Chapter 13: Thirteen: Seeking the Woman in White (Combined)

Thirteen: Seeking the Woman in White (Combined)

Her willow-leaf brows were tightly knit together. Painful memories, like wave after wave of a rising tide, battered Yu Lianyun's aching conscience. She choked back sobs for a long time before finally opening her mouth to recount the truth of that day.

That day, she had indeed tripped into a mass of raw, hair-growing flesh strips due to a hallucination. Immediately after, countless flesh buds crawled all over Yu Lianyun's feet, continuously extending upward in an attempt to cover her entire body.

Seeing his beloved daughter in distress, Yu Lianyun's father naturally fought desperately to save her. Upon seeing those flesh buds burrowing into Yu Lianyun's body, he immediately guessed the female corpse's intent. The entity residing within the female corpse—or rather, the existence hiding behind it—wanted to devour human spirit and soul to take their place.

Facing such a critical moment, Yu Lianyun's father made a major decision without the slightest hesitation: "You want a body, is that it? Fine, then I will kill her now. That way, you won't be able to occupy her body, right? Heh, if you could occupy a dead person's body, then the female corpse on the autopsy table wouldn't be unable to move!"

As he spoke, he flipped over and straddled Yu Lianyun's slender waist. The hands that had once taught her to hold a pen to write and how to wield a scalpel were now gripping her throat with all their might. The pain from the Other-dimensional Power's invasion, coupled with the agony of suffocation, brought Yu Lianyun's sense of terror to its peak.

Enduring immense pain, Yu Lianyun was stunned when she heard her father's decision. She could not believe that her father would actually try to strangle her to death with his own hands.

The desire to survive made her struggle violently. It seemed that this near-death experience made her already innately powerful intuition even sharper. It was at this moment that the memories from the female corpse Jin Xiu's life flooded into her mind.

The despair and resentment from two souls left Yu Lianyun unable to distinguish who she really was, but regardless, her instinct for survival was magnified countless times over.

Sensing the fact that Yu Lianyun was dying, the Other-dimensional lifeform—which was controlling the hallucinations and devouring her soul to reshape her body—immediately shifted its focus. The flesh buds and strips detached from Yu Lianyun's body one after another, turning instead to entangle her father's limbs and torso.

The intense pain caused her father's body to stiffen and lose its strength. Yu Lianyun was able to catch her breath at this moment, taking the opportunity to kick away the father who had wanted to kill his own daughter.

Yu Lianyun escaped the autopsy room, desperately trying to flee, but her father, covered from head to toe in flesh buds like sea worms, stumbled in hot pursuit behind her, muttering, "Xiaoyun, don't run! Let me kill you!"

Hearing this, Yu Lianyun's heart was filled with grief and indignation beyond measure.

At the time, with her legs weak and sore, Yu Lianyun could not run fast, and she soon ended up brawling in the corridor with her father, who was controlled by the monster.

During the struggle, Yu Lianyun grabbed a vase from the corridor and used all her strength to smash it onto her father's head. Her father's head tilted to the side, and he tumbled down the stairs.

Seeing her father roll down the stairs, Yu Lianyun panicked and hurriedly crawled over to check on him, only to find that the father she had once respected most had already collapsed in a pool of blood at the bottom of the stairs.

The image of her father's tragic death was too intense a shock; Yu Lianyun could not bear it and fainted on the spot.

This was the bloody truth of that day!

Even if they were not eyewitnesses to the terrifying hallucinations of that day, all bystanders could see that Yu Lianyun's father did not die by accident. Although the hallucinations were fake, the fight between the two was real.

Therefore, when Yu Lianyun heard her mother say that her father died in an accident and that she had fainted in the autopsy room, she knew that her mother had covered up her crime of patricide.

Every time she recalled the events of that day afterward, Yu Lianyun was tormented. Regardless of whether her father had struck first and she had only resisted instinctively to save her own life, the act of killing her father remained an irrefutable fact.

At this very moment, Yu Lianyun confessed her crime to Lin Ling face-to-face. Although she had killed her father, she felt it was excusable and a last resort.

After hearing the true story, Lin Ling did not maintain the attitude of a rational, indifferent listener like last time. Instead, he put on an expression of great emotion and sighed sincerely, "What a good father who sacrificed himself for his daughter."

Hearing Lin Ling's words, Yu Lianyun trembled all over and looked at him in disbelief, "What are you saying? He was trying to kill me!"

"If he really wanted to kill you, there were countless ways to do it, yet he chose the slowest method," Lin Ling laughed. "As a doctor, especially a forensic pathologist, you surely know how many tools in an autopsy room can easily cause death, don't you?"

As Lin Ling's words reached this point, Yu Lianyun immediately realized a possibility she had never imagined. In an instant, her soul felt as if it had been struck by lightning, and her heart was pierced by a sharp blade.

"Your father was a man of considerable wisdom. In such a short time, he realized the loophole in the Other-dimensional lifeform's invasion and made his own decision," Lin Ling praised. "By acting as if he were going to strangle you, he forced the Other-dimensional lifeform to shift its focus, drawing the danger onto himself."

"But if he had to do that, hadn't he already succeeded? Why... why did he still pursue me relentlessly afterward, threatening to kill me?" Yu Lianyun's voice trembled. In fact, she had already thought of the reason, but she hoped more that this answer would not be something she realized herself, but something someone else pointed out to her. That way, her pain might be lessened, as she could shift part of the blame onto something called "stupidity."

Lin Ling satisfied her intent. While petting a cat, he explained nonchalantly, "There are probably several reasons. First, he himself could not bear the pain of his bones being eroded and his soul being devoured, so he sought death for relief. Second, he was still gambling—gambling that his death could end the Other-dimensional lifeform's invasion. Third, he wanted the misunderstanding to continue so that his death wouldn't bring you so much burden, making you feel that his death was deserved."

"In fact, he had already succeeded. Well, I'm very sorry. The dead are to be respected, and I shouldn't have gone against his reasonable wishes, yet I exposed him." With no remorse on his face, Lin Ling stared at Yu Lianyun with eyes devoid of emotional fluctuation and offered a perfunctory apology.

Seeing the beautiful woman immersed in an even more shattered mental world, Lin Ling maintained his standard faint smile, observing her as if he wanted to record this expression.

After admiring Yu Lianyun's expression for a while, Lin Ling felt bored and said, "The perfect solution you want actually exists. As long as the Blessing of the videotape has warded off an Other-dimensional lifeform's invasion for you once, you don't need to worry about it occupying your body again. As the saying goes, 'once bitten, twice shy,' and those wretched things lurking and growing in the Other-dimensional darkness are even more so."

"Therefore, you only need to resolve the Blessing on your body. Go find that woman in the videotape. Sometimes, resentment doesn't need to be resolved, but expressed and guided..."

Yu Lianyun did not know how she returned to the hotel afterward. She returned in a daze, losing track of day and night. Only after sleeping soundly in the hotel for two days did she slowly walk out of the shadow of the truth about her father's death.

After waking up, Yu Lianyun became much calmer and more rational. She could not afford any other emotions; a clear head was what she needed most right now.

Sleeping for two days meant that she had less than three days left before the "Seven-Day Death" Curse.

After waking up and eating, the first thing she did was seek help from He Jia'an and the Xuanmi Group, saying, "I want you to help me find someone—a dead person."

"Find who?" He Jia'an did not refuse immediately but asked.

Yu Lianyun replied straightforwardly, "The woman in white who died in the videotape."

"Why are you looking for her?" He Jia'an frowned. Actively seeking out an Abnormal event was not something a rational person would do.

"I thought of a way to resolve the Blessing on me." Recalling what Lin Ling had said at the end that day, a trace of guilt welled up in her heart. "Only by finding the woman in white can I solve the problem on me."

Hearing Yu Lianyun's words, He Jia'an and Li Yingqi turned their gazes toward Wei Jiang, who possessed the ability to distinguish truth from lies. Wei Jiang shook his head at both of them, indicating that Yu Lianyun was not lying.

Yu Lianyun was naturally not lying; she was just withholding some of the truth.

"You just need to let me go alone. Whether this journey leads me to death or a way to live, I am prepared," Yu Lianyun said earnestly.

He Jia'an pondered for a moment and gave his reply, "We can help you, but we won't let you go looking for her alone."

Yu Lianyun was silent for a while, finally nodded, and said softly, "Thank you."

He Jia'an reported Yu Lianyun's request to the Xuanmi Group. The Xuanmi Group quickly accepted the problem and provided a result that same afternoon.

Based on the footage recorded in the videotape and the architectural style of the residence where the perverted father and son had stayed, the Xuanmi Group quickly found places in their massive database that matched the footage. There were three similar locations found, and fortunately, all three were not far from Litaishi.

The group prepared to pull several all-nighters, drove out of Litaishi overnight, and headed straight for those three locations.

Upon arriving at the first city, Yu Lianyun didn't even get out of the car after reaching the destination. She just glanced at the two bungalows outside and immediately shook her head, "Not here. The trees planted in this city are wrong. Where I need to go should be a place with many maple trees."

Yu Lianyun thought of the nightmare scenes she had experienced for several consecutive days; that stone well should be located in a maple forest. She suddenly remembered this characteristic.

Hearing this, He Jia'an in the car directly crossed out the first location on the list. After pondering for a moment, he immediately deleted another location and tapped his pen on the last one—New Dragon City—saying, "I've been on a mission in this city and still have some impression of it. If I remember correctly, the city tree of this city is the maple, and it was once a city built in a forest."

"Then let's go straight there!" Yu Lianyun said. At this point, she only had two days left. If she continued to investigate according to the original plan, she might run out of time, so it was better to take a gamble and treat New Dragon City as her final destination.

The era the woman in white lived in should have been the 1960s or 70s. Decades of time could change many things, especially since the Shenzhou Region was developing rapidly and every city was changing every day. New Dragon City had been one of the cities the World Government focused on developing, so its changes must have been significant. She might not be able to quickly find the forest where the woman in white died, or even the stone well.

The facts were indeed so. When Yu Lianyun and the others arrived in New Dragon City half a day later, they were astonished to compare the hand-drawn sketch of the woman in white's former residence from the videotape with the skyscraper in front of them. Yu Lianyun and the others could not help but marvel at how rapidly the times had developed.

Next was to find the whereabouts of the stone well. He Jia'an used the connections of the Xuanmi Group to search the maple forest where the stone well was located, and finally, their eyes locked onto an abandoned amusement park.

This amusement park was not built long ago, having only a history of a dozen years, yet its operational lifespan was pitifully short, lasting a mere two years.

Opinions varied on the reason for the amusement park's closure. Some said the owner was poor at management, others said the owner owed a mountain of debt, and the most eerie theory was that ever since the park was built, strange things had been reported, and it was said that people had died. Unable to bear such eerie facts, the amusement park was shut down.

Because many feng shui masters said the feng shui here was bad, and the location of the amusement park was not very good, with too high an investment cost, no one was willing to take over the park, so it remained abandoned here.

Yu Lianyun felt that perhaps she had come to the right place; the moment she entered the abandoned amusement park, she had a familiar feeling, as if guided by her soul. Having once had a brief memory resonance with the woman in white, she actually walked all the way past the carousel, the log flume, and the roller coaster, finally arriving in front of a haunted house with faded wall paint.

The entrance to the haunted house was the head of a clown, and one had to enter through the clown's mouth; looking from the outside, the clown's ferocious and bizarre expression made everyone feel a trace of chill and unease.

"I feel that it should be inside here," Yu Lianyun said to the group. She found an unattended haunted house introduction brochure from the guide map outside the haunted house, on which the several attractions of the haunted house were clearly written. Among them, a Sacrificial Altar set up with an inverted cross caught her attention. She pointed at that Sacrificial Altar and said, "That's right, it can't be wrong, it is exactly this appearance. The stone well in my memory is just like this; beneath that Sacrificial Altar, it must be the place where the remains of the woman in white were soaked."