When the voice outside the door sounded, Cen Yao was just about to bite into her second piece of fried chicken.
“Guest.”
“What are you eating in your room?”
Cen Yao's hand paused.
The fried chicken skin was still steaming, condensation clung to the cup of ice-cold cola, and the aroma of french fries mixed with ketchup, stubbornly spreading through the cold, damp room.
She slowly raised her head and looked toward the tightly shut door.
It was only nine o'clock.
There were still three full hours before midnight, the peak time for regular hauntings in Horror Game dungeons.
Starting already?
Was this a joke?
Cen Yao put the fried chicken back in the paper bag and set the cola down securely on the table.
The thing outside the door seemed to press even closer.
It didn't knock immediately, but merely sniffed against the door panel, over and over.
The sound was very soft.
Wet, sticky, and slow, as if something was pressing its nose against the crack of the door, inhaling the scent from the inside.
“It smells so good.”
“Guest, what are you eating?”
“Can I have a bite too?”
The voice was no longer raspy like before. Instead, it had become thin and soft, like a child standing at the door begging for candy.
If Cen Yao hadn't been able to clearly feel the cold, sticky ghostly aura outside the door, she might have actually believed it.
She gripped her wand, preparing to walk over and open the door.
But just as she took a step, she suddenly thought of something and paused, slowing her movements.
Cen Yao turned back to the table and picked up the high-backed chair in the room.
The chair looked very old, with dark red roses carved into the backrest and several deep scratch marks along the wooden edges.
In the next second...
Bang!
The chair slammed violently against the door panel.
The dilapidated wooden door let out a harsh, deafening boom, and the entire doorframe shook along with it.
The voice outside came to an abrupt halt.
Cen Yao stood inside, her tone even more impatient than the ghost outside.
“What does what I eat have to do with you?”
“Do you live by the ocean? Mind your own business!”
Outside the door: “...”
The hallway fell dead silent.
Even the faint creaking of floorboards, scratching noises, and low chuckles drifting up from downstairs seemed to have been stunned by the chair slam, halting all at once.
The livestream's bullet comments also went blank for a brief moment.
Immediately after, the comments erupted.
【???】
【What did she just do?】
【Did I just see her slam a chair against the door?】
【LMAO, I thought she was going to open the door and counter-kill, but she just gave the door a good wallop first.】
【Wait, is this streamer suicidal? That's clearly a nighttime monster of the inn outside. How does she dare to actively provoke it?】
【As expected, a rookie is just a rookie. She looked cool earlier, but she let the praise go to her head.】
【To the person above, did a dungeon monster just eat your brain? Her current identity is a Witch!】
【Exactly. If a Witch is interrupted while eating, is she supposed to politely reason with a dirty thing?】
【If she actually opened the door gently, she might have been flagged for failing to act like a Witch.】
【Fuck, I was too busy watching her eat fried chicken, I almost forgot she has identity rules to follow.】
【Putting myself in her shoes, I definitely would have died just now.】
【This dungeon is so insidious. On the surface, it's a monster knocking on the door, but it's actually testing her role-playing.】
【Stop, I'm already getting nervous.】
The thing outside the door seemed to be enraged by the strike as well.
In the next second, a sudden knocking erupted.
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
Each strike was heavier than the last.
The entire door shuddered, shaking fine dust down from the crevices.
“Not allowed...”
“No eating outside food...”
“Not allowed...”
The voice outside grew higher and thinner, until it sounded like a dozen mouths shrieking against the door panel at the same time.
“Not allowed! Not allowed! Not allowed!”
“The inn does not allow guests to bring outside food!”
“Open the door!”
“Hand over the food!”
“Open the door!”
Bang!
Bang!
Bang!
The knocking turned into violent slamming.
The door panel dented inward slightly from the impact.
The Alarm Curse placed on the door crack hummed softly, and the fire butterflies circled the room rapidly, their golden points of light tracing uneasy paths in midair.
Cen Yao looked down at her fried chicken.
Good.
The chicken was still hot, and the cola hadn't spilled.
But the thing outside the door was really noisy.
She was already exhausted today.
Since entering the dungeon, she had purified the high tower, divined the royal capital, jumped off the tower to fly, gathered clear-heart vine, summoned a phoenix to travel, and threatened a crow for directions. Finally, she had managed to find a room and summon a hot meal.
Now, before she could even take a couple of bites, some dirty thing was banging on her door.
Cen Yao's temples throbbed slightly.
This was intolerable.
There was no need to tolerate it any longer.
She stepped toward the door.
The orb quickly warned, “Host, there's more than one thing out there.”
“I know.”
Cen Yao gripped the doorknob, her tone terrifyingly calm.
“Which makes them even noisier.”
Click.
The door unlocked.
The banging outside stopped abruptly.
Cen Yao pulled the door straight open.
The dim, yellow light of the hallway spilled in.
Before the thing lurking outside could fully reveal its form, a plume of black mist, so dense it had almost materialized into a physical entity, surged out from behind Cen Yao.
The black mist poured out like a silent tide from the abyss, carrying with it a bone-chilling pressure that froze the very soul.
It instantly wrapped around the mass at the doorway.
Cen Yao couldn't even tell if the entity was a human, a ghost, or some kind of rotted lump of flesh.
In the next instant, the black mist tightened.
A brief, stifled shriek sounded outside.
The moment the shriek escaped its throat, it was entirely swallowed by the black mist.
The hallway went quiet.
Her head stopped throbbing.
Cen Yao stood at the doorway, looking down at the few drops of black slime remaining on the floor.
Within three seconds, even those drops of slime were devoured clean by the black mist.
Not a single trace was left behind.
Good.
Environmentally friendly.
She looked up, gazing down the long, dark corridor of the fourth floor.
The lights in the hallway were very dim.
The faded portraits on the walls, which had been stealthily rolling their eyes, froze in unison.
The pale fingers hiding behind the door cracks retracted one by one, and the rustling, crawling sounds inside the ceiling space ceased entirely.
The entire Decapitated Goose Inn felt as if it had been choked by an invisible hand.
Cen Yao watched all of this coldly.
In the next second, she increased her mana output.
Even more black mist spread out from beneath her feet.
It was pure black without a single blemish, so dense it seemed capable of swallowing light itself.
It crawled along the floorboards, crept up the walls, and slithered like countless slender snakes into door cracks, window crevices, behind portraits, and into the shadows of the staircase.
Wherever it passed, the dim yellow lights went out one by one.
Not blown out by the wind.
But devoured by the darkness.
The inn had been eerie to begin with.
Damp floorboards, rotting wallpaper, eyes hidden in the corners of the stairs, and blood seeping from the cracks of the doors.
But when Cen Yao's black mist spread, the entire inn's eeriness suddenly shifted in nature.
The previous creepiness came from monsters lurking in the shadows, waiting for a human to make a wrong move before pouncing to tear their throat out.
But the current darkness felt like a much older, more silent abyss descending upon this place.
It did not shriek, chase, or brandish claws.
It simply spread in silence.
Yet, it made every creature hiding in the inn begin to tremble instinctively.
For they realized that the darkness they were so familiar with no longer belonged to them.
This darkness now had a true master.
Cen Yao stood in the center of the black mist, the hem of her purple Witch's Robe lifted by the airflow. Her face under the hood was half-hidden in the shadows, revealing only a pale jawline and tightly pressed lips.
A few wisps of black mist wrapped around her wrists like submissive snakes.
There was no light behind her.
Yet she was more impossible to ignore than any light.
Rate on N.U.
