The kid's nerves snapped.
"Y-you're—" he blurted, voice cracking, "you're a ghost!"
Silence fell.
The paper person's smile twitched.
The word ghost hadn't even finished echoing when the café began to die.
Not collapse, but melt.
The paper people sagged where they stood, their bodies softening, edges blurring, ink bleeding outward as if soaked from beneath. Faces slid off faces. Limbs lost definition. They all slumped downward, sinking into the floor like wax left too close to a flame.
A random person screamed. Maybe the same kid who started the ghost chase?
"WHY ARE THEY MELTING—"
Probably another newbie. Queens above, how many were there? Before Ah'Ming could propose an answer though…
The floor answered first.
Red bled up through the tiles in branching veins, soaking the wood, turning it fibrous and thin. The solid thump of the café floor softened into a papery crinkle underfoot. With every second, the ground lost its rigidity, becoming layered, pulpy, wrong.
Ah'Ming staggered back. "The floor… the floor is paper."
"No," Shen Yulan said hoarsely, bell rattling uselessly at her side. "It's becoming paper."
He turned to stare at her, incredulous. What was the difference? Was she actually the type of person to try and add drama, at a time like this?
The walls followed.
Shelves wrinkled inward. Tables folded at unnatural angles, creasing along invisible lines. The ceiling sagged like wet parchment, red stains spreading outward from the center like an infection.
In front of everyone except Ah'Ming (since he still didn't have a system), a bright blue screen that contrasted with their blood red surroundings flickered.
|Ghost mission ensues.What is HongZhi?
A harsh beep cut through the chaos.
Above the counter, burned into the air itself in dripping red characters, numbers appeared.
|03:00
A timer.
"RUN," Bianheng barked.
They ran.
The floor gave way beneath their feet, sucking at shoes, tearing strips of paper free as they moved. Behind them, the café continued to liquefy, paper people fully absorbed now, their forms reduced to red-stained pulp spreading outward like a tide.
"HongZhi?! What here isn't red paper???" Huipao sobbed. Really loud, very annoying. Just shut up— No. No. Ah'Ming had to play nice. Be nice. His weak glare didn't stop the blondie from yelling more though. "WHERE IS IT—"
Ah'Ming's eyes scanned the surroundings, trying to find something, anything that would help them.
Floor? Gone.
Tables? Upended, destroyed.
Chairs? Shattered.
Kitchen? Gone. Where the large doors had once been, only a blank canvas left.
Wait—
Canvas!
The paintings.
The paintings were the only thing left in the shop, all else had melted into the beyond.
The walls were lined with ink-and-wash murals, with bamboo forests, over and over, identical stalks bending in painted wind. The paper rot crept after them, seeping from the café doorway, crawling along the baseboards.
The bamboo stalks started to sway, becoming more vivid, more three dimensional with every second that passed.
"Which one?" Ah'Ming gasped.
Yulan staggered, then forced herself upright. "The wrong one," she said. "The one that doesn't belong."
They scanned frantically.
Bamboo. Bamboo. Bamboo…
"There!" Lin Qiao shouted weakly.
It was subtle.
Where the others were forests, this one hid something. Behind layers of bamboo stalks, half-obscured, was a house. Old-fashioned. Low roof. A wooden sign barely visible through the ink—
An egg tart shop.
The painting felt… heavier. Thicker. Like it had more layers than paint should allow.
The timer screamed.
|00:37
Bianheng scratched at the mural, the panel falling down, revealing a safe behind it.
It was tall, dark, with a number pad.
"THE NUMBERS," Yulan said. "The date—"
Gu Wenhao's voice cut in, strained but clear. He recited them without hesitation, the numbers the painting route had burned into their memories, the only thing the system hadn't locked away.
The moment the last digit left his mouth—
The safe opened.
It was pitch black, yet the blackness spread.
They fell forward, blackness swallowing them whole.
Silence.
Then—
They landed inside a small, cramped space.
The air smelled like dust and old sugar.
The walls were bare wood, unpainted, real in a way nothing else in the resort was. In the center lay a low table.
Spread across, as if the person drawing it had just left momentarily, were many sheets of paper, covered in doodles and drawings.
Most prominently, was a single piece of blood-red paper sitting at the top of the messy pile.
A child's drawing.
Two egg tarts, uneven and lopsided, drawn in crayon. Yellow scribbles overflowing crusts too big, too round. The paper was wrinkled, stained dark at one corner with an unidentified substance.
Huipao froze. "…That's it?"
Next to it sat a newspaper.
Ah'Ming picked it up with shaking hands.
The front page was wrong.
Headlines half-printed. Names missing. Dates reduced to blank lines. The next pages were worse, entirely empty, sheet after sheet of nothing, as if the story had been erased mid-print.
Until one page.
Only one.
It was fully inked.
It told the story of a couple who bought a small village storefront. Of recipes brought from home. Of egg tarts made by hand, sold cheaply, shared with neighbors. Of a child who waited after school, drawing behind the counter.
Of a sickness.
Of paper offerings.
Of ghosts that stayed because they were fed.
Ah'Ming swallowed. "So that's what the shop is made of."
Zhaoying whispered, "What about Hongzhi?"
The name moved the air.
The drawing trembled.
Hongmei rolled her eyes, yelling out and completely breaking the chilling atmosphere.
"HONGZHI IS THE NAME OF THE CHILD WHOSE SHOP WAS DESTROYED BY THE RESORT!"
There was a soft ding, before…
White.