He had only spoken half a sentence when a crackling noise came from the phone, and William Sherman said, “Hello?”

Logan Sullivan seemed to say something, but it was so broken up that William Sherman couldn’t make out a single word. He took two steps toward the window, as if trying to restore the signal, but while Charles Gray wasn’t paying attention, he quietly lifted the curtain and looked outside. At the same time, he feigned confusion and asked, “Hello, hello? What did you say? Can you still hear me?”

This time, Logan Sullivan’s voice came through clearly. William Sherman heard him say urgently, “Damn it, get out of there, now!”

A dark shadow flashed across William Sherman’s pitch-black pupils. He instinctively narrowed his eyes, and in the next instant, the lights in the hospital room went out. The glass beside William Sherman shattered with a crash, a sharp cat’s yowl rang out, and Logan Sullivan’s black cat leapt up. William Sherman felt a gust of wind brush past his face, and immediately caught a whiff of a foul stench—rotting decay mixed with the acrid smell of blood.

In the darkness, no one saw William Sherman reach out into thin air and grab at nothing. Then he opened his hand, revealing a blood-red little worm writhing in terror in his palm. William Sherman expressionlessly crushed it, took a deep breath, and carefully suppressed his own baleful energy.

Logan Sullivan seemed to be saying something else on the other end of the phone, but the interference was too strong—nothing was intelligible. Chaos had already erupted around them: the cat was screeching, the sounds of something grappling and crashing together filled the air, and then there was a loud bang as something was thrown out, knocking over a chair. William Sherman took two steps back, and at that moment, his phone automatically hung up due to the loss of signal.

He turned the phone’s screen brightness to maximum and raised it to shine ahead.

A strange male voice said, “Watch out!”

The one who had knocked over the chair and suddenly shouted a warning was Darrin Grant. The fallen chair had tripped up the panicked Charles Gray, sending him sprawling awkwardly to the floor.

William Sherman reached back and his hand landed on a wooden mop propped in the corner of the room. He grabbed it, shoved the wooden handle forward, and at the same time, quickly leaned his upper body back. A tooth-grinding crash sounded as a dark shadow shot over his head at incredible speed.

His hand suddenly felt heavy—the wooden mop handle had been split in two. The shadow leapt past, silent as a ghost, so fast it was a blur, and lunged straight for Quinn Barnes on the hospital bed.

Quinn Barnes had been injected with a sedative and lay on the bed, completely unaware.

By now, everyone’s eyes were adjusting to the darkness. By the faint glow of the phone, William Sherman saw a shadow… its gaping mouth opened at least ninety degrees, making its head, thrown back, look like a watermelon split open.

This time, Charles Gray didn’t faint in time. He stared, dumbfounded, at the scene before him. His heart hadn’t even started to race before his mind went blank, all the blood in his body rushing to his limbs. He trembled like a grasshopper that had just jumped into ice water, and his skyrocketing blood pressure made him feel as if his face had swollen to twice its size.

A voice screamed in his mind—What is that? What is that?!

The shadow was humanoid, its body shriveled and thin like a skeleton, but with a grotesquely swollen belly. Its upper limbs had turned into a pair of giant scythes. After a silent roar, it slashed viciously at Quinn Barnes’s stomach.

Only then did Charles Gray’s belated scream finally find its way out. He shouted three times in a row, “Ah—ah—ah—”

William Sherman’s face suddenly darkened. He stepped forward at lightning speed, but just then, a figure suddenly blocked the front of Quinn Barnes’s bed.

It was an old lady who had appeared out of nowhere, probably not even one and a half meters tall, plump, with a ridiculous fake hair bun on her head. She materialized out of thin air, flung her arms wide, stretched out her round body, and, like a clumsy old hen, desperately shielded the girl on the bed.

William Sherman withdrew the step he had just taken, moving so quickly that no one noticed. At the same time, he grabbed the iron chair that Darrin Grant had knocked over and hurled it hard at the shadow.

The chair struck the shadow’s “body” with perfect accuracy, tearing it in two. The thing let out a shriek like an enraged gorilla. Its body, ripped apart by the iron-welded chair, hung together by a few strands, swaying unsteadily to one side.

But then, the torn area began to bubble like boiling water, big and small bubbles rising up, just like a nightmare monster that refused to die. The two halves of its body shook violently, emitting terrifying sounds, and slowly began to fuse back together.

“It’s joining back together! It’s joining back together again!” Charles Gray shouted incoherently, not helping the situation at all.

William Sherman had no choice but to rush over, retrieve the iron chair that had flown to the head of the bed, and then swung it furiously at the monster’s body.

Professor Shen might look refined, but when it came to fighting, he was anything but gentle—steady, accurate, and ruthless. While everyone else was paralyzed by fear, not knowing what to do, he had already taken the initiative and smashed the thing into seven or eight pieces, then tossed the iron chair aside, not even out of breath.

The hospital room fell silent for two seconds.

Then, Darrin Grant jumped onto the head of Quinn Barnes’s bed, his whiskers trembling as he said, “Don’t just stand there, hurry up and go! That’s a starving ghost. You can’t kill it with a chair. You only got lucky because the yang energy in this room is strong. If you really piss it off, it won’t be fun.”

William Sherman looked up and locked eyes with the black cat for a moment.

“That’s right, you’re not seeing things,” Darrin Grant said seriously. “I’m the one talking. You just split open a starving ghost’s head with an iron chair, so let’s not waste time debating whether the wise speak of ghosts and spirits. Move!”

Whether it was William Sherman’s nerves of steel or his high tolerance for the bizarre, as soon as Darrin Grant finished speaking, William Sherman snapped out of it, bent down, and quickly hoisted Quinn Barnes onto his back. In his urgency, he even managed to exchange a line with the cat, asking, “Where’s that old lady from just now?”

The cat replied, “Don’t worry, she’ll follow. No need to worry about her—she’s not human, she’s a newly dead ghost.”

William Sherman gave an “Oh,” completely abandoning materialism. “Officer Xiao Guo, follow me!”

Charles Gray’s mouth hung open, his neck stiff, twisted into an extremely awkward position.

Carrying Quinn Barnes, William Sherman raised his voice and called again, “Officer Xiao Guo!”

Charles Gray snapped out of it, flailed on the ground like an octopus, and scrambled to his feet, “I…I, I, I…”

William Sherman: “Enough, just open the door for me!”

Charles Gray’s central processor was already overloaded and fried. He simply followed orders, and at the command, he scrambled to push open the hospital room door.

At this point, there wasn’t a single light in the hallway. The doctors and nurses on duty had vanished as if into thin air. Every hospital room was empty. The entire floor had become a ghost building.

The black cat, moving with an agility that belied its size, led the way. William Sherman carried Quinn Barnes, and Charles Gray brought up the rear.

Their footsteps echoed through the empty corridor, circling again and again. Maybe a window hadn’t been closed properly, because a chilly draft kept swirling around them, making the back of Charles Gray’s neck prickle with cold. The fear-numbed fog in his head slowly began to clear.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was behind him.

Chapter 14: The Reincarnation Sundial Thirteen …

But Charles Gray didn’t dare look back. As a child, he’d grown up around elders who’d filled his head with all sorts of superstitions, including the famous one: never look back when walking at night, or you’ll blow out the two lanterns on your shoulders and attract ghosts.

Yet no matter how hard Charles Gray tried to restrain himself, the scene he’d just witnessed in the hospital room kept replaying in his mind. The more he thought about it, the more urgent his fear became. He kept feeling that “that thing” was about to catch up to him. It didn’t seem to care whether there were lanterns on people’s shoulders or not—with that pregnant-looking belly and those mantis-like scythe arms… Charles Gray touched his own neck, thinking that with such a fragile head, it wouldn’t take much for the thing to slice it into five pieces.

Then, his overactive imagination replayed the image of the corpse lying in the alley—Charles Gray hadn’t seen the real scene, only the photos. That young girl, her belly cut open… just that one image was enough to give him nightmares for three or four months.

Look back… don’t look back… look back…

The question of whether to look back or not was about to drive Charles Gray mad. His forehead was soon covered in cold sweat.

Charles Gray wiped it away and, unable to help himself, quickened his pace. Before long, he caught up with William Sherman, who was carrying someone on his back.