The Lost Tomb : Sea Of Sands

Chapter 51: Strange Farmhouse

After leaving the internet cafe, Li Cu found that he couldn't remember the route he had taken to get there, and it was useless to ask for directions. No one would be able to tell him where a tree with fingernail scratches was, plus it was already past midnight.

He could only walk back slowly according to his memory, finally finding the alley sometime after four in the morning. He listened at the mouth of the alley, but heard nothing. It seemed like things had calmed down.

Li Cu carefully kept close to the wall and went all the way down the alley. The moon at four in the morning was higher and brighter than it was earlier, and he could see clearly that nothing inside had changed.

The gate of the neighbor whose yard he had destroyed was also closed, so he couldn't see any signs of the disturbance he had caused. He went to the iron gate at the end of the alley and immediately found that the door was unlocked.

Wow, he said to himself, this woman really has skill. But then he remembered there were people behind the gate, so no matter how skilled she was, it was still very dangerous.

Li Cu put his ear to the gate, listened carefully, and then lay down on the ground to see if he could peek inside through the gap between the door and the ground. Maybe he could see if the lights were on or something.

There wasn't a single light on.

He got up and thought it over some more. Still uncertain, he bent over, pushed open the iron gate, and then crawled into the yard.

The yard was so incomprehensibly clean that it looked like nothing was there. If it was really an abandoned house, then there would still be at least some trash. But there was no such thing, and it was so clean that it was terrifying.

This meant that there was nothing to prevent Li Cu from being seen, and he would be a complete fool for going in if anyone was in the yard.

He stood up, feeling that there was no need to keep crawling if there was nothing to hide behind in the yard. At this time, however, he noticed that it wasn't that there was nothing in the yard, just that he hadn't seen the many boards on the wall. He initially overlooked them because they looked very similar to the wall, and he simply thought that the dark ones were just spots on the wall that were dirty.

Li Cu leaned against one of the boards and touched it, only to find that it wasn't a board at all, but the back of a mirror. The wall was covered in these big mirrors, and when he looked up, he saw that the tops of these mirrors were higher than the wall. He was shocked and asked himself: The scary face I saw just now wasn't me, was it? Fuck! Are all these walls covered in mirrors?

He tried to turn one of the mirrors around to take a look, but it was too heavy to move. He looked at the spot where he might have climbed up before and continued cursing in his heart. It looked like he wasn't wrong— what he saw just now was his own face.

Shit, when did I become so ugly?

Despite this, he turned back around and continued to look into the yard. The front door of the house was open, and the inside was dark.

Don't, he scolded himself again, the mirrors... the open door... in horror movies, this is a really really bad sign.

Li Cu snuck over to the door and listened carefully, but there really wasn't any sound coming from inside at all. It was impossible to be so quiet unless there was really no one there. He took a deep breath and felt that if someone was actually inside, then he should be able to hear their heartbeat in such a quiet environment.

Hallelujah. That must mean no one's there.

He flashed into the room, but it was so dark inside that he couldn't see anything. The moonlight outside only reached part of the door, and the absence of light made the rest of the room seem completely small and enclosed.

Li Cu glanced around and saw a strange white light flashing in the corner. He hugged the wall as he inched towards it, and found that it was Liang Wan's cell phone. When he picked it up and turned it on, he noticed that the screen was cracked, but it still worked fine.

He then turned the phone's light on and moved it around the room, suddenly seeing a man sitting beside him and looking at him with the aid of a cell-phone light.

Li Cu's first reaction was to throw a punch and hit the man directly on the side of his face. He thought that no matter if the opponent was a human being or a ghost, this type of blow would at least make them retreat. But he didn't expect there to be a bang! and then the whole area in front of him began to shake, and he felt a sharp pain in his fist.

Li Cu instinctively retracted his fist and looked carefully before finding that he had hit another mirror. It turned out that the person holding the phone just now was simply his own reflection, and now the constant vibrations made his face look distorted.

The mirror was leaning against the wall, very close to him. He breathed a sigh of relief and thought, fuck your ancestors! Who the fuck put a mirror in a place like this? Is this place a warehouse for mirrors?

As Li Cu rubbed his painful knuckles and took another look around with the light, he found that something was off— the whole room seemed to be filled with mirrors. He took the cell phone and looked at where they had been placed along the wall, finding that the mirrors were of different sizes. Some were covered with a white cloth, while others were covered with a thick layer of dust. As a result, when he came in just now, he didn't see the phone's glowing screen reflected in any of them. The dust on the mirror he had hit had been wiped off at some point, and judging from the distance between where the phone was lying on the ground and the mirror, Liang Wan was the one who did it.

Li Cu took a deep breath and felt that the situation must have been like this: Liang Wan may have accidentally rubbed the dust off when she came in, and when she suddenly caught sight of her face, she was just as startled as he was and dropped her phone on the ground and ran.

But where did she go?

After circling around the room, Li Cu found a staircase leading to the second floor. The stairs were full of debris, however, which left only a very small walkway for him to pass through. He shined the phone's light on the dust there and found traces of someone having walked all the way up.

Li Cu said to himself: This woman is actually quite daring. He didn't see anyone else's footprints besides hers, but the marks of her high-heels were still very easy to recognize anyways. The footprints only led upwards, not downwards, so was she still upstairs? Why didn't she pick up her phone after she dropped it?

Li Cu looked at the cell phone and then at the room full of mirrors, finding that there was only one place in the room that was different from everything else. A small table was set up beside a pillar, and there was something on it that was covered with a cloth.

Li Cu walked over and examined the dust on the cloth. There were a lot of footprints around the small table, which showed that Liang Wan had also come to look at it. But it didn't seem as if she had lifted the cloth, as there was still a layer of dust covering it. Liang Wan obviously didn't stay in this room very long.

Li Cu started debating with himself. It was possible that Liang Wan was upstairs, probably so scared that she couldn't even hear anything. Or maybe she was on the third floor, unable to hear anything going on below even if she wasn't scared. If she had run upstairs right after after being frightened by the mirror, then Li Cu was afraid she might have peed her pants by now.

He thought it over carefully and compared all the various scenarios. He still felt that he should find Liang Wan first, since it wasn't easy to tell if she had really been scared by something.

So he gingerly walked upstairs. There were three rooms on the second floor, but the doors appeared to have been locked for a long time and were covered in cobwebs. Since the dust on them hadn't been disturbed at all, it looked like Liang Wan hadn't touched them. He continued on to the third floor, where he saw that the door to the only room up there had been left open. After reaching the top of the stairs, the only thing he could see was Liang Wan's footprints on the ground leading all the way to a corner of the room.