Chen Ping knew he was already dead.
After all, the living couldn't bleed this much.
Nor could they drag a mangled arm and leg around, wandering through an office building in the dead of night.
Some said that a name was the shortest curse.
A person's fate was determined right from birth by those few short characters.
His entire life had been just like his name, “Chen Ping”—ordinary and unremarkable.
A mundane elementary school, an average high school, an acceptable college, and a job as plain as could be.
After graduating, he had joined this game company and stayed for twenty years.
Following the life trajectory of countless ordinary people, he got married, had a child, maintained a happy family, and carried the heavy burden of car and mortgage loans.
His accomplishments were neither grand nor meager; his savings, neither vast nor scarce.
If nothing unexpected had happened, he probably would have lived on like that forever.
And then?
Then he died.
He died in a gruesome manner.
Falling from the twenty-seventh floor, he crashed onto the billboard outside the seventeenth floor, smashing his skull to pieces and snapping his spine in two.
Fortunately, he had no memory of the agony of dying.
He had been waiting all this time for the legendary Ox-Head and Horse-Face to take him away.
Yet nothing came.
There was no Black and White Impermanence as he had imagined, nor was there the Underworld depicted in movies.
He was trapped between the seventeenth and eighteenth floors, completely unable to leave.
Unable to communicate with people, unable to leave, unable to die.
Day after day.
Chen Ping felt as though he were going mad.
In fact, he was probably not far from losing his sanity completely.
One day, recovering consciousness from his muddled stupor, he found himself clutching a bird in his hands.
It was a common sparrow that had often perched on the billboard.
Its tiny head was crushed to pulp, its beady black eyes clouded with a murky film, and its mangled flesh and broken feathers stuck together in a sticky clump.
A bloody mess.
This was only the beginning.
Ants, cockroaches, butterflies, moths, sparrows...
Even larger pigeons.
Chen Ping found himself lucid less and less often.
Whenever he opened his eyes, he felt an unbearable, parching thirst in his throat, and an endless malice inside his chest clamoring for release.
Why?
Why was I the one who died?
Why haven't I vanished?
Why? Why? Why? Why?
He lurked beneath every light fixture, glaring with blood-red eyes as he greedily and desperately spied on the living inside the building.
Chen Ping even began to fantasize about the pleasure of ripping open their throats, plucking out their blood vessels with his fingertips, and greedily gorging on their flesh and blood.
He no longer had the capacity to think about what kind of creature he had become.
Chaotic, evil, disordered.
Chen Ping needed more blood.
Evidently, small critters like birds and insects could no longer satisfy him.
Everything Master He had done merely restored his lucidity for a brief moment.
He was clearheaded for only a fleeting moment, and by the time he came to his senses, his hands were already clamped around Master He’s neck.
The warmth of human skin fascinated Chen Ping.
He could even feel the vibrant blood surging and flowing just beneath that thin layer of skin.
Tear it open.
Tear it open.
With just a gentle tear, he could drink his fill of that sweet, luscious...
For some reason, Chen Ping didn't follow through.
He fled in panic, having nowhere to vent the violent urges inside him.
Hurting people was never his intention.
Yet as night fell and darkness once again blanketed this concrete jungle,
the uncontrollable bloodlust in the depths of Chen Ping's heart quietly awakened once more.
After suppressing it for two days, he finally targeted a young woman working overtime.
Young, healthy.
Most importantly, her heart was pulsing steadily inside her chest.
Chen Ping could hardly contain the ecstasy surging within him.
That is, if a ghost could still possess emotions.
He struggled internally even as he craved fresh flesh and blood.
Confronted with the woman’s terrified expression, Chen Ping even began to imagine the glorious sight of piercing her heart.
Crimson, fervent.
His persistent cling to being “human” seemed destined to end tonight.
Two figures seemed to manifest beside Chen Ping.
One roared at him to stop:
You are human, not a beast!
The other leaned against his ear, quietly tempting him:
Eat her. Eat her.
In the end, instinct triumphed over reason. Chen Ping pursued the woman, lunging impatiently toward his prey for the night.
Then, an unexpected incident occurred.
Ding—
The elevator doors slowly slid open, and a woman stood before Chen Ping.
It was a woman.
A breathtakingly beautiful woman.
She appeared somewhat frail, as if a gentle gust of wind might blow her over.
With a woman like this, Chen Ping could easily pierce her heart with just a fingertip.
Yet...
The woman was enshrouded from head to toe in a thick, inescapable, viscous black mist.
Countless tendrils of blackish-red killing intent and resentful energy intertwined, tightly coiling around her, while endless darkness seemed to lurk in the tranquil depths of her eyes.
She held a forearm-length blade in her hand, the blood on its tip still wet.
Chen Ping seemed to hear the dying wails of countless living beings.
He felt as if he were looking at mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
The woman curved her lips, a sinister, terrifying smile spreading across her face.
Though her voice was melodious and pleasant, in Chen Ping's ears, it sounded as piercing as an underworld emissary claiming a soul:
“Excuse me, do you have any wishes?”
As she spoke, the air nearly froze into solid ice.
A bone-chilling cold swept through the entire elevator lobby.
What is this?!
What kind of monster is this?!
Chen Ping desperately wanted to turn and flee, yet the woman's gaze remained pinned firmly on him.
Endless malice bore down on him like a crushing mountain.
The wails and shrieks of slaughtered beings on the tip of the blade grew louder, echoing before him like a scene straight out of hell.
If the resentful energy on his own body was a single drop of water,
then the intertwined resentful energy and killing intent surrounding the woman before him was a roaring, ceaseless river.
Just how many lives had she taken to accumulate such monstrous resentment?!
Chen Ping froze entirely, only a single thought left in his mind:
Disobeying her commands meant death.
He would die.
He would definitely die.
Chen Ping didn't know if a ghost could die a second time.
Yet he was utterly certain that the woman before him was not an existence he could ever resist.
She was like an apex predator in a beast pack.
The only thing he could do now was roll over and expose his belly to show submission.
—As for her asking what his wish was?
Could it be that the living human from earlier was her chosen prey?
The woman wanted to kill him, which was why she asked such a question.
With his reason returning, Chen Ping instantly reined in all the resentful energy across his body, becoming as docile as a venomous snake with its fangs pulled out.
“H-Hello, my name is Chen Ping.
I'm sorry, I've only been dead for a year, and I didn't know th-this building was your territory.
If I have offended you, please forgive me! I'll accept any punishment, truly!!
I beg you to show mercy and spare me this once.”
Chen Ping hurriedly added:
“It's my first time being a ghost too, but I understand the rules! I understand!”
With that, he dug into his own abdomen, pulling out items one by one and laying them before the woman:
Gleaming yellow copper coins.
Glittering golden ingots.
White candles emitting an eerie, sickly green glow.
The moment Chen Ping produced these items, the air immediately filled with the smell of burned paper money ash.
“Are... are these enough?”
He stared eagerly at her, trying to catch even the slightest hint of wavering on the woman's face.
The woman wore a faint, ambiguous smile. Her pitch-black eyes shifted as she spoke with that half-smile:
“I don't like eating these things.”
She doesn't like eating offerings?
Could it be...
what she wants to eat is me?
Was he going to die a second time?
Chen Ping fell deeper into despair.
Rate on N.U.
