"I...I have diarrhea..." Xiao Kai groaned weakly in pain. "Help...help me to...to the toilet..."
Seeing his legs trembling uncontrollably, Tian Yang carried him on his back without a word and strode towards the toilet around the corner.
"The toilet...is it dangerous?" Wu You asked her companions anxiously.
"I'll go check," Ke Xun said, standing up.
"I'll go," Qin Ci said. "We can also judge the symptoms by looking at the excrement."
Ke Xun turned on his phone and walked towards the toilet with Qin Ci. Qin Ci knocked on the door and went in, while Ke Xun waited outside.
Inside the toilet, Xiao Kai seemed to have more than just diarrhea; he was vomiting incessantly and didn't come out for a long time. Ke Xun, standing outside, was facing the stairs leading to the second floor opposite the toilet door.
The narrow, cramped wooden stairs led all the way to the deep darkness of the second floor. That darkness didn't seem peaceful; something was stirring within.
Ke Xun stared into the darkness for a while, listening intently. Amidst Xiao Kai's painful vomiting behind the door, he struggled to discern a sound like something gently rubbing against the floor.
The sound came from the second floor, from that darkness that seemed to conceal unimaginable things.
Ke Xun calmly pulled a spare cell phone and a folding fruit knife from his pocket. He'd found the knife in the kitchen, and the spare phone's case had been removed before the scene unfolded; the battery was exposed, and forcefully stabbing it with the fruit knife could easily cause it to explode.
Ke Xun slowly tucked the lower half of the phone in his other hand into his collar, leaving the upper half exposed. Then, holding the spare phone in one hand and the fruit knife in the other, he slashed the screen of the phone tucked into his collar, activating the flashlight.
A beam of white light flashed down the stairs into the unsettling darkness of the second floor. Against that backdrop of endless darkness, a pale, human face instantly appeared at the top of the stairs!
The face was horribly pale, like a piece of white paper wrinkled from being soaked in water, or the face of a corpse drained of every drop of blood. Yet, in the sockets of its eyes, only the whites remained, hung several long, short, thick, and thin streaks of dark blood, winding down its cheeks and into its stiff mouth, which seemed to hold a lump of flesh.
This eerie, horrifying pale face, embedded in the gray, dusty darkness behind it, was so abrupt, like a ghostly face emerging from another world, creeping menacingly at the top of the stairs on the second floor, expressionlessly "looking" at Ke Xun below with its two blood-soaked white eyes. The
sudden appearance of such a face startled even the brave Ke Xun, causing him to break out in a cold sweat. He stared intently at the face, gripping his knife and phone tightly.
The face was positioned very low, like someone kneeling on the ground, but no matter how bright the phone light shone, Ke Xun couldn't see anything else besides the face.
Then, Ke Xun saw it move.
This pale face slowly tilted its head, not left or right, but up and down, the forehead tilting to the right and the chin to the left. Such an angle and movement, on a normal human, might be called a "head tilt," but on this face, it had an extremely eerie, distorted quality.
It was as if the face wasn't controlled by the neck; the uncoordinated, inflexible trembling of the entire face as it tilted its head resembled a shaky mask.
And its head-tilting didn't stop. After exceeding the limits of human head tilting, it continued to twist its face until the entire face was tilted to a parallel position, the forehead and chin horizontally positioned.
Ke Xun felt goosebumps rise all over the back of his neck, yet the pale face continued its twisting and eerie turning until its chin was turned upwards and its forehead downwards, at which point it began to writhe in the darkness.
Ke Xun watched as it crawled down one step of the stairs.
The darkness behind it writhed forward with its crawl, and its face continued to twist and tremble, like a grain of dead white rice being carried by a swarm of black ants.
It crawled down the second step, carrying with it a dense mass of writhing darkness. Ke Xun shouted, "It's here!"
The people sitting a little further away in the central hall were all startled by the sound and looked in the direction Ke Xun was standing. Mu Yiran, however, reacted even faster, and before Ke Xun finished speaking, he had already strode towards him.
Ke Xun stabbed the spare phone's battery with a fruit knife, and before it exploded, he threw the phone at the dead face climbing down the stairs. A flash of light appeared, and the dense darkness enveloped the pale face, which writhed in the flames. Even with the light, Ke Xun couldn't make out what the dark mass was. But in the instant the battery exploded, the dark mass was scattered in all directions, and in that instant, Ke Xun saw what was wrapped in this black, unidentified substance.
It was a soft, shriveled human skin, like rubber.
This skin was connected to the pale face; the limbs and torso had been crumpled and rolled into a pretzel shape. It was covered and rolled up again by the thick, black substance, wriggling as it continued to crawl down the stairs.
"Old Qin, get them both out here!" Ke Xun knocked on the bathroom door behind him.
The people in the central hall also went on high alert, standing up and forming a circle back-to-back, surveying their surroundings while keeping their eyes on the direction where Ke Xun and Mu Yiran were.
"How's the situation?" Shao Ling asked, raising his voice.
"The phone battery explosion isn't working!" Ke Xun and Mu Yiran replied cautiously as they backed away. "Keep an eye on the outside of the building, see if there's anything unusual. If it gets too dangerous, run outside!"
Wei Dong and Fang Fei rushed to the window simultaneously, peering out. What they saw was a dark street littered with pale faces shrouded in black matter!
It was as if the entire world had been transformed into a hellish scene of skinning corpses.
"We're surrounded!" Wei Dong pulled Fang Fei away from the window, because the pale, lifeless faces outside had "seen" them and were writhing towards them.
"What do we do?!" Wu You asked, her voice trembling with tears.
Zhu Haowen glanced around, grabbed a bed sheet, and threw it into the pot of burning branches. Once the sheet was completely ablaze, he pulled it out, rushed to the stairwell, and threw it at the dead face that had already climbed down six or seven steps.
Qin Ci and Tian Yang helped Xiao Kai, who was still vomiting, out of the toilet. Shao Ling was directing the others to use sofas and cabinets to block the doors and windows. Outside, a thick, unidentified black mass, carrying countless pale, dead faces, surged towards the door, making the already dilapidated doors and windows creak.
"They don't seem to be able to get through the walls!" Gu Qingqing shouted, announcing her discovery.
"Block it!" Wei Dong yelled, and everyone frantically searched the room for anything usable, piling it all up to block the doors and windows.
The burning bedsheet Zhu Haowen threw out was quickly engulfed by the thick, black mass on the steps. Ke Xun, while backing away with Zhu Haowen and Mu Yiran, shone his phone upwards. Where the white light swept across, two more pale, lifeless faces appeared at the top of the stairs on the second floor.
"To the living room, everyone go!" Mu Yiran shouted to the crowd. Without hesitation, everyone immediately abandoned their plan to block the doors and windows and rushed towards the living room next to the central hall.
Ke Xun and Mu Yiran were the last to enter the room, locking the door behind them. The others then moved the sofa from the living room to block the door, closed the windows, and drew the curtains.
"What's going on? What's happening?" Wei Dong asked, panting heavily.
"It's not zombies, definitely not zombies!" Luo Yi also gasped, still shaken.
"It's human skin," Ke Xun wiped the sweat from his brow and turned off his phone's flashlight. "It's wrapped up by something, and under those faces are human skin, a whole set." "
A whole set..." Wei Dong pulled at his shirt hem to wipe his face. "Does this mean that the people who died in these houses were all skinned alive?"
"No wonder there was so much blood in the houses," Shao Ling gasped. "It really is all the blood sprayed out of a person's body. But who could do something like this? This residential area is practically a small village; an entire village was killed like this. Who could do that? Why would they do it?"
"Cult worship?" Wei Dong thought of the book *Faith*.
"It has nothing to do with religion." Mu Yiran's tone was very firm. "In all the houses we checked, there were no religious items. The entire residential area, whether indoors or outdoors, had no distinctive totems or images of deities."
"So... some psychopaths took pleasure in cruel killings, so... so they massacred everyone in the residential area?" Gu Qingqing said, her voice trembling as she voiced her most terrifying conjecture.
"No, remember, when we were summarizing the clues, didn't we speculate that other areas outside this region were likely in the same state?" Ke Xun quickly calmed down. "What kind of gang could have such power to massacre so many people? Impossible."
"There's one more thing," Zhu Haowen continued, "When we checked these houses during the day, we didn't see any human skin. Where did they come from? Illusions?" "
If it's an illusion, it shouldn't be blocked by something as solid as a wall, right?" Shao Ling thought of the "Burning Rhinoceros at Sea" painting.
"I think," Ke Xun pointed to the walls and ceiling, though the walls and ceiling of the living room were relatively clean, "that human skin, those uneven things we saw during the day, covered in blood and grime, were covered by the blood and grime during the day, so we didn't notice them. At night, they peeled off from the blood and grime. I suspect that the dark, grime-like substance we saw earlier was actually that blood and grime."
"Ke Xun is probably close to the answer," Mu Yiran said, "It's the human skin and blood that's causing this."
"What…what do we do now?" Wu You and He Tang huddled together, trembling.
"If those things can't penetrate solid matter, then we should be relatively safe hiding here," Shao Ling said.
"I'm afraid…" Ke Xun suddenly remembered something, quickly swiped his phone, and used the flashlight to shine it on the floor in front of the door.
Author's Note:
Dead Face: Ah, handsome guy! Watch me give him a cute look~ [Head tilt kill.jpg]
Ke Xun: …Please control your excited emotions. [Ugly and mischievous, either an idiot or a bad guy.jpg]