Chapter 39

The pregnant woman who died of a difficult labor in Room 106 was among the very first group of people to move into the Liwan Apartments. Back then, the complex had only recently been completed, and no homicides had yet occurred.

The tenant of Room 106 was a doctor who worked at a veterinary hospital.

She loved small animals dearly. Not only did she keep seven cats at home, but she also frequently fed the stray cats around the Liwan Apartments.

Furthermore, she didn’t just feed them; she used her own money to help the local strays get neutered, dewormed, and treated for illnesses. Thanks to her efforts, those stray cats lived well, and their population remained stable.

However, in this world, besides those who love small animals, there are also those who enjoy venting their emotions and satisfying their twisted, perverted desires on defenseless creatures.

By the time she noticed the number of stray cats around the apartments had significantly decreased, the veterinarian was already five months pregnant.

Because her health wasn’t great and she suffered from severe morning sickness, she had taken maternity leave to rest at home.

Precisely because she was in the apartment all day and could go out during the daylight hours to check on the strays at any time, she eventually discovered where the disappearing cats had gone.

She saw the “fur-babies¹” she had meticulously cared for turned into bloody masses, tossed into alleys like trash… their bones crushed flat, and on heads missing half their skulls, the single remaining dilated eye would be wide open, as if unable to understand even in death why humans would hurt them.

Upon seeing this scene, she nearly fainted.

Leaning against the alley wall for a long while to recover, the veterinarian finally regained her composure. She went home in tears to grab a small shovel and trash bags, then buried the dead cats.

To find the person secretly torturing and killing the cats, she brought the matter up in the residents’ group chat and paid out of her own pocket to install several cameras in the alleys that previously lacked surveillance.

Finally, a week later, she successfully caught the culprit.

It was an adult male wearing a face mask. He didn’t look like a tenant of the Liwan Apartments; judging by his clothes, he seemed to be an unemployed thug who loitered around the nearby wholesale market.

When the veterinarian saw the man on the monitor catching another cat and walking into the alley, she gathered several other tenants who owned pets. Together, they went to the alley and cornered the man inside.

The man was forced to release the stray cat, appearing somewhat humiliated and enraged by being surrounded.

He originally wanted to take his anger out on the pregnant veterinarian, who looked incapable of resisting, but fortunately, one of the tenants who came along was a man who owned three Huskies.

The muscular male tenant knocked the cat-abusing thug to the ground with a single punch, and then the group pinned him down and took him to the local security office.

However, because the victims were stray cats and no damage to private property was involved, the law enforcement officers at the security office only gave the thug a verbal reprimand and warning, telling him not to do it again.

Later, the veterinarian felt she couldn’t let it go, so she exposed the man’s actions on various social media platforms.

Although the photos and videos were blurred, after resourceful netizens scrutinized the surveillance footage frame by frame, the man’s true identity was discovered. He became a “rat crossing the street²,” despised by everyone.

Under public scrutiny, the thug vanished for a period of time, and the stray cats around the Liwan Apartments were no longer persecuted.

This peace lasted until the veterinarian was eight months pregnant.

That morning, she went to the hospital for a prenatal check-up.

The veterinarian’s husband worked in the petroleum industry. Due to the nature of his job, he had to work away from home for three months before returning for a one-month break.

At that time, her husband was still a week away from coming home, so she had been going to her prenatal check-ups alone.

During that day’s check-up, the veterinarian felt particularly uneasy. Every stray cat she passed on the street seemed to be meowing at her, and the cries of the infants in the obstetrics department sounded uncannily like the wailing of kittens.

When she stepped out of the hospital to catch a ride back to the Liwan Apartments, two stray cats suddenly darted out and circled around her feet.

At the time, the veterinarian didn’t sense anything wrong, assuming she was just overly stressed during her third trimester.

After shooing the two cats away with some cat treats she carried with her, she took a car back to the Liwan Apartments.

In stark contrast to the situation outside where she was surrounded by various cats, once she returned to the Liwan Apartments, the cats she fed—who were usually very familiar with her—failed to appear.

The veterinarian’s heart grew increasingly anxious as she quickened her pace home.

The moment she pushed open the door to Room 106, she saw more than a dozen bloody cat skins nailed to the wall directly facing the entryway.

On the floor, the seven cats she kept had also been dismembered. Pieces of cat corpses were scattered across the ground, and blood had stained the floor red, flowing all the way to the doorway.

The veterinarian thought she was having a nightmare, or perhaps just seeing things… In disbelief, she stumbled inside, trying to prove that everything in the room was a hallucination.

But with her first step, she slipped on the cat blood that had pooled at the door and fell heavily to the ground.

Her health was already fragile, and the fall caused her water to break immediately. Blood and amniotic fluid flowed out together, mingling with the cat blood on the floor.

Enduring excruciating pain, the veterinarian struggled to crawl toward the door, trying to reach her handbag that had fallen nearby so she could get her phone and call an ambulance.

However, at that exact moment, the familiar figure of the man in the mask appeared at the doorway of Room 106.

He picked up the veterinarian’s handbag and slammed the door shut.

Until the moment she died, the veterinarian remained slumped before the door, weakly calling for help, but because it was a workday, no one in the apartment heard her cries.

In the crime scene photos within the case file, her body lay amidst the dismembered remains of the cats, her dress stained red by the vast pool of blood beneath her. Her hand had been clawing at the door, her fingernails torn back, leaving a series of bloody streaks at the bottom of the door that looked like cat scratches.

After the veterinarian died, her child also suffocated to death in her womb—two lives lost in one tragedy.

Zhou Fangdong finished reading the file with a heavy heart.

Because the records didn’t mention the fate of the cat-abusing man or whether he had been caught, Zhou Fangdong had a faint suspicion. He quickly previewed all the homicide records related to Room 106.

Finally, in a document within the Room 106 folder, he found the death file for the cat-abuser.

No one knew what his mindset was when he moved into Room 106, but he only survived in that room for three days, and his death was extremely gruesome.

Except for the skin on his face, the flesh all over his body had rotted. Numerous purplish-blue tumors shaped like cat heads had grown on the side of his neck. His hands were deformed, with finger bones protruding through the flesh and twisting into the shape of cat claws. A human-faced tumor in the likeness of an infant had grown on his abdomen, but the ears on the tumor were not human—they were the ears of a cat.

Zhou Fangdong looked through the detailed files of other tenants who had died in Room 106 and found that only this man had died in such a horrific manner.

The death photos of the other tenants only showed purplish skin, as if they had suffered cardiac arrest from a sudden, extreme fright.

Judging from the veterinarian’s death records and the state of the cat-abuser’s corpse, the ghost in Room 106 was likely related to cats.

In his previous world, Zhou Fangdong had heard of similar cat-related spirits and entities.

He had a colleague from Jinling. When Zhou Fangdong attended that colleague’s wedding, he had heard of a folk taboo circulating in the Jinling area—the Cat Ghost Stealing Joy³.

During a wedding procession, the bridal car had to avoid Phoenix Street or any place where a large number of cat corpses were buried.

As the saying went: “Better to detour three kilometers than to walk the path of the Cat Ghost.”

Legend had it that in the former residence of Gan Xi in Jinling, a wealthy merchant’s entire family had been poisoned to death, and all the cats the merchant kept in the Hundred Cat Workshop were also brutally killed. The resentment of the people who died violent deaths combined with the resentment of the slaughtered cats to form Cat Ghosts.

Because the resentment in such a place was too heavy, the auspicious energy of a wedding would clash with it. Therefore, weddings could not be held nearby, or the Cat Ghost would cause trouble and ruin the marriage.

This Cat Ghost was more like a geopathic feng shui formation caused by resentment rather than a typical haunting by a common ghost.

“Is Room 106 in a similar situation to the Cat Ghost Stealing Joy? Is it because the resentment of the cats and people has fused into the house, becoming part of the room’s feng shui, that no ghost can be found?”

Zhou Fangdong’s brow furrowed tightly; he truly didn’t know how to clean this room.

Although he had a rough idea of what the entity in Room 106 was, there was no sign of the Cat Ghost itself.

Without finding the Cat Ghost, he couldn’t use Mind Reading to learn its Killing Pattern, which meant he couldn’t draft the Tenant Rules.

Furthermore, the grease in this room was produced by the Cat Ghost. The Automatic Cleaning Tool was ineffective, and ordinary cleaning supplies would likely be useless as well.

How troublesome…

“Does my young friend wish to clear the Cat Ghosts from Room 106?” An old, raspy voice suddenly sounded from outside the door.

Zhou Fangdong snapped out of his thoughts and looked toward the sound, discovering that Zhang Zhiwu had appeared at the entrance of Room 106 at some unknown point.

Zhang Zhiwu had originally left his room to call Zhang Qingyang for morning lessons, but as he reached the door of Room 107, he noticed the door to Room 106 was open and took a peek inside.

He hadn’t expected to see the current landlord of Liwan Apartments standing atop the “Cat Grease Calamity⁴.”

A “Calamity” usually referred to disasters or misfortunes, but in feng shui terminology, it also meant malignant Qi. The final breath exhaled by a person after death was also called a “Calamity.”

This “Cat Grease Calamity” was a type of earthly filth phenomenon formed by Cat Ghosts.

Because a large number of cats had died in one spot, the putrid air of the cat corpses and their pre-death resentment had drawn out the malignant Qi of the earth’s ley lines, forming a yellow-black oil stain. This grease was equivalent to a physical curse of malignant Qi… In a humid environment, these oil stains would even sprout grey cat fur.

Hearing the tone of this Zombie Taoist Master, he seemed to know how to deal with the entity in Room 106. Thinking of this, Zhou Fangdong quickly walked to the door. “Taoist Master, you know about Cat Ghosts? Then do you know how to clean this grease? Is this stuff harmful to humans?”

Zhang Zhiwu stroked his beard. “If you only want to clean the Cat Grease Calamity without clearing the Cat Ghost itself, that is simple. I will call my disciple over and have him recite the ‘Supreme Chapter of the Cat Spirit for House Protection⁵‘ a few times in the room. It just so happens he hasn’t done his morning lessons yet.”

“As for whether it is harmful… these things are indeed harmful to the human body. If a living person comes into contact with this grime, ring-shaped, coin-like rashes will grow on their body. Over time, these coin-shaped rashes will spread across the entire body until the skin festers, as if it were being licked by a cat’s barbed tongue.”

At this point, Zhang Zhiwu’s gaze shifted to the grease on Zhou Fangdong’s hand that hadn’t been wiped clean yet. He paused, then added, “Of course, a curse of this level is not worth mentioning to someone like you, my young friend.”

“If you don’t want the room to produce this grease again in the future, I can draw four talismans for you. You just need to stick them in the four corners of Room 106.”

Zhou Fangdong breathed a sigh of relief.

The Taoist Master’s expertise was truly a perfect fit. Recruiting this Ghost Tenant was worth every penny; he was practically a walking encyclopedia.

Just as Zhou Fangdong was about to ask how to find the Cat Ghost, a system notification suddenly popped up:

[Ding—Detected that the tenant of Room 102 has successfully entered a Main God Supernatural Instance! The Instance Corrosion hidden function is now unlocked!]

[Based on the Rental Contract, the host can use the tenant and the Room 102 key as a medium to use the room’s ghost to erode the instance and steal energy from the Main God System!]

The map interface, shared by the exploration function and the Instance Erosion function, popped up.

On the Linjiang City Map, a small purple dot had appeared. Clicking it allowed him to see a live broadcast of the location.

Room 102… Wasn’t the tenant of Room 102 Duan Wenyu?

Thinking of Duan Wenyu, who had excitedly told him yesterday while carrying a backpack that he was going out to work, Zhou Fangdong’s heart sank.

Good grief, what happened to the internship? How could the Bureau of Paranormal Oversight send his tenant to such a dangerous place for an investigation? Was this really a place for an intern investigator to go?

Translator’s Notes