After running forward for a while, Brian Cooper really couldn’t run anymore. He stopped, gasping for breath, his whole body drenched in cold sweat, still shaken with fear.

Recalling that perilous moment just now.

He was certain that his survival wasn’t due to luck, but because the ghost had given up chasing him. But why?

He listened carefully to both sides.

The footsteps that had been following him were gone.

He seemed to be safe for the moment.

“Never mind for now. Since that thing didn’t follow me, it means I’m fine for the moment. No matter what, I still need to get out of here as soon as possible.” Brian Cooper panted, lifted his head to look at the source of the red light, and then walked over.

Soon, he arrived at the spot where the red light was emanating.

“A lightbulb? A glass bead?” Brian Cooper was stunned for a moment; in the darkness, he really couldn’t see what it was.

He tried reaching out to touch the spot where the red light was coming from.

“Ah~!”

In an instant, Brian Cooper felt a sharp, intense pain and quickly withdrew his hand.

“This... this isn’t a lamp.”

But what terrified him was that the glass sphere emitting the red light had stuck to his hand and was writhing frantically, even opening a slit and burrowing into the back of his hand.

Coldness and pain instantly engulfed his entire body.

Brian Cooper collapsed to the ground, convulsing in agony as if his muscles were cramping and his skin being flayed, his soul being crushed.

But in the midst of this painful struggle, Brian Cooper noticed a change in his surroundings.

The darkness around him began to recede rapidly.

He could see clearly now...

Everything around him became visible.

It was as if he suddenly gained night vision.

The pain came quickly and left just as fast.

After struggling for less than three minutes, Brian Cooper felt the pain ebb away like a receding tide.

He lay on the ground, nearly exhausted, gasping for breath, his muscles still twitching slightly from the pain.

“What on earth is going on?”

After a while, once he had recovered a bit, Brian Cooper struggled to sit up as if he had narrowly escaped death.

But when he saw his surroundings clearly, his pupils suddenly contracted and a look of horror appeared on his face.

In front of him was a tree.

A pale tree, as if made of bones.

Hanging from the tree were tattered human skins, filthy strips of cloth, shriveled heads, strange paper streamers... But what terrified him even more was that lying on the trunk of the tree was a figure at least four meters tall.

No, not a person.

But a shadow, a human-shaped silhouette, as if condensed from darkness itself.

This towering black shadow hung motionless from the tree, head facing downward.

Looking closely, he saw that a thick iron nail, as thick as an adult’s arm—no, to be precise, a coffin nail commonly used in folk traditions—was driven through the shadow’s chest. Who knows how many years that nail had been there, rusted and seemingly about to break.

“Drip, drip~!”

Black blood was oozing from the spot where the shadow was nailed.

The dripping sound he’d heard in the darkness along the way had actually come from this.

But when Brian Cooper saw the head of the giant shadow, he felt a chill run through his body.

The shadow’s head had no facial features, only a hollow indentation, which seemed to be where its eye was. The red light from before seemed to have been its eyeball.

Brian Cooper looked at the back of his hand.

“Gulp~!”

The split skin was forced open, and a red eyeball spun around and emerged, while a strange perspective appeared in his mind.

It was as if an eye had really grown on the back of his hand, and the images from this eye could be transmitted directly into his mind.

Weird, bizarre, or perhaps some kind of unknown ability.

But as Brian Cooper looked at the strange bone-white tree, the human skins, the mummified heads, and the giant black shadow nailed to the trunk...

“This place is really creepy. No matter what this tree is, I’d better get out of here as soon as possible.”

He vaguely felt that the giant black shadow nailed to the tree was even more terrifying than that old man.

And he also seemed to sense that the hollow eye sockets of the mummified heads hanging from the tree were secretly watching him.

A chill ran down his spine.

He glanced at the red eye exposed on the back of his hand, a sense of gloom enveloping his heart, impossible to shake off.

But now was not the time to worry about that.

The darkness around him seemed to have faded away, and Brian Cooper could see everything around him clearly.

This was a dim, endless space, empty except for the bone-white withered tree.

It was like another world, nothing like anywhere he knew.

But when he looked back, he could see a door in the direction he had come from. That was... the bathroom door.

So the door was this close to him, and he hadn’t noticed it before.

Chapter 9 Eric Clark

“The ghost seems to be gone.”

When Brian Cooper cautiously retraced his steps, he didn’t see the ghost that had been chasing him.

Maybe this is what they call a blessing in disguise.

He opened the door and walked in, and Brian Cooper suddenly froze.