Mysterious 1_2

Gradually, the sounds from outside quieted down. Li Chengjiu closed the door to sleep, and his parents also got up to wash and went to bed.

All the hustle and bustle outside slowly vanished, leaving only the classical music endlessly looping on a single track through the headphones.

The music repeated over and over, becoming seemingly softer and fainter in his ears.

Li Chengyi lay motionless, his mind becoming somewhat chaotic as he sorted through memories.

Scenes of memory surged continuously in his mind.

'He' had studied diligently for twenty years, only to face unemployment upon graduation.

All the certificates he had worked so hard for over the years had become worthless in the face of the vast unemployed population.

In the half year since graduation, he had sent out hundreds of resumes, with very few responses.

The great ambitions he had before graduation had now turned into complete confusion.

'He' didn't know what he should do, nor did he know what he could do, without a plan, without ideas, without any expectations.

He just holed up at home, living each day as it came.

Beyond that, there were past confrontations where he argued fiercely with his sister, Li Chengjiu.

His sister Li Chengjiu always regarded her family as a burden and dead weight.

Out there, she was brilliant and promising, her abilities strong, her ambitions high, looking down on all those without talents.

His parents, mere common factory workers, and his unremarkable brother, were also objects of her impatience.

The former Li Chengyi couldn't stand it and had argued because of his sister's attitude towards their parents and towards himself, but it was all in vain. The parents were willing to sacrifice; his protests were useless, and they even rebuked him for it.

On the narrow bridge of college entrance exams, he struggled desperately, yet he only managed to get into a common university. Compared to Li Chengjiu who was recommended to a top military academy in her second year of high school, it was heaven and earth apart.

Even though he also made a decent internship resume, the biggest problem was still that he had naively chosen the wrong major.

What the hell is a major in plant maintenance? Although he had heard that high-end plant maintenance indeed paid very well, it was too competitive...

Students from ordinary schools like his only had the option of working for a forestry bureau or a city greening company.

Earning three thousand yuan a month to make ends meet was already good enough.

In this era of automation, many people couldn't even find a job.

Li Chengyi turned over and continued to sort out the memories of his predecessor. Although many parts were blurred due to the natural forgetting mechanism of the person himself.

Still, he was able to glean a lot of useful information from those memories.

The night grew deeper.

A car passed by outside the window, honking continuously, accompanied by a man cursing loudly.

"Who the fuck parked in the wrong spot again!"

"I'll fuck your entire ancestral family!"

The cursing continued for a while, then faded away, and quietness was restored once more.

The combined music of the guzheng and pipa repeated endlessly in his ears, over and over again.

The other noises around him slowly receded, as if only the pure music remained.

Crisp, cold, quiet.

Li Chengyi's consciousness continued to organize, watching as if watching a movie, and as his spirit increasingly expended energy, his body began to feel an inexplicable additional fatigue.

This tiredness grew stronger, causing his consciousness to blur and nearing a state of sleep.

This was how his predecessor used to fall asleep every day, with long-term poor rest and the distress of not finding a job making him increasingly silent and inarticulate.

Time slowly slipped away, and Li Chengyi's body grew more tired, his thoughts falling into chaos.

He closed his eyes to adjust his sleeping position, intending to take a brief rest.

Click.

Suddenly, a clear, crisp sound startled him from his drowsiness.

His eyes slowly widened, and the drowsiness that had just arisen began to fade.

'What was that noise!'

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He sat up halfway, looking left and right, but noticed nothing unusual. Then he realized there was no more sound coming through the earphones.

"Why is there no sound?" Li Chengyi picked up the tape player, an old-fashioned music player his predecessor had bought from a flea market as a collectible.

In the now gray and somewhat peeling tape player, through the glass-like plastic case, one could see the tape rotating inside, but there was no sound in the earphones.

The music that had been playing just moments ago had vanished, leaving only a faint trace of electrical current noise in the earphones.

Frowning, he shook the device, but the music still did not return.

Li Chengyi took off the headphones and quickly glanced around the bedroom.

The light from the streetlamp outside had disappeared at some point, leaving nothing but darkness.

There weren't many items in the bedroom; paired with the white walls, it appeared quite bare and cold.

A wardrobe, a desk, a miscellaneous cabinet, two high-backed metal chairs placed crookedly with backpacks hanging on them, and a pair of white plastic slippers with their tips touching each other.

Beyond these, there was nothing else.

"I always feel that something is a bit off."

Li Chengyi's brows furrowed, and a strange unease began to emerge in his heart.

He had slept in this room for many years, and he should have been familiar with every corner, but now...

"Could it be that the predecessor lived for more than twenty years without incident, and I encounter trouble as soon as I arrive?"

He looked around the room once again, his gaze slowly coming to a halt at the door.

The door was open!

A chill ran down his spine.

He was certain he had locked it before getting into bed!

But now, the door was ajar.

From the darkness outside, it seemed that a shadowy, human-like figure crouched at the entrance, peering inside.

In the dark, Li Chengyi's skin crawled, his eyes fixed on the crack of the door.

Through the slim gap, no wider than a finger, it seemed there was a black eye staring straight at the bed, at him sitting there—whether it was a delusion or an illusion, he couldn't tell.

Creak.

A gust of cold wind blew in through the crack of the door.

The bedroom door, urged by the air current, swung open a little more.

Li Chengyi felt a slight cold sweat on his body, and his vision began to blur.

Now when he looked carefully again, there were only darkness and no eyes, no figure at the gap of the door.

Everything just now seemed to be his misperception.

He paused for a while, sitting quietly on the bed, saying nothing.

After waiting for several minutes, when his body was no longer overly tense, he slowly eased his breathing and, tiptoeing, slipped into his slippers and got out of bed.

Taking deep breaths, his chest rising and falling, he calmed his emotions. His hand gently grasped a metal baseball bat standing in the gap between the head of the bed and the wardrobe.

It was the weapon his predecessor had purchased for home defense.

The cold bat provided a solid assurance, which slightly settled his nerves.

Silently lifting the bat, he started to move, stepping carefully, moving to the side of the door where he couldn't be seen from the crack.

Standing behind the door, this angle provided him a view of the window, and the night scene through the gap in the curtains.

But to Li Chengyi's shock, with just a peripheral glance, he found nothing but pitch-black darkness outside the gap in the curtains—there was nothing there.

"Hallucination? Dreaming??"

His throat felt dry; he swallowed saliva, gripping the baseball bat tightly in one hand while the other slowly reached for the doorknob.

Whoosh!

Suddenly, he pulled hard.

Turning around to face the now-open doorway, he raised the baseball bat high, ready to smash down.

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