Zhang Han’s expression changed. He wasn’t sure whether that thing was Cao Yang.
“Tong Qian, lock onto its position. Feng Quan, you and Xiong Wenwen bring up the rear. Keep an eye on him.”
Tong Qian immediately nodded and brushed aside the hair on one side, revealing a terrifying smiling face.
Immediately after, that face opened its mouth and let out a piercing laugh. The horrifying laughter echoed through the dilapidated building, and gradually, as the sound reverberated, the laughter grew louder and more urgent.
Suddenly, the sound came to an abrupt stop.
Tong Qian pointed toward one of the floors. “Found it. It’s in that spot.”
“Move!”
Zhang Han was the first to charge into the building.
Several figures followed close behind, sprinting through the stairwell.
They were very fast, reaching the target location in less than a minute. But at a corner, Zhang Han, who was at the very front, suddenly stopped, causing everyone behind him to crash into one another.
Looking past the glass of the fire door on that floor, half of a deathly pale face had appeared there, an eerie eyeball slanting as it stared toward the ground.
From the middle of the group, a mass of pitch-black long hair shot out, winding toward that face.
However, just as the black hair was about to touch it, that half of a deathly pale face abruptly vanished.
“Behind us!”
Feng Quan’s voice rang out from the rear of the group, and everyone abruptly turned their heads at the same time.
Feng Quan reacted the fastest. He was experienced and had been observing their surroundings the whole time.
Black-yellow soil beneath his feet spread like a living thing, but the soil inside his body could not get too far away from him; otherwise, it would easily cause the fierce ghost within him to fall out of balance.
He shouted, “Zhang Han! Work with me!”
Immediately after, a sinister tattoo merged into the black-yellow soil. The speed of the soil abruptly increased, swiftly spreading toward the rear.
However, the same thing happened again.
That half-face abruptly disappeared once more.
“It disappeared again?”
Zhang Han looked at the place where the half-face had vanished, his mind racing.
“Feng Quan, use your Ghost Domain to lock onto its position. The terrain here is too narrow. Tong Qian’s two faces could easily injure teammates by mistake.”
“Understood.”
After saying that, a faint white mist rose from Feng Quan’s body. Accompanied by a cold, rotten stench of corpses, gray-white fog rapidly spread out, gradually enveloping the entire building.
Feng Quan raised his hand and pointed toward the fire passage door ahead.
“Straight ahead, behind the second door...”
“But something isn’t right. That ghost seems to have a Ghost Domain too, but it doesn’t quite feel like one.”
He frowned. The ghost’s state was very strange. Within Feng Quan’s Ghost Domain, it flickered in and out of sight, as though it had been constantly avoiding the Ghost Domain.
Just then.
“Pat—pat—pat—”
The sound of bare feet stepping on the floor rang out from deep within the dense fog.
Cold, muffled, rhythmic.
A man’s voice came through.
“Is this support from headquarters?”
A blurred figure slowly emerged within the thick fog, gradually becoming clear.
What was strange was that the figure was clearly wearing shoes as he walked, yet the sound he made was like bare feet stepping on the floor.
It was a young man in the uniform of a person in charge.
Xiong Wenwen pointed at the young man and said, “Hey, I know you. Aren’t you that guy...”
Zhang Han stared at the young man and recognized him at once.
“Cao Yang.”
“It’s me...”
After confirming the other party’s identity, their taut nerves relaxed slightly.
Cao Yang spoke stiffly. “Come with me. That ghost isn’t very threatening for the time being. It simply wants to trap me here.”
It seemed that he had used the power of fierce ghosts too many times; his condition was already close to the verge of revival.
Inside a room covered all over with yellow paper.
Cao Yang leaned against an old table.
“That ghost seemed to be deliberately luring me here...”
Tong Qian asked in confusion, “What do you mean? Wasn’t that piece of glass thrown by you?”
Cao Yang slowly shook his head. “No. The first time I encountered it was at an amusement park. I could only see half of its face.”
“When encountering a non-target fierce ghost during a mission, one should avoid contact. I chose to stay away, but that ghost seemed to be following me. It blocked me on the path I had to take, so I had no choice but to detour.”
“Until I entered this building. It was already waiting here. In order to figure out its pattern, I tried to approach...”
Suddenly, Cao Yang’s legs began trembling uncontrollably. The leather shoes on his feet let out a rapid tapping sound.
“Tap tap tap! Tap tap tap!!”
It was as if a pair of invisible feet were marching in place.
But Cao Yang seemed long since accustomed to it and did not care.
He continued, “This morning, I was just about to make contact with it, but the source ghost of this heavy snow suddenly went out of control. The entire city fell in an instant.”
“At the same time, I found that ghost, but I seem to have triggered its killing pattern...”
“It was a corpse. A corpse with half its face covered by newspaper...”
When Zhang Han and the others heard the word “newspaper,” their eyes changed slightly, and they fell into thought. As members of Yang Jian’s team, they had read some of the supernatural incidents Yang Jian had handled. Those records that Yang Jian had sorted and planned out could greatly increase their odds of survival when facing fierce ghosts.
And newspaper corresponded precisely to one of Yang Jian’s classmates back at Seventh High.
Zhao Lei.
An ordinary person who had attempted to explore the supernatural. After actively coming into contact with the supernatural, he had sunk deep into it, and in the end, not even his corpse had been left intact.
But the extraordinary talent he had displayed when facing fierce ghosts had left a deep impression on Zhang Han and the others.
Cao Yang continued, “When I completely saw that face clearly, the eye that had been staring at the ground suddenly looked at me.”
“A certain-death killing pattern. But it should be incomplete. That piece of newspaper covered half its face, so I survived...”
After listening, the few of them quietly pondered, but for the moment, none of them had any particularly good countermeasures.
Zhang Han looked at the yellow paper covering the floor of the room and asked, “Where’s Liu San?”
Cao Yang casually picked up a sheet of yellow paper.
“He’s all here. I dismantled him.”
“...”
“Don’t be nervous. He has plenty of paper men. He was the one who told me to do it. I needed rest, and these yellow papers just happened to serve as a medium, isolating that ghost and the heavy snow outside. That also gave me enough time to wait for your arrival.”
Feng Quan said, “What do you plan to do next? The mission we received was to bring back you and a machine. Now that we’ve found you, where’s the machine?”
Cao Yang shook his head.
“I don’t know. Headquarters has cut off communication equipment across almost the entire country. Right now, I can’t contact my operator.”
“But I’m going to catch that ghost. I don’t want to be followed by a ghost every single day.”
After listening, Zhang Han sank into thought. Their mission was halfway complete, but if they wanted to get out of here, they had to contain that ghost. Their objective did not conflict with Cao Yang’s.
Thinking of this, Zhang Han said, “It won’t be that simple. Every time we get close, that ghost changes position. It seems to be deliberately avoiding us, but at the same time, it also seems to want us to discover it.”
Cao Yang pondered for a moment, his gaze shifting between Feng Quan and Xiong Wenwen.
Headquarters had files on both Feng Quan and Xiong Wenwen, and he had read them all.
“I have a plan, but I’ll need everyone to cooperate.”