the two red dots on its head seemed to be looking at Yu Tu.

Yu Tu'e glared back fiercely and waved the lighter in his hand. The paper-studded man was silent for a moment, turned his head 180 degrees, and changed direction.

Without that kind of following gaze, Yu Tu could finally relax and take in the surroundings. Looking down from this angle, he saw many long white cloth strips and many rough hemp ropes tied to the beams. There was no pattern to them, they were dense in some places and sparse in others.

There seemed to be some patterns carved on the edge of the tower at the top of the load-bearing column. Yu Tu took out his mobile phone and turned on the flashlight. After realizing that he did not recognize it, he decisively turned on the flash and took a picture.

After walking around the stairs and making sure that all the patterns in the four directions had been photographed, Yu Tu finally breathed a sigh of relief. As long as he could figure out what these four patterns meant, his mission would not be completely in the dark.

Putting away his phone and holding his lighter, Yu Tu prepared to evacuate from the second floor when he suddenly noticed a figure at the door on the first floor.

Yu Tu retracted his foot that was about to go down the stairs. He tiptoed back a distance on the second floor and found an angle from which he could clearly see the door on the first floor.

He saw a thin and skinny old man with a hunched back and wrinkled face. He was sitting on the doorstep with an old-fashioned dry pipe in his hand, smoking intermittently. The smoke escaped from his mouth and drifted into the dark building.

"Zhao Di... Pan Di... Lai Di... Wang Di..." The old man's voice was hoarse in the smoke, "Cong Cong is your brother's only son, and also your only nephew... You should take good care of him and don't let others bully him."

He stopped talking and wiped his face, with faint traces of tears on it: "He is the golden grandson of our Feng family, we only have this one precious grandson..."

He was smoking a pipe and talking on and on. Yu Tu was squatting on the second floor with an expressionless face. After hearing the words "only" and "golden grandson", he felt goosebumps all over his body.

Sometimes I feel really helpless when I am alone, and I don’t know who to talk to when I want to complain.

Feng Wei sat on the doorstep below and talked. Yu Tu couldn't walk, so he could only sit on the stairs in an extremely uncomfortable position. After a while, he felt something small rubbing his cheek.

It's not quite accurate to say that it was pinching his cheeks. It was more like the thing that had been grabbing his ankles was now playing with the mirror chain hanging from his face, like a cat playing with a toy.

Yu Tu: “…”

Maybe because he had gone crazy before, he was now unusually calm. Yu Tu calmly took off his monocle, looked into the darkness behind him, and whispered, "Take it and play with it."

Although Feng Wei's chatter was very annoying, Yu Tu already knew the origin of the old building from his words—it was built on an abandoned baby tower, a tower full of abandoned baby girls.

He didn't know how many female infant skeletons were in the abandoned tower, but at least the old man sitting on the doorstep had four children in it.

The monocle between the fingers was being tugged by some tiny force, with a cautious tentativeness, and the metal chain made a tiny rustling sound.

Not sure if it was Yu Tu’s illusion, but he vaguely heard faint “wow,” “ooh,” and “ah,” a bit like the sound of frogs coming from the pond outside the window when he was half asleep and half awake.

Yu Tu felt a sudden lightness at his fingertips, and the monocle had disappeared, but he began to feel a cool touch on the back of his hand as he was holding on to the escalator.

It felt like something tiny was poking the back of his hand, you poke me, you poke me.

Yu Tu: “…”

He withdrew his hands and tucked them into his sleeves, making a cat-like pose.

Those tiny things stopped poking his hand and started pulling his hair. They weren't very strong, you pulled two strands here, I pulled two strands there, the movements were gentle, it didn't hurt, but it was very itchy.

Yu Tu held on for a while, but couldn't bear it anymore. He rubbed his hair hard, turning his hair, which was already covered with spider webs, into a mess.

Yu Tu pointed his finger in the direction of the beam and lowered his voice: "Bring me a hemp rope."

The tiny thing still pulled Yu Tu's hair, poked his face, and pinched his waist, but after a while, there was something extra at Yu Tu's feet.

Yu Tu stretched his hand toward his feet and touched a hemp rope.

He picked up the rope and began to unravel it carefully, with the tiny things messing around with it.

On the threshold downstairs, Feng Wei was chattering about the difficulties of the past years and talking about how great his deceased grandson Feng Cong was. On the narrow stairs on the second floor, Yu Tu was untying hemp rope with an expressionless face and weaving small gadgets.

He made a grasshopper, two dragonflies and three butterflies, but before the talkative old man had finished speaking, more things gathered around Yu Tu.

Yu Tu: “…”

He began to think about threatening the paper-tied man and bringing back the things inside, and then going down to scare the man away.