1 The Story in the Forum

"I calculated with my fingers that you are reading a novel in bed while lying on your side, and you may also be charging your phone."

Yang Jian, who was in his third year of high school, was lying in bed at this moment, scrolling through his phone in a bore. He casually clicked open a random post and saw that many netizens were replying to it.

"F*ck, the poster is really a God. To think he can even guess so accurately what I'm doing now."

"Heh, would I tell you that I'm currently squatting in the toilet? No need to ask, my legs have gone numb."

"If you want to tattoo, tattoo a certain Zhou, and free yourself from being someone's worker."

"So gangly."

Yang Jian closed the post and opened another post that had a high click rate. What greeted him was such a sentence:

"I'm a doctor at The Third Chinese Medical Hospital in a certain province. I would like to share with all of you something horrifying that happened recently in the hospital I'm working in. It's so terrifying that I don't even dare to go to work now and am on leave at home."

"Don't say anymore. I won't buy your shoes nor will I give you my WeChat."

"The poster must have experienced a medical dispute. If it's not so, I'll commit suicide by eating poo."

"Quick, look. The netizen on the third floor is cheating to get food and drinks again."

Yang Jian found the replies somewhat boring, so he clicked on the button that allowed him to only see the contents posted by the poster.

The post immediately became clean, and what remained were the posts of the poster who claimed he was a doctor. The username of the doctor was "Leidian Fawang".

He continued to read the post. It wrote, "This is what happened. Last week, when it was my turn to take the night shift, at about midnight, the ambulance sent an old man over. The medical staff on the ambulance had told me that the old man had fallen from the fifth floor. At that time, my colleague had some urgent matters to attend to, so I was the only one in charge of the diagnosis. I can be 100% sure that at that time, the old man was void of any life signs, and was long dead."

"On top of that, from the characteristics of the old man's corpse and the temperature of his chest, I was able to determine that it was impossible that the old man had died from falling off a building just that night."

"Anyone with some common sense should know that after one is dead, within ten hours in normal temperature surroundings, the corpse's body temperature will decrease by one degree Celcius every hour. After 24 hours, only then will the temperature of a corpse be about the same as its surroundings. However, the body temperature of the old man is at least below 10 degrees Celcius the normal temperature, or even lower than that. The temperature that night was 22 degrees Celcius."

"In that instant, I had determined that the old man had been dead for more than a day."

Immediately below his posts, the netizens commented:

"The way the poster said 'common sense' is just terrifying. Allow me to kneel to the expert."

"Hurry up and check if the patient's shoes have fallen off. If they haven't, there's still a chance for him to be saved."

"The more I think about it, the more terrifying it is. Poster, please hurry up and continue with your story. I'm already in bed and have wrapped myself up in my blankets."

Yang Jian continued to scroll down, and Leidian Fawang continued to post.

"From my experience of watching more than three hundred episodes of a famous detective animation in junior high, I could immediately determine that the old man had not fallen to his death due to accident. It should've been a murder and his body must've been stored in a freezer. At that time, I chose to call the police to report the incident."

"However, what I want to talk about today is not this matter, but what happened after."

After this, the posts stopped for a while, and the next update was two hours later.

"Sorry, someone came to my door just now to ask about the incident. It wasn't a detective, nor a reporter though, but the person had the documents. Well, let's put that aside."

"In the morning of the next day, I wasn't at work yet, but I heard from a colleague that the corpse of the old man that had been sent over last night was mysteriously missing from the morgue. The police were doing their best to investigate, and they suspected that the murderer had stolen the corpse. There was quite a commotion over it, and they even pulled up all the surveillance cameras in the hospital. However, the old man's corpse was still nowhere to be found in the end, nor was the murderer."

"It was still my shift that night..."

"However, the matters that happened in the day made me somewhat uneasy. One of the patients in the hospital had said that he did see the old man's corpse, but it hadn't left by being carried by someone else. Instead, it had left on its two feet. The patient even accurately pointed out the route that the old man took. From the route, the old man had indeed left from the direction of the morgue."

"When I heard this, I was quite terrified. Fortunately, I'm an atheist. I didn't entirely believe in the patient's words."

"When I heard the head nurse say that Doctor Fang from the neurology department was planning to increase the patient's dosage, I was slightly relieved."

"As expected, it was the right choice to not have believed in the patient's words..."

"All this aside, what I want to share with all of you is not this, but something that happened when I was on duty at night."

"It was about 2 in the morning that day, and I was playing Blue Moon in the emergency room. You guys just can't imagine how fun that game is. If you're my friend, come along and give me a slash..."

"F*ck, poster you are a f*cking genius."

"What happened to the sincerity between people? This backhand of yours caught me off guard."

"How gangly. I guessed the beginning of the story right, but not the ending. However, what I want to say is, third floor, how about your promise of eating shit?"

A whole bunch of netizens replied to the post, and the forum was very lively.

Yang Jian didn't know whether to cry or laugh as he lay under his covers. Were the people nowadays so good at advertising?

However, when he scrolled down again, he found that something was wrong.

Leidian Fawang had continued posting.

"Sorry, sorry. I'm really not advertising. An unimaginably queer supernatural event did happen that night, something that none of you would ever have imagined in your whole life. About 2:15 in the morning, while I was playing games in the emergency room, I suddenly felt a chill, like one would feel in the morgue. I had goosebumps then and there."

"Guess what happened next?"

"The old man that had disappeared from the morgue yesterday had appeared outside the emergency room at some point. He wasn't dead. Instead, he was walking very slowly, step by step, towards the outside of the hospital."

"Oh my God, this is impossible. I saw with my own eyes that the old man was dead, and had been dead for more than a day. How could he have been alive again?"

"Was it a prank? Had he come back to life? Was this a medical miracle?"

"In that instant, all these thoughts raced through my mind. But maybe it's because I've been in contact with many corpses in my usual days, I wasn't very afraid. The first thing I did was took a photo to share it on my WeChat moments."

"Below is the relevant photo. The photo can prove my validity. It's not a product of Photoshop."

Yang Jian scrolled down and a photo immediately popped up before his eyes.

The photo was not blurry at all. On the contrary, it was very clear. In the photo were the glass window of the emergency room and the old man that was walking past the window.

The old man wore a black jumpsuit and seemed sort of antique. He was skinny and his skin was brown with spots on them. From the angle the photo was taken, one could see one of the old man's eyes. How was the eye... Dull, hollow, and empty, with a sense of terrifying deathly stillness.

The photo was not bloody nor was it of a terrifying setup, but the feeling the old man gave off in the photo immediately made people's hair stand on end as their scalps went numb.

Once they recalled that the doctor with the username Leidian Fawang had stated clearly that the old man was once a cold corpse, it fueled the emotion of fear.

The longer one looked at the photo, the more horrifying it was.

It was like one was looking at a dead person, or rather... a ghost.

"I'm scared out of my wits. This photo is so terrifying, the more I look at it the more scared I am. Poster, where did you find this photo?"

"Why are there so many spots on the old man's hands? I have Trypophobia."

"Those are livor mortis, they mean that the old man is a corpse."

"Begone all demons and ghosts, I, Lin Zhengying, am here." A netizen sent a photo of a Taoist priest.

"Pui, what's with your Lin Zhengyin, I can even call myself Luo Liyin."

However, no matter what the netizens commented, Leidian Fawang continued with his posts.

"The photo is real, I took it myself. After that, the old man left the hospital just like that. I have no idea where he went, but if any of you are in the same city as I am, you better be careful. Although I'm an atheist, there are some things we have no choice but to believe in."

"Wait a minute, someone seems to be knocking on my door again. I think someone's here to get my statement. I'll be back in a while and I'll share with you what happened next."

The post had just been posted less than a minute before Leidian Fawang sent a new post.

"Shit, shit, shit. It's the old man who ran from the hospital. That thing is knocking on my door, I can see it clearly from the peephole. What should I do now? I seem to have provoked something I shouldn't have."

"Poster, is it fun to play tricks?"

"F*ck, for real? It can't be so creepy, right?"

"Hurry up and call the police, quickly, dial 110."

"Poster, stop pretending. All this must be fake. If it's not, I'll eat double the shit."

"It's you again, the shit-eating boy. What happened to eating the shit that you promised last time?"

Leidian Fawang posted again.

"I've reported the case, but what should I do now? That thing is still knocking on my door, and it seems that it has no intentions of leaving. Shit, the lights in my living room have suddenly gone out. I'm so scared I don't even dare to go to the living room."

"I've closed the doors and on all the lights that I can, but that old man is still knocking."

At this point, the netizen with the username Leidian Fawang was very quick in posting. The interval between every post was less than 30 seconds, and there were even some wrong words.

It could be seen that the doctor who had posted all this was in a panic and under huge fear.

Reading this, Yang Jian couldn't help but feel a chill. Although he knew that the story was probably fake, when he imagined the old man in the photo knocking at the door, even he felt his hair stood on end.

For a dead old man to come back to life and even appear in front of one's door, knocking, anyone who encountered such a thing would be terrified.

However, the post had not ended.

"Shit, shit, there is the sound of footsteps from my living room. Oh God, I'm the only one in the house, and I think the old man who was knocking on the door is now inside. He must have entered the living room. What, what the hell is this? I didn't even hear the sound of him opening the door. How on earth did he get in?"

"The sounds of footsteps seem to have stopped in front of my bedroom door."

"That thing is knocking on my door again. I think things are bad. I've recorded the sounds now as evidence and will be leaving my phone number here. If you can't get through to me, it must be that something has happened to me. Please kindly report to the police: 138....."

"Thump, thump thump, thump, thump thump..."

Below was an audio file. Once he clicked it open, the dull and suppressed sounds of knocking could be heard.

The thumping landed rhythmically as if knocking on one's heart, making it even difficult for one to breathe.

At this point, the posts stopped for a while.

Yang Jian scrolled to the end, and was only greeted by one sentence, "That old man is in here..."