Her heart bled with every swipe of her card. After getting home, putting the groceries in the fridge, and assembling the litter box and doggy toilet, she was pleasantly surprised to find that Mr. Hei had done his business on some old newspaper. She was about to smother them with hugs and kisses to show her affection when she suddenly realized her two furry masters were keeping their distance, their faces full of caution. She felt a little annoyed.
"Hmph. I love you two more than I love money, but you won't even let me get close. You shouldn't be a cat and a dog, you should just be a pair of ingrates!" But despite her words, the anger quickly passed. As dusk fell, she went to the public bathhouse on the corner to wash up, then came home, went straight to her room, and got into bed.
'If I don't move, I won't get hungry. I spent way too much today, so I have to save where I can. I'll just call it a diet. Too hungry to sleep? I'll just lie in bed and play on my phone. Once I fall asleep, I won't feel the hunger anymore.'
She wasn't worried about not seeing Xiao Qi and Mr. Hei. 'They're so small, they couldn't get out the main door or jump off a table. They're probably just curled up in some dark corner somewhere.'
Just as even the most beautiful woman still worries about pimples, even the most prosperous city has places the sun doesn't reach. Xin Huohuo's home was one of those places.
Her home wasn't in a remote area. On the contrary, it was in the very heart of the city center. But precisely because of that, land prices were astronomical and the population was dense. Many properties were private assets left over from decades ago, resulting in numerous holdout households. No real estate developer had the resources or the guts to touch the area. As a result, while the rest of the city sprouted skyscrapers, this place alone remained dilapidated and crowded, like an urban-rural fringe zone.
But you wouldn't know it from the outside.
Just as a beautiful woman uses high-end concealer to cover a pimple, this area of less than two square kilometers was encircled by a perimeter of colorful billboards, giving it a bright and shiny shell. Unless one entered through the few designated entrances, outsiders would have no idea of the filth, chaos, and squalor within. Any locals with the slightest means had already moved out, renting their houses to migrants looking for a cheap place to live. Xin Huohuo belonged to the particularly helpless and unlucky category of people who could only stay.
The area was centered on a large, two-story house, surrounded by rows of single-story homes. Decades ago, it might have been orderly, laid out in a neat grid. But with continuous illegal additions and unauthorized construction, it had gradually become a maze of narrow, winding, and cluttered alleys. Stained by years of smoke and soot, it looked pitch-black by day and downright sinister by night. The streetlights were perpetually feeble, and shadows lurked everywhere you looked.
In reality, the area was quite safe. The houses were packed so tightly together that if trouble ever started, a single shout would alert ten or twenty neighboring households. But they say old houses attract ghosts, and at night, the place was enough to give anyone goosebumps.
The Xin family lived in... a corner of that large, two-story house.
It was unclear which big shot from a bygone era had owned this mansion. Its twenty-some rooms, spread across two floors, had long since had their property rights carved up and sold to over a dozen families. The upstairs was better off—at least it was higher up and brighter. The downstairs rooms, however, had their sunlight blocked by the surrounding single-story houses and were therefore quite gloomy. But the Xin family's home was gloomier still, for it was the smallest room under the stairs. It was only about ten square meters and didn't even have a window, just a foot-wide ventilation hole near the top of the outer wall.
Naturally, in a house like this, only the master and main secondary bedrooms on the second floor would have had attached bathrooms. There was only a public toilet at the main entrance and another across from the second-floor landing. The one upstairs was for women, the one downstairs for men. To put it in the words of her two furry masters, Xin Huohuo had to use a public toilet to answer the call of nature and a public bathhouse to wash herself. Her living conditions were atrocious. This was also why she never cooked with an open flame, and even when she occasionally boiled something, it had to be something that wouldn't create any oily smoke.
Who could imagine that such a place still existed in a major city?
It was like a rash on the city's skin—small, unsightly, and inconsequential to the big picture, but stubbornly persisting, just waiting for the day it would be completely cured. But until that day came, Xin Huohuo had to continue her struggle to survive here.
Fortunately, she was a young woman, after all. Though the exterior was wretched, she did her best to keep her room clean and tidy, decorating it with a cute, charming touch. So, setting aside the surrounding environment, stepping into her room was actually quite refreshing. Except that her dining room, bedroom, and study were all in one place, because it was tiny, tiny, tiny. Some things are worth repeating.
Xin Huohuo had hoped that falling asleep would make her forget her hunger, but she never expected that the hungrier she got, the more awake she'd feel. She lay in bed watching movies, reading books, and playing games on her phone, messing around until midnight with no sleepiness in sight. Out of sheer boredom, she stumbled upon a news article. It said that using a phone for long periods in the dark could damage your eyes, and that in severe cases, the blue light from the screen could cause blindness.
She jumped in fright—to save electricity, she had turned her light off long ago!
The sudden wave of panic, combined with the ache in her arm from holding it up for so long, made her hand go slack. The phone slipped, hit her right in the face with a SMACK, and then tumbled onto her stomach.
"Dammit, that hurts!" she muttered, reaching up to touch her nose.
'Thank goodness, it's dry. It didn't make my nose bleed. But it stings so bad, my eyes are watering...'
"'When your luck is down, even drinking cold water will...'" She stopped midsentence, her hand freezing in place. Her hands flew to her mouth, crossed as if to stifle a scream she was afraid might escape.
Because in the darkness, two black figures were standing by her bed.
She had been so focused on her phone, and the room was so pitch-black, that she hadn't noticed them at all. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her—it had to be the blue light, right? And her eyes were still watery. But she quickly realized that what she was seeing was real.
When a person is subjected to extreme terror, their first reaction isn't actually to scream or run away. They freeze, completely unresponsive. At this moment, Xin Huohuo was a perfect example.
'So, is this sleep paralysis?'
She had been living alone since she was twelve and suffered from a severe lack of security. Every day, like a compulsion, she would repeatedly check that the door and windows were locked before going to sleep. And she hadn't even been asleep moments ago. It was impossible for someone to have broken in without making a single sound.
She squeezed her eyes shut, mustering every ounce of her strength to try and truly "wake up," to break free of this sleep disorder. But it was no use. While her mind raced, her body remained completely rigid, as if she had been struck by an Immobilization Skill.
"Our Mana... it's on her!" the figure on the left suddenly spoke. "I can feel it!"
'They're talking! They can talk! What the hell is going on?'
"Are you certain?"
"One hundred percent!"
"Precise location?" The voice of the figure on the right was deep and somber, clearly belonging to someone who didn't like to talk much.
"It's on her... her upper body... probably, maybe... around her chest?"
"Inspect it."
'Inspect it? What's that supposed to mean? Whether they're human perverts or ghostly ones, this isn't their usual M.O. They sound more like a pair of psychos and freaks.'
"How do we inspect it?" The figure on the left scratched its head, sounding perplexed.
"Obviously, we need to undo her clothes."
'What the—? So they *are* a couple of predators!'
A cold sweat broke out over Xin Huohuo's entire body, and she tried to leap up.
But for some reason, she was truly frozen solid. She couldn't move, as if a strange, powerful, and icy pressure was floating all around, pinning her forcefully to the bed.