Chapter 17: Fu'an Apartments
Wang Qi kept urging Chen Ge to leave. From the perspective of a stranger, he was being overly enthusiastic.
Chen Ge didn't agree right away. After hearing Wang Qi's story, he vaguely felt that the man might be hiding something.
"I've told you everything I can. It's not too late to leave now. After midnight, this apartment building turns into something else entirely." With that, Wang Qi brushed the dust off his clothes, turned around, and walked out of the building.
It wasn't until Wang Qi's figure disappeared into the night that Chen Ge snapped back to reality. He had initially planned to ask the tenants in the building for information, but now, instead of having fewer doubts, he had even more.
"This guy is seriously off. Is he crazy or what?" Recalling Wang Qi's murky eyes, Chen Ge felt uneasy. The man's eyes were filled with exhaustion and pain—something that couldn't be faked. "It seems he must have really loved his wife."
Chen Ge turned back. When he passed the room of the woman on the first floor, he hesitated and tried knocking on her door.
"Hey, new guy." The woman's door didn't budge, but the door behind Chen Ge opened halfway, revealing a tall, thin man leaning against the frame.
He looked to be in his thirties, unkempt, with hair and beard almost merging together. On the back of his exposed hand was a tattoo of a peony.
"And you are?" Chen Ge turned around cautiously.
"That guy handing out missing person flyers isn't a tenant here. He's got a screw loose." The tall man tapped his temple. "Don't believe a word he says. Getting too close to him will only bring trouble."
This was Chen Ge's first time seeing the tall man. Despite his scruffy appearance, his tone was the most normal among the people Chen Ge had encountered so far. "His behavior is indeed strange, but it might be because he's been through a lot after his wife went missing."
"Did he tell you his fiancée disappeared near the apartment building?"
"Yeah."
"Did he also say the police told him that, so he keeps coming here to look?"
"That's right."
"Heh." The tall man let out a short laugh. "I've lived here for nine months, and I've never seen a single cop show up. That lunatic is lying to you. All that talk about ghosts and spirits? Nonsense."
He pulled a cheap cigarette from his pocket and stuck it between his lips. "How could ghosts possibly exist? At most, someone's pretending to be one. Alright, it's getting late. You should head back to your room."
Chen Ge thanked the man and turned to leave.
Walking up the stairs, he mulled things over. "One of them has to be lying. But which one?"
Lost in thought, Chen Ge didn't realize he had reached the third floor until he looked up.
Faded numbers were printed at the corner of the stairwell. The dim light from the motion-activated lamp above cast a weak glow. Chen Ge glanced around. This floor hadn't been renovated. The ground was filthy, with burn marks everywhere, and the peeling paint on the walls looked like crisscrossing scars.
"Why is only the third floor untouched? Lack of funds, or is there another reason?"
The motion-activated light flickered off, plunging the building into sudden darkness.
Having worked in a haunted house for years, Chen Ge was fairly used to the dark. He didn't panic. Pulling out his phone, he was about to turn on the flashlight when he caught a glimpse of a figure quickly walking through the pitch-black hallway.
"Who's there?" The light from his phone illuminated the third floor, but the figure had vanished.
Chen Ge wanted to investigate, but just then, he heard footsteps coming from downstairs.
"Is that the landlord?" If the irritable, limping landlord caught him wandering around the third floor, he'd definitely get an earful. After a moment's thought, Chen Ge put away his phone and quietly retreated to the second floor.
As he came down the stairs, he saw a short, stout middle-aged man carrying a washbasin as he stepped out of a room on the second floor. The man had been humming a tune, seemingly in a good mood, but the moment he saw Chen Ge, his face stiffened. He lowered his head and hurried past.
"What's that supposed to mean? Do I really look that scary?" Back in his room, Chen Ge lay on the bed, clutching his backpack. "Not a single normal person in this building. Everyone looks like a potential murderer..."
The thought made him sit up abruptly. "The task on my phone only asked me to find the killer, but it didn't say how many there are. If I think about it that way, there really could be more than one! Especially since this involves a family massacre—a group crime is highly likely. I need to look into the case from back then."
Chen Ge pulled out his phone. His conversation with Wang Qi hadn't been entirely useless. At least he had figured out one thing: Ping'an Apartments used to be called Fu'an Apartments.
He typed "Fu'an Apartments, Hanjiang" into the search bar. After scrolling through a few pages, a series of alarming headlines jumped out at him.
"A Family of Four Brutally Murdered! The Killer Vanishes Without a Trace?!"
"Accident or Murder? What Sparked the Fire at Fu'an Apartments?"
"Corpse Found Inside the Building, Uncovering a Case Within a Case!"
Chen Ge read through all the information related to Fu'an Apartments. A chill crept over him. Reality was often more terrifying than fiction—because it had actually happened, and one day, it could happen to him.
Five years ago, a villager spotted flames coming from Fu'an Apartments and called the fire department.
After the firefighters put out the blaze, they began investigating the cause and assessing the damage.
What started as a routine procedure soon revealed more and more suspicious details.
The concrete had cracked, the window glass was shattered into small pieces with faint smoke stains—this indicated that the fire had burned fiercely, reached high temperatures, and spread rapidly.
The scene had multiple, unrelated points of origin, a classic sign of deliberate arson.
The nature of the case shifted. Local law enforcement got involved, and among the building's ruins, they found four bodies—the family of four who ran the apartments.
The case caused quite a stir at the time. The police gave it their all, but the fire had destroyed the scene. They searched everywhere and found no trace of a fifth person, let alone the killer.
The building was sealed off for a year. Later, in accordance with the law, it was handed over to the original owner's father. That was when Fu'an Apartments was renamed Ping'an Apartments.
"A family of four burned to death, and the killer is still out there. No wonder there are ghost stories about this place." Now that he understood the case, Chen Ge had a clearer picture. He looked at the webpage on his phone and noticed a detail. "The report says the original owner was forty-one when he died. The building was then transferred to his father. If I do the math, the real owner of this place should be in his sixties or seventies by now."