Translator: CinderTL
Glug glug...
Glug glug...
The sound of rolling wheels echoed down the corridor, stopping outside the interrogation room door. A police officer approached, opened the door, and found no one there—only a luggage trunk standing outside.
"These new recruits are so irresponsible," he muttered. "Delivering evidence like this?"
Unfazed, the officer grumbled a few more complaints, dragged the trunk inside, and casually leaned it against the wall.
Before the interrogation began, they had alerted the evidence room officer, warning him they might need the trunk to completely shatter the suspect's psychological defenses.
But as the officer turned to resume, he noticed A'Qiang's face had changed. Gone was his earlier manic frenzy; now his eyes were fixed on something beside the officer.
Following A'Qiang's gaze, he realized the man was staring at the luggage trunk.
Suddenly, A'Qiang began writhing violently in his chair, desperately leaning backward as if trying to escape some unseen horror.
Locked in place, his efforts were futile. He let out unintelligible gasps, his eyes wide with terror, as if witnessing something utterly horrifying.
The scene startled the two police officers, but when they looked around, they saw nothing amiss.
Everything nearby appeared normal. The luggage trunk, kept as evidence, stood quietly against the wall, untouched.
But A'Qiang saw something entirely different.
He noticed a small gap where the zipper had come undone. Through the slit, an eye—nothing but white sclera—glared coldly at him.
Suddenly, a pale, waterlogged hand emerged from the gap, groping across the trunk until it found the zipper.
Slowly, inch by inch, the zipper unzipped. As the trunk gaped open, a woman crawled out.
But this was no ordinary crawl. Her limbs were broken and twisted into grotesque angles, her movements accompanied by the grating of dislocated joints.
Her long, mud-caked hair hung in dripping strands. Through the gaps in her hair, A'Qiang glimpsed a pair of venomous eyes burning with hatred.
Staring into those eyes, A'Qiang suddenly understood. He frantically searched his body and discovered a ring on the middle finger of his left hand—a ring he didn't remember putting on.
It was the jeweled ring, the very one he had taken from the corpse's hand!
A'Qiang went berserk, desperately trying to remove the ring and return it to the woman. But the ring seemed fused to his finger, unyielding to his frantic efforts.
As the woman crawled closer, her hand—missing its middle finger—reaching for his foot, A'Qiang finally snapped. With a primal roar, he lunged at the finger bearing the ring and bit down.
The two police officers reacted instantly, grabbing A'Qiang's hands to restrain him. But A'Qiang's strength had surged to superhuman levels. The officers stood no chance. With a sickening crack, A'Qiang clutched his severed finger, blood streaming down his face as he laughed maniacally.
"Ha! I got it off! Here's your ring! Stay away from me! You won't find me now!"
He hurled the bloody finger, still adorned with the ring, into the luggage trunk.
Finally, the woman who had crawled out of the trunk vanished, and A'Qiang gradually quieted down.
Just as the officers breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to call for a doctor, A'Qiang suddenly trembled violently, as if experiencing a final surge of life. His body stiffened abruptly, his head lolled to one side, and he went still.
"He's dead?" a woman whispered, the story's abrupt ending leaving everyone wanting more.
The man in the tracksuit didn't answer immediately. After a long pause, he spoke in a strained voice, "The official explanation was that the suspect died of a sudden heart attack during interrogation, likely due to extreme stress. But despite a thorough search of the scene, the police never found that severed finger."
As he finished speaking, the man adjusted his collar. In the dim light, Jiang Cheng noticed that the man's left hand, the one adjusting his collar, had only four fingers.
The missing finger was none other than his middle finger.
Combining this with the story he had just told, Jiang Cheng was certain that A'Qiang, the protagonist, was none other than the man himself.
And it wasn't just him. The other storytellers had all been the subjects of their own urban legends.
The first story, about the female student who sensed something emerging from the closet behind her, had ended abruptly after she described the presence behind her.
Jiang Cheng suspected there was more to it—that the student, like her roommate, had been dragged into the closet by the ghost hiding inside and killed.
The second storyteller, the tall, thin writer, was also telling his own story. Not only did his demeanor match the character, but his backpack's zipper was slightly undone, revealing a laptop inside.
More importantly, he was wearing a scarf, and from Jiang Cheng's angle, he could just make out the deep purple strangulation marks peeking out from beneath it.
In his story, the ghost had been hanged in exactly the same way.
As for the Red-Clad Woman who told the third story—Xiao Lan, the girl who made a pact with the ghost in the tale—Xiao Lan's legs were perfectly fine in the story, yet the Red-Clad Woman's gait was disturbingly unnatural.
This meant none of them were human; they were all ghosts!
Each ghost had shared their own urban legend.
"Those were all fascinating stories," the last man said as he emerged from the shadows, "but they pale in comparison to the one I'm about to tell."
The man was short and dressed in plain clothes. He kept his head bowed so low that no one could see his face.
Even stranger, his head wobbled precariously, as if it might detach from his neck at any moment.
A peculiar glint flickered in the eyes of the previous storytellers upon hearing his words. Jiang Cheng sensed their displeasure.
While the urban legends themselves were intriguing, Jiang Cheng was far more curious about why these ghosts had gathered here in the dead of night, seemingly competing to see whose story was the most terrifying.
A group of ghosts had gathered, each vying to tell the most gruesome and bizarre tale of their demise. Jiang Cheng found it baffling.
Is internal competition this fierce even among ghosts? he wondered.
Before Jiang Cheng could dwell on it further, the short, stout man began to speak. Contrary to his appearance, his voice was remarkably pleasant, with a smoky, textured quality. "The story I'm going to tell is called 'The Guest.'"
"The protagonist's name is A Zhe. He's a 35-year-old bar singer."
"A Zhe has a four-year-old son whom he adores. However, due to his work schedule, he rarely gets to spend time with the boy, who is primarily cared for by his mother-in-law."
(End of the Chapter)
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