Chapter 34: The House That Hunts (Part VII)

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Ding Chaojie sensed the door behind him opening. He was forced to step backward, one step at a time, into the space beyond it.

With a bang, he watched helplessly as the Green Door closed once more.

There was a foyer before him. He must have entered the inside of the Green Door. After being hunted for so long, this was the first time Ding Chaojie had made it inside. He could not move his hands or feet, like a pitiful fly stuck in a spider’s web.

The cold was unbearable. He was wearing nothing but a jacket, and every hair on his body stood on end. He could not even force out a single word.

Ding Chaojie’s neck was rigid. He could feel someone slowly drawing near behind him.

He could not turn around, but he could see the shadow cast in front of him. Someone was raising a hammer high behind his back.

Bang!

…

The demon hunter who had transformed into a snail lay beneath the television.

Zhu Ning was facing the television. She had just been about to examine the employee bracelet on the demon hunter’s wrist.

The employee bracelet served much the same purpose as a black box. It might contain a record of how the demon hunter had died. Zhu Ning could not understand how a demon hunter had ended up dying here.

Suddenly, she stopped moving.

There was someone behind her. She could see the shadow cast by the newcomer, and from the reflection in the television, it looked like a tall, thin woman.

A hammer came crashing down from behind with tremendous force. Zhu Ning’s body went limp, and she slammed into the floor with a bang.

Zhu Ning had been beaten hundreds of times by demon hunters during combat training. There was no way she could be knocked down so easily. She had intended to struggle, but after hesitating for a moment, she went still.

Bang, bang!

Perhaps afraid that Zhu Ning would fight back, the woman struck her twice more, hard, at the back of her neck.

After the gene injection, Zhu Ning’s skin had become tougher. It was as though she were wearing a soft suit of armor beneath her work uniform, protecting her fragile cervical vertebrae. She felt pain, but it was not unbearable.

Her danger premonition did not sound. This was not as dangerous as the pig-man’s ambush last time.

Zhu Ning heard a clatter. The woman had thrown away the hammer. Then a woman began breathing heavily nearby. She seemed to have been trapped in a state of extreme panic for a long time, her gasping especially loud.

The voice was strangely familiar.

“I’ve caught you,” the woman said, still shaken. “I’ve caught you.”

A moment later, Zhu Ning felt a weight tug at her foot. The woman dragged her by the leg as if she were hauling away a corpse. Zhu Ning was somewhat curious about what the woman intended to do.

Zhu Ning herself, together with her work uniform, weighed at least one hundred and fifty pounds. Dragging her was an exhausting task, and the woman kept stopping and starting.

Zhu Ning took the opportunity to survey the room. On the floor lay a set of the demon hunter’s steel armor, presumably left behind by the dead hunter.

There were also two severely decomposed corpses beside the bathroom door. They had probably failed to transform, and it was impossible to tell whether they had once been men or women.

The woman dragged Zhu Ning into the master bathroom. The inside looked like a murder scene. Everything was drenched in blood, and droplets had splattered across the ceiling.

The blood around the bathtub had dried. It looked as though someone had once killed a person there, filling the bathroom with blood. There was still someone in the room.

With a click, the woman shackled Zhu Ning’s wrist to a pipe.

From that position, Zhu Ning finally saw the woman before her—Huang Yaru.

She was wearing the floral nightdress she had disappeared in. On her feet were a pair of white slippers shaped like rabbits, though they had been stained red with blood.

Huang Yaru’s hair hung loose and unkempt. It was dry and yellow, and she was so thin that her eye sockets had sunken inward. With those hollow eyes, she looked like a skeleton draped in skin.

She looked just as frail and helpless as she had in the video and had hardly aged at all. She still slipped easily into states of panic, but a clear madness now shone in her eyes.

The system voice sounded:

[Side mission, “The House That Hunts Its Victims”: Locate the Missing Huang Yaru—completed. Current purification progress: 60 percent.]

This really was Huang Yaru. She did not appear abnormal in any other way. At least she had not grown a snail shell.

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Huang Yaru kept muttering, “Why is there one more? Why is there one more?”

One more what?

Huang Yaru seemed to want to remove Zhu Ning’s work uniform, but the Cleaner protective suit was difficult to take off. Even Zhu Ning had needed twenty minutes the first time she wore it. Anyone unfamiliar with it would not know where to begin.

Sure enough, Huang Yaru gave up after only three minutes. In the end, she removed Zhu Ning’s cleaning pack instead.

Apart from containment tools, the cleaning pack contained standard-issue weapons. An ordinary person would not even dare touch them, and it would be easy to set one off by accident.

Huang Yaru frowned when she saw the pack full of weapons.

“Are you like him?”

Like him in what way? Was she saying Zhu Ning was like the demon hunter outside?

Huang Yaru studied Zhu Ning deeply.

“Don’t be afraid. It’ll be over soon. It won’t hurt.”

The helmet had not filtered out the smell of blood. With blood everywhere, Zhu Ning felt that the woman’s promise that it would be over soon meant she intended to send her to her death.

Huang Yaru had no intention of speaking with her at all. She took Zhu Ning’s cleaning pack and placed it in the corner by the bathroom door.

The distance between Zhu Ning and the cleaning pack was now more than a meter, so she could no longer use her metal-control ability. However, the handcuff on her wrist and the pipe behind her were both made of metal.

With a click, Huang Yaru left the bathroom and closed the door.

Only after the woman was gone did Zhu Ning begin examining the other victim in the bathroom. His hands were bound, and he was curled up beside the bathtub, his body covered in blood.

He might have been struck with the hammer as well. The back of his head and his shoulders were smeared with blood, and Zhu Ning suspected that some of his bones had been shattered.

The man looked oddly familiar.

Was that Ding Chaojie? Wasn’t he at the Public Security Bureau? Couldn’t the bureau help him?

Ding Chaojie had his back to Zhu Ning and kept twitching faintly.

For a moment, Zhu Ning found the entire situation deeply bizarre. She and Ding Chaojie seemed like some kind of stored food.

Huang Yaru’s actions just now had been the preparation. Now she was going to summon someone to eat.

But Ding Chaojie’s appearance had shattered the house’s eerie atmosphere. At least he was alive, not another corpse, and Zhu Ning could speak with him.

When people know nothing, they are good at frightening themselves. After seeing Huang Yaru, however, the situation gradually became clearer, and Zhu Ning began reconsidering everything.

Ding Chaojie lay on the floor, half dead. He and Zhu Ning were bound at opposite ends of the bathroom, though the bathroom itself was not very large.

Zhu Ning nudged him with her foot and whispered, “Hey. Ding Chaojie?”

Ding Chaojie’s eyes flew open. He recognized Zhu Ning’s voice. When he raised his head, he saw a woman in motorcycle gear.

Even if he died, Ding Chaojie would never forget this strange woman. He glared at her with bloodshot eyes.

“Liar! You lied to me!”

Zhu Ning: “…”

Was this really the time to argue about who had lied to whom?

Ding Chaojie was covered in wounds. Zhu Ning noticed that all ten of his fingers had been broken, as though someone had forcibly snapped them backward. Was Huang Yaru really that brutal?

But on closer examination, it did not look like her doing. Every finger had been bent in the wrong direction. An ordinary woman would not possess the strength to break an adult man’s finger bones backward.

Zhu Ning lowered her voice.

“What happened to you?”

Ding Chaojie’s face was covered in blood. When Zhu Ning questioned him, it was as though she had touched an old wound. He pressed his head against the edge of the bathtub.

“This is retribution. Retribution. It found me.”

His voice sounded unbearably heavy.

“This is the retribution for killing her.”

What did that mean?

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When Zhu Ning had first seen Ding Chaojie, she had thought he was merely tense. Now she felt that he might have lost his mind.

“Hahahahahaha…” Ding Chaojie muttered to himself. “It followed me to the Public Security Bureau. No one can save me. This is retribution.”

Zhu Ning’s temples throbbed. She could roughly guess that the Green Door had resumed hunting Ding Chaojie at the Public Security Bureau. She simply had not expected the Green Door to have become so agile.

Zhu Ning extracted the key information and asked, “You killed someone?”

Ding Chaojie’s voice grew even more anguished. He slammed his forehead against the bathtub, producing a series of dull thuds.

“I didn’t mean to. I only wanted to steal something, but she said she was going to call the police. I—I—I—I had no choice…”

As expected, he had concealed part of the story he had told Zhu Ning. Ding Chaojie was not merely a thief. He had attempted to burglarize the house, only to be discovered by its owner.

“I lost control,” Ding Chaojie said. “I’m guilty. I’m guilty.”

So that was the truth behind Ding Chaojie’s story. He had attempted to rob the house, killed someone, and fled immediately afterward. He had never expected that the first thing to catch up with him would not be the Public Security Bureau, but the Green Door.

He had killed the original owner of the house and become its new owner. The Green Door had bound itself to him. He could evade capture by the authorities, but he could not escape the Green Door’s pursuit.

The Green Door could hunt him for the rest of his life, to the ends of the earth. Over time, even he had begun to wonder whether this was retribution: because he had killed someone, the victim had become a door and come after him.

No wonder Ding Chaojie had been so desperate to enter the Public Security Bureau and atone when Zhu Ning first encountered him.

He had done something shameful and feared that someone would come knocking at his door like a ghost.

It really was retribution. He deserved it.

Zhu Ning surmised that this house had probably existed for a very long time. The Green Door kept wandering through the human world, searching for the next accidental owner to move in.

Once bound to it, the owner would be hunted to death—unless they entered the Green Door, which would break the bond. But once inside, they would be trapped in another dimension, unable to leave until they were assimilated into a snail.

Then what was Huang Yaru’s role? She did not look as though she had been forced into it. Had she been taking care of this house all this time?

The house had no ability to attack on its own. If one had to compare it to something, its existence was more like that of a Venus flytrap.

Huang Yaru knocking Zhu Ning and Ding Chaojie unconscious was very much like a mother feeding her young.

The young had not yet grown fangs, and snail-men moved slowly. Huang Yaru had to chew the food herself before feeding it to the house.

Zhu Ning asked, “How did you get in?”

She wanted to hear the details of how Ding Chaojie had entered the Green Door. Perhaps she could find a new clue.

But Ding Chaojie seemed unable to understand her. He suddenly jerked violently, like a fish lying on the cold bathroom floor.

His movements were far too strange, unlike anything a human being could make.

Zhu Ning’s heart lurched. She was all too familiar with this kind of reflexive reaction.

It was like the precursor to a human turning into a zombie.

After a moment of silence, Zhu Ning asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I—I—I’m so cold.”

Cold?

The house was indeed quite cold. The temperature displayed on her helmet panel was only eighteen degrees Celsius. Ding Chaojie was wearing a denim jacket, so it was perfectly normal for him to feel cold.

Ding Chaojie let out strange cries and writhed, but his hands were shackled. All his struggling produced was the clinking of metal against metal.

“You—you you you—”

Ding Chaojie’s eyes widened. Two streams of liquid ran from them. They were not tears, but something resembling a yellow secretion.

His neck trembled. Like a zombie, he crawled toward Zhu Ning while muttering, “You, you, you…”

Normally, Zhu Ning would have kicked him away. But today, she did not move.

“Can you take a look at me?” Ding Chaojie asked.

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