Mo Yi reached out into his nylon backpack, under his palm was the rustling sound of paper.
He raised his eyes and looked out of the window. In the dark sky, the countdown timer emitting blue light was slowly changing the last digit, methodically counting the elapsed time second by second.
A new hour began.
According to the speed of the monsters crawling below, they may have reached the downstairs by now.
Mo Yi unconsciously endured his sweaty fingers, the cold and wet feeling seemed to remain in the palm of his hand, as if the thrilling scene just now had not ended.
He took a deep breath, stepped toward the window, and placed the turned on flashlight on the dusty windowsill.
Under the icy light of the flashlight, the tiny bones hanging in the air shone with a cold halo, and the goat skull hanging on the wall stared at him with empty dark eyes, looking extraordinarily strange.
Mo Yi took another deep breath, narrowed his eyes, and stretched out a hand into his backpack.
Now that the dangerous period had passed, the attic could be said to be relatively safe.
In such a difficult instance, this kind of opportunity was rare, but it must be grasped well.
He took out the stack of papers hurriedly stuffed into the backpack before. The yellowed paper was wrinkled and crumpled because of Mo Yi’s previous rough handling. The edges were also rolled up, looking a little pitiful.
Mo Yi carefully smoothed the creases on the papers and looked at them by the light of the flashlight.
It was a stack of letter paper.
One corner of each letter was simply fixed together so that it didn’t fall apart.
–It seemed to have the same texture as the folded letter hidden in the music box.
However, it was different from the crooked, slightly crazy handwriting on that piece of paper. This rough and yellowed paper was quite clean, and except for the dust, there were no other stains on it. It had beautiful English written on it. The feminine ink handwriting was rational and delicate. It could be seen from the words and sentences that this person had a very good education.
Each letter was addressed to a man named “Esther”, but never seemed to be sent, nor signed or dated.
Mo Yi read the above text:
“Erica has a fever today and seems to have caught a cold. Other than that, we are all fine.”
He opened the next one, and the brittle paper made a soft rustle under his fingers:
“It’s still raining today. It’s been seven days. The clothes never seem to dry. John fell down with a fever today. God bless.”
This piece of paper seemed to have been soaked in water, and the writing on it was a little blurry.
Mo Yi had some vague guesses in his heart.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
He pursed his lips, hesitated for a moment, then flipped over to the next one.
Ktf tjcvkglalcu bc atlr qlfmf kjr rmglyyifv jcv oierafgfv, klat j iba bo rwevufr bc atf gbiifv fvuf, jcv wbgf agjmfr bo rmglyyilcu:
“Ktf vbmabg mjwf abvjs, jcv tf rjlv Sglmj jcv Abtc tjv asqtblv ofnfg. Xbv, atfs’gf cba sfa fluta sfjgr biv, qifjrf tfiq atfw.”
Ktf gfra bo atf qjqfg rffwfv ab yf rbjxfv klat afjgr, jcv atf mgewqifv ifaafg qjqfg kjr j ilaaif yglaaif, ilxf j kglcxifv vfjv ifjo.
The next one was even more scribbled:
“It’s still raining today. Erica and John are burning red, I stayed by their side and couldn’t sleep all night, their shallow breathing could almost tear my heart apart.
I prayed to God in the dark: let me take their place, just for a moment, take my life, let my children live…”
Acute typhoid fever was an equally vicious disease, with a high mortality rate in those days, especially in children.
So what did this had to do with the plague, which had disappeared for nearly a hundred years by then?
Mo Yi took a deep breath, frowned and opened the next one.
The next one was even more frantic and scribbled: “The doctor said he couldn’t do anything. How could it be! Trash! Trash! Impossible, my Erica and John, they’ll live forever, and if everyone is damned, then I’m too!”
The rest of the letter was filled with “godpleasehelpme”, messily occupying all the free space. A desperate and crazy mother seemed to be in front of him, making it hard to read.
Unexpectedly, the next letter was almost empty and more clean compared to the one before, with only one line of small words on it:
“God doesn’t exist.”
Mo Yi’s heart was a little heavy, and his palm subconsciously stroked the silver necklace wrapped around his wrist. The heavy pendant on it was cold against his skin and fell heavily.
If nothing else, the two pictures there were of these two children, who died of acute typhoid fever.
He ran his fingers slowly across the rough edge under the letter and compared it with the previous one.
–This letter was a little shorter than the previous one, and it seemed that a part of it had been torn away.
Perhaps this was the key to the instance.
Mo Yi flattened out these pieces of letter paper, and then carefully stuffed them back into his backpack. He looked up at the skeletons hanging in the attic.
His dark eyes narrowed slightly, and his pale face became more and more bloodless.
He hoped his conjecture was wrong.
Mo Yi picked up the flashlight on the windowsill and swept the whole attic roughly, just as he was about to continue looking for clues that he missed before–
A familiar sound came from outside the window.
“Crack” dragging, rolling, and soft, vague humming.
Mo Yi was stunned, he walked back to the half-open window, stuck his head out and looked down.
He saw on the barren and otherwise deserted ground, the fragmented man who had chased him just now was squirming along the crooked path. The skeletal dead tree next to him pointed to the dark sky, looking strange and bizarre.
Next to the man’s body, were several bloody amputated limbs. As they crawled forward beside him, they left deep and shallow bloodstains behind.
The man slowly climbed over the edge of the suspended platform, and disappeared into the darkness with his rolling head and wriggling body.
However, beyond Mo Yi’s expectations, those following the man, which should be freshly severed limbs that once belonged to the players, changed their direction, squirming and struggling to move there.
Mo Yi was stunned, and leaned out to look.
The severed limbs slowly crawled to the back of the house and disappeared from his sight. Only a long trail of blood remained behind, which looked particularly dazzling on the barren land.
According to previous experience, these bloodstains will disappear without a trace within ten minutes.
Mo Yi turned around abruptly, lifted the secret door on the attic floor, then quickly climbed down the wooden ladder and ran out as fast as he could.
The wooden floor, covered with dirty carpets, creaked violently under his feet, and the thick dust carried up and lifted into the air with his movements. The cold and humid air pressed against his cheeks, penetrating his thin clothes, as the whistling draft sounded, and filled his ears.
Mo Yi ran across the corridor and came to the narrow and twisted staircase.
He held the handle of the stairs with his palm, the flashlight in his hand swayed violently with his movements, and the light beam shook erratically on the crooked stairs, which made one almost dizzy.
The sounds of his breathing and heart beating mixed into a noisy tone, hitting his eardrums.
Mo Yi’s lips were pressed against each other, his sharp lip line tight, and his pair of very dark eyes made one’s heart palpitate.
He ran down the stairs.
The other players, who were still alive, saw him and couldn’t help but be startled– when the torn man came down the stairs, none of them thought that Mo Yi had the possibility to survive.
But he was still alive?!
Incredible!
Mo Yi ignored the different faces of everyone, and accelerated his pace, pushed open the wooden door that had not been closed and rushed out.
Only the dumbfounded players looked at each other.
Mo Yi ran off the porch and couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief– great, the bloodstain hadn’t disappeared.
He still didn’t dare to slack off, maintaining his speed, walking forward quickly along the intermittent bright bloodstains on the ground, and stepping to the side, around the distorted house.
On the way, Mo Yi saw several corpses that had also been drained of blood. Their eyeballs had disappeared. It should be the players who were killed by the deformed mice after running out.
However, unexpectedly, the hands of these corpses were also missing, and there was not a trace of blood on the pale fractures.
He frowned and continued to follow the blood that spread on the ground.
Mo Yi walked suddenly to a place he hadn’t seen before.
Because the shape of the house was so strange, the walls and the twisted and protruding rooms blocked one’s sight. If someone didn’t walk around the house, it was almost impossible to find the strange land beyond the overlapping walls.
The smell of blood was getting stronger.
Mo Yi took a few steps forward, until the soil under his feet felt moist.
Different from the barren yellow earth outside, the ground here was a strange dark red.
Mo Yi squatted down, picked up some dirt with his hand, twisted his fingers lightly, and a moist bright red instantly appeared on his white fingertips.
Blood.
The entire land here was actually dyed with blood.
Mo Yi stood up and looked around the land, barely recognizing that the window on the half-corner protruding beside him was the kitchen on the first floor.
He frowned.
According to the rough map in his mind, this piece of land– he was afraid it was in the center of the whole house.
The blood on the ground slowly seeped into the moist and soft soil, and the clearly visible traces slowly disappeared.
Mo Yi took a few steps forward, and the shape of the land was more clearly revealed in front of his eyes.
He saw two small raised mounds in the center of this piece of land. The color of the soil above was the most bright red and eye-catching, as if it had just been watered with blood.
In front of the mound stood two humble tombstones with two familiar names written on them:
“Erica”.
“John”.
In front of the tombstones was a half torn piece of letter paper. Mo Yi stepped forward and picked it up– it was the other part of the last piece of letter paper.
It was almost soaked with blood, and only some vague handwriting could be discerned:
“Dear Esther, God has taken you away from me, and I will never allow him to take our children again.”
“—I will do whatever it takes.”
Wow, it’s scared
Thank you for your translation 🤍🤍🤍🤍
Arggg, it pain my heart just reading this
She’s trying to exchange their lives for her children’s? Or bring the children back Frankenstein-style? Oh nooo
Thank you so much for translating! <3
Lmao this instance is gonna throw me off so much bc Esther is a female name and is in fact my sister’s XD