Chapter 027: This Person Does Not Exist

That eye immediately reminded me of the rumors surrounding pleasure houses. Some people said that while they were busy in their rooms, they always felt a pair of eyes watching them. I sprang up from the bed at once, but as I moved, Xiaomei grabbed me.

I realized her legs were wrapped around my waist, and she began to laugh. Seeing her smile, a strange feeling rose in my heart. She looked so familiar, as if I’d seen her somewhere before. When Xiaomei smiled, there was nothing seductive about it; instead, she seemed pure and clean.

She arched her body slightly and whispered in my ear, “Don’t go.”

Those three words inexplicably filled me with sadness, but I quickly regained my senses. I shoved her away, my sudden motion stirring the air and snuffing out the candle; the room was plunged into darkness.

I immediately opened the door. By the faint moonlight filtering in through the window, I saw the corridor was empty. I called out for Luo Feng several times, and he responded quickly, hurrying back to ask what was wrong. I told him about the eye I’d seen outside the door. Cursing, he joined me in searching the second floor.

When I saw that ghostly eye, Luo Feng had been upstairs; the building had only three floors, with the top being an open rooftop terrace. Luo Feng told me there was nothing unusual up there. We then went down to the first floor, where Luo Feng’s men were stationed. They said no one had passed by.

Luo Feng instructed them to keep watch, and we climbed up to the third floor again. As soon as we stepped out of the stairwell, a cold wind slashed our faces like a knife. The rooftop was small and empty; at a glance, we could see there was no one there. I walked to the edge of the terrace and finally took in the layout of the place.

This place was utterly strange. Next to the pleasure house was no other building, just a courtyard enclosed by a wall, which was attached to the house. That wall formed a yard for the pleasure house; the trembling trees we had seen earlier—despite the lack of wind—were those stretching out from that yard, over the wall. The wall of the courtyard and the opposite residential wall formed a narrow alley—the very one we had used to enter.

That was not so unusual, but the strange part was that there was no passage leading into that courtyard.

The pleasure house had only two entrances: one was the alley we had just used, which led directly to the second floor, as the first floor appeared blocked off by walls. The other was a stairwell locked with an iron gate. The proprietress had said that door had never been opened, and we had found out that after Lao Jiu and the others were drugged, they were carried out one by one through that door.

Luo Feng told me he had noticed this when he came up, but hadn’t had the chance to mention it. The courtyard wall was also sealed, meaning the yard was completely enclosed. Luo Feng had already searched the second floor but found no way to access the ground floor courtyard.

Ordinarily, buildings would not be constructed in such a bizarre fashion. I gazed at the courtyard; there were quite a few trees, and in the dim light, I thought I saw a small shelter resembling a doghouse. The weeds had grown high. All of a sudden, Luo Feng pointed and said the grass was moving over there.

I squinted, and sure enough—something seemed to be crawling through the weeds. I turned and dashed downstairs to search, but found no way into the courtyard from the first floor. I then ran into the alley, but Luo Feng’s subordinate was nowhere to be seen. Luo Feng called out for him several times, but he didn’t appear.

Luo Feng was getting anxious and rushed out of the alley, only to discover his man hiding in a convenience store. As soon as he saw Luo Feng, the man, visibly panicked, stammered that the trees inside the courtyard had begun shaking violently again, and he had even heard the sound of a woman weeping. He’d been utterly terrified.

“What on earth is in that courtyard!” Luo Feng’s face darkened.

“Wait for me here. I’ll go take a look,” I said to Luo Feng.

He and I stepped out of the convenience store. I looked up at the wall bordering the alley—it was about two meters high. I jumped and grabbed the top, only to feel a sharp sting in my palm; it was too dark to see clearly, but I realized the wall was studded with broken glass, and my hand was bleeding. Just as I was about to climb higher, someone suddenly called out to us.

I turned to see the proprietress of the pleasure house returning, accompanied by the girls. I let go of the wall and dropped down. At first, the proprietress’s voice was tinged with anger, but as soon as she recognized Luo Feng and me, her tone switched to one of fawning. She batted her eyes and asked what brought us back.

Luo Feng and I had met her before and were used to her ways. I asked directly where she had been, and her answer was much like Xiaomei’s: she said she had taken the girls out to play mahjong. Soon, she asked what we were doing there. I smiled and said we had come for some fun.

She seemed suspicious. “What sort of fun requires you to climb the wall?”

Luo Feng bristled. “I’m calling you ‘boss’ out of politeness. To put it bluntly, you’re the madam here. Do we need your permission to do what we please?”

The proprietress was not pleased. “Brother Feng, maybe business is slow these days, but I’ve still got plenty of friends. This is my place; things don’t happen here just because you say so.”

Her sudden toughness was obvious, and I knew it was only because she had caught me trying to scale the wall. She was clearly not someone who liked making enemies, but she was willing to offend Luo Feng for the sake of this deserted courtyard. That only made me more certain there was something wrong in there.

Luo Feng sneered, “I know what kind of girls you have here. I won’t say I’m afraid of no one, but even if all your guests ganged up together, they wouldn’t make me bat an eye.”

The proprietress knew well enough not to cross Luo Feng. She seemed ready to back down, but couldn’t quite save face. I still had questions for her, so I gave her a way out. I asked why she’d left Xiaomei alone in the pleasure house.

She stared at me strangely, and the girls behind her also stared. “Who’s Xiaomei?” she asked.

A chill ran through me; I had a feeling the proprietress was about to say something shocking. Luo Feng was growing impatient and snapped at her to stop pretending. She retorted, acting genuinely baffled.

Luo Feng, restraining himself, recounted everything that had happened with Xiaomei.

At this, the faces of the proprietress and her girls changed dramatically. She told us there was no such person as Xiaomei in the pleasure house. I was stunned and rushed back inside. The hallway still reeked of rotting flesh piled up in a corner; as the proprietress followed, she called out in disgust, demanding to know who’d left such filth there.

I hurried to the room where I’d left Xiaomei, but she had vanished. Luo Feng asked his man if he’d seen a woman run out, but he shook his head, trembling, and said he’d seen nothing at all. I bent to check the bed; it was perfectly neat, not a single crease.

“Brother Feng, could it be you two saw a ghost?” the proprietress asked. The words had barely left her lips when the girls behind her gasped in unison. Luo Feng, irritated, ordered his men to search the area and let no suspicious person leave.

I asked the proprietress repeatedly for confirmation. She insisted there was no one named Xiaomei, and that none of the girls in the house had hair longer than shoulder-length—certainly not down to the waist. She claimed she had taken all the girls with her when she left, since she was shutting down business, and had left no one behind.

A chill crept down my spine. Who exactly was that woman named Xiaomei? Now, thinking back, the curve of her lips and the pallor of her face seemed even more unsettling. A woman of unknown origin, claiming to be one of the girls, had held me so tightly—and stranger still, I’d felt she was familiar, as though I’d met her before.

I stared at the proprietress and her girls. The proprietress didn’t seem to be lying; the others whispered fearfully among themselves. Listening closely, I heard them say we must have seen a ghost. I paced a few steps, then sat at the edge of the bed. The candle was still on the table; I took out my lighter and lit it again.

Crossing my legs, I found a hair on the bed—so long that, when stretched, it was nearly a meter. I smiled and challenged the proprietress, “Didn’t you say none of the girls here have hair past their shoulders? What’s with this hair, then?”

Her face changed at once. After a moment’s hesitation, she lowered her voice and said, “Brother Feng, sir, you’d better leave quickly. A master once said this place is unclean.”

Luo Feng laughed. “So business suddenly dried up because of this rumor, and now you act as if you never knew?”

She looked aggrieved and explained that the rumor about the place being haunted began when it first opened, after a master visited. The proprietress believed in feng shui, so she followed his advice and renovated, walling off a courtyard. The master claimed this would gather yin energy.

Afterwards, all had been peaceful and she’d forgotten about it. But recently, the stories of hauntings had grown more persistent—not just from the guests, but some of the girls had seen things, too.

“It was an eye, wasn’t it? I saw it just now as well,” I said calmly. “Who was this master?”

“Daoist Xuan Yi,” she replied.