But our dear landlady sohow managed to get along peacefully with the tenant for another month, until next month when it was ti to collect the rent. She was preparing to use the rent money to pay for the next day’s gas, water, and electricity bills when she discovered that the entire stack of cash was green with red stripes, which is the kind of paper money used for the dead.
The landlady still did not think of other possibilities, believing that the tenant was deliberately trying to scare her to skip out on the rent.
After barging into the rental room to confront him and getting no outco, she then enlisted several of her relatives to prepare to kick the fellow out.
When relatives and friends arrived, they found that the tenant had been dead inside the room for nearly a month, not only was his body stiff, but it was said that a bizarre layer of white hair had grown on the surface of his skin, and all this while the landlady had failed to notice anything unusual.
Regardless of the truth of this story, Zhou Wenfei, who was also in the Aries District at the mont, did not want to speculate about other people’s misfortunes; he was only concerned with his own situation.
Zhou Wenfei was a local from Aries City District, and the courtyard he lived in was similar to that of the landlady’s from the story, resembling a quadrangle of sorts.
However, the building with rooms had only two sides; on the other sides, one was the gate, and the other had been dug up by Zhou Wenfei into fertile soil for planting vegetables.
He had always lived alone, and the wealth left to him by his deceased parents ant he did not lack food or clothing, essentially entering retirent early.
It’s just that at forty years old, he had yet to marry or have children.
And the events that had been happening to him these past days had left Zhou Wenfei unable to sleep or eat in peace, especially dreading the arrival of night.
Whether he had encountered any strangeness, he wasn’t sure, but every night when he went to sleep, he would invariably dream.
In his dreams, a strange woman would play gas with him.
Actually, Zhou Wenfei was no longer clear whether these were just dreams he had after falling asleep, or if a real woman indeed entered his room every night, playing gas with him in his half-asleep, half-awake state.
Lately, he’d been so distracted and muddled during the day that he could not even distinguish between his dreams and reality, let alone differentiate the morning sky from the twilight at tis.
Looking out the window at the sky, Zhou Wenfei took quite a while to figure out that it was not morning, but apparently dusk.
“Dusk? Night? It seems… the sky is about to darken!”
The thought of nightfall made him stiffen all over and he couldn’t help but shiver from the chill.
He walked in from outside the courtyard to his desk, picked up his mobile phone, and opened the call log.
The display showed all calls marked “4747.”
Starting from yesterday, nearly every ten minutes, he couldn’t help but dial the number again.
However, when he called again at five in the afternoon today, Zhou Wenfei received a stern warning, asserting that his situation had been recorded and was in queue for processing, and that if he called again, security personnel would co to arrest him.
Then… the guy imdiately, decisively, without hesitation dialed it another ten tis.
Being alone at ho already felt fraught with danger, so why not simply let them arrest him, get lodged in jail with free als, and have other prisoners around to bolster his courage? Why not do it?
Yet, contrary to his wishes, his number was quickly blacklisted by 4747, and after he heard a sweet-voiced operator from the other end of the phone let out an exasperated, hysterical scream in the final call, he couldn’t connect any further calls.
What puzzled Zhou Wenfei was why the security officers hadn’t co yet? Was arresting soone also sothing that required queuing?
The sky began to darken, and he suddenly shrank his neck, feeling a chill down his spine as if sothing was staring at him from behind, and quickly turned to look.
Behind him were the familiar pieces of furniture, but as cold and lifeless as ever, casting an inexplicable chill in Zhou Wenfei’s heart.
He hurriedly walked to the front of the house, closed the door, locked it, peeked out the window next to the door to the courtyard, then drew the curtains.
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