This Damned Thirst for Survival
chapter-22

Jiang Luo almost laughed.

What could be as scary as you?

Next to him is a vicious ghost in human skin, and outside the door is another filthy thing. To be honest, Jiang Luo would rather deal with the ghost outside the door than hide in the utility room with Bai Yefeng.

Jiang Luo does not reveal the evil spirit’s clumsy performance now, but also keenly catches the malice in its tone.

The malice, it made his nerves tense up.

The air in the enclosed utility room is damp and sticky, and there is only a small area for people to stand.

Jiang Luo slaps Bai Yefeng’s hand away and takes a step back, distancing himself from Bai Yefeng.

The overhead lights flickered as if they would burst in the next moment, the stench burst through the door, and a thin layer of frost covered the door panel of the single room.

There was a sudden cacophony of footsteps outside the toilet.

A gruff male voice said viciously, “Where is she! We can’t let her get away!”

“Come on, she’s hiding in the toilet, find her now, or we’ll be found out!”

Jiang Luo stares, listening from the footsteps of three people outside, but only the sound of two people talking. They were arguing loudly, as if they were not at all worried about being overheard. By the sound of their voices, they were all around thirty years old.

How does someone in their thirties get into a hostel full of contestants?

Jiang Luo realised in a flash that, like the memories of the owner’s wife he had touched at Hotel 129, he was now most likely caught up in the scene of an event that had happened before.

The tone of the three men outside grew sinister, “Find them one by one.”

While Jiang Luo listens intently, Bai Yefeng looks disinterested, circling a strand of Jiang Luo’s black hair with his fingers in bemusement.

“With a bang, the door to the first toilet was heavily kicked open. The man kicking the door spat, “Shit, that bitch ain’t in the first one.”

Another door was kicked open.

The utility room where Jiang Luo was staying was in the sixth compartment.

A kick at the door sounded as ghastly as muffled thunder, and soon the three men outside had kicked open four doors.

Only the fifth compartment remains.

Jiang Luo could not help but feel a cold sweat for the escaping girls, even though he knew this had already happened, the tension and terror was still frightening.

The three men outside the door obviously thought the same as he did, that the girls were in the fifth cubicle, and they laughed lewdly twice, the words with horrible content coming out of their mouths just as plainly.

“Bitch, why are you still hiding?”

“I’m exhausted, I can fucking run. Luckily there’s no one here on holiday, so I’ll have to get a bit more out of her before I kill her.”

“Hahahahahaha haven’t you had enough? Don’t you fucking die on a woman.”

“The bitch isn’t as pretty as her bestie, but at least she’s a live one, can’t we use her more?”

Accompanied by obscenities, someone kicked open the door of the fifth cubicle.

Jiang Luo’s brow furrowed and he could already guess what was to come.

But surprisingly, there was silence outside.

One man spoke up in surprise, “How come there’s no one in the fifth room either?”

Not even the fifth room?

Where can that be?

Jiang Luo frowned and suddenly his face froze and a cold chill ran up his back.

It occurred to him that there was a utility room.

It is where they are now.

Jiang Luo slowly twisted his head and on the ground, a hand jerked around his leg.

A female ghost with torn clothes suddenly appeared in the corner of the utility room where there was nothing. The female ghost lifted her head from her dishevelled hair to reveal a ghastly white ghostly face.

Two tears of blood streaked down the girl’s bruised face, her face covered in blood, and she grinned horribly and grimly towards Jiang Luo.

Jiang Luo’s breath hitches.

The next moment, the door to the single room was kicked open and three men came in, laughing fiercely, as if they could not see Jiang Luo and Bai Yefeng, and dragged the ghost out as she screamed.

The lights wavered rapidly again.

Jiang Luo is steadying his mind when he suddenly feels a familiarity with the female ghost, and he fixes his eyes on it, recognising in the unsteady light that it is Wang Xinhui, the missing girl from Fu Yuaner’s class.

The lights suddenly went out.

In the darkness, the ghostly figures outside were nowhere to be seen. But the voices did not disappear, the sound of doors opening and closing kept ringing, and the sound of the constant flushing of the toilet water rang out again.

Bai Yefeng whispered in his ear, “Hmm? It looks like they chopped someone up and flushed them down the drain.”

Yes, Jiang Luo heard it.

Not only that, but he also thought of the stench he had smelled when he first entered the hostel and what the staff had said about the “frequent blockage of the drainage”.

It took an unknown amount of time before the flushing stopped slowly.

Silence was restored to the toilet room.

Bai Yefeng asks, outwardly worried, but with a vague smile, “Are you scared?”

Jiang Luo instantly understood the malice in his earlier words.

The evil spirit had known that the female ghost would hide in this interval, which is why he had taken him to hide in the utility room.

Just to try and scare him?

Jiang Luo smiled instead of being angry, he sounded cheerful, as if he had gotten a surprise, “No fear, I also have to thank Mr. Bai for giving me another clue.”

Jiang Luo patted Bai Yefeng’s shoulder affectionately and said gratefully, “Bai, it’s a good thing you acted quickly and dragged me into the utility room, I can’t thank you enough.”

The dark-haired young man’s eyes were sincere: “I thought you were targeting me earlier, but now it seems that I was overthinking it, I was being petty to the gentleman’s heart. Bai Yefeng, Bai, you are really a good person.”

The Good People Bai Yefeng : “……”

His smile narrowed slightly.

Jiang Luo flashed him another broad smile and led the way out of the utility room.

Zhuo Zhongqiu was still waiting unnoticed outside, and when he saw them coming out, he couldn’t help but say, “You’re just going to the toilet, how can you take so long?”

Jiang Luo asked, “How long did it take us?”

Zhuo Zhongqiu clasped his arms and said, “Fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes,” Jiang Luo pondered, “and I thought an hour had passed.”

Such an interruption did not affect their plans and Jiang Luo was still thinking about the scene in the toilet as they headed to Liu Zhi’s office.

The three men were dressed as workers, and Jiang Luo took note of their looks, not forgetting an easily overlooked point.

Of the three workers, one had not spoken since the beginning.

Coincidentally, two workers also died during the work on the 2012 extension.

There is definitely an extraordinary connection between these two events.

The words of the three workers were repeated over and over again in Jiang Luo’s mind, “This bitch is not as pretty as her best friend, but at least she’s a living person”.

Fu Yuaner was already dead when the three workers saw him?

Jiang Luo already had a vague framework in mind, but there were still some key points that needed to be looked up to make sense.

There was no one in the teaching area at midnight. The three men walked through the quiet corridors to the locked office and tumbled in through the window.

Jiang Luo went straight to Liu Zhi’s desk. Liu Zhi’s drawer had a small lock on it, but a small lock was easy enough for them to pick aside and Zhuo Zhongqiu pulled it open.

Jiang Luo and Zhuo Zhongqiu went through the drawers one by one and eventually found a folded newspaper at the bottom of the drawer.

Jiang Luo picked up the newspaper and felt that something was wrong with the weight. He pulled the newspaper apart in layers and it turned out that there was a pile of women’s jewellery wrapped inside.

As a designer, albeit a landscape designer, one needs to understand the design styles of various industries when learning the basics of design. Jiang Luo can see at a glance that the jewellery, which comes from five different brands

There is also a time distinction in the way the soldering is done and the design pattern; if this is a gift from Liu Zhi, there is at least one to two years between the purchase of each set of jewellery.

But while the small details are different, the overall aesthetic direction is the same, leaning towards a more mature and feminine style.

One of the pairs of earrings is matched to the necklace worn around Fu Yuaner’s neck.

Jiang Luo took his phone out of his pocket and carefully photographed the jewellery one by one, “How many girls have gone missing between 2012 and now?”

Bai Yefeng said leisurely, “Five.”

Jiang Luo is thoughtful.

After taking the photos and restoring the office to its original state, the three men jumped out of the window and returned to the dormitory. Jiang Luo was able to establish that Liu Zhi and Fu Yuaner had been in a relationship, but the relationship between Fu Yuaner, Wang Xinhui and the workers was somewhat unclear to him.

Among the three workers, there was no Liu Zhi either.

When I got back to the hostel, it was already three o’clock in the middle of the night, and even the most capable night owl would have felt exhausted.

Jiang Luo had finished packing and was lying in bed, about to fall asleep, when his mobile phone rang once again.

Immediately awake this time, he picked up his phone and saw the strange caller from last night.

But this time, the unfamiliar caller’s number has a name in the notes.

[Liu Zhi].

The female ghost is using Liu Zhi’s mobile phone to call Jiang Luo.

Jiang Luo pressed record and picked up, saying calmly, “Hello?”

“Zillah …… Zillah ……”

The same radio break sounded as Jiang Luo waited patiently for the female voice to ring out.

“I …… Zilla ……,” said the indistinct female voice, “I’m with you, back to back.”

“It’s you and me back to back, or you and Liu Zhi back to back.” Jiang Luo asks rhetorically.

Which word in his words seemed to have poked the female ghost’s scar, and her voice gradually quickened, “I’ll go back to back with you, I’ll go back to back with you, I’ll go back to back with you ……”

The sound is getting shrill.

So not only are humans by nature repeaters, but ghosts are also repeaters by nature?

Saying the important thing three times?

Jiang Luo holds the phone down and looks under the bed.

–nothing.