"…By the way, you've read transmigration novels before, right?"
Seeing that the boy was still staring blankly at him, Ryan rubbed his hands hard, then pressed his palms together in a pleading gesture.
"If you don't want to freeze to death out here, can we go inside first and save the questions for later?"
The boy stood there in a daze for several seconds before finally nodding with difficulty, his gaze shifting toward the temple gate ahead.
It was as if he had only just come back to his senses. The snow was falling harder and harder. Even if he wanted to leave, the thin clothes on his body guaranteed he would freeze to death halfway down the mountain. Once he realized he had no way of getting out of here in the short term, his expression became even uglier, his face full of confusion and unease.
As Ethan listened to their exchange, his expression changed slightly.
…Ghosts?
He had noticed the obvious fear in the shirted man's face when he used that word.
Which meant that the things Ethan had seen earlier… really were ghosts?
The apartment building he had lived in for years had actually been hiding that many ghosts… No. More accurately, everything seemed to have started changing from the very moment that madman broke into his home.
From that point onward, everything had seemed to shift. The police had clearly already reached his apartment, yet it was as if their space and time had become misaligned. Or perhaps… he had entered a world that was almost exactly the same as his own, only mirrored.
Could it be that the experiences these people had gone through were the same as his?
Then what exactly did that line of bloody text on the elevator door represent?
Ethan's gaze moved slightly. The others were all watching the terrified boy by the steps with cold, guarded expressions, while several of them had taken out their phones and were checking something.
Phones?
Ethan remembered how, inside the elevator, the phone in his pocket had seemed to vibrate again and again. He reached into his pocket. He hadn't been carrying much—just his phone and the two identical keys.
But now, all he touched was the cold screen of the phone.
Both keys were gone. He had no idea whether he had dropped them or whether something else had happened to them.
He pulled out the phone and lit up the screen.
A crimson glow reflected on his face. On the display were the same familiar, horrifying blood-red words:
Find the corpse of the vengeful ghost within the boundaries of Tuanshan Temple.
This nightmare contains only one death rule.
There were only two lines of text. When Ethan saw the second line, the bloody sentence he had seen earlier on the elevator door surfaced in his mind once again:
Do not leave your residence for more than five minutes.
A death rule…
When he thought of what had happened after he violated that sentence, Ethan's heart gave a violent jolt. If he hadn't entered the elevator, he might already be dead.
At that moment, the blood-red words on the phone screen spread like fresh blood, quickly turning the entire display into a sheet of crimson before, as if it had all been a hallucination, fading back into the normal interface again.
The signal bars on the phone showed no service.
But what was even stranger was this—when Ethan had gone out, it had been a little past eight in the evening, and it had been Monday.
Now, however, the phone was showing Wednesday, 4:00 PM.
Ethan took a deep breath. The questions in his mind only multiplied.
And what alarmed him most was this:
If the death rule in his world had been not leaving his residence for more than five minutes, then what was the rule here?
"AHHHHH—!!!"
A shrill scream suddenly tore through the air.
Ethan immediately looked up.
The sound had come from the direction of the steps, and the only one standing there was that young boy. Then, with a dull thud, the frightened boy slammed face-first onto the ground.
Right after that, it was as if something were dragging him.
His whole body was being pulled down toward the muddy path.
The boy desperately clawed at the ground, trying to grab onto something, but the slick surface offered nothing to hold. His fingers raked through the dirt mixed with fresh snow, carving a string of twisted marks into the mud.
"Damn it!"
Ryan's face changed instantly. He reacted with astonishing speed, lunging forward to seize one of the boy's hands. He adjusted his footing and planted his boots into the ground with all his strength. But in the very next instant, even he was dragged downward as well.
The scene erupted into chaos.
The others, who had shown little reaction a moment before, all went pale. The ponytailed girl—the same one who had said the boy had been scared witless—rushed forward decisively, grabbed the boy's other hand, and pulled upward with all her might.
Ethan's gaze moved past them, and in that instant he saw it—
From a filthy mound of dirt beside the path, a long arm had stretched out. It was deathly pale, and one side of it was mottled with purple-red corpse spots. At that very moment, that hand had latched onto one of the boy's feet.
"Hurry! Take off your shoe!"
The girl who had rushed forward shouted sharply.
The boy came back to his senses and immediately started kicking at his shoe with his free foot. The foot that had been grabbed seemed unable to move at all, held rigid and straight. He kicked frantically several times before the shoe finally came loose.
In an instant, the boy's frail body was yanked back onto the steps as if in a tug-of-war.
Ryan and the girl both stumbled. After watching for a moment to make sure nothing else happened, they finally let go and allowed the boy to collapse onto the ground, gasping heavily for breath.
Ethan walked over, his pupils shrinking slightly.
The place where the arm had appeared was now empty.
Even stranger, the shoe had vanished too.
The shoe and the arm had both disappeared into thin air.
"Kid, can you still move?"
Ryan walked up to the boy and, without waiting for permission, grabbed him by the arm and hauled him upright.
The boy could barely stand. Mud covered him from head to toe, and the exposed parts of his skin were scraped in several places. He looked utterly miserable.
But compared to the physical injuries, what had just happened had clearly dealt a much heavier blow to his mind. His whole body was shaking violently, and his face was as white as paper.
A piercing gust of wind swept through, carrying fine snow with it like sand, lashing against everyone's faces.
"Let's go… If we stay here any longer, we might freeze to death before the ghosts even get a chance to kill us."
The ponytailed girl's expression had turned grave.
Everyone nodded. No one said anything more. Ryan supported the injured boy, and the group began heading toward the temple.
Ethan followed behind them, his mind still racing with everything that had just happened.
From the moment he saw that pale arm seize the boy, he had felt a strong sense that this incident resembled what he had experienced earlier.
Just as leaving his apartment had triggered something in his world, the boy had likely triggered some kind of rule here, causing that arm to appear…
Could it be that in this world, too, there was some kind of boundary tied to space itself?
Ethan suddenly thought of the message on his phone:
Find the corpse of the vengeful ghost within the boundaries of Tuanshan Temple.
Perhaps just now…
the boy had unknowingly stepped outside the boundaries of Tuanshan Temple.