CH 489

489: Dying With a Smile

The toilets in the ancient mansion sat disused for such a long time it was inevitable there would be a smell. A thick layer of dust coated everything and lots of tiny mosquitos buzzed around the room. The toilets on this floor, because they were made for servants, were in worse condition than all the toilets on the upper floors.

The girls made a face at the disgusting scene. Feng Wu frowned slightly while the other four girls looked considerably worse. They would have turned around and left if they weren’t in a hurry.

It wasn’t their first time in the bathroom, but the stench was so strong it was hard to ignore. How could they do what they needed to do in such a dirty and smelly place?

Ai Lin couldn’t do it!

If they didn’t use the stalls, then they would have to go to one of the other floors, but that would put them at greater risk. With so many people already dead, none of the girls dared go up.

Out of desperation, they used magic to clean up the toilets. Opening the windows drew out some of the stench. Magic fire burned away the little mosquitos while magic water cleared the toilets. The entire bathroom became cleaner and smelled much more tolerable.

It was a large bathroom with ten stalls, so a maximum of ten people could use it at a time.

Ai Lin remembered reading that tainted spirit things loved to hang around bathroom stalls, the last one being the most popular. She promptly took the middle one.

Zi Cheng was probably familiar with the same ghost stories. She took a stall close to the middle.

Feng Wu casually took the third one down.

Shani and Yaoyue didn’t give it much thought. They picked a stall, closed the door and squatted inside.

The roar of rain and thunder boomed outside. It was fine earlier when they were chatting, but now that they were quiet, the bathroom felt eerie.

Ai Lin swallowed. Even if she was in a world of magic and swords, she was still scared of ghosts!

Few girls could claim to be unafraid. Only Yaoyue and Feng Wu were unphased. The other girls felt their hearts thumping. Especially Ai Lin and Zi Cheng. Modern society was influenced by ghost movies – Mountain Village Old Corpse, Midnight Bell, Sadako, Hanako – and every other horror film they could remember flashed through their minds unbidden.

“Where’s Shani? She’s been inside so long and she’s still not done!” Yaoyue was the fourth person to come out. She didn’t expect anyone else to be slower than her.

“Shani, are you all right?” Zi Cheng directed her voice at the door of the Shani’s stall.

No response.

Ai Lin couldn’t help but call out too. Again, no response. Other than the rain, there wasn’t a single sound in the bathroom.

The girls exchanged troubled glances.

As the necromancer in the party, Yaoyue stepped forward. Ai Lin, Zi Cheng and Feng Wu followed behind her.

Yaoyue grabbed Shani’s stall handle with one hand while holding her staff in the other. She gulped. Just as she was about to yank the door open, the door swung open on its own.

The girls were so startled they screamed out, “Ah!” in unison.

“What are you doing?! Trying to scare people to death!” Yaoyue gave Shani an unhappy look.

“What were you doing in there?! We called out to you and you didn’t reply. We thought you were dead!” Ai Lin yelled out.

“Who said I had to reply right away just because you called out to me?! You don’t tell me what to do!”

The carefree look on Shani’s face made Ai Lin just want to slap her.

Yaoyue was so angry she wanted to hit Shani too. She was a seventh-year at Xingguang Holy academy. When had she ever been treated so rudely? If it weren’t for Zi Cheng grabbing her hand, she would have given Shani a hard slap to the face.

The girls parted on bad terms. Yaoyue took her party and left without a backward glance at Shani so they never noticed Shani’s expression change. A trace of pain shot through her eyes and she looked like she was struggling with something.

The flickers of expression passed quickly and her face regained its earlier carefree appearance.

No one paid special attention to Shani after the bathroom incident, so it came as a surprise when a day later, she suddenly died.

“How weird, she died laughing.”

“This place is getting more and more strange.”

“Yeah, too creepy.”

“I feel chills on my back just looking at her.”

What surprised everyone about Shani’s death was not that she died, but how she died – it was different from all the others. Everyone else was either froze to death to death without an expression on their face or died with a pained look. But Shani died with a big open smile on her face, almost like she was laughing. Such an expression on a dead person was unnerving.

Apart from her face, she died frozen to death like everyone else. There was a layer of frost on her, almost like she had been stored in a freezer overnight. She gripped the doll she took from upstairs in her hand even in death.

The whispers couldn’t be helped. Caesar’s people heard it, but they had other things to think about.

The desire to leave grew stronger as more people died. Everyone wanted to leave but the rain wouldn’t let up. They wanted to find the evil thing doing all the killing but they couldn’t find any clues.

Shani dying put a lot of psychological pressure on everyone. They felt helpless. They couldn’t find what was killing them nor could they leave. Were they really going to just wait and die?

“Is there a problem with that doll?” Zi Cheng asked suspiciously. She had hadn’t spoken to Shani much, but she could see how differently Shani treated the doll. It was one of the dolls from upstairs.