The Wang family’s old manor—but not the one in reality. This one existed within memory.
Within a certain segment of memory.
Perhaps it was something Wang Chaling had once discovered by chance, or perhaps it was a fragment of some ghost controller’s memories.
An old pendulum clock stood silently at the stairway.
Time kept rewinding. Space kept shifting.
Li Leping and Shen Lin stood there, staring at that eerie pendulum clock.
“Tick... tock... tick... tock...”
The sound of the hands moving came continuously from within the old clock. The surrounding environment changed along with it, and occasionally, one or two ghost controllers could be seen hurrying past.
But all of them seemed unable to see the two men, subconsciously ignoring their existence.
Inside the pendulum clock curled a withered corpse. That corpse had already fused with the components within the clock. Driven by some unknown supernatural power, the parts inside the clock kept turning in a way that could not be understood.
The abnormalities around them had no effect on the two. Within memory, time was no longer linear. Shen Lin had already locked onto the clock’s position, and the chaotic flow of time could not affect them.
Shen Lin said, “This pendulum clock exists in far too many people’s memories. Even if we erased everyone’s memories, we could only borrow it for a short time.”
“That’s enough.”
Li Leping slowly raised his arm.
“Even if it’s only one minute, it can still play a decisive role. An old manor built through the painstaking effort of a ghost controller from the Republican era exists solely to cooperate with this pendulum clock. That alone is enough to prove its importance.”
Black smoke began to spread through the memory, and the acrid stench of burning corpses quickly diffused outward.
Gradually, Li Leping’s eyelids grew heavier and heavier. He looked as if he was about to fall asleep, but this place was not reality. Because of Shen Lin’s intervention beside him, he still retained a clear consciousness.
Shen Lin looked at Li Leping but did not act. He was thinking, planning a less risky approach.
A moment later, he said, “Do you still remember that memory where the first generation of the Wang family existed? That place has already become a void. Perhaps it can serve as a stepping stone.”
After Li Leping heard this, he fell into thought, then nodded. As a ghost controller of the consciousness type as well, he understood Shen Lin’s intention.
“I agree with your plan. The pocket watch Wang Chaling gave me completely nullified the supernatural power of the Wang family’s first generation. We can move the pendulum clock there, then use the pocket watch’s characteristic to bring the clock out from that place.”
“Exactly.”
As Shen Lin spoke, he reached into the void and grabbed. A hatchet appeared abruptly in his hand. Communicating with intelligent people was simple; Li Leping had understood the key to Shen Lin’s plan in an instant.
Shen Lin continued, “If we simply rely on our own supernatural powers, then even if the two of us succeed in bringing this pendulum clock out, it will not be complete. But as long as we pass through the medium left behind by the Wang family’s first generation, we can completely isolate that phenomenon, because that memory itself does not belong to Wang Chaling.”
The method Shen Lin and Li Leping were using had a very high chance of success. It was equivalent to letting the pendulum clock undergo a cleansing through the medium planted within Wang Chaling’s memories. This would both avoid losses on their part and allow them to bring the pendulum clock out of this place intact.
“Let’s move.”
After saying this, Li Leping walked forward. His steps were stiff, making him look like a sleepwalking corpse.
He stretched out a dried-up palm and gently placed it on the pendulum clock. The black smoke around his body gradually thickened, slowly covering and enveloping the clock.
At this moment, Shen Lin also raised the hatchet and took a step forward. As Shen Lin walked toward the pendulum clock step by step, his figure began to blur. The medium had been triggered. The invasion had begun.
The next moment, the two of them and the pendulum clock together sank into that already dissipated memory. Although the medium here had become very faint, it still existed.
The supernatural power of the Wang family’s first generation was too terrifying. Before dissipating, he had deliberately stabilized this space, perhaps to leave the two of them a fallback.
There was nothing here. It belonged to the interstice between memories, like when one recalled something from long ago but could never remember what had happened at the time—only a hazy blank.
If an ordinary person entered this place, they would be swallowed by the endless void in an instant, even forgetting their own existence.
Looking at the pendulum clock floating before him, Li Leping took out the old pocket watch from his chest. Then he squeezed hard. His fingers actually passed through the glass on its surface and forcibly stopped the hands.
The two felt the surrounding darkness suddenly stagnate. Li Leping’s action had triggered the medium between the pendulum clock and the pocket watch. The components inside the pendulum clock also seemed to become jammed, producing a “tak, tak, tak” sound of malfunction.
The sound was exceptionally terrifying, as if it were coming from the throat of that corpse.
Then, a deep toll of a bell rang out within this space. In this space where the passage of time should not have existed, the two of them actually sensed a faint change at that moment.
As the toll rang out, the two of them and the pendulum clock began to slowly dissipate together, like a process of gradually being forgotten. Their figures rapidly blurred, and in the end, they vanished completely.
At this very moment, Dadong City.
Inside the dark, silent Wang family manor, Liu Baimu was searching for something as he usually did.
“Wait... what was I trying to find again?”
He suddenly stopped in his tracks, his brows tightly furrowed.
In that brief moment of distraction just now, he realized that he had actually forgotten something extremely important.
He did not know what that thing was called, nor did he know its exact shape, but in his heart he clearly understood that it was something crucial to him.
As long as he found that thing, he would be able to escape this eerie supernatural place.
He suddenly thought of something and immediately opened the notebook in his hand. It was densely filled with information about the Wang family manor, intelligence written down in relay by everyone trapped inside the old manor.
But whenever he saw certain words, his vision would blur, and then his memory would be erased as if wiped clean. He could no longer recall the contents he had just seen.
“How is this possible... How is this possible? So many of us spent countless hours recording these notes. How can I not even see them clearly!”
The more Liu Baimu flipped through it, the stronger the chill in his heart became. He gradually realized that his memories might have been tampered with. This was an extremely terrifying thing. He even began to doubt whether he was truly still inside the Wang family manor.
“Damn it!”
Liu Baimu snapped the notebook shut heavily, a trace of savagery appearing on his face.
He no longer knew how long he had been trapped in this damned place. He had originally thought that if he followed the notes step by step and continued searching according to their contents, he would eventually escape one day. But he never expected that now, something as bizarre as his memories being tampered with would actually occur.
“Liu Baimu, what’s wrong?”
Behind him was a ghost controller sitting in a wheelchair. His name was Zhang Qing. His feet looked as if they had been flattened by something, and after the blood dried, they had stuck to his pants, making for an extremely nauseating sight.