Chapter 70

Upon pushing open the door to Room 205, the first thing that met the eye was a warm-toned living room.

The floor was laid with dark red wooden planks, their edges faded to a light brown that made the seams between them quite prominent. However, because the floor was kept impeccably clean and polished with wax, it didn’t look dilapidated; instead, it possessed a deliberate, vintage aesthetic.

A chandelier hanging from the ceiling was covered by a ruffled lampshade, with chains of crystal beads cascading from its edges. The warm yellow light filtered through those translucent beads, casting fragmented, dreamlike spots of light onto the walls.

Zhou Fangdong stood at the entrance, looking at this spotless, cozy room. He looked down at the semi-circular hand-woven rug placed in the foyer, remained silent for a moment, then stepped back out to double-check the room number.

Yes, it was indeed Room 205.

He was certain he had never cleaned this room.

The moment Zhou Fangdong pushed the door open, he had experienced a brief lapse of focus, as if he had accidentally stumbled into someone’s home. He actually felt an impulse to change into slippers.

Then again, he was currently in the Liwan Apartments, wasn’t he?

Zhou Fangdong looked at the dense crowd of quiet, obedient ghosts in the second-floor corridor, confirming that he was indeed inside this haunted building.

It was truly incredible that after being abandoned for so many years, the Liwan Apartments still contained such a clean room.

Zhou Fangdong pushed the door open again. This time, he didn’t hesitate at the threshold and walked straight inside.

The window directly opposite the door was tightly covered by checkered curtains. Zhou Fangdong yanked them aside, only to find the same boarded-up window found in every other room. He finally felt at ease.

The ghost in this room was probably one that loved cleaning.

Zhou Fangdong turned around and surveyed the entire living room.

Beneath the window stood an old mahogany chest of drawers. Atop the chest sat an enamel mug and an old photograph in a frame.

The faces of the people in the photo were completely blurred, but based on their silhouettes, it appeared to be a mother with two daughters.

A sofa upholstered in a light blue floral fabric sat against the wall next to the window. The back of the sofa was covered with a hand-crocheted white lace dust cover. On the wall above the sofa hung an old calendar and a mural of a “Greeting Pine¹” with slightly curled edges.

The former owner of the room was likely a crochet enthusiast. Zhou Fangdong noticed that not only were the back and armrests of the sofa covered in hand-crocheted white dust covers, but even the legs of every piece of furniture were fitted with white cotton-knitted… leg warmers?

Should these be called leg warmers or foot pads? Regardless, their purpose was likely to prevent the tables and chairs from making noise when moved across the floor, or to prevent the chair legs from scuffing the wood.

Zhou Fangdong walked to the coffee table opposite the sofa.

He discovered several black-and-white photos pressed under the glass top of the coffee table. Just like the frame on the chest of drawers, the faces in these photos were blurred as if they had melted. They all depicted a woman with two children.

The woman’s silhouette was always the same, but the girls’ silhouettes varied… the children photographed with the woman didn’t seem to be the same person.

Aside from these eerie photographs, the room was far too cozy and normal. It didn’t look abandoned at all, nor did it look like a haunted room in a ghost building; it felt no different from an ordinary household.

“It’s just a bit too quiet, which makes it feel eerie instead,” Zhou Fangdong muttered to himself.

As soon as he spoke, a sizzling sound suddenly erupted from the kitchen, followed immediately by the clatter of a spatula hitting a wok.

On the mahogany chest of drawers beneath the window, an alarm clock appeared next to the photo frame out of nowhere. The second hand moved with a rhythmic “tick-tock.”

A large-headed television appeared out of thin air opposite the coffee table, its screen beginning to play old-fashioned advertisements.

Zhou Fangdong was stunned for a moment before continuing his critique: “You’ve got the cooking sounds, but there’s no aroma of stir-fry.”

The moment he finished speaking, he smelled a rich, savory scent of food.

Zhou Fangdong stopped teasing the ghost and walked straight into the kitchen.

To his surprise, the ghost didn’t hide from him. She stood openly in front of the stove.

The ghost took the form of an old granny, wearing a lead-gray shirt that had been washed until it was slightly pale, layered with a red wool cardigan. She was slightly hunched over, focused on stir-frying the food in the wok.

She had snow-white silver hair, slicked with hair oil, with every strand tucked neatly into a formal bun at the back of her head.

When Zhou Fangdong entered, she sensed him and turned to look. A warm, kind smile appeared on her wrinkled face. “You’re back. Dinner will be ready in a moment.”

She was like that female elder who exists in everyone’s memories—the one whose busy figure you would always see whenever you returned to your hometown.

She was like the heart of the entire family; one never saw her idle. When she was around, the rooms were always tidy and warm. She tirelessly managed everything for the family, performing invisible, unacknowledged trivial chores, never resting for a single moment.

Zhou Fangdong looked at the ghost. Without responding, he directly used [Soul Siphon] on her.

This was the first time he had encountered such a cooperative ghost on the second floor. Naturally, he used the skill immediately to learn her killing conditions as quickly as possible; otherwise, it would be troublesome if she hid later.

After successfully harvesting five hundred Ghost Coins, Zhou Fangdong learned of the ghost’s past life.

Ghost Granny had long since forgotten her own name. In her childhood, she was the Wang family’s second daughter; when she grew up, she was Jianguo’s wife and Xiaohua’s mother; in her old age, she was the Li family’s mother-in-law, the Li family’s grandmother, and Old Man Li’s spouse.

Ghost Granny’s eldest daughter, Xiaohua, lived to be eleven. Her second daughter, Xiao-cao, lived to be five. The unborn child of unknown gender turned into a pool of bloody water at three months because of a “gender-reversal pill².”

Later, she lost her fertility. To ensure the family line didn’t end, her husband “brought home” a boy from outside.

Even after losing three children, Ghost Granny never complained. She didn’t rest for a single day during her postpartum recovery. She was like a wound-up robot, always perfectly playing the roles of mother, wife, and daughter-in-law.

Her hair was always combed with meticulous precision, the stove scrubbed until it gleamed, the floors swept without a speck of dust in sight. The clothes of her “son,” her husband, and her parents-in-law were forever clean and crisp.

She wanted to prove something through her competence.

But no matter what she did, all she received was a sense of entitlement.

The tidy home, the delicious meals, the well-kept clothes—these were all things she was expected to do. Whether it was her husband, her “son,” or her in-laws, they repaid her only with cold indifference and endless demands.

During her life, she desperately craved to be needed. She longed for her existence to carry even a tiny bit of weight, for someone to see her… not just to see the things she did, but to see her as a person.

But she never spoke these words aloud.

The elderly Ghost Granny eventually died on a quiet afternoon. Her death was silent and unnoticed, much like her life.

She had lived for a lifetime, yet it felt as though she had never lived at all.

Her life was like her hair, always combed into a sleek, polished bun—smooth on the surface, but tightly wound with endless pain and repression within.

She died of natural causes, free of disease or pain, yet after death, she became a vengeful spirit burdened with heavy resentment.

The emotions she had suppressed for a lifetime transformed into a twisted obsession after death… Ghost Granny craved to be needed. She craved to have a home even in death, a home that would reciprocate her emotions, a home that would return her “love.”

After death, within Liwan Apartments, in Room 205, Ghost Granny had raised many daughters and possessed many families.

She took meticulous care of every girl’s life, and in return, she siphoned the emotions she needed from them.

She would prepare lavish meals; when a daughter ate her fill and radiated feelings of satisfaction, she too would be satiated.

She was the best listener, lending an ear to all of a daughter’s grievances and sorrows. The daughters would become increasingly dependent on her, finding it harder and harder to move past their pain, unable to withstand even the slightest setback.

She provided all the care a daughter could need, and gradually, the daughter would only want to stay within the emotional comfort zone she created. Unwilling to contact the outside world, they became caged birds kept by her in Room 205.

The more emotion Ghost Granny gave, the more she took.

Ghost Granny had never killed a tenant of Room 205. Every tenant of Room 205 had committed suicide… the more they depended on her, the harder it was to break free; the more they depended on her, the more they suffered.

When they could no longer produce emotions of their own, those hollow, pained girls kept in Room 205 chose suicide without exception.

In death, Ghost Granny had become an emotional predator. She wove a cage with threads of tenderness, siphoning the emotions of the living to fill an emotional black hole that could never be satisfied. She was trapped in an eternal cycle of gluttony and emptiness, never to find release.

After reading through Ghost Granny’s past life and her killing conditions, Zhou Fangdong fell silent.

These killing conditions seemed impossible to bypass… how was he supposed to draft the Tenancy Rules?

Should he have Hou San move in so he and Ghost Granny could steal emotions from each other? You steal my negative emotions, I steal your positive ones, or something like that…

While Zhou Fangdong was lost in thought, Ghost Granny had finished cooking and brought the dishes to the dining table.

Her face still wore that same kind, grandfatherly smile. She didn’t fear Zhou Fangdong like the other ghosts, nor was she angry because he had just snatched her Ghost Coins.

Like the gentlest of elders, she called out in a soft voice, “The food is ready. Come and eat.”

Zhou Fangdong snapped back to his senses, glanced at her, and used [Soul Siphon] on her once more.

He thought he had seen a specific fragment of memory that interested him and wanted to confirm it.

After having another five hundred Ghost Coins snatched away and continuing to be met with the cold shoulder, Ghost Granny’s expression finally changed.

Her originally kind and gentle face suddenly turned as deathly pale as a corpse, tinged with a faint purplish-blue hue. Her clear eyes were gradually overtaken by a web of scarlet blood vessels.

She glared at Zhou Fangdong with hatred, but clearly wary of something, she didn’t attack. Instead, she vanished on the spot.

Zhou Fangdong didn’t care about her disappearance. He was still rapidly flipping through Ghost Granny’s post-death memories, finally finding the fragment he was looking for.

The last female tenant to live in Room 205 had not committed suicide. She was the tenant who had lived with Ghost Granny the longest, right up until the Flesh Ganoderma outbreak in the second-floor corridor. She had fled Room 205, and her fate remained unknown.

Although this tenant had been dependent on Ghost Granny, it wasn’t a total dependency.

While she enjoyed Ghost Granny’s cooking and praised her meals every day, she would also offer suggestions for improvement alongside the praise. For instance, “This dish might taste better with a bit less salt,” or “Blanching these greens beforehand might remove the bitterness”… This tactic essentially released emotions for Ghost Granny to absorb, but interrupted the process by nitpicking when too much emotion was being siphoned.

Furthermore, this female tenant didn’t just wait around to be fed. If she got off work early, she would help Ghost Granny cook, and she maintained a habit of proactively washing the dishes after every meal.

By helping Ghost Granny cook, the meal wasn’t entirely Ghost Granny’s own work, which reduced the amount of satisfying emotion she could siphon from the living human.

Cleaning the room was also done in shifts between her and Ghost Granny.

This tenant would also confide her feelings to Ghost Granny, but she didn’t just share painful emotions; she also shared trivial, mundane things.

Sometimes, the tenant would even guide Ghost Granny to focus on “second-hand” emotions… such as watching television dramas with her—the kind with plots that triggered strong emotional fluctuations—or sharing gossip she had heard at work during the day.

While Ghost Granny was “raising” her, she was also raising Ghost Granny. She acted as though she needed Ghost Granny, but she wasn’t completely incapable of living without her.

Mutual dependence, mutual coexistence… to live in this room with Ghost Granny long-term, one needed interaction, not pure dependency. One could not become mere emotional fodder for her.

After reviewing this tenant’s experience, Zhou Fangdong had a rough idea of how to formulate the Tenancy Rules for Room 205.

Zhou Fangdong left Room 205, preparing to go back and write the Tenancy Rules before handing out flyers to find a tenant.

However, before leaving the second floor, he wanted to head back into the hallway to take another look at that hidden room.

As luck would have it, the moment he pushed open the door to Room 205, he spotted a Cleaner mopping the floor outside.

It was one of the paper-headed Cleaners, though he couldn’t tell which of the three—Qian Duolai and the others—it was.

Zhou Fangdong stepped forward and got straight to the point. “Do you know where the hidden room on the second floor is? Take me there.”

The Cleaner’s body stiffened. A moment later, his paper-mache head was so startled that it fell off and hit the floor.

He scrambled to pick up his head and set it back onto his neck before stammering, “Landlord, sir… you should probably find Quan Wuming or Ming Wuqian to open that door… I—I don’t really dare to.”

Translator’s Notes