Translator: CinderTL
The suitcase kept following him, gliding steadily behind, not too close, not too far, but moving surprisingly fast—faster than A'Qiang could run.
Just as A'Qiang felt it closing in, something grabbed his left foot. He lost his balance and fell hard.
When he woke up, he was in a hospital bed.
The nurse administering his IV explained that he had collapsed and been brought in by a friend who had also covered his medical expenses.
Hearing this, A'Qiang felt a mixture of relief and gratitude. He hadn't realized his friends were so loyal.
Since he seemed fine, he convinced himself that the events of the previous night must have been hallucinations brought on by stress.
A'Qiang reassured himself with this thought, then swung his legs over the side of the bed, intending to go outside for a cigarette to calm his nerves. But the moment he pulled back the blanket, he froze.
Just above his left ankle was a pitch-black handprint.
The handprint seemed branded directly into his bone. The fingers were incredibly slender—his gut told him without a doubt it was a woman's hand!
But even more importantly, this woman's hand only had four fingers!
A wave of icy dread exploded in A'Qiang's chest. His vision blurred, and he tumbled off the bed.
Before he could regain his composure, hurried footsteps approached outside, followed by several doctors who rushed into the room.
Their faces grim, they demanded A'Qiang summon his friend immediately to explain the situation.
Still reeling from terror, A'Qiang watched as the apparent head doctor angrily threw a wad of cash at him.
At first glance, the bills seemed ordinary. But upon closer inspection, the denominations were far higher than any currency in circulation, and the craftsmanship was shockingly crude.
"This is fucking ghost money—the kind burned for the dead!"
The lead doctor insisted this was the payment his friend had made for A'Qiang's medical expenses the previous night.
Fortunately, A'Qiang still had some real money on him. He managed to scrape together the full amount, and the hospital finally let him go. Otherwise, it looked like they would have even ripped out the half-empty IV drip he was currently receiving.
After finally getting rid of the doctors, A'Qiang had a chance to call his friends. He called them all, but not a single one admitted to knowing anything about his collapse or helping him get to the hospital.
Their stories were eerily consistent: they claimed they hadn't heard he'd collapsed and had even been planning to call him that evening to invite him out for drinks.
Hanging up, A'Qiang was dumbfounded. If it wasn't his friends, who else would have been kind enough to bring him to the hospital? Slowly, his gaze drifted involuntarily to his left leg.
A terrifying scenario he had dared not consider, even deliberately suppressed, was slowly becoming reality.
When he tried to get out of bed, he discovered that the leg bearing the handprint felt frozen and completely useless. Dragging his stiff limb, he limped to the hospital's security office and requested the surveillance footage from the previous night.
The moment he saw himself appear at the hospital gate in the video, A'Qiang's blood ran cold. The surveillance footage showed only his solitary figure. He was completely alone.
The surveillance footage showed the time as 2:46 AM. A'Qiang was walking with his head down, stumbling like a sleepwalker, his steps unsteady as if he might fall at any moment.
But even more bizarrely, every time he was about to lose his balance, an unseen force seemed to right him, as if an invisible person was standing beside him.
The video then cut to the hospital's billing counter. The cashier was yawning, talking to empty air in front of her.
She skillfully printed out a receipt, then extended her hand as if to receive payment. The next instant, after she retracted her hand, several banknotes inexplicably appeared in her palm.
Witnessing this, A'Qiang turned deathly pale. He called over the equally stunned security guard and ordered him to rewind the video.
After replaying it several times, the video froze at the moment the cashier reached out to take the money.
A'Qiang gasped. A hand had suddenly appeared in front of the cashier.
The hand was unnaturally pale, almost translucent, unlike a living person's hand. But most disturbingly, it only had four fingers—the middle finger was missing!
A'Qiang didn't remember how he got home. All he knew was that once he was inside, he drew all the curtains and bolted the doors.
Driven by fear, he drank incessantly, desperate to numb himself with alcohol.
He wasn't sure how long he'd been lying unconscious on the floor beside the bed when he vaguely stirred, a strange sound ringing in his ears.
The noise was coming from the bathroom—it sounded like someone was taking a shower.
He'd been separated from his ex-wife for some time. She hated his drinking and gambling, and in a fit of anger, she'd taken their child back to her parents' home.
He lived alone in the house now.
The bathroom door stood slightly ajar, a sliver of light escaping through the crack. With his pupils constricted, A'Qiang spotted a large, foul stain on the floor. It looked like a mixture of rotting matter and mud, dragged across the floor and ending right in front of the bathroom door.
A'Qiang was on the verge of losing his mind. Fueled by alcohol, he grabbed the kitchen knife he always kept close by and, with a ferocious expression, stalked toward the bathroom.
Standing outside the bathroom, the sound of the shower grew clearer.
A'Qiang imagined a large bathtub inside, picturing the person bathing within.
As he pushed open the bathroom door, the scene came into view. The room was much darker than he'd expected, and the floor was covered in murky water mixed with mud and sand, making it look utterly filthy.
A'Qiang wasn't paying attention and stepped into the water. The surface felt soft and yielding beneath his foot, nothing like solid ground. If he had to describe it, it was like stepping into the silt at the bottom of a lake.
He struggled to pull his foot free and discovered it was entangled with strands of long women's hair.
The next moment, he suddenly realized the sound of water splashing in the bathtub had stopped.
A shower curtain obscured the view behind it, but a blurred shadow lingered on the fabric.
It was the silhouette of a woman with a shapely figure. A'Qiang heard a faint scraping sound, and the shadow's rhythmic movements suggested the woman behind the curtain was combing her hair.
Gradually, A'Qiang's breathing grew rapid. The sound of the comb grew faster and faster, and the woman's movements became increasingly violent. A'Qiang could hear the tearing of hair and even skin.
Large clumps of dark shadow fell to the floor as the woman combed off her scalp. Black liquid splattered across the shower curtain, creating a bloody scene reminiscent of a slaughterhouse.
(End of the Chapter)
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