Chapter 1129 - Face-to-Face Encounter 2 in 1 (1/2)
His legs could not stop shaking. Shang Guan Qing Hong knew that the person covered in blood before him was definitely not Ma Feng. It was a monster, a monster whose body was much larger than a common person’s!
As the smell of blood intensified, his body instinctually started to retreat. When the level of mental pressure that he could suffer reach its limit, he screamed at the top of his lungs for Sister Snake to run before he turned around and raced away as fast as he could. At the same time, someone pulled on Sister Snake’s arm. Since Shang Guan Qing Hong had just screamed her name, she made the natural connection that it should be Shang Guan Qing Hong who had dragged her to escape together in the darkness.
In the darkness, she could not see anything, Sister Snake could only hear the continuous sound of heavy breathing and loud footsteps coming from Shang Guan Qing Hong. She did not have the time to think over the whole situation before she was dragged up from the ground and was half pulled and half shoved, stumbling through the corridor in an unknown direction into the darkness.
“Hey! Do not just run in any direction! We need to calm down and confirm our location first!” Sister Snake also wanted to remind Shang Guan Qing Hong that they still had other teammates that were left behind, but Shang Guan Qing Hong was already scared out of his wits. When a person lost the protection of light, their heart would become extremely fragile, and the sting of fear would be greatly amplified. Shang Guan Qing Hong half crawled and half rolled down the corridor. Curiously, whenever he was about to ram into the wall or trip on something, a pair of hands appeared to block before him to prevent him from getting injured.
Normally, one would easily come to the conclusion that there was someone trying to protect him in the dark, but the current Shang Guan Qing Hong did not have the capacity to think anymore. He stumbled into the darkness, and suddenly, a pair of hands materialized out of thin air to try to stop him. The man who did not know the truth only got even more frightened. All he did was change direction and continued to run even faster. Shang Guan Qing Hong did not dare to even stop for a moment. It was as if he had told himself, as long as he could run fast enough, the ghosts would not be able to catch up to him. After being blocked, or rather protected, more than ten times, Shang Guan Qing Hong finally felt his hands grab the banister of the staircase, and he stopped moving.
“There is a staircase in such a dark place?” Shang Guan Qing Hong did not dare imagine what would have happened if he accidentally tripped on the steps in the darkness. His heart was in total panic mode. His trembling fingertips holding the banister, Shang Guan Qing Hong did an action that no one would have imagined the man could have done. He sat down on the ground, reached out with both of his hands, used one hand to grab hold of the edges of the steps, and slid down the steps one by one. The boss of the largest haunted house in Xin Hai, Shang Guan Qing Hong, who had seen so many big and small incidents in his life, had resorted to this kind of method to move down the stairs. At that moment, even the hands that had been helping him, protecting him, had stopped appearing.
When Sister Snake heard the strange noise, which was Shang Guan Qing Hong using his butt to shuffle down the steps, she raised her voice to ask, “Shang Guan Qing Hong, what are you doing?”
“I am going down the stairs!”
In such a dark environment, going deeper into the building was definitely not a wise choice. Sister Snake was very against this idea, but she had no better one to counter it. Therefore, she grabbed the banister, half squatted down, and started to nudge downward. During the whole process, someone was kind enough to keep ahold of her arm. Her teammate had been protecting her to stop her from falling. Sister Snake was very slow moving down the stairs. She could not be blamed because she needed to be extra careful due to the sudden loss of her sense of sight, but throughout the whole process, the hand was firmly holding her.
“Thank you so much, Qing Hong! I had no idea you were such a caring person.” Sister Snake was slightly younger than Shang Guan Qing Hong. At the beginning, she had a very low opinion of this boss of the haunted house from Xin Hai, but who knew, at the most dangerous moment, Shang Guan Qing Hong would not abandon her and run away on his own but stay at her side to protect her and guide her by every single step? that honestly had touched her heart and changed her opinion of the man.
“What are you talking about‽ Why would you suddenly say something like that?” Moments later, Shang Guan Qing Hong’s voice came up from the lower floor. Shang Guan Qing Hong was moving faster than Sister Snake. Using his own unique method, he had already shuffled his way down to the next floor. Hearing the direction from where Shang Guan Qing Hong’s voice came from, Sister Snake’s face turned pale almost instantly. She knew then that the hand that had been holding her did not belong to Shang Guan Qing Hong.
The shaking arm grabbed hold of the hand that had been holding her. The hand was cold, and the chill travelled up Sister Snake’s arm and froze her heart. But her hand continued to move downward. She appeared to have touched some kind of fabric. She believed it was the edge of a skirt. The skirt was sticky with what felt like blood, and among the various sensations was something akin to animal fur. Before Sister Snake’s hand moved away from the dress, she felt something tingly next to her ear. It was as if someone’s hair had brushed past her ears. With a shiver, Sister Snake was about to reach out to touch her own ear when a cold breath blew past her earlobe.
“When I first lost my sight, my best girlfriend also accompanied me down the stairs like this. Once upon a time, I really thought she was my best friend in this world.” The bitter and eerie voice drilled into Sister Snake’s ears, causing her scalp to go numb and her whole body to freeze. “My best friend cooked for me and took care of me. We were the best of friends who shared everything in the world. There was no topic that was off the table. I even wanted to opt out of my relationship to give her a chance with Ah Ming. I thought she was the most caring and most beautiful girl in the world. I regretted accepting Ah Ming’s confession when we were at school. I liked Ah Ming, but I knew that she loved Ah Ming. She deserved him more than I did.”
The woman’s voice echoed in Sister Snake’s ears sentence by sentence. The voice got closer and closer to her until it felt like someone was leaning on her back and was talking to her with her lips directly placed next to her ear.
“Ah Ming eventually left me because I believed he had found another girlfriend. All I had left was my best friend. She was very nice to me. Even though she had moved on from Ah Ming and found a new boyfriend, she was still willing to come over every day to take care of me. I felt so sorry toward her, but she did not mind all the bad things that I had ever done to her. She even said that she was willing to be my eyes.
“Our relationship became better than before. I shared every feeling that I had with her, and we even recorded everything that we did inside the diary. We had taken all kinds of pictures. Every time, my best friend would help dress me up, putting me in the most beautiful dress and helping me with the latest make-up trend. She said that I was still the most beautiful girl in the school, just like when we were still studying together. I was so thankful to have met such a good friend… until that day.”
The woman’s voice was pierced through with spine-chilling coldness.
“That day, she came home very late. She appeared to have taken one too many shots. She used the spare key that I’d given her to open the lock to my room and said that she wanted to take me for a walk. I could smell the alcohol coming off from her, so I advised her to please take a rest. It was not wise to go wandering out in her current state. But she cut me off very rudely. She forced me out of the room, dragging me along with a powerful force. I resisted subconsciously, but who could’ve known that it would only anger her further? She reached out to grab my hair and pressed down against my body.
“She told me that she had lost her love that day and warned me not to go against her wishes. That scary tone was completely different from the best friend that I knew. It was like I was dealing with a completely different person. After leaving my house, she forced me to go up the stairs. I was very afraid, but she kept a firm hold on my arm, just like how I am holding you now.”
Sister Snake felt a powerful grip holding her arm, and her body was gradually being pulled forward.
“She refused to tell what she intended to do until we reached the rooftop. She suddenly yanked on hair and leaned into my ear and told me many different things that I will never forget.
“She said that she hated me. She’d hated since we went to school together, and even at that moment, standing on the rooftop, she still hated me. I did not know why she hated me that much until the moment she pushed me down the stairs, until I reopened my eyes and saw myself lying there bleeding out on the stairs, until I saw the diary that recorded our lives together. It was not filled with sweet words as I imagined; every page was filled to the brim with the repetition of ‘die, die, die, go to hell and die, you bitch!’ The dresses that she put me in was the ugliest I had ever seen, and the make-up that she applied to me was more suitable for a clown! Only then did I realize that we were actually not good friends. I was willing to befriend this girl who was ostracized and ugly because I believed she could compliment and highlight my natural beauty even though I had gone blind. On the other hand, she was willing to stay with me because she was planning to slowly transform me into a monster that would become uglier than her.”
Sister Snake’s face was slowly being lifted. At that moment, Sister Snake’s body was pulled taut like a string. She could sense that in the darkness, there was a face that was coming close to her own.
“By the way, I forgot to tell you the most important detail. That day, she said she had lost her love because it was Ah Ming’s wedding day, but the bride was neither me nor her! Hahaha!”
The shrill and sorrowful laughed boomed beside her ears. Sister Snake felt that there were many hands grabbing at her, attempting to pull her deeper into the abyss of despair. “Do not come any closer! Help me! Help me!”
Enveloped in the world of darkness, she could not see anything. The endless fear around her heightened the darkness in her heart that was even darker than the darkness around her. Sister Snake’s pleas for help rang out for several times before she slumped to the ground unconscious. Shang Guan Qing Hong, who was downstairs, had no idea what happened. When he heard Sister Snake call for help the first time, he did not move up the stairs to help her but slid faster down the steps.