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Chapter 54: Here is Jonny
Long before the paper man appeared, Wen Jianyan had already made preparations.
The moment the paper man showed up with the axe in hand, he immediately activated the prop. In the next second, there was a “bang”, and the paper man was knocked away by an invisible force and fell backward into the dark room.
Wen Jianyan jumped up and rushed over to close the bedroom door. He deftly locked the door and drew a chair to solidly block it.
“……”
Su Cheng stared at the other party’s smooth series of operations, and couldn’t help being dumbfounded.
“Why are you standing stunned? Look for it!” Wen Jianyan turned to Su Cheng and shouted, “Look for the body, hurry up!”
The monsters in this hidden line could not be eliminated, and props could only be used to block their actions or delay time at most. Completing the mission was the only way to survive.
Su Cheng reacted suddenly: “Oh, oh!”
He put the mobile phone that was still shooting the video on the TV cabinet beside him and started to rummage through the cabinets with Wen Jianyan, looking for the hidden body of the child in the room.
“Crack!” “Crack!”
A monotonous and ear-piercing sound sounded from inside the door panel. The paper man seemed to be hacking at the door panel in front of him with an axe, and the thin wooden door made a creaking sound.
The sharp axe blade pierced through the door and was quickly pulled back.
There was an irregular gap left on the wooden door, and through the gap, one could vaguely see the pale and stiff, smiling face of the paper man: “Wife, where is our child?”
Wen Jianyan: “……”
You’re just one step away from saying “here’s Jonny”* and going straight to do a cameo on the set of a classic horror film.
[*T/N: “Here’s Johnny” was a catchphrase, reused by Jack Nicholson in 1980 in the film “The Shining”.]
Through the door panel, the voice of the paper man came muffled:
“Where is our child?”
Crack!
Another axe.
“Wife, where did you hide our child?” the paper man asked with a stiff smile.
The sound of Su Cheng’s retching came from the bathroom.
“What’s wrong?” Wen Jianyan asked loudly while searching in the TV cabinet.
“…I think I’ve found the female owner.”
Su Cheng stared at the messy bathroom in front of him and spoke weakly.
On the ground and walls, there were splatters of blood everywhere, and the strong stench made it difficult for him to even open his eyes. The bathtub was filled with sticky blood, and floating in it were the pale corpse fragments that had been hacked with an axe.
On the toilet, a woman’s head was placed upright.
Her long, black hair was stained with blood and was knotted. The frightened expression on her pale face was slightly frozen, and her eyelids drooped loosely, covering her dead gray eyes.
“She should have been dismembered.” Su Cheng spoke slowly, resisting the discomfort.
Wen Jianyan’s voice came from outside the bathroom: “Look through the body parts; you can’t mistake the child’s body parts for those of an adult, right?!”
Su Cheng: “…”
It’s easier for you to say!
He closed his eyes forcefully, suppressed nausea, and began to rummage through the bloody water, body parts, and internal organs in the bathtub.
The sticky sound of “splashing, clattering” resounded in the narrow room, causing Su Cheng’s stomach to churn.
Among the remains of a corpse that obviously belonged to an adult, Su Cheng found a broken leg that belonged to a doll. Before he could wonder, a familiar system notification sounded in his ears.
【A body part of the child has been found.】
【1/5】
…Was it actually a doll?
He was startled: “I found one, and there are four left!”
The sound of the axe chopping became more obvious than before. The paper man holding the axe was obviously about to cut through the bedroom door.
While ripping off the blood-stained sofa cover, Wen Jianyan activated a prop again, and the sound of the axe slashing in the room disappeared temporarily.
He pulled out a torn doll arm: “I found one too.”
【A body part of the child has been found.】
【2/5】
Su Cheng continued to rummage in the pool of blood. Suddenly, a pale hand that had been sinking in the pool of blood moved and grabbed his wrist tightly.
“!!!”
The eyelids of the head on the toilet moved, and a pair of dead gray eyes slowly looked at Su Cheng.
“Aaaahhhhhhh!”
Su Cheng screamed and rushed out of the bathroom, closing the door of the bathroom behind him.
Wen Jianyan was lifting the lid of the pot at the moment, taking out the torn half of the doll’s body.
Seeing Su Cheng come out, he was stunned: “What’s wrong?”
“Female… the body of the female owner has moved!” Su Cheng panted violently, looking in shock at the bathroom door that he had just closed tightly.
The doorknob turned “crack” and “crack,” as if something was trying to escape from it.
On the ground, scarlet blood overflowed little by little from the crack of the door, looking particularly shocking under the dim light.
Su Cheng forced himself to look away: “I found two corpse fragments, how about you?”
As he spoke, he handed the doll parts he found in the bathroom to Wen Jianyan:
“How many did you find?”
“Two.”
Wen Jianyan pointed to the two doll parts—the body and the legs—on the coffee table beside him.
There was still a head missing.
The whole room was basically turned over by them, except for…
Wen Jianyan and Su Cheng raised their heads slowly, and their eyes fell on the slashed and scarred bedroom door.
“Crack——”
“Crack——”
The slashing sound that had just stopped for a while sounded again. The door was already crumbling, and it was soon hacked into pieces. In the dark room, the figure of the paper man was already clearly visible.
He repeated the sentence incoherently:
“Wife, our child was eaten by it. I can’t find him. If we open its stomach, we might find our child…”
“Crack!”
Another sound.
“Wife…”
With a pale smile on his pale face, the paper man bent down stiffly and slowly walked out of the room door: “Where’s our child?”
Wen Jianyan was startled and narrowed his eyes thoughtfully.
The description of the task was to “find the dead body of the child hidden by the male owner,” but the male owner insisted that his child was eaten by “it,” and the child could only be found by cutting open its stomach.
If he connected it with the paper man lying on the bed in the bedroom with human internal organs in his stomach…
“Husband.”
Su Cheng was startled by Wen Jianyan’s sudden utterance. He subconsciously turned his head and looked at the young man standing beside him.
The other party was calmly staring at the paper man in the distance. Although his voice was still purely male, the ending sound was extraordinarily soft, with a bit of unexpected femininity:
“Have you forgotten?”
Wen Jianyan stepped back slowly, ready to throw the prop, and said in a tender tone:
“You ate it.”
The paper man’s body was stiff and still, and it stopped moving forward.
There was a strong smell of blood in the air, and the dead silence in the dark room made their heart beat wildly.
Wen Jianyan stared closely at the paper man holding an axe not far away and said softly:
“Our baby is in your belly.”
There was still a chilling smile on the pale face of the paper man, but it seemed extraordinarily confused:
“My… in my belly?”
Wen Jianyan said slowly, in a half-leading, half-bewitching tone:
“Rip open your belly and you’ll find it.”
The young man spoke such strange and terrifying words in a normal, almost gentle tone. Su Cheng felt goosebumps all over his body.
…My friend, do you know how perverted you are right now?
The paper man raised the axe stiffly, turned the blade of the axe, and slowly slashed his blood-stained stomach. The human viscera that was stuffed into it flowed out instantly.
Gululu.
A blood-stained doll’s head rolled out of its internal organs and landed at Wen Jianyan’s feet.
【A body part of the child has been found.】
【5/5】
The paper man seemed to have lost his life and slowly fell on his back, and the axe in his hand fell to the ground with a clang.
【Ding! The hidden branch line is complete!】
A mechanical voice rang in the ears of the two of them.
Wen Jianyan and Su Cheng breathed a sigh of relief.
【Ding! Live broadcast special task: Find all the body parts of the child hidden by the male owner.
Special line unlocked, Bonus points: 5000】
【Live broadcast task rewards are being calculated for you:
Instance exploration: 71%, Reward Points: 5000
Current plot modification: 56%, Reward points: 10000】
……It’s over.
Wen Jianyan breathed a sigh of relief and sat down on the half-sofa beside him. No matter whether it was the sound of the axe chopping the door or the doorknob being twisted, all the sounds disappeared, and only the deadly silence remained in 1306.
Su Cheng was also in shock:
“You said… did the male owner of this house really eat his child?”
Wen Jianyan was noncommittal: “Maybe.”
He narrowed his eyes slightly and said thoughtfully: “However, based on the information from the previous instance, if the female owner really gave birth to the child in Fukang Private General Hospital, then the child she brought home should be a baby made by the dean to cultivate ghost babies. Although he did not tell me whether the child brought home by its biological father or mother was still a human being, the probability of this baby being normal was too small.”
Maybe that was why the male owner said “the child has been swapped.”
In a sense, his judgment was correct.
However, there was a significant difference between realizing one’s child had been swapped and eating the child and dismembering the wife with an axe. Something must have happened in between…
What did this have to do with what Granny Wen said about “evil spirits” and “stolen spirit-locking altars”?
Was it because the male owner of this family stole the soul-locking altar that he was possessed by an evil spirit and killed his whole family?
In 1304, it was the wife who poisoned the dinner and killed the whole family.
Wen Jianyan couldn’t help but fall into deep thought.
Although he felt that the truth in this instance was still shrouded in thick fog, he had a feeling as if he had already touched some faint threads.
Suddenly, the doll on the ground moved.
Seeing this, both of them were shocked.
Under the pull of an invisible force, the doll that was divided into five parts was slowly put together into a complete doll. Then it moved slowly and obliquely in the direction of Wen Jianyan, step by step, slowly approaching.
“Be careful!”
Su Cheng gasped, raised his hand, and grabbed Wen Jianyan’s arm, trying to pull him back.
However, after a few seconds of contemplation, the young man shook his head at Su Cheng: “It’s okay.”
Su Cheng was startled and subconsciously let go of his hand.
Wen Jianyan stepped forward, bent down, and looked at the broken little doll in front of him.
Perhaps because he knew it was once a part of the ghost baby, as the mother of the ghost babies in the previous instance, he didn’t fear it, but rather felt a little close to it.
The doll slowly climbed up along Wen Jianyan’s trouser legs. It climbed upward and finally got into Wen Jianyan’s pants pocket and stopped moving.
Wen Jianyan was stunned.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the doll, which had completely turned into a dead thing, along with it was a cookie jar.
He remembered that the soul-locking altar found in 1304 happened to contain the bones of a baby.
In addition, there was an entire month between the two murder cases.
Could it be…
The soul-locking altar in 1304 contained the corpse of the child in 1306?
Too many thoughts were stuffed in his mind. Wen Jianyan frowned; it seemed that there were also inextricable connections between these murder cases. But now he still had too little information, and he couldn’t understand it clearly for a while.
Perhaps……
He could find some clues in the barrage?
Despite the fact that there was a strict anti-spoiler mechanism in the live broadcast room, it only prevented the audience from directly telling the plot and clues of the instance, but their attitudes and reactions to many details reveal far more than imagined.
Thinking of this, Wen Jianyan opened the live broadcast panel.
The “Integrity First” live broadcast room exploded in an instant:
[!!!]
[Aaaaahhhhhhhhhh the anchor has opened the barrage!]
[This is the first time in this instance!! Is he finally going to interact with us? Woo-hoo!!!]
[Aaaahhhhhh, the wife has finally came!]
The dense barrage overlapped on the screen, making Wen Jianyan a little dazzled for a while.
Under the dim light, the young man’s face showed a bit of helplessness:
“Okay, okay, everyone, restrain your enthusiasm. Don’t comment so fast, I can’t even see what you want to say.”
With the passage of time, the explosive upsurge brought about by opening the barrage finally passed, and Wen Jianyan could finally see the specific barrage clearly.
“It’s been a long time. I haven’t had the chance to be with you all…”
Wen Jianyan’s voice paused.
He blinked and stared at the most pop-ups on the screen, a hint of incomprehensible confusion on his face: “What?”
“What happened to the paper man?”
Wen Jianyan asked in confusion.
Wasn’t that just in the setting of the plot? He had just followed the words of the paper man. Was something wrong?
The moment his voice fell, there were more related barrages.
Wen Jianyan felt more and more wrong.
…Why did he feel like, after not seeing it in just a few days, the barrage style in the live broadcast room had become different from what he remembered?
Had he done something weird himself?
Wen Jianyan thought about it carefully.
It didn’t appear to be!
“Don’t change clothes? Is there something wrong with these clothes…”
“No?”
All the barrages across the screen were completely beyond his expectations. For the first time, Wen Jianyan was a little overwhelmed by the indiscriminate bombardment of these overly enthusiastic barrages.
His expression was a mix of confusion and shock, and he could understand what was happening in the barrage.
Enthusiastic remarks:
“Don’t wear clothes after that… eh?”
“……”
In the next second, the young man was stunned for a moment, and a subtle crack appeared in his expression that was always calm:
“You want to hear me call your husband?”
The author has something to say:
Wen Jianyan: ? ? ? Something is wrong with the audience (pointing