Chapter 55: How to Survive?
Tongguan listened to the increasingly distant and hurried footsteps. His smile slowly faded.
He glanced at the little girl beside him, her eyes red and tear-streaked. On the eighteenth floor, only the two of them remained.
Straightening his slightly wrinkled clothes, he walked over, bent down, and gently wiped the tears from her cheeks.
"Xiao Qi, would you help me?"
The warmth of his hand made the girl's frail shoulders tremble. She tightened her face and nodded.
"I'll help you. Uncle, can you take me home afterward?"
Tongguan looked into her pure, untainted eyes and smiled gently, nodding in agreement.
...
The eighteenth floor held the building's most unique room: the monitoring room.
Once occupied by Ji Li and Li Xing, it was now taken by an unusual pair.
The cold glow from the screens cast a chilling light over Tongguan's face and made Xiao Qi even more uneasy.
Tongguan sat down, operating the monitors to track Li Xing's location.
Excluding Ji Li, there was only one staff member and a part of a ghost in the building.
No ghost remained beside Tongguan; the last one was inside Li Xing.
No one knew when Li Xing had died. Since their last meeting, Tongguan had confirmed that he was fully possessed by the ghost.
Normally, Tongguan's only way to complete the task was to locate Li Xing directly.
He already knew the true task and had been given a method by the hotel to neutralize the ghost's attacks.
He could resolve everything in an instant, successfully turning over the ghost inside Li Xing to the hotel.
So he entered the monitoring room.
The goal was to find Li Xing's exact location—but not entirely.
For Tongguan, physically searching for Li Xing was unreliable.
The ghost possessed Li Xing, but if it left him, it would become purely ghostual.
Without being able to see or sense it, approaching could result in instant possession and death.
From past experience with Fang Shenyan and Yu Guo, once possessed, even thought itself stopped functioning.
With this in mind, Tongguan did something strange.
He placed his backup phone in front of the screen as a stand, the camera facing his face.
Staring at himself on the screen, he began repeating in a low voice:
"The ghost is in me, the ghost is in me, the ghost is in me…"
He repeated the phrase until it became a one-and-a-half-minute video.
Afterward, he raised his hand slightly, fixed the phone in place, and set the video on loop.
His deep, strange voice echoed in the enclosed room, like a haunting chant.
Tongguan's plan was to draw the ghost to him.
He knew the true task lasted twelve hours. The ghost had two targets: him, the staff executing the task, and the outsider Xiao Qi.
However, in his estimation, Xiao Qi posed no threat under the hotel's rules.
Only Tongguan could hand the ghost over to the hotel, so it would inevitably focus on him.
He used the rule allowing any method to identify the ghost to his advantage, recording the identification video in advance. This way, even if his thoughts froze when the ghost arrived, it could still be located.
This was Tongguan's plan, though highly subjective.
After preparing everything, he looked at Xiao Qi with a hopeful gleam.
"Are you ready?"
Xiao Qi rubbed her red eyes and nodded firmly. "Xiao Qi is ready."
...
Time passed slowly, the sky outside beginning to lighten slightly.
Yet the torrential rain showed no signs of stopping, drenching billboards and the three staff members waiting outside.
Inside the monitoring room, Tongguan remained alert, his eyes fixed on the phone screen.
Xiao Qi grew a little sleepy. Thankfully, she had napped earlier; otherwise, she wouldn't have held on this long.
Her small hands twisted in her lap, and though unaware of Tongguan's plan, her posture showed how tense she was about what was coming.
Tongguan silently counted thousands of numbers in his mind, awaiting the ghost's sudden attack. Yet there was still no movement.
After another twenty minutes of tense waiting, he glanced at his watch: it was 5:30 a.m.
Dawn was near.
He took a deep breath, realizing how extraordinarily patient the ghost truly was.
Suddenly, Tongguan felt a sharp ache in his eyelids and instinctively raised his hand to rub them.
The moment his palm touched his brow, an intense and piercing intuition swept through his mind.
Every hair on Tongguan's body stood on end. He spun his head toward the monitoring room door. It was empty, yet his instincts screamed that something had already entered.
Before he could react, his arm stiffened abruptly. His upper body froze!
Tongguan still kept his head turned, a posture that unwittingly accelerated the ghost's attack.
On the video in front of him, the playback continued: "The ghost is in me…"
Five words. If the video could finish them, Tongguan could have completed the task in this absurd way.
But the next second, the video could not finish the words. His body, manipulated by the ghost, failed to snap his own neck in time.
Instead, the ghost-controlled hand grabbed the still-playing phone and slammed it mercilessly to the ground.
'Crack!'
The phone shattered instantly.
Tongguan's plan—using the recorded video to identify the ghost—seemed to have failed. Perhaps it had been wishful thinking.
The ghost's move was sharp: it didn't rush to take Tongguan's life but destroyed his identification tool first.
Tongguan's head was pressed down by his own ghost-controlled hand. His twisted posture only hastened the approach of death.
But at that moment, the ghost overlooked another living person in the corner of the monitoring room: Xiao Qi.
She was not the ghost's first target. In its eyes, she was not a staff member and had no authority or power to identify its location—she posed no threat.
Yet…
At that critical moment, Xiao Qi tossed the stuffed bear in her arms to the floor. In her palm appeared a phone—her own.
As Tongguan's head neared the limit of rotation, she aimed her phone at him.
A pre-recorded video began playing.
It was her phone, but the video had been recorded by Tongguan.
"At this moment, the ghost is inside my body, Tongguan."
This was Tongguan's backup plan. He had long anticipated that the ghost would try to seize and destroy the phone to prevent his identification.
On the way to the monitoring room, he had quietly borrowed Xiao Qi's phone to record a backup video.
The surface-level video was merely a lure to draw the ghost in. The real identification was carried out by Xiao Qi—the one the ghost was destined to ignore.
Tongguan's neck stiffening vanished completely, and his mobility returned.
With Xiao Qi's assistance, he completed the identification task and received the hotel's evacuation alert in his mind.
...
Outside, Fang Shenyan and Yu Guo stood before the Broad Valley Building. The wind and rain whipped around their narrow frames as they stared at the crime scene behind the glass doors.
The lights were still on, but from outside, they could not see the carnage that should have filled the first floor.
Something had sealed the entire building in advance—either the ghost or the hotel itself.
Then Tongguan emerged, carrying Xiao Qi. Chang Nian, her legs numb from crouching, immediately ran forward.
Tongguan set Xiao Qi down, then turned to look at the building, his eyes betraying some unreadable emotion.
"The building is still sealed. The task is not over. That means Ji Li is not yet dead.
Now, you are the only living person inside, with two parts of the ghost watching you. No matter what you do, you will inevitably be possessed.
Ji Li… Ji Li…
Under these circumstances, how can you survive? How can you turn the situation around?"
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