Chapter 139: No Matter What Sound You Hear, Don’t Come Out
“After dark, don’t knock on the door… don’t knock on the door…”
The old man was mumbling in his strange voice. Although his posture while walking was odd, he moved quickly, and in the blink of an eye, he was in front of Gu Qiqi.
His murky eyes seemed to be afflicted by some illness, with the eyeballs drifting to the sides. A waxy yellow face was filled with wrinkles, and the tired, weak muscles could no longer support the flesh on his face, allowing it to sag, giving a feeling that it was about to decay and melt.
As he approached, his head appeared as if it were being pulled by something, his neck sticking up straight. When he stopped in front of Gu Qiqi, his bizarre face gradually became clear in the darkness, moving so close that it was less than a palm’s distance from her.
In an instant, the only thing left in Gu Qiqi’s vision was the old man’s strange face. However, he did not sense anything wrong. Maintaining that eerie posture, he repeated the same words.
“After dark, don’t knock on the door. The noise is too loud; those things will hear it.”
A strange foul smell wafted into Gu Qiqi’s nostrils. It smelled like the unique odor of an elderly person but was mixed with more, harder-to-describe scents.
This grandpa is so scary! Gu Qiqi didn’t dare to speak out loud, only murmuring in her heart.
In the past two or three years, guided by the system, she had faced many kinds of urban legends. By all accounts, her nerves had already been toughened.
But now, facing this man who was clearly human yet looked like a character from an urban legend, she felt a shiver run down her spine.
She instinctively took a few steps back, stopping only when her back collided against the cold stone wall of a cottage, and quietly asked, “Grandpa, you said those things will hear? What are those things?”
“Don’t knock on the door.” The old man did not answer Gu Qiqi’s question, merely repeating it in a faint tone, as if Gu Qiqi were not the target of his initial words.
He stood there, stiff and motionless, with his eyes continually rotating, as if desperately trying to move the displaced eyeballs back to their normal positions.
“Don’t knock on the door…” the old man repeated, then turned and walked back in the direction he came from. His steps were small and strange, yet he moved quickly; his back looked extremely odd.
As the old man moved away, Gu Qiqi swallowed the breath that had been stuck in her throat and cautiously began to communicate with the system.
“System? What should I do now? Should I listen to that grandpa?”
The system, “…” Asking me about such matters touches on my blind spot of knowledge.
When I arrived before, there weren’t so many weird occurrences. The legends of red lanterns were either killed off if there were few or avoided if there were many. The process was very simple.
While the system was pondering how to respond to Gu Qiqi’s query while cleverly dodging her question and maintaining the air of an interrogative system, strange sounds once again came from ahead.
“Don’t knock on the door, come with me, I’ll take you to a place to stay…”
Looking in the direction of the voice, the old man, who had already left, had somehow stopped his steps. He stood beside a dry well in the distance, raising his arm, moving stiffly to wave, as if controlled by an invisible thread, like a puppet performing an action.
At this moment, the sky had completely darkened, and behind the old man, the cottages covered by night appeared alive, densely packed together; the maze-like paths leading here and there were twisted and narrow.
“System, should we follow him? I’m a bit scared…” Gu Qiqi whispered.
In such a situation, who wouldn’t be scared? But… After a few seconds of silence, the system replied, “Let’s follow and see what he’s up to.”
In cases like this, the atmosphere was inexplicably strange, yet the urban legend was not visible; I had seen plenty of these!
In situations where escape wasn’t completely feasible, actively seeking out legends and letting them manifest was instead the best option.
Haunted entities lurking in the shadows are often far scarier than those visible in front of you, the system thought.
After hearing the system’s words, Gu Qiqi walked towards the old man, who also turned and continued to move in his weird manner.
The whole way, the old man kept his back to Gu Qiqi. She gazed at his back, with terrifying scenes flickering through her mind, secretly speculating about what expression the old man might have at this moment.
Would it be the same as earlier, with a vacant, numb expression, or fierce and sinister? Or perhaps at the moment of turning, his face would be painted with a chilling, mysterious smile.
The old man led Gu Qiqi along the dirt road of this desolate village, walking towards the edge of the village, and after making several turns, he finally stopped in front of a temple at the village’s edge.
It was a dilapidated temple located at the very outskirts of the village, with abandoned fields visible in the distance. In the night, the shadows of scarecrows could be faintly seen, and beyond that lay the dark, undulating mountains.
The temple resembled a mountain god temple often seen in Z Country, with its ancient eaves and tiles covered in grass, naturally obscured by some green, creeping plants.
The grayish-yellow wall plaster had largely peeled off at the base, and the wall surface was pockmarked, with some remote corners even having collapsed.
Reaching the temple, after stepping over the damp moss-covered stone steps, he pushed open the door filled with the scent of rotting wood and walked straight in, showing no intention of acknowledging Gu Qiqi, as if he had completely forgotten that someone was following him.
As Gu Qiqi followed the old man into the temple, she instantly felt a chilling pressure enveloping her, causing her hair to stand on end, as if she had stepped into icy sea water; the air was damp, making it hard to breathe.
The system noticed something unusual and immediately activated its spiritual sense to the maximum, yet unexpectedly detected no spirit energy fluctuations.
If this situation wasn’t due to a hiding urban legend, it was likely a feng shui issue.
However, upon looking beforehand, the temple’s orientation and layout did not seem particularly problematic. How strange! the system thought.
The system only knew that feng shui influenced spirit energy, but it had only a superficial understanding; it couldn’t exactly pinpoint what was odd.
As soon as they stepped into the small courtyard behind the door, Gu Qiqi suddenly froze in her tracks, her body stiffening in place.
In that dilapidated courtyard, there were densely arranged two or three dozen water tanks, each large enough to hide an adult male.
Those tanks were filled with water, reflecting a faint light coming from who knows where. A damp, cold breeze passed, causing ripples to form, and the sight before her was a bizarre, eerie shimmer as if something would suddenly leap out of a tank at any moment.
Gu Qiqi stared ahead, watching the old man walk between the tanks, her icy small hands gripping the metal bat tightly, her entire demeanor suddenly becoming as heavy as a mountain.
This was a sign that she was about to release spirit patterns. Faced with such a situation, she instinctively entered a battle-ready state, prepared to confront any enemy that might spring from the shadows at any moment.
At that moment, a coarse, grating voice abruptly came from the thatched cottage beside the courtyard.
“Dad, why did you run out again so late at night? I’ve told you so many times, why won’t you listen?”
Following that, the door of the low thatched cottage was pushed open, and someone emerged from the dark room. The dim candlelight illuminated his face.
The newcomer was a tall and robust man, his dark face marked by deep and shallow scars, looking as if someone had scratched it with a small kn*fe or as if he had been attacked by some beast, with almost no intact skin.
What was strange was that the scars were almost parallel to each other; generally speaking, it was hard to create so many organized wounds with a kn*fe, and as for a beast attack, it was hard to imagine any beast having claws with only two sharp points.
The man’s walking posture was different from the old man and the previous villagers; his body did not maintain that strange movement and looked quite normal.
Upon seeing the only somewhat normal person in the Bamboo Slips Illusion, Gu Qiqi sighed slightly in relief. However, the man’s mood was just the opposite.
Noticing Gu Qiqi following behind the old man, in the candlelight, he clearly saw her and reacted as if he had seen something terrifying, his pupils suddenly contracting sharply.
“Outsider!” the man exclaimed, turning suddenly to look at the old man, who had walked deeper into the temple, and growled, “Dad, why did you bring an outsider back? Are you trying to get us killed…”
Before the man could finish his words, they heard a chaotic and neurotic mumble from the dark depths of the temple.
“It’s dark now, don’t knock on the door. Be careful… be careful that what comes out isn’t human. Don’t knock on the door… those things will hear…”
Gradually, the old man’s voice weakened, and his figure completely disappeared, as if swallowed by the darkness.
Hearing the old man’s words, the man paused for a moment, frowned for a long time, and finally sighed, looking at Gu Qiqi, saying, “You come with me, I’ll arrange a place for you to stay. Once inside, just stay in the house quietly; no matter what sound you hear, don’t come out.”
“I don’t care where you came from or how you got here. After tonight, when the dawn comes, you need to leave quickly. We do not welcome outsiders here; others won’t be as courteous as I am.”
While speaking, the man kept sizing up Gu Qiqi, with a strange look in his eyes. His expression was unfriendly, tinged with resentment and hatred, as if he had the same look that people had towards traitors in old black-and-white films.
“Others?” Gu Qiqi tilted her head. “Are there other people in this village? I saw when I came…”
Before Gu Qiqi could finish her sentence, the man suddenly turned around, glaring at her with fierce eyes. She felt a chill run down her spine as he stared. He then lowered his voice and said, “You don’t want to meet the others.”
“Hurry and go in and sleep. Remember, don’t come out no matter what sound you hear.”
After the man said that, he stepped aside, allowing Gu Qiqi to enter the low thatched cottage. As she walked in, the man immediately closed the door.
In the instant the door closed, Gu Qiqi’s vision plunged into darkness. In the dark, a crisp “click” echoed, the sound of the lock being turned from the outside…
