Kaleidoscope of Death

Chapter 82: Night Time

After a simple dinner, the sky began to darken.

Everybody returned to their own rooms to rest. Lin Qiushi and Gu Longming were no exceptions. After quickly washing up inside, Lin Qiushi didn't rush into bed, but stood by the window and watched the rooms across from theirs.

The places where the baby's corpse cried last night were right across from them. There were two teams of people in those rooms, four people total. The room Lin Qiushi moved out of last night was sandwiched right between theirs.

During their daytime inspection, Lin Qiushi didn't find anything peculiar about those rooms, beside the tiny holes in the window paper that were easily overlooked.

The windows here were partitioned by wood into little squares, with glass along the top and paper along the bottom. Standing at the window Lin Qiushi could see outside through the glass, but if he were sitting he wouldn't be able to see anything.

"What are you looking at?" Gu Longming, who was lying on the bed, cocked his head and asked Lin Qiushi.

"I want to know what makes those rooms so different from ours," Lin Qiushi said. "You go ahead and sleep first."

Gu Longming said, "let's do it together then, yeah?"

Lin Qiushi, "I can do it on my own, I won't watch for long. You sleep. Even if you stay up there's not much you can help with."

Gu Longming blinked big eyes at Lin Qiushi and didn't insist. "Alright." He yawned, turned around, and sure enough, not two minutes later fell asleep.

Watching him, Lin Qiushi couldn't help but think of Ruan Nanzhu... Ruan Nanzhu's ability to fall asleep was also top notch. Come to think of it, the mission partners who'd entered doors with him seemed to be fast sleepers overall, Cheng Yixie included.

The night grew thick, and cool winds assaulted the halls, blowing the lanterns lining the hallway into a swaying frenzy, nearly falling.

Firelight swelled and dimmed. Lin Qiushi could only keep watch through the dark, his vision of the hallway outside vague and impaired. He looked down at his watch. It was already eleven PM, nearing midnight.

Lin Qiushi's plan was to wait until midnight, and, if the room across from theirs still hadn't changed in any way, go to bed.

But just as he thought this, Lin Qiushi noticed motion at the head of the hallway. A blurred red mass had appeared out of nowhere, and moved slowly through the dark. Only when it came underneath a lantern could Lin Qiushi see, by light, what the red blur was.

It was seven, maybe eight children wearing red outfits. They each had a hand on the shoulder of the one in front, heads hanging as they took one step, two steps slowly forward. Maybe it was the distance confusing Lin Qiushi's vision, but from the way they walked, these children seemed obviously inhuman.

They moved forward in a slow line. When they got beneath a window, suddenly they stopped, and the first child, with that awfully pale face, grinned eerily, slowly turning to face that window. It got onto tippy-toes, extended a small thin finger, and poked a tiny hole in the window paper. Then it pressed its face to the hole.

When Lin Qiushi saw this, all the hairs on his body stood up on end. He finally understood why, on the window of the room he'd switched them out of, there was that handful of tiny holes... If he hadn't brought the baby corpse, hadn't switched rooms, then at this moment, those ghost children would be looking through the window paper right at them.

Those things seemed to realize there was nobody in the room, and turned to head toward the next one. Lin Qiushi recalled there were people living in that room—so he got to see those children poke a hole, morph into a stream of bloody liquid, and slip along that window paper through the hole straight into the room.