Chapter 4 – No One in the Room

Someone was hidden inside this room that had never been able to be opened — the moment this realization struck Yu Sheng, he felt his scalp go numb, and immediately after came an uncontrollable cascade of speculation.

Who was it? When had the owner of that voice snuck in? Had they slipped in while he was asleep, or had they already been here when he arrived two months ago?

If it was the latter, then he had spent long stretches of time inside this large house without going out, and he could confirm that the room on the second floor had never once been opened during that period — so the person inside had been hiding there the entire time? Was there another passage inside the room, or perhaps…

Was the one who had let out that soft laugh truly a “person”?

A chaotic jumble of thoughts surged wildly through his mind, yet the expression on Yu Sheng’s face gradually grew calm — perhaps it was some change brought about by his earlier encounter with that “frog,” or perhaps it was the influence of having “died and come back to life,” but he felt his current state of mind was… somewhat strange.

That voice carried neither goodwill nor malice, but it was unmistakably eerie. Yet after that initial moment of his scalp going numb, Yu Sheng found that all fear and hesitation had vanished from his heart. What remained was… only an intense curiosity.

He wanted to figure out exactly what was inside that room.

He wanted to figure out exactly what secrets lay within this large house he had been using as a base.

This was his safe house — the only “home” he had in this vast city. Inside a safe house, there could be no unsafe things.

He slowly leaned in and pressed his ear against the door. He thought he could hear low laughter still hidden within, but it might have been an illusion — perhaps it was only the hollow sound of the wind spinning in his ears.

He curled his fingers and knocked on the door.

“Open up. I heard you.”

The door, naturally, did not open, but that hollow laughter did indeed disappear.

An expected outcome. Yu Sheng said nothing, simply turned and left — he went to the adjacent room piled with miscellaneous items and retrieved an axe.

Returning to the locked door, he stood in silence, raised the axe high, and brought it down with the full force of his body.

The sharp blade struck the thin wooden door and produced a piercing sound like metal colliding, sparks flying from the blade’s edge, yet the door — which looked like it could be kicked open with a single foot — showed not the slightest mark.

That soft laughter floated over again, faintly and indistinctly, but Yu Sheng paid it no mind whatsoever. His expression remained perfectly calm as he raised the axe once more, as though performing an exceptionally serious, meticulous task requiring great patience, continuing to bring the axe down again and again.

He knew this door could not be opened — not with a power drill, not with an electric saw. But even knowing this, over the past two months he had attempted nearly every day to open it by various means. Today, a strange sound had come from within the room, which only further fueled his motivation to open it today.

And with each fruitless swing of the axe, that motivation only grew stronger. Each blow of his axe became more forceful, more fluid, and even… more in tune with his own will.

His gradually emptying mind even conjured up some peculiar associations — he felt like Wu Gang, chopping away at the tree on the moon. If only he could cut down that wretched osmanthus tree, the bystanders watching the show — Chang’e, the Jade Rabbit, Guangtou Qiang, and Sisyphus — would gather in a circle and applaud him…

He didn’t even know why Sisyphus had appeared in his imagination.

Meanwhile, the soft laughter coming from behind the door grew increasingly grating, becoming more and more distinct, drawing closer and closer, as though the owner of the voice had stepped forward one step at a time and was now pressed right up against the back of the wooden door — as though she knew perfectly well that this door was impregnable, and was shamelessly mocking Yu Sheng, who was swinging his axe out here, from behind this wall of sighs.

But suddenly, amid that strange and grating laughter, another voice appeared — one that sounded tense and irritated: “Could you stop laughing?! If he actually gets the door open and comes in, I’m the first one he’ll chop!”

The laughter from within the door immediately stopped.

Yu Sheng, in the midst of raising the axe to bring it down, also froze for an instant — and then heard a loud crack from his own lower back.

Accompanied by that crack, the axe he could no longer control also fell, striking a position entirely outside his plans.

A crisp sound completely unlike the previous jarring collision rang out from the door. The axe in Yu Sheng’s hand fell to the floor, and immediately after, he jerked his hands up… to support his lower back.

His back hurt — he had thrown it out quite badly, a sharp, shooting pain.

He supported his lower back with difficulty, pressed close to the door, and took two seconds to recover before shifting his attention to the spot where his final axe strike had landed.

A “flash of light” lingered approximately two or three centimeters from the door’s surface, located on the side near the door hinge. It looked like the sparks that had flown up when the axe struck, yet it seemed fixed in the air, frozen at the instant the burst of light had flared.

And by the light of this small glow, Yu Sheng could faintly make out what appeared to be something on the door’s surface nearby.

He reached out his hand toward it.

A suppressed, high-pitched shriek came from behind the door: “Ahh—”

Yu Sheng’s eyes snapped open. The bright electric light of the living room seemed somewhat glaring. Sleeping on the sofa had left his entire body aching, and the wall clock nearby ticked steadily — the time on its face showed he had slept for less than forty minutes.

Yu Sheng lay on the sofa in a daze for a moment before the somewhat numb memories in his mind finally gradually became clear.

He had fallen asleep… had what just happened only been a dream?

He sat there in a stupor, but suddenly he felt something was wrong.

That “dream” had been far too real in its unfolding, its details far too vivid and complete. He could even clearly remember the sensation of the axe in his hand, the frozen flash of light on the door, he remembered…

He abruptly sat up from the sofa and jerked his hands up… to support his lower back.

His back hurt — he had thrown it out quite badly, a sharp, shooting pain.

“What the… hiss… hell…” Yu Sheng couldn’t help but recite praises to the sky. The freshly thrown-out back combined with the sudden movement combined with the full-body aches from sleeping on the sofa produced a compound therapeutic effect, making him feel for a moment that he would have been better off letting that frog stab him in the heart — at least that had only hurt for two seconds. Then, one hand pressing his lower back, he laboriously stood up, all the while growing increasingly certain that this had absolutely not been an ordinary “dream.”

A thrown-out back from a dream couldn’t make it hurt in reality. Something truly uncanny had appeared.

That thing had invaded his “safe house.”

He adjusted his posture and mindset, trying not to let the back pain affect his movement too much, then after a brief moment of thought, he grimaced and made his way up the stairs to the second floor.

He held a telescopic baton in one hand and returned to the room piled with miscellaneous items, where he found the same axe he had used in the dream. Gripping it in his right hand — the sensation of the handle in his palm was identical to what he had felt in the dream, and the wooden handle even seemed to still carry the warmth of his own palm.

He came to the locked door. The door remained perfectly intact, and there was no trace of the “light-mark” left by the dream’s axe strikes visible to the eye.

The inside of the room was completely quiet.

As though everything were as it always had been, as though nothing at all had happened.

But Yu Sheng still clearly remembered the position of that light-mark.

He hung the telescopic baton at his waist and switched the axe to his left hand, reaching out his right hand to feel along the door, searching for the position of the flash of light he had struck open in the dream… He remembered it was near the door hinge, and at the time he had seen something faint and indistinct…

The next second, he felt a handle — a handle invisible to the naked eye.

But he clearly remembered that this handle had not been there before. From the very first day he had discovered this locked door, he had examined every inch of its detail, had felt his way across its every surface. He was certain he had never once felt any such “nonexistent handle.”

Why? Was it because he had observed it in the dream? Was it because he had “cleaved through” some kind of disguise with the axe? Because he had confirmed its existence, and so it truly existed?

Yu Sheng ran through every film, television show, game, and novel he had ever seen through his mind, instantly coming up with a great pile of possible reasons — but his hands did not hesitate for even a moment. He had already gripped that invisible door handle, and gently turned it.

The impregnable locked door thus opened with effortless ease, swinging open from the side of the door hinge.

It was an empty room. Peering through the gradually widening gap, there was only floorboards and walls. The light spilling in from the doorway slowly illuminated that dim space, yet even after carefully pushing the door completely open, Yu Sheng saw no sign of the owner of the mocking voice.

He gripped the axe tightly in one hand and carefully surveyed the room, only to find there was truly nothing inside — not even a bed or a chair.

Only cold moonlight, filtering through the cracks in the aged curtains to fall into the room, leaving a mottled patch on the floor.

But suddenly, something caught the corner of his eye.

There was “something” in the room after all. On the wall directly facing the door hung a painting.

An exquisite frame, its edges decorated with intricate and classical vine and floral motifs. At the center of the canvas was a chair covered in soft red velvet, serving as the backdrop.

But that was all. There was no cursed phantom sitting in the oil painting, laughing mockingly at the intruder.

Yu Sheng frowned and stared intently at the roughly half-meter-tall frame for a long while. Keeping his gaze fixed on it, he reached out to find the light switch beside the door frame and turned on the room’s light.

Under the light, the details of the painting became even more exquisitely clear.

He carefully approached the painting and studied it for quite some time.

And then he spotted it — in the corner of the frame, almost imperceptibly faint… the hem of a skirt.

“…”

He thought for a moment, then spoke with a somewhat peculiar expression: “Are you there?”

“I’m not!”

A guilty voice replied from within the painting.