Chapter 539: 536
The time allotted for the second door opening was only thirty seconds, and although the time had not yet elapsed, the abnormality behind the door had already tensed up everyone in the room.
Two sets of footsteps.
Almost overlapping, though not easily distinguishable, for those often dealing with the supernatural, such abnormalities were very easy to discern.
Was there a ghost following behind Li Jun?
That was the thought in everyone's minds, which then shifted to the corpse they had encountered in the old brick and tile house just moments before.
However...
Leuk San's gaze shifted subtly; to him, there were two other possibilities.
Perhaps, behind the door wasn't Li Jun and a ghost but two ghosts, and Li Jun had died.
As for the third possibility...
Leuk San then turned his gaze to Wang Xiaoming, who was standing at the end of the corridor outside the room. If the information provided by Professor Wang before was true, then something inconceivable was about to occur.
The seconds ticked by. Read latest chapters at My Virtual Library Empire
The footsteps behind the door grew clearer, without any pause in between.
Suddenly, the dim red door frame shook violently as if something was leaning on it from behind.
"Something's about to come out," Su Fan said, glancing at his phone to give everyone a heads up.
But the phone's screen showed no alerts; just two overlapping silhouettes behind a faintly illuminated door frame, neither signaling danger nor the death of a character with red letters, seemingly just a normal phenomenon.
The next moment.
From the blackness behind the doorframe, one that obscured any clear sight, a human leg stretched out.
The leg was clad in dirty, slightly tattered long pants, and through the garment's ragged tear, everyone could clearly see that the skin of the leg was no longer the natural hue of a living person; it was discolored, dark and green, much like a corpse that had been left unattended for a long time.
Just a leg, akin to one of the dead emerging, filled the tiny room with an overpowering stench of decay.
Was it a ghost?
In an instant, everyone's complexion turned ashen.
The worst scenario had unfolded.
The first to emerge wasn't Li Jun, but a ghost.
Thus, it was possible that Li Jun had indeed perished, with the footsteps being a mere deception; they couldn't possibly belong to Li Jun, and undoubtedly the remaining footsteps were also those of a ghost.
"Quick, close the door!" Cao Yanhua, outside the room, cried out with an urgent shout, his face beading with cold sweat.
Sure enough, opening the door a second time was too risky; a ghost emerged in just thirty seconds, though nothing had happened within that time frame during the first opening, where the anomaly only appeared close to a minute in.
"Wait," Wang Xiaoming intervened, preventing the action.
"What?"
Cao Yanhua looked at him in shock: "Are you mad? Do you want whatever's behind the door to invade the room? This is headquarters, if something goes wrong..."
"I know, let it come out," Wang Xiaoming said calmly: "If there's a problem, hold me accountable."
"What exactly are you planning?" Although Cao Yanhua had managed to keep his temper in check before, this time he bellowed at him.
Wang Xiaoming's demeanor suggested to him that the professor must have arranged something behind the scenes, perhaps related to an experiment.
"No matter what, I need a result, it's important," Wang Xiaoming said with rare seriousness.
"More important than human lives in the room?"
Wang Xiaoming succinctly and firmly replied, "Yes."
Their argument, carried by the intercom, reached the clear ears of Su Fan, Leuk San, Xu Yiping, Ah Hong, and Old Qin inside the room.
They could have disregarded the commands of the two men for their own safety and simply closed the door.
As ghost controllers, snap decisions were theirs to make, not to be halted by a mere statement.
But they hesitated.
Because an old man, leaning on a cane and his face speckled with age spots, had blocked the restless few.
A moment's obstruction, barely ten seconds, but the outcome was already evident.
The owner of the rotten leg behind had successfully crossed the darkness and passed through the mysteriously ancient door frame into this room.
The light within the room instantly dimmed, and the air was thicker with the scent of death.
A somewhat emaciated corpse, skin darkened and eyes the color of dead ash, stood rigidly before the group.
"Impossible."
Through the murky yellow glass, Cao Yanhua stared at the emerging corpse, uttering an incredulous gasp.
"This has got to be a joke, he came back to life...?" Su Fan clenched his phone tightly, his pupils contracting.
"Is it a person or a ghost?" Leuk San's sickly, sallow face showed a touch of confusion.
The corpse before their eyes was unquestionably the one he had personally cut down from the beam in the old house. Moreover, this corpse was not nameless or an unknown ghost; it had a name in life.
Wei Jing.
But Wei Jing was already dead.
The cause of death... a malevolent ghost's resurrection.
And the resurrecting ghost was none other than the main character of their previous supernatural incident, that terrifying specter known as the Ghost Envoy.
The body stood rigidly in place, its pair of hollow, pale eyes seeming to survey everything in the room.
Everyone felt themselves being watched by this entity, a chilling tremor running through them.
So what was this body now? A ghost... or a human?
"Cough, cough!"
At that moment, a pained cough sounded from behind the old doorframe as Li Jun stepped out, his body charred black. Seeing the others who had left the room earlier, and Old Qin standing in the room, he realized that their plan had succeeded.
Heaving a sigh of relief, Li Jun collapsed to the ground in pain and weakness.
Making it this far without dying from the ghost's resurrection had been lucky.
However, now, overusing the Ghost Domain had caused his body to be further invaded by the Ghost Flame, a pain so intense he could no longer bear it, making it impossible for him to even stand.
"It seems my choice was not wrong; you are indeed still alive, Wei Jing."
Suddenly, Wang Xiaoming's voice came through the walkie-talkie, breaking the deadlock.
"What?"
The next moment, everyone's eyes widened, shocked by this news.
Was this person in front of them really Wei Jing?
"An aberration?" Emotion flickered across Old Qin's wrinkled face.
If Xiao Wang's words were true, then the Wei Jing before them was an aberration like him, one who could control ghosts.
"I should already be dead. Professor, how did you know I was still conscious?" At that moment, the stiff, rotting body that stood before them, Wei Jing, finally spoke.
His voice was strange, as if he was missing vocal cords, and the tone so devoid of warmth it was frighteningly indifferent.
"I received some incredible information from something and decided to conduct an experiment, albeit tentatively."
Wang Xiaoming's voice spread from outside the room, "Though I can't understand the phenomenon of your continued existence, my guess is that the Ghost Envoy's infinite restart, which revives itself, might have also reset you since you died as a result of the Ghost Coffin. There's a chance that you were restarted too. Assuming your reset was successful, then with the intrusion of the Ghost Drawing, it's highly likely that this state could be maintained, after all, the Ghost Envoy couldn't handle you anymore while dealing with the Ghost Drawing."
"So, from the intel I received, there is indeed a possibility that you're still alive. The source of that information was just too bizarre; I needed to conduct further experiments."
"It seems a lot has happened after my death," Wei Jing said coldly, unaware of events that had transpired after his death or any information regarding the Ghost Envoy.
All he knew was that at some point when he regained consciousness, he had been hanging from the beam by a rope.
However, after awakening, Wei Jing was unable to do anything as the old, coarse rope tightened around him, gradually killing his body.
He had thought he would die again, yet while his body grew cold, died, decayed, and stank, his consciousness remained intact.
The body died, but the mind lived on.
Wei Jing found himself in this inexplicable and eerie state.
Until suddenly, a balance was disrupted, and his body was taken down.
The confirmation that Wei Jing was still alive horrified everyone even further.
Is this even possible?
The Ghost Envoy had inadvertently reset Wei Jing to a time when he was still alive?
"Wei Jing, what are you considered now, a human or a ghost?" Su Fan couldn't help asking, glancing at his phone which simply marked "danger."
This confirmed that the corpse-like Wei Jing was still dangerous.
Wei Jing responded in a numb tone, "I'm not sure what I am now... Instead of being a person, it's probably more accurate to say I've become a ghost. I seem to have become part of the Ghost Coffin."
As he spoke, the darkness in the room grew denser.
It was as if a Ghost Domain covered everything, eerily unsettling.
"Don't worry; I need to conduct further experiments," Wang Xiaoming said slowly, his expression becoming more solemn as he stood outside.
Because he was considering another matter entirely.
"It, revealing information to me that Wei Jing is still alive, did it know I would try to rescue Wei Jing, or is Wei Jing's existence a crucial part of its plan? Or is Wei Jing's appearance just to prove that 'it' is trustworthy, with the trap lying in the next step?"
"Of course, I can't rule out the possibility that Wei Jing is a decoy and the intelligence is a decoy too, with the real intent targeting me."
"Does it want to pique my interest, to be studied by me, to break free from Yang Jian's control?"
In an instant, Wang Xiaoming mulled over the significance of the human skin document considerably.
Regardless, borrowing the human skin document from Yang Jian turned out to be quite a surprising gain for him.
"Let's end the discussion here. The matter regarding Wei Jing is classified; no one is to reveal anything to the outside world," Cao Yanhua immediately stopped the others' inquiries.
To be honest, Wei Jing's appearance had also shocked him.
But Cao Yanhua was well aware that now was not the time to dwell on these issues; whether or not Wei Jing was still alive had no impact on the bigger picture. The priority was to complete other tasks.
The issue of Wei Jing would be set aside for now.
Seeing this, Old Qin immediately closed the door, preventing other strange events from occurring.