An intense wave of dizziness struck again, even more violent than the last, as if the entire world were spinning, all colors and sounds twisting out of shape before finally sinking into chaos. When the dizziness receded like the tide, Bai Yu found himself once more standing before that pitch-black shop door.
This time, the syrupy mechanical female voice from before did not ring out again. The entire café was like a tomb long abandoned, submerged in a suffocating dead silence. Inside, it was pitch-dark, so black he could not see his hand before his face. Even the air seemed to have congealed, carrying a faint, almost imperceptible moldy smell and some indescribable stench of decay. Fortunately, with Hei Yan’s help, those eyes that could see even in darkness allowed Bai Yu to make out the scene of despair before him.
The café had returned to its original state of silence. All the music had vanished completely; not even the faintest echo remained of that strange melody that had once lingered by his ears. All the customers—the diners who had been as stiff and eerie as puppets—as well as the employees in black-and-white uniforms had disappeared without a trace. The entire space was empty, leaving only the vague outlines of furniture standing in Bai Yu’s vision like the skeleton of some enormous creature.
Bai Yu’s heart beat irregularly in his chest, not from fear, but from an instinctive vigilance. This dead silence was far more unsettling than the previous clamor. He tried taking a step forward, intending to investigate whether this space had undergone some new change.
“Plap.”
A clear footstep sounded from behind him. The sound was incredibly distinct, like a bare foot stepping onto a damp wooden floor, carrying a sticky texture. Bai Yu’s body instantly tensed, but he forced himself to keep facing forward.
He tried taking a few more steps forward, each one cautious, as if treading on thin ice. And the footsteps behind him sounded again in turn. They were completely synchronized with him, neither fast nor slow, neither near nor far, like an invisible shadow clinging tightly to his back, following him wherever he went. Bai Yu could even feel a cold breath spreading from the nape of his neck, as if someone were pressing their face close behind his ear and breathing soundlessly.
Shake it off?
The moment the thought arose, Bai Yu rejected it himself. This thing clearly could not be escaped by speed alone. It was like a curse attached to him—or rather, his “companion” after stepping into this ghost story.
“According to the Customer Rules, the one following closely behind me must be that child, right?” Bai Yu thought silently.
It was the little ghost that had asked him to help it find its eyeballs. Then, where was that “restroom”?
Since this space had distorted and changed again after he agreed to the child’s request and put on that red uniform, then within this warped time and space, that “restroom” must exist.
But where exactly was it hidden?
A bold thought suddenly occurred to Bai Yu. He did not turn around. He merely spoke into the hair-raising darkness behind him in a casual tone. “Hey, brat following me, do you know where the restroom is where you dropped your eyeballs?”
“…”
As expected, he received no answer. Only those sticky footsteps continued following him at an unhurried pace.
Bai Yu clicked his tongue, feeling a trace of irritation.
Among Evil Nightmares, there was no lack of beings possessing a certain degree of intelligence. Some could even conduct limited communication with humans, though the content was usually extremely twisted.
Bai Yu had always trusted his ability to “negotiate” with Evil Nightmares. He could always capture key information from those seemingly meaningless fragments of speech.
However, within the nightmare worlds created by Evil Nightmares, the materialized “ghosts” were different. They usually had no intelligence—or rather, their intelligence was so low it was outrageous. Their behavioral patterns were like precisely programmed procedures. Even simple communication resembled a script set in advance.
For example, the little child ghost he had encountered earlier could ask Bai Yu whether he could help it look for its eyeballs, but that was merely a “question trigger” set by the Evil Nightmare that had created this ghost-story world, bait meant to lure prey deeper into the trap.
And Bai Yu’s question just now was clearly outside the Evil Nightmare’s “preset range,” so naturally there would be no response.
It was only a manipulated doll, a tool executing specific instructions, not a truly thinking creature.
After making almost a full circuit around the café, Bai Yu’s gaze fell on the last place he had never truly set foot in before—the coffee-making counter. Even during the previous times he had been dragged into this ghost story, Bai Yu had only glanced over it in haste, placing his attention on those statue-like employees and never truly exploring the counter in depth.
He walked around behind the counter. Everything there seemed exceptionally tidy, completely out of place amid the dead and chaotic silence outside. Two neatly folded sets of clothes lay quietly on the smooth countertop, especially clear in Hei Yan’s vision. One was a male waiter’s black uniform, while the other was the red uniform worn by the female employee who had greeted customers at the entrance.
Bai Yu stood in place and pondered for a moment.
According to the Customer Rules, when he was being followed by the child, he needed to seek help from an employee in a red uniform.
Then, combined with his current circumstances, the most reasonable inference was that he should put on the red uniform and make himself the “red-clothed employee” mentioned in the rules.
Of course, there was another possibility—that when the child was following him closely, he needed to immediately seek help from some “truly existing red-clothed employee.”
However, in this empty, deathly silent space, Bai Yu clearly no longer had the conditions to look for another “red-clothed employee.” He could only make himself become that “red-clothed employee.”
He picked up the red uniform. The fabric was icy cold to the touch, carrying a slickness that belonged to no textile, as if it had just been fished out of some freezing liquid. A faint smell of blood drifted into his nose, making him subconsciously frown.
He did not think too much. He merely put the damp, cold uniform on in silence. The instant the fabric pressed against his skin, Bai Yu felt an indescribable chill, as if something icy were seeping into his body bit by bit along the weave of the clothing.
“Creak—”
A piercing sound of friction, like a rusted hinge groaning in agony, abruptly shattered the dead silence inside the café. A door appeared without warning on the originally smooth wall at the end of the café. The door opened little by little, revealing the bottomless darkness within. On the door, male and female symbols were clearly printed, looking especially abrupt in Hei Yan’s vision.
Bai Yu walked up to the door. In the darkness, a slip of paper had been carefully pasted to the door panel, its edges slightly curled, as if it had been eroded by moisture for a long time.
Restroom Rules:
1. The restroom is # safe.
2. There are no mirrors in the restroom.
3. At all times, please ## use the last stall in the women’s restroom.
4. Please ^do not turn on the restroom lights when encountering danger.
5. If you encounter danger, please trust the restroom cleaning staff. They will protect you.
6. Please help me find my eyeballs.
These Restroom Rules had far fewer entries than the previous Customer Rules, but there were many more traces of alteration and correction on them. The crossed-out and added ink marks were like twisted ghostly faces, silently screaming on the paper.
Bai Yu stared at these rules and activated Hei Yan’s ability. In his vision, the tampered words began to tremble, as if being tugged by some invisible force.
He could feel an energy filled with intense malice trying to force these erroneous rules into his mind.
But Hei Yan’s power was like a sharp blade, precisely cutting through these disguises. The falsified handwriting that had been tampered with was peeled away before his eyes bit by bit, revealing the true and twisted rules beneath.
“Rule One: The restroom is not safe.” Bai Yu silently corrected it in his heart. The crossed-out word “not” was now exceptionally clear in his eyes, like some kind of warning.
“Rule Three: At all times, please do not use the last stall in the men’s restroom.”
“Rule Four: Please turn on the restroom lights when encountering danger.” A “do not” had been added there.
“And…” Bai Yu’s gaze fell on the final rule. That sentence—“Please help me find my eyeballs”—had not been covered by any crossed-out marks, yet it seemed so out of place. It did not resemble a rule, but more like a plea for help, or… some deeper form of deception.
“Could the one who made the rules and the one who tampered with them be the same person?” Bai Yu chewed over this question repeatedly in his mind. Of course, he was not referring to the Evil Nightmare itself, but to the “me” in the final rule. Even without Hei Yan’s ability, the abruptness of the last rule was obvious.
No matter how one looked at it, something like “Please help me find my eyeballs” could not be a rule.
Then why add this line? And who added it? This question was especially important.
He thought of how he had only entered this strange space-time with the “restroom” after agreeing to the child’s request and putting on the red uniform. Then, the “me” who had written in the rules asking for help finding eyeballs… could it be that thing? The child that had been following closely behind him all along, yet had never made a sound? And could this child possibly be a “victim”? A soul trapped within the rules, truly seeking help?
Bai Yu first pushed open the door to the men’s restroom.
The door hinge gave off a piercing screech, like a pained groan. In his view, the rules had not mentioned the women’s restroom. There should be no important clues inside, so there was no need to investigate it.
He had to focus completely on the areas explicitly or implicitly indicated by the rules.
The ceiling light in the restroom scattered a pale, sickly glow. An incandescent bulb, long in disrepair, hung there on its last breath. The light flickered constantly, each flicker causing the entire restroom to switch violently between brightness and darkness, like an eerie breath that made the space unpredictable.
The restroom tiles were all a cool cyan color. Under the flickering light, that color appeared even gloomier, as if soaked through with some inauspicious liquid.
The faint sound of running water came from somewhere—the “drip, drip, drip” of some liquid falling from above. Other than that, the entire restroom was frighteningly quiet.
Above the sink, the place where a mirror should originally have hung was now empty, leaving only a cold wall. This absence brought an indescribable sense of wrongness, as if something had been deliberately erased.
Bai Yu noticed that in the deepest corner of the restroom, a mop stood upright in a filthy bucket. The wooden handle of the mop had already decayed, and the cloth strips on the mop head were covered in grime. But upon closer inspection, he could see an ominous dark red faintly showing beneath the filth.
He was just about to step forward and examine it when a series of clear, heavy footsteps suddenly came from behind him. This sound was completely different from the sticky and faint footsteps of the child from before. This was clearly something else, a heavier and slower existence approaching.
“Young man, what are you doing here?” An aged, elderly voice, as if squeezed out of rotting wood and carrying a hoarse texture, sounded from behind Bai Yu.
Bai Yu slowly turned around.
The child that had been following closely behind him all along was gone. In its place was an old man with a head full of white hair. He wore a loose blue cleaner’s uniform, and his entire body gave off a faint, strange smell of disinfectant mixed with rotting corpses.
The old man’s face was covered in wrinkles both deep and shallow, like a sheet of wastepaper that had been crumpled up. In his deeply sunken eye sockets, a pair of murky eyeballs looked like two dust-covered glass beads, now staring at him indifferently. Judging from his aged appearance, he was clearly already very old, yet he carried an eerie aura that did not belong to an ordinary mortal.
After seeing Bai Yu turn around, the old man made no special move. Only those murky eyes remained fixed on Bai Yu’s face, motionless. Then he spoke to Bai Yu in that hoarse voice. “Sigh. Ever since this place was abandoned, it’s been a very long time since any living person came here. I didn’t expect to run into someone again today. Young man, I advise you to leave sooner rather than later. This place… it isn’t clean.”
As the old man spoke, he walked past Bai Yu. His movements were slow and stiff. He walked to the bucket in the corner and picked up the mop inside.
The mop’s wooden handle gave a soft “creak,” as if protesting at being lifted. The old man ignored it. He simply gripped the mop tightly and prepared to begin cleaning the restroom.
Bai Yu’s gaze followed the old man’s actions closely the entire time. The other party seemed to bear no malice. Just like an ordinary cleaner, he mopped the restroom floor on his own. He appeared completely out of place with the terrifying atmosphere of the restroom, as if he did not belong to this twisted space at all—or rather, as if he were the space itself. Looking closely, even the mop in his hand was somewhat abnormal.
Bai Yu clearly saw scarlet liquid dripping down the cloth strips of the mop head one drop at a time, falling onto the cyan tiles. Yet what was even stranger was that the instant the blood touched the ground, it vanished into thin air, leaving no trace behind, not even the faintest water stain. The floor remained that cold cyan, as if it had never been polluted by anything.
The old man turned a blind eye to all these abnormalities. Not the slightest ripple appeared in those murky eyes of his. He merely worked mechanically. His mopping movements were slow and regular; every drag seemed to be rubbing against something invisible, producing a faint “hiss.”
Bai Yu also stood patiently in place. He did not disturb the old man, only quietly watched him work. In this eerie restroom, two people—one mopping, one observing—both seemed exceptionally calm, as if this scene were merely a part of everyday life. Yet beneath this calm hid extreme tension and strangeness.
“Please move aside.” The old man had mopped up to Bai Yu’s feet. His voice still carried that rotten hoarseness as he raised his head and spoke to Bai Yu.
This was the first time Bai Yu had seen the old man’s face from such a close distance. Within those deeply sunken sockets, his murky eyeballs looked even more wretched under the flickering light, as if they might roll out of their sockets at any moment. His two nasolabial folds were as deep as knife cuts, dividing the skin of his face into rigid sections, and his face was covered with spots of all sizes, like a rotting corpse eroded by time and disease. An indescribable stench of decay mixed with the smell of disinfectant rushed toward him.
The two of them maintained eye contact for a short while. Those few brief seconds, in Bai Yu’s perception, seemed to stretch out endlessly. There was no malice in the old man’s eyes, nor any kindness—only a deathly, hollow emptiness, as if it could suck a person’s soul inside.
Bai Yu felt his heart pounding violently. He forced himself to calm down before opening his mouth. “All right.”
“Thank you,” the old man replied mechanically, then continued mopping the floor.
Bai Yu took two steps forward, moving away from the area the old man needed to mop. He looked at the old man. The old man’s head turned slightly back, his murky eyes sweeping over the spot where Bai Yu had been standing. He thanked him, then turned his head back and continued mopping.
Both people in the restroom remained silent. Only the “hiss” of the mop and the “drip, drip” of water echoed through the dim space.
Not until the old man had mopped all the way to the doorway did he put away the mop and stand stiffly still. Those murky eyes looked at Bai Yu again, and his hoarse voice asked, “Still not leaving, young man?”
He waited at the doorway for a long time, as if time had stopped at that moment.
Bai Yu did not move. He merely looked at him quietly, and in the end, shook his head.
The old man did not force him. A nearly imperceptible glimmer seemed to flash through those hollow eyes, but it quickly returned to dead silence.
He complied with Bai Yu’s choice, and his body began to dissipate bit by bit at the doorway. His outline became blurry, like sand scattered by the wind, or ink dissolved by water, spreading upward little by little from his toes until he vanished completely into the air.
“Bang!”
After the old man completely dispersed, the mop that had been tightly gripped in his hand suddenly fell heavily to the ground, producing a muffled sound that made one’s heart palpitate.
The scarlet blood on the mop head no longer vanished eerily. Instead, in an instant, it surged out like a burst dam, dyeing the cold cyan tile floor a glaring blood-red at a speed visible to the naked eye.
The smell of blood spread instantly, thick, fishy, and foul, making one want to vomit.
The ability Hei Yan had granted Bai Yu seemed to suffer some kind of intense interference at that moment.
His originally clear night vision now seemed covered by a heavy layer of black fog, turning blurred and indistinct.
He felt a sticky, spherical object suddenly roll down across his face. Its touch was cold and slick.
Darkness descended completely.
Having lost the night vision granted by Hei Yan, Bai Yu had no choice but to rely on himself to adapt to this sudden darkness. He raised a hand and touched the spot on his face where the sphere had rolled past. It was sticky, carrying a nauseating fishy smell.
“Is it blood?” He brought his fingers to his nose and sniffed with a tremble. It was not ordinary blood, but more like a mixture of rust and some unknown mucus. An indescribable nausea rushed straight to his head.
He felt everything around him begin to twist. Above the sink, on the wall that had originally been empty, an enormous mirror appeared out of thin air, reflecting a deep, dark glow in the absolute darkness, as if it led to another dimension. At the deepest part of the restroom, the door to the final stall, which had originally been tightly shut, was now suddenly wide open. The darkness inside was like a gaping maw, silently inviting him in. A cold wind carrying the smell of decay blew out from the depths of that stall.
Bai Yu wondered whether he had stepped into an even deeper trap.
Right now, he had completely fallen into the darkness woven by this ghost story. He had lost the ability of Hei Yan that he relied on most, and had also lost the ability to distinguish directions.
And the final stall, which the corrected rules had said “do not use,” now seemed like a bottomless abyss, opening its mouth wide as it waited to swallow him whole.
Something was approaching him soundlessly within that darkness. He could feel that icy malice wrapping around him bit by bit, pulling him toward an endless abyss.