Chapter 109: The Secret of the Third Ward (Second Update)
"I must have seen her somewhere before."
It wasn't that Chen Ge had great confidence in his memory, but rather that the girl's face was so distinctive it was hard to forget.
He couldn't recall it at the moment, but he didn't want to let her leave either. Grabbing his phone and clutching the iron hammer, he chased after her.
The scattered white rice on the floor was kicked aside as Chen Ge rushed out of the staff break room, but the shadow had already vanished.
"Where did she go? The door is locked—the girl should still be in the haunted house."
Turning on the lights, Chen Ge walked over to the scattered rice and followed the few stray grains that had fallen, slowly making his way to the deepest part of the first-floor corridor.
The wooden board covering the floor had been lifted, and he could hear the wind whistling from below.
Pushing the board aside, Chen Ge turned on his phone's flashlight and entered the Muyang High School scene.
He could faintly see rice grains on the stairs, which confirmed that the girl had run into the Muyang High School scene.
"Her escape route was very clear—she came straight in this direction." The scene was vast, but the remaining rice on the ground pointed the way.
The horror scene was set in the underground parking lot, but it hadn't altered the lot's layout. The rice grains finally disappeared near a load-bearing pillar.
"Could she have hidden inside the pillar?" This pillar was directly beneath the haunted house, bearing the entire weight of the structure.
Patting the pillar, Chen Ge recalled stories his elders had told him as a child—that every home housed a spirit, mostly benevolent, but sometimes malevolent.
Benevolent spirits protected the household, stabilized fortunes, and harmonized neighbors; malevolent spirits disrupted order and ruined a home's feng shui.
Usually, the spirits living in a home were deceased ancestors, but there were exceptions. For instance, the place where Fan Yu and his aunt lived was a chaotic mess of ghosts, and if left unchecked, it would spiral out of control.
This matched the description in the black phone's mission briefing: an unseen guest in the house, perhaps full of malice, perhaps harboring goodwill.
"Could the girl hiding behind me just now be the spirit protecting the haunted house?" The more Chen Ge thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. He walked around the pillar and noticed a doll lying behind the concrete column—a doll he had made with his own hands, the very first one.
"That's not right! I always carry that doll with me." Chen Ge reached into his pocket, but the doll that had been tucked inside was long gone. "The one living with me in the haunted house—was it you?"
He bent down to pick up the doll, and as he moved it, he saw a man-made hole beneath it.
Shining his phone's light into the hole, he found a bracelet and a paper crane inside—barely enough space for four fingers to reach in.
Neither was valuable. The bracelet was plastic, looking like a little girl's toy, and the paper crane, stuffed at the bottom, was badly crushed.
Taking them out, Chen Ge saw three crooked characters at the end of the bracelet: Luo Ruoyu.
"Why would a girl's toys be in the underground parking lot?" Chen Ge held the bracelet up to his eyes. "If this bracelet belongs to that shadowy figure, then those three characters must be her name."
Surname Luo, the guardian spirit of the haunted house, toys of a girl in the underground parking lot...
Connecting the clues, Chen Ge slapped his forehead. The face he had glimpsed in his daze overlapped with another face in his memory.
"This girl is the daughter of Director Luo from New Century Paradise!"
When he had gone to negotiate with Director Luo about renting the underground parking lot, he had seen a photo of the girl. She had a physical defect but the purest smile.
"Did the girl become the guardian spirit of the entire park? But why did she possess the doll my parents left behind?" Chen Ge felt that this nightmare mission held deeper meaning. Carrying the doll, bracelet, and paper crane, he ran back to the staff break room, took out a photo album from a locked drawer, and flipped to the first page—a family photo of Chen Ge and his parents.
It was taken on the day the haunted house was completed, with the haunted house's entrance as the backdrop.
In the photo, Chen Ge's father stood proudly in the center, grinning like a child. Chen Ge, still in school at the time, stood apart from his parents, looking at the camera with a helpless expression.
His mother stood on the other side of his father. Studying the photo closely, Chen Ge noticed that his mother's hand was raised in the air, fingers curled, as if holding someone else's hand.
"Were there four people in this photo?"
Flipping through the album, another photo was even stranger. His father pointed at the haunted house, boasting to Chen Ge, while his mother crouched down, gently stroking the air.
There were many more everyday photos, and they sent a chill down Chen Ge's spine. He had always found it odd—why was there always a large empty space beside him in every photo? As if the real subject was someone else, and he was just a breathing backdrop.
"These old folks were way too kind to ghosts! With parents like that, no wonder the spirits favored them!"
He never expected Director Luo's daughter to be attached to the cloth doll his parents had left behind, and it seemed she had been living with them for a long time.
Director Luo's daughter was the park's guardian spirit, unable to leave the park, which was why Chen Ge's doll only worked in the haunted house and the park.
That was also why, in the cabin on the hill behind Ping An Apartments, when Wang Qi tried to ambush Chen Ge, the doll had no reaction. There were many similar instances.
Chen Ge closed the album and gently rubbed his temples. He felt this mission had hidden layers.
His gaze shifted from the doll and bracelet to the paper crane cradled in his palm.
The material was ordinary, but it seemed stained with blood, looking dirty.
"This paper crane doesn't look like it was stuffed in recently. It's been there for a long time."
Unfolding the paper crane, he found nine characters written on the bloodstained white paper: "Third Ward, Third Room!"
"Third Ward?" The moment he saw those words, Chen Ge couldn't stay calm. After completing three nightmare-level daily missions, he could earn a trial mission for another horror scene. Before starting the missions, he had already planned to choose the one corresponding to the Third Ward, since it was the only three-star horror scene that came with the black phone.
"The handwriting looks like my family's, but why would they leave a location without any context? Is the third room of the Third Ward dangerous, or does it hold the secret to their disappearance?" Chen Ge put away the paper, his mind racing with another question.
"The black phone said that after completing the third nightmare mission, future nightmare missions would be randomly generated. That means the three I've finished are fixed."
"The first mission opened the door to another world for me; the second told me my parents were only missing, not dead; and this third mission left me a location. First, it earns my trust, then gives me hope, and finally leaves me a direction to explore. The three nightmare missions are all connected—this seems significant."