Chapter 43#
Those Who Listen to Stories (Part 10)#
Ye Sheng held the gun, took a deep breath, and walked step by step towards the window.
He lived on the fourth floor. There were few people in the school during the summer vacation, and strange noises were rarely heard at night. It was so quiet in the middle of the night that only insects could be heard chirping, making the knocking sounds outside the window even more abrupt and eerie. The female ghost’s hands were only white bones, and the sound of her knuckles tapping lightly on the window was like a child throwing stones at the glass from outside.
She knocked patiently and gently.
As if she wasn’t here to take his life, but to attend a romantic encounter under the moonlight.
Ye Sheng grabbed the curtain with his fingers but didn’t pull it open.
The female ghost sensed his approach from outside the window and pressed her entire face against the glass. Her tone was soft and strange, coaxing: “You’re here, open the window and take a look, I’m right outside your window.”
Ye Sheng stood in front of the curtain, holding the gun in one hand, without any extra movement.
The female ghost laughed, her tone containing malice and mockery: “What’s wrong with you? Didn’t you take the initiative to go down to the lake to find me just now? Now that I’ve come to find you, are you unhappy?”
Ye Sheng was almost amused by her. He lowered his eyes, feeling no emotional fluctuation in his heart. He wanted to get more information about the Story King from her, so he wasn’t in a hurry to open the window.
The female ghost couldn’t see Ye Sheng’s cold expression clearly, only hearing his somewhat distorted voice through the window.
“Shouldn’t the heartless people be the ones paying the price for walking across the Verification Bridge? Why look for me? Your target tonight should be Li Guangyun.”
The female ghost said: “I will find him. People who lie habitually will always pay the price. Justice will come sooner or later. But tonight, someone wants me to find you first.”
She started tapping on the window with her knuckles again, laughing strangely.
“Actually, even if he didn’t say it, I would have come over on my own.”
Duan Shi pressed her five fingers against the glass, like Juliet and Romeo’s midnight date, her voice drifting and distant, coming softly: “What were you thinking when you jumped off the bridge?”
—What were you thinking when you jumped off the bridge?
Her whole life was confined to three things: that lake, that bridge, and that window.
In college, the boy she loved climbed out the window, ran across the bridge, and jumped into the lake, fulfilling her childhood sweetheart’s journey in the water. But after marriage, the person standing by the window became herself.
Like a bird in a cage, she witnessed her husband’s day and night affairs and ambiguity on the lake bridge from the window.
Duan Shi’s emotions suddenly became agitated. After self-pity came intense hatred and killing intent.
“You jumped off the bridge because you wanted to kill me… It turns out, you all want to kill me.”
Ye Sheng knew where Duan Shi’s knot lay. He took a deep breath and said calmly: “Duan Shi, after the incident at Luohu Mansion, the police didn’t release your name or photo.”
Ye Sheng said expressionlessly: “Because this was your parents’ plea. They preserved your last bit of innocence. Everyone at Huaian University is still talking about the story of Lover’s Lake with relish, but no one knows. The enviable heroine in the story was driven to become a vengeful ghost by love long ago.”
Duan Shi’s pronunciation was twisted: “Decades have passed, my parents died long ago! Do you think bringing them up will make me let you go?”
Ye Sheng twitched the corner of his lips sarcastically and said lightly: “I didn’t expect you to let me go. I just wanted to chat with you through this window.”
Duan Shi laughed strangely: “Chat? Chat about what?”
Ye Sheng said: “You died by drowning after jumping into the lake. Why did you lose your legs?”
Duan Shi was horrified and didn’t speak again.
Ye Sheng said: “It wasn’t your husband who took your feet, but someone else. You were afraid of me in the lake, but now you took the initiative to come find me. Did that person give you new abilities?”
Duan Shi scratched the window with her fingers, her breathing becoming rapid.
“Come out.”
Ye Sheng said lightly: “I’m still very curious, do you really have the ability to verify true hearts? Remember Liu Xiaocan? The girl who was lured by you to jump off a building and commit suicide three years ago. Her experience was actually very similar to yours. She met a bad person and suffered from depression. How exactly did you determine she was lying on the Verification Bridge—didn’t you think of yourself when you lured her to jump out the window?”
Duan Shi screamed suddenly: “You don’t understand anything!”
Ye Sheng said indifferently: “Yes, I don’t understand, and neither do you.”
His fingers suddenly grabbed the curtain.
“A lunatic living in her own world, making bullshit rules, fabricating a story that is a lie from beginning to end.”
Ye Sheng said softly: “Are you killing heartless people, or are you killing the person in your own heart?”
With a “swish”.
The curtain was pulled open instantly!
Ye Sheng saw the appearance of the female ghost outside the window. No wonder she dared to come to the door on her own initiative.
Those black and white reversed chaotic eyeballs were now dug out, leaving only two pitch-black holes. To avoid being deterred by the Spirit Calling, she dug out her eyeballs.
Ye Sheng twitched the corner of his mouth sarcastically.
Duan Shi’s pale face was full of irritability and malice. Her damp and smelly black hair was like slender worms, covering the window overwhelmingly. Her face was also flattened against the glass, her fingers tapping ferociously on one spot. Thump, thump, thump. Tiny cracks had already appeared where she was banging.
It seemed that even if he didn’t open the window, Duan Shi would break in herself.
Ye Sheng suddenly understood why her legs were broken.
…Tracking regardless of space naturally required severing the feet connected to the land.
The Story King’s first postscript, “Justice will come sooner or later,” gave her the ability to track infinitely using windows as a medium.
The Story King’s second postscript, “I won’t meet you like this,” allowed her to flee on the spot and “reunite” with him after digging out her eyes.
Gently, quietly.
Like a quiet dream.
After seeing Ye Sheng, Duan Shi’s face burst with intense hatred. That hatred contained sorrow, tyranny, and nostalgia. She began to bang on the window crazily, and the spider web grew larger and larger.
“…”
Ye Sheng was afraid she would really break the window and he would have to spend money again.
He reached out and opened the window from inside the room.
The moment the window opened, a strong wind blew in, carrying the fishy and damp smell of the lake water. Ye Sheng felt his body become light as if blown by the wind. The bloody and cold breath made him dazed for a moment, but he quickly sobered up.
When the female ghost roared low and pounced on him.
Ye Sheng pressed one hand on the window and quickly picked up the gun.
Ye Sheng looked up, the cold white moonlight flowing over his jawline tensed into a straight line. When he raised the gun, his eyes seemed to glint with the chill of silver metal.
Duan Shi’s eye sockets were empty, but she could still sense Ye Sheng’s existence by his breath.
Her fingers touched Ye Sheng’s face through the air, and she said gently and strangely: “Don’t hide, this time I climbed through the window to find you.”
“The person you’re looking for was dismembered by you long ago.”
Ye Sheng had no expression, the muzzle pressed against her forehead.
The moment he pulled the trigger. Ye Sheng felt a sharp pain in his wrist, and a bone-piercing chill began to spread from the surface of the gun.
A bullet shot out from the muzzle, too fast to be seen clearly.
Pure white light seemed to illuminate this piece of heaven and earth. The dazzling light illuminated the female ghost’s bloody and twisted face. She changed from being full of contempt at the beginning to being stunned and panicked, her mouth wide open, facing the sudden light in disbelief.
A C-rank bullet, he didn’t know if it could deal with a C-rank anomaly.
But comparing supernatural values, he felt that the blood Xiao Fang came into contact with on the Yinshan Train 44 was definitely more than Duan Shi.
Ye Sheng was gambling.
He stood barefoot on the dormitory floor.
The bullet passed through the fluttering curtain, leaving a hole, and then passed directly through Duan Shi’s forehead!
She stood there blankly, a faint red light appearing on her body. Her expression seemed sad, incredulous, and painful. Her hands were stained with the blood of too many innocent people, and slaughter had eroded her reason. Now another more extreme hatred and pain poured into her body. The two fought, tearing her apart completely.
Duan Shi’s expression became a little confused for a moment.
She screamed and held her head with both hands, but bloody tears were falling in large drops from her dark eye sockets.
Ye Sheng pursed his lips, afraid that the Story King’s third postscript would be generated. He pressed the trigger wanting to fire another bullet, but the magazine was empty.
…One corpse-sewing needle could only extract one C-rank bullet.
Fortunately, the Story King didn’t care much about this ‘story’. After being hit by the bullet, Duan Shi froze in place, her limbs unable to move, her body pierced firmly by the “needle”. Her bloody tears fell in large drops. In Huaian University, she finally looked up and let out a desperate scream of weeping blood!
Ye Sheng’s hand was still numb.
He felt a fishy sweetness in his throat. When he fired the gun, a powerful backlash pierced through his body, making him almost unable to stand steady from the pain now.
Ye Sheng put down the gun, held the edge of the window with his fingers, and with agile and light movements, flipped from the dormitory onto the window and jumped onto the balcony.
Duan Shi was pierced by ten thousand needles and bent down in pain, but the more painful it was, the more awake she became. A look of confusion and daze like waking up from a dream appeared on her face.
Her memory had been chaotic since falling into the lake, as if she had had a long dream, and now she was slowly waking up.
These broken legs didn’t give her freedom, but instead made her live in hatred forever, never able to break “that window” again.
Ye Sheng looked at her vigilantly.
Duan Shi’s body gradually became blurred and faded. She looked up blankly. She couldn’t see the world clearly without her eyes, only sensing that the young man had jumped out of the window and landed in front of her.
Ye Sheng was breathing a bit heavily, standing a meter away from her.
With the Story King, this stupid postscript monster, around, he didn’t dare to relax his vigilance until the last moment.
Duan Shi “looked” at him for a long time, then suddenly cracked her blood-filled mouth gently and smiled: “You were right, I don’t have the ability to verify true hearts.”
Bloody tears fell quietly down her face.
“I didn’t kill heartless people, I killed people who lied.”
She seemed to have fallen into a kind of obsession, her words contradictory.
“Oh no, of course I have the ability to distinguish between true and false. My husband, I’ve known him since elementary school. I know him too well. We were desk mates for more than ten years, I understand him too well.”
“I understand that he likes to whistle when he’s happy, understand that he’s used to not talking when he’s sad, understand that he can’t take his eyes off things he likes like a child. I also understand him… understand that when he lies, he subconsciously touches his nose.”
“Ha, he doesn’t even know this himself.”
Duan Shi said: “All his lies will be seen through by me, but he doesn’t know! He lies to me every day, lying that there’s something going on at the company, lying that he’s socializing outside, lying that… he still loves me!”
After the large drops of bloody tears ran dry, Duan Shi raised her head, her expression twisted and crazy, as if two personalities were confronting each other, murmuring.
“I look at him from under the bridge, I look at him through everyone.”
“But why?”
“After I killed him with knife after knife, I didn’t want to live anymore. Why do I have to look at ‘him’ from under the bridge, why do I have to stand outside every window—I looked out the window all my life when I was alive, why do I still have to stand by the window after I die!”
After listening to her words, Ye Sheng took a deep breath and remained silent for a long time.
The truth came out, and all the clues came true.
She couldn’t distinguish heartless people at all. She just knew that her husband would touch his nose when he lied. So she guarded the Verification Bridge, using this as a standard, watching couples coldly.
—“Li Guangyun, there’s something on your nose.”
—“The senior sister happened to have a cold during that time, so we thought she was sick and having wild thoughts.”
Besides this, what surprised Ye Sheng more was that Duan Shi was not trapped in Lover’s Lake voluntarily.
That’s right, she tortured and killed her husband with such means, her resentment had long dissipated completely. Jumping into the lake to commit suicide was her own end to herself.
Unfortunately, she was chosen by the Story King.
She became the Story King’s… person in the Verification Bridge story.
Duan Shi held her head and wailed in pain. Those bloody and crazy memories began to attack her.
The people killed by her, whether men or women, looked at her with fear and pain before they died.
After screaming and crying hysterically, she gasped heavily. After a long, long time, at the last moment on the verge of extinction, Duan Shi quieted down again.
Duan Shi looked at Ye Sheng quietly and said softly.
“Yes, I remember. After I died, I sank into the lake water and my feet were entangled by the water plants at the bottom of the lake. It cut off my feet and said I was free. It gave me the ability to track and claim lives. I can appear by those people’s windows, doors, and car windows.”
“But am I really free—”
“I was trapped in this lake, on this bridge. I became a ghost story known to everyone on campus.”
She said trembling with pain.
“And I can’t get out.”
Ye Sheng panted slightly and finally opened his mouth to ask: “Who is it?”
Duan Shi smiled miserably, with relief and liberation, and said softly: “It is, the storyteller.”
Ye Sheng was stunned.
He wanted to say something more, but a gust of wind blew past, and Duan Shi’s soul body had already dissipated like wind and smoke.
Snap!
The only thing left on the balcony was a folded page of diary paper.
Ye Sheng was startled, walked over, and unfolded the diary page. On it were the lyrics of a song, written in vermilion handwriting. Perhaps this was the last page of the villa diary.
She tore it off back then, clutched it in her hand, and jumped from the lake.
She studied Chinese in college, and her handwriting was beautiful and gentle. Every stroke accompanied the mood unknown to anyone at that time.
That diary, three hundred and sixty-five days of records of infidelity, a bloody suicide note of a desperate struggle, but the final chapter was just an old song.
[Who looks at the past from the screen
And who stops standing in front of my door
Like an eighteen-year-old youth, very annoying
Who is willing to accompany you to adulthood
I love this youth, is it ironic?
Does this flower bloom?] (1)
Ye Sheng frowned and put away the diary paper.
He knew that not all anomalies would have such an item that pinned all resentment and carried all supernatural value.
His luck was quite good.
But this time, Ye Sheng didn’t plan to convert the supernatural value of this diary page into a bullet.
Duan Shi’s diary was more useful elsewhere.
He thought of the agreement between Xia Wenshi and several live broadcast friends in the haunted house, Luohu Mansion.
Ye Sheng wanted to figure out how the Story King chose Duan Shi back then and why he chose her.
However, in Luohu Mansion, that refrigerator that could never be closed only represented the anomaly transformed from the male protagonist who was brutally dismembered and died. It wouldn’t be lower than C-rank.
Ye Sheng stood on the balcony for a long time.
In the quiet campus of Huaian University, there were only the chirping of insects in summer.
*
After returning to the dormitory, Ye Sheng turned on the desk lamp and drew simply with paper and pen at the desk. Finally, he took out his phone, found the number Ning Weichen used to message him at night, and sent a paragraph.
[I saw Duan Shi tonight. I think the Story King’s ability is not making what is written come true. The Story King is using ‘strange tales’ to create ‘strange tales’.]
Writing Duan Shi, who died in Luohu Mansion, into the story, making her a legend guarding love in “Verification Bridge”.
But clearly, the key to Duan Shi’s killing had nothing to do with sincerity and lies, just because her husband had a habit of touching his nose when lying.
In the postscript, Duan Shi gained tracking ability by relying on her broken legs and dug out her eyes to contend with him.
It seemed that the Story King’s “continuation” also had various costs and limitations.
It was four o’clock in the morning.
Ye Sheng put the gun back, turned off his phone, and went back to bed to sleep.
The next day, just as Ye Sheng got up at seven o’clock, he received a series of deadly calls from Xia Wenshi.
After Ye Sheng answered the phone, it was Xia Wenshi’s trembling crying voice.
“Little Ye, fortunately you didn’t follow us. That female ghost came looking for us last night. Ahhh, she found the temple!”
“Woo woo woo, scared me to death. Li Guangyun is crying bitterly now, his legs are weak, and he refuses to leave even if he dies. Qiqi is also terrified and hasn’t recovered yet.”
“Fortunately, the three of us didn’t sleep all night yesterday, and there were no windows in the guest room. The female ghost temporarily switched to killing someone else.”
“As soon as we went out this morning, we saw a strange corpse hanging on a tree. He was hanging on the tree, his two legs sawed off from the roots of his thighs. Only half of his body was left, dying with grievances, dangling on the branches. Damn, scared me to death.”
Ye Sheng was stunned.
The female ghost went looking for them??
That’s not right. Duan Shi was clearly with him yesterday.