A normal person who runs into an urban legend would panic.
One split-second mistake can get you killed.
But Gavin Moore wasn't normal.
He belonged to a different category entirely—he imagined the worst possible scenario first, crushed his expectations down to hell, and only then moved.
2409 – Frank Fang:
"Walter Wang and Autumn Qiu have probably already been killed. The rest of us have to stick together if we want even a sliver of a chance. I want Zack Zhao's family to come out and explain everything, because if Zack Zhao is coming back to this building, it has to be because of YOU!"
2304 – Lily Li:
"Zack Zhao may have been picked up from the trash, but we treated him like family! It's you neighbors who called him 'Brother Zhao' to his face while looking down on him inside! You spread rumors behind his back—made up stories about me and him—don't think I didn't know! Zack Zhao was driven to death by YOU!"
Her video feed shook violently.
On the third floor, Lily was terrified. She clutched her child and yanked open her apartment door.
The corpse was on the second floor. She didn't dare go down.
So she tried to run upward, hoping to hide inside someone else's unit.
Zack Zhao's adoptive mother followed behind Lily.
Tears slid down the deep grooves of her wrinkles.
A basket looped over her arm was still filled with paper money.
"At a time like this you're still carrying that stuff?" Lily snapped at her. "You're the one who dragged him back!"
In the pitch-black stairwell, the sound returned—wet flesh scraping and crawling, like several hands grabbing the steps and springing upward.
Lily screamed.
She didn't care about the old woman anymore.
She didn't care about the video call either.
She ran.
The image lurched and blurred until nothing was clear.
2409 – Frank Fang:
"Lily! You just ditched your own mother-in-law?!"
2501 – Mimi Huang:
"Why don't we all go to the top floor? Stay together and think. Being alone in our apartments isn't safe anyway."
2607 – Jackie Jia:
"No! Hiding upstairs won't solve anything. That thing will find us sooner or later!"
2707 – Miles Yao:
"My unit is farthest from the stairwell. Come to my place first."
2409 – Frank Fang:
"Teacher Yao? Y-you… your illness… did you recover?"
Frank—and several others—looked genuinely stunned.
Teacher Yao was in his seventies, a retired police academy instructor.
A legend in anti-pickpocket work. He knew lockpicking, self-defense, and every scam in the book. He used to be built like a tank.
But two years ago he'd been diagnosed with a terminal disease.
Everyone in Lijing Apartments knew it.
Within those two years he'd wasted away until he barely looked human—wheelchair-bound, unable to speak, struggling even to eat.
"I…" the old man pressed his lips together, forcing a bitter smile. "I don't know why this happened. Three months ago I gave up treatment and waited to die at home. I could barely get out of bed. But tonight… I felt my illness completely vanish."
"No pain. No weakness. My body feels like it's back at its peak."
Seeing no one believed him, Teacher Yao silently pulled off his shirt.
His skin was the color of death—chalk-white, bloodless.
Across his chest and abdomen, thick black veins bulged like they were trying to burst through and merge with the world itself.
"I don't know why I'm like this," he said quietly. "But I'm clear-headed. I'm still me."
No one spoke.
Watching Teacher Yao's body, the neighbors couldn't hide their fear—or their disgust.
Their eyes made him visibly uncomfortable.
He put his clothes back on.
He'd lived long enough to know words were useless right now.
He stopped suggesting everyone come to his place.
The neighbors didn't trust Teacher Yao.
But Gavin was different.
He had seen "replaced parents" before.
Those Unknowns could mimic real humans perfectly—so perfectly they wouldn't leave flaws this obvious.
"According to the message on the back of the photos… people on the verge of death can enter the game."
"Does Teacher Yao fall into that category?"
Every neighbor who looked normal on the screen felt… off to Gavin.
But the one who looked the most wrong—Teacher Yao—felt oddly familiar.
"If there are ghosts hiding among the normal-looking neighbors," Gavin thought,
"then they'll push the malice onto the real living people—make the living kill the living."
He gripped the doorknob.
He wanted to leave Zack Zhao's apartment and go find Teacher Yao in person.
It was a good plan.
But the moment he cracked the door open, he heard frantic footsteps—
as if Lily Li had just passed the fifth floor, carrying her child.
"Should I tie them up?"
Gavin pressed his back to the door.
"The simplest way to verify someone's identity… is restraint."
He hesitated for less than half a second before deciding to act.
Lily and her child were "isolated."
An opportunity like that was rare.
"The group video call lets me monitor the others… but it also means I'm being watched."
"And what I'm about to do… isn't something I want them to see."
He covered the camera.
Then shoved open the door and entered the hallway.
He sprinted at full speed—
but even after racing all the way to the seventh floor, he didn't see Lily anywhere.
"Something's wrong."
"She's carrying a kid. Even if she started a few seconds earlier, she shouldn't be faster than me to the seventh floor."
The air reeked faintly of rot.
He leaned over the railing and looked down.
Below, the floors were swallowed in darkness—dead silent, like the exact stillness of Zack Zhao's life before he died.
"Are they really all ghosts?"
Voices argued through his phone.
Gavin quickly lowered the volume and hid in a corner to watch.
2409 – Frank Fang:
"I can't get out! Zack Zhao is outside my door! He really came back!"
Frank uploaded a video—captured by the security camera outside his unit.
In the black-and-white footage, Zack Zhao's twisted body writhed on the stairs.
His face scraped against the floor.
His snapped neck dangled limply across one shoulder.
Then Zack Zhao's corpse seemed to sense something.
The head slowly lifted.
He grinned at the camera.
And began slamming his head into Apartment 2409's door—again and again.
Just watching the footage made everyone's hands go cold.
Frank's shaking got worse.
On the ninth knock, he screamed.
Then—glass shattering.
The video spun, blurred, tumbled—
until the entire building heard a heavy impact outside again.
THUD!
The phone slid from Frank's hand even in death.
The camera landed on his face.
He looked like someone had shoved him from the fourth floor—
and his corpse matched Zack Zhao's death exactly.
Blood smeared across the lens.
Even Gavin flinched.
He forced down the nausea, sprinted to the far end of the seventh-floor corridor, smashed the sealed window, and looked outside.
"Just as I thought."
In the video, Frank died downstairs.
But when Gavin looked down with his own eyes—
there was no corpse.
Only a puddle of blood near the stairwell entrance.
The neighbors… seemed to exist only inside the video.
As if something was deliberately manufacturing terror.
"The video is wrong."
"The neighbors calling in are wrong."
"And Zack Zhao's phone left in this apartment… might have been planted by a ghost on purpose."
A vein throbbed at Gavin's temple.
If he couldn't clear this game fast, he'd end up ten times worse than Frank.
"In reality, Zack Zhao's phone wouldn't just be left here."
"After his suicide, his adoptive mother and sister-in-law would've tried to strip everything he owned."
"Vivian rented this place—and all that was left were the cheapest pieces of furniture."
"It was obviously searched and looted."
Covering the camera, Gavin stared down at the dead man's phone in his palm.
And a memory surfaced—
a game he'd designed years ago to help Derek Wei compete in a contest.
The title was:
The Only Family.
In that game, the protagonist was a washed-up middle-aged loser—
but he had a gentle, beautiful wife, a smart and sweet daughter, loving parents.
He video-called them constantly.
Every connection in his life flowed through his phone.
Until one day, he saw a woman on the street who looked like his wife.
He ran to hug her—
and she slipped into another man's arms.
From the protagonist's perspective, the player investigates the truth.
And the final revelation hits:
Everything he "had" was fabricated by the phone.
His real life was hopeless, filthy, terrifying.
He'd been fantasizing other people's wives and children as his own.
In reality, his biological parents had cut ties with him long ago.
His only family—
was that battered phone.
In truth, he was the biggest villain.
He personally tore away his layers of lies
and exposed the rot in his heart to the world.
The game had three endings:
One ending: the man finds the lost diary and medication.
It's revealed this is his fifth time waking up…
but he swallows the pills anyway and chooses fantasy for a sixth time.
The "good" ending: he destroys the phone with his own hands, steps out of the illusion, and decides to start over—break his habits, rebuild his life, reconcile with his parents.
The last ending is the most disturbing:
He goes insane.
He treats the phone as his real family—
and dies with it.
Later, the phone is picked up by a bullied child…
and the cycle begins again.