Chapter 251 - Villa in the Dark (1/2)
Unlike Huang Li earlier, Cao Xuedong had inadvertently betrayed his fear of me. Smiling wryly at the former instructor’s inability to fully rein in his emotions, I said, “I’m fine, Instructor Cao. I believe you need our help to see what’s wrong with your house?”
“Of course,” Cao Xuedong chuckled and said, “Huang Li told me about your visit. I have been expecting you. Come on in.” He whirled around and began walking deeper into the darkness of the house and we followed just behind.
The last of us had barely entered through the threshold when the door swung with an invisible force and clicked shut, plunging all of us into pitch-black darkness that I could not see anything. Blasted hell! I cursed quietly, It’s all because of the bloody liquor that I have become careless and clumsy to have fallen into such a trivial trap!
“Godd*mmit!” Lin Feng was the first to burst with an expletive, “It’s a trap! *hick*” His knees began to give way and with Chongxi weighing him down, he began leaning to the back suddenly. Having just entered the villa, he should have been able to lean on the door, but instead, he crashed to the floor with Chongxi down with him. “D*mmit!” He hissed and I scrambled over to him, juggling between helping him up to his feet while struggling to pull a completely-stoned Chongxi back up. It was a marvel that despite the crash, Chongxi still showed no signs of waking up.
“What should we do now?” Lin Feng barked at me once he got up and I extracted my Spirit Gourd and released my Spirit Wolves. I needed them to search for Cao Xuedong’s scent.
Half a dozen of silvery, spectral forms of wolves appeared at my heels. With my instructions, they lowered their snouts and got to work sniffing around at once,.
Within minutes, the alpha male of the pack stopped to look back at me before it dashed forward into the darkness with the rest of its pack in tow, snarling as they padded after their leader. The six spectral wolves formed a neat file that we followed behind quickly and it oddly reminded me of the time when Master Six hurled me back through Time, although I was accompanied by countless of twinkling stars during my travel through the wormhole instead of a scary and abyssal blackness of complete oblivion!
I set alight a cigarette and flicked it away from me. We watched it flying away, leaving a short tail of burning embers until it suddenly disappeared. There was nothing of it hitting a wall or ground, otherwise we would have seen a tiny explosion of embers, and we saw nothing in the miniscule glow. Not even the foot of a table or the leg of a chair! We were standing in an empty expanse of nothing! Sh*t, I cursed, This is not the inside of the villa! And I don’t even know where we are now!? And the staggering darkness threatening to engulf us whole only made the trepidation stronger.
I had once heard that most people had nyctophobia. The intense and persistent fear of darkness, or more accurately the fear of the vast emptiness around us. This was mostly due to the fear of the unknown. The fear of possible or imagined dangers concealed by the darkness that might pop out and catch us unawares. Hence the darkness was a substance of fear itself, more so, since humans could see nothing or feel nothing in the dark. I, for one, might already be frightened and terrified if not for the fact that my feet are still feeling the sensation of hard ground and the sight of my spirit wolves pacing before me in a straight line. Lin Feng was just behind me, still carrying Chongxi. I could hear his heavy pants, although I could not say if he was getting afraid or he was getting tired bearing Chongxi.
I frowned and lighted another cigarette, welcoming its flavor that supplied me with a brief bout of relaxation and calm. But I knew for sure that I was getting afraid, for even my fingers were trembling as I struggled to hold on to my burning stub. With no Shiyan Blade with me and the complete unfamiliarity to our enemy this time, I could hardly say that I was confident.
We meandered on in the darkness until I finished my cigarette, then I saw it. Two dim dots of light in the far distance ahead of my wolves. But it was not a comforting sight as I felt myself growing tense. It looked like the eyes of some beasts or monsters, identical to the gleaming eyes in dark I saw at Mount Changbai!
The wolves seemed to notice my caution and they shared my wariness. Moving coherently, they formed up in a spearhead formation in front of me and crouched, their backs arched menacingly in full readiness to charge. Breathing slowly but heavily, we moved step by step forward carefully. My steps were still wobbly due to the lingering hangover that I was teetering on the edge of collapsing. Absolute Vodka, I reflected in the dark, It’s a good drink, all right! But never again before work!