After a long while, Justin Huang finished cleaning up. The pile of rotten flesh lay still.
"We're in luck today. Let's step aside a bit," Justin Huang said. He and I moved further away, leaning against the cage and quietly waiting.
"What exactly are we waiting for?" I asked. Justin Huang just smiled.
"You'll see in a moment."
I was growing impatient when, finally, I heard the squeak of a rat. A huge rat darted toward the pile of rotten flesh on the ground. Justin Huang suddenly sprang forward, bone knife in hand, and just as the rat approached, he leapt and stabbed the knife into its neck.
The rat struggled desperately. I was about to help, but Justin Huang pinned the fat rat to the ground with one hand until it stopped moving, its blood staining the nearby water red.
"Not bad, that's a big catch. I haven't seen such a large rat in ages. We'll have a good meal today."
Justin Huang began skinning and butchering the rat, his movements smooth and practiced.
After a while, Justin Huang had a large bag of meat. Smiling, he carried it to the entrance leading downward.
"Let's go."
After we went down, I saw Justin Huang busy extracting human oil, cutting up rat meat, and hanging human tendons to dry. Strangely, I didn't feel uncomfortable at all.
"Impressive willpower—for the 1,079th person to arrive here."
I let out a surprised sound.
"You don't seem to have come down here because of that trickster's promise. And you're special—so thin and weak, you should've been eaten soon after you arrived, right?"
After finishing everything, Justin Huang looked me up and down.
"Hurry up and tell me, what's really going on here?"
Justin Huang began to explain.
After Justin Huang entered this ghost domain, he saw the person who had disappeared earlier, now turned into a ghoul. Justin killed him, and at that moment, he realized something was different about his own body—he felt stronger.
At first, Justin Huang thought it was an illusion, but over time, his body kept growing stronger. He relied on this strength to hunt rats for food and survive.
But as time passed, Justin Huang became even more powerful, until he turned into what he is now. Every day, he felt like he was about to explode—the swelling pain was unbearable.
Only after using up his strength would the pain subside. Later, others were sent down here, and that was when the ghoul monsters began to appear. Some people, like Justin Huang, couldn't handle the changes and their bodies exploded.
Justin Huang discovered something strange—their organs were all black, even their blood. He once cut his own hand and saw that his blood was black too.
As more people died, the number of ghouls increased. Justin Huang fought with these creatures daily, suffering injuries. After a serious wound, he fled and eventually found an entrance to this place.
Justin Huang said he might have escaped for months before finding the entrance. Over the past twenty years, he tried to find an exit, using human tendons tied together as markers.
But after twenty years, Justin Huang said that because of monsters and the tendons not being long enough, he never found the exit.
I asked Justin Huang how he knew about things outside. He told me it was from the people he saved here, but most just wanted to escape quickly. Unlike Justin Huang, they couldn't wait—they got confused or ran into powerful ghouls and died.
"That ghost is cunning—it uses the exit as bait. It's just an illusion, but most people who come in don't realize it. They really think they've found the way out, but once they go, they never return. Some even go insane."
"What about you?"
I asked, watching Justin Huang. He seemed perfectly sane, even energetic.
"My only wish is to get out, just to see that little girl one more time. That's all. Even if the promise expires, it doesn't matter. I have no parents or friends—she's the only one I care about. Silly, isn't it?"
I shook my head.
"I have a way out," I suddenly said.
Justin Huang stared at me in disbelief as I hurriedly took off my clothes.
"What are you doing?" Justin Huang asked. I pointed to the strange white object on my chest.
"Try to help me pull it out. Then I'll know what to do."
Justin Huang came over, pressed around the skin, and pinched the thing.
"What is this, anyway? I'm about to pull it out." I gritted my teeth and nodded.
Suddenly, Justin Huang pulled hard, and I was in excruciating pain. He gripped my shoulder with one hand and yanked with the other. My face turned pale, nearly fainting, but the thing embedded in my body didn't budge.
"No way. If I keep pulling, I'll probably break your shoulder." I sat on the hide mat, and after a while, the pain faded.
"Do you know anything else?"
Justin Huang shook his head.
"I don't know anything else. Nobody tells us what we're supposed to do in here. As for ghosts, I only know what the dead have told me."
I let out a surprised sound.
"Didn't you notice? Each cage has a pile of white bones—those are dead people. They can't get out of the cages. Some tricks, I learned from them."
At that moment, I understood why that night in Room 1042, when I spoke to a "normal" person, they suddenly pretended to be crazy. They must have been ordered to keep this secret, with the promise of riches as the incentive.
After a hearty meal of cooked meat, Justin Huang asked me a lot, especially about the Ghost Burial Squad. I told him the truth. When I mentioned the Immortality Society, Justin Huang looked surprised.
"What's that?"
I shook my head.
"But an organization like that sounds alright. By the way, Ethan Zhang, if we get out, I look neither human nor ghost. I can only work at a place like that. You'll have to introduce me, alright?"
I nodded and smiled.
Thinking about what happened this time, I was so angry I could grind my teeth.
"It's strange. I don't know what's happened to my body, but it's strong—and my fists are hard. Ordinary knives can't even cut my skin."
I stared in surprise as Justin Huang spoke, holding out the bone knife.
"Try it if you don't believe me."
Skeptical, I lightly scratched Justin Huang's skin with the bone knife—nothing happened.
"Put some strength into it. Haven't you eaten?"
I gripped the bone knife with both hands and slashed hard. Sure enough, Justin Huang's skin didn't react at all.
"The director is pretty tough," Justin Huang said. I remembered the director—he knocked me out with one punch and could even change the size of his fists.
"Can't you control your body to change at will?"
Justin Huang shook his head.
"I've tried before. It's impossible."
Suddenly, I remembered—the flow of water.
"Have you noticed? The water here is flowing."
Justin Huang shook his head, so I shared my theory: if the water flows, it must go somewhere. Maybe that's the exit.
Justin Huang was silent for a while, then smiled.
"Why don't we give it a try?"
With that, Justin Huang took a huge roll of human tendon from under the bone-and-hide bed and slung it over his shoulder.
I nodded, and we rested for a while. When we were ready, we went back up.
As soon as we got up, Justin Huang tied one end of the tendon to a bone and fastened it to an iron bar on the cage. I stretched out my finger, trying to feel the direction of the water flow, but it was very slow.
"Use this," Justin Huang said, taking a hollow bone and pouring the human oil inside onto the water's surface.
We watched the water's surface as the human oil slowly spread out, but it was definitely moving. We followed it, step by step.
The human oil flowed toward the right. As we walked over, a path appeared where the cage had been. We entered and kept following the oil, winding through many twists and turns.
Suddenly, from around the corner, a ghoul covered in pustules lunged out. Justin Huang rushed forward, grabbed the huge mouth on its chest, slammed it to the ground, and stomped hard into its mouth. I saw several of its teeth crack and break.
Then he grabbed a small knife and sliced off the ghoul's head, pried open the iron bars nearby, and tossed the head inside. He also broke the ghoul's arms and legs.
"Let's go. What are you standing around for?"
I hadn't even reacted before Justin Huang finished off the ghoul. We kept moving forward.
"By the way, Ethan Zhang, if we run into the director after we escape, I might not be able to beat him."
"It's fine. As long as we get out, I have plenty of powerful friends."
"How powerful?"
"Some Green Wraiths."
Justin Huang stared at me, mouth agape, then looked at me doubtfully.
"It's true. I have a lot of friends—ghosts and humans alike."
Just then, a dead end appeared in front of us, and the human oil stopped flowing. There were still more than ten meters of tendon left unused.
Ahead was a cage. We planned to check it out, but suddenly, a new path appeared to our left. Immediately after, a deafening roar sounded—a four- to five-meter-tall ghoul, made from fused corpses, charged straight at us.