Feng Chengyuan scanned the furnishings and the way the rooms were put together and felt a chill he couldn’t explain.
From floor to walls to the pieces of furniture, everything had been done in the same deep crimson. Under the cold white light of the chandelier, the living-room sofa looked less like upholstery and more like a dried, dark pool of blood.
They moved into the bedroom and found it unnervingly large — directly in line with the front door, narrow and deep. The chandelier hung low over the bed, and a huge dressing mirror stood dead center facing it. Zhou Feiyu snorted.
“Who chose this layout? That takes some real talent,” he said.
Yu Nian let her gaze drop. Indeed, the designer had trampled every feng shui taboo on the list.
Su Yue’s face went pale. “This was the previous owner’s decor. We thought it looked nice when we moved in, so we never changed it… Is there a problem?”
“If you want to keep living here in peace,” Yu Nian said quietly, “replace all the dark-red furniture with lighter colors, and get that chandelier and the mirror out of the room.”
After last night’s incident, Su Yue swallowed hard and nodded as if the words were a lifeline. Nannan clung behind her mother, peeking out at Yu Nian with shyness.
Yu Nian squatted down and smiled gently at the child. “Nannan, be a good girl and tell Auntie — before you fell asleep last night, did you see anything?”
Nannan hesitated, then said in a small voice, “I saw a sister in a red dress waving at me. She told me to come play, so I went with her.”
Su Yue stiffened. “Nannan, don’t make things up. There’s no—” Her sentence stopped mid-breath when she realized what the child meant. The “sister” Nannan had described had to be the woman who’d called the child last night. She’d probably been trying to lure the child’s soul.
The thought made Su Yue’s skin crawl. She grabbed Yu Nian’s sleeve and sobbed, “Master, that ghost has latched on to Nannan. Please, save us!”
Zhou Feiyu, annoyed by the crying, moved around the room in a practiced way, muttering as he gauged the situation. He walked two full circuits and then halted, frowning. “That’s absurd. There’s no spirit here.”
His eyes flicked between Su Yue and Kang Ning and sharpened. “Have either of you offended someone recently? Done something you’re guilty about? Sometimes the mind fabricates what the heart fears. People get suspicious, and then they see ghosts.”
Su Yue’s face went ashen. “Masters, believe me — Kang Ning and I are ordinary people. We’re not saints, but we haven’t done anything monstrous.”
Zhou Feiyu looked to Yu Nian. “Could it be a ghost that only appears at certain times?”
The couple immediately offered to clear a spare room for the exorcists and, after Yu Nian put protective talismans on every doorway, everyone finally relaxed enough to retreat to bed.
Yu Nian’s own room was sparely furnished but featured an enormous double bed pushed tight against the wall, giving the room a claustrophobic chill. She crouched and ran her hand along the dust beneath the bed. Her brow lifted.
Carved into the underside of the bedboard was a talisman. Patchy, uneven strokes — clearly not the work of a trained practitioner. It was a clumsy copy of a talisman, all form and no power: a symbol without spirit, useless for warding.
She dusted her hands and lay down as though nothing had happened. Her breathing soon slowed. Something brushed down from above and tickled her face. She turned without much thought.
The next moment a cold, rotten breath blew full into her mouth.
Yu Nian opened her eyes to a face magnified to monstrous size: paper-white skin, blood seeping from every orifice. Her brow prickled. She used her hand like a blade and struck, swift as a split-second cut.
The face only gave a weird, hollow laugh — it didn’t dodge. The instant her palm — her blade — met that visage, the thing collapsed as if shattering: skin rupturing, blood spraying, chunks of hair and flesh slopping to the floor beneath. The stench of rot filled the room.
A thick black mist swirled through the air. The gore and blood on the floor vanished as if someone wiped them away in a blink. Yu Nian sat up, slightly stunned. She hadn’t used her full strength. Even so, the face had been torn apart to an extent that made no sense — so fragmented it could not possibly put itself back together.
She frowned. Had she just witnessed the ghost’s deathly end — its death rattle and broken last expression?
Night deepened. Su Yue tossed and turned, unable to sleep. Nannan suddenly piped up from the bed, “Mom, I need to go to the bathroom.”
Worried, Su Yue carried her there. When they stepped back into the corridor, Su Yue’s peripheral vision caught a flicker of red outside the window. She looked harder — nothing. Empty sky. Had she been seeing things?
She locked the bedroom door and tried to calm down, but a few minutes later came the soft “tap-tap” of something knocking on the bedroom window.
Su Yue turned and saw Kang Ning pressed flat against the glass outside, two eyes glaring in like polished coins. When his gaze met hers his lips pulled into a smile and he mouthed something.
She squinted until she could make out the words: “Open the window.”
“You were on a business trip, weren’t you? Didn’t the company send you back?” Su Yue asked as she moved to unfasten the latch, irritation and confusion tangled in her voice.
Kang Ning nodded slowly. His face was swallowed in shadow; she couldn’t read his expression. Su Yue opened the window a little and then froze.
They were on the sixth floor.
On the other side of that pane, the thing pressing against the glass was impossibility itself. Kang Ning’s grin widened until the red of his mouth nearly swallowed his face. His teeth were too many, too bright.
Su Yue let out a terrible sound. Panic flared — Nannan was alone in the room now. She moved to slam the window shut, but it was already too late.
Two cold, rotting hands clamped onto her wrist. The fingers were mottled purple-black, nails long and stained, a constant seep of dark mist oozing from the tips. The thing at the window scrambled in like a warped spider, using every limb to force its way inside.
A violent impact threw through Su Yue’s body, an ice that went past bone and straight into the marrow of her soul. Nannan saw everything and began to cry, “Mama, what’s wrong?”
Su Yue bowed her head and convulsed. Her chest rent with a laugh that was too low to be right. When she raised her face again, she was changed — eyes heavy-lidded and sultry, her smile soft and honeyed. She glided toward Nannan.
From the child’s angle, a woman in red clung to Su Yue’s back — the same sister who had called Nannan to play the night before. Su Yue reached out and patted the girl’s head with practiced tenderness.
Her voice was sharp as a blade now. “Nannan, be a good girl and stay right here.”
Then she drifted to the door, tore the talisman from the frame with a single rude motion, and moved toward Feng Chengyuan’s room.