A bizarre and terrifying experience; I messed up the dungeon world.

At the end of the stairs was a corridor, much narrower than the one above, barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side.

The green light from the oil lamp danced on the wall, illuminating patches of water stains. The air was thick with the smell of mildew, and something else even more pungent—like lime, or perhaps cement.

"This smells wrong," Zhao Qiang said, covering his nose. "It smells like a construction site."

Zhou Lang didn't speak; he was looking at the wall.

The walls on both sides of the corridor were strange. The left side was made of ordinary red bricks, while the right side was a whole cement wall with a rough and uneven surface, as if it had been hastily poured. The cement color was also inconsistent, with some places being gray and others white, creating a patchwork of dark and light shades.

He held the oil lamp close to the cement wall, and under the green light, he could see fine cracks on the wall surface, from which black liquid seeped out and flowed down the wall.

"Don't touch it," Zhou Lang said to Zhao Qiang, who was reaching behind him to touch the wall.

Zhao Qiang withdrew his hand. "I just wanted to take a look."

The corridor was short, about twenty meters long, and branched into three paths at the end. There were words carved above the entrance to each path, but they were barely legible due to years of disrepair.

The left side reads "Storage Room," the middle side reads "Boiler Room," and the right side is covered in cement and is illegible.

Zhou Lang chose the right side.

"Why are we going this way?" Han Yingying asked in a low voice.

"Things that are deliberately covered up usually have problems."

The fork in the road narrowed, allowing only one person to pass at a time. Zhou Lang walked at the front, holding the oil lamp above his head, its green light casting a long shadow.

After walking about thirty steps, the road came to an end.

It wasn't a dead end, but a door. A wooden door, very old, with a layer of sheet metal nailed to the door panel. The door wasn't locked, it was ajar.

Zhou Lang pushed open the door.

Behind the door was a small room, about ten square meters. In the center of the room stood a metal-framed bed covered with yellowed bedding. Beside the bed was a small cabinet with a framed photo on it.

The photo in the frame is a group photo. There are seven people in the photo, standing in front of a building, with this guesthouse in the background. The photo has yellowed, but the faces are still clearly visible.

Standing at the front were a man and a woman. The man was in his fifties, wearing an apron, and smiling very solicitously. The woman was a head shorter than him, with a blank expression and her eyes looking down.

Five people stood behind them. A young couple embraced and made peace signs; a woman in her thirties carried a lantern and wore a polite smile; and a simply dressed young girl with a backpack stood at the very edge, some distance from the others.

The last person stands on the far right of the photo; he is tall, wears sunglasses, and his expression is obscured.

Zhou Lang stared at the photo for a few seconds, then flipped it over. On the back, a line of text was written in pencil:

"Opening Ceremony Group Photo: All Guesthouse Staff"

Below that is an even smaller line of text, written in a crooked and messy hand:

"If they don't leave, I won't leave either, I'll never leave."

"Everyone?" Zhao Qiang leaned closer to look. "These are all the ghosts in the guesthouse?"

"It should be." Zhou Lang put the photo frame back and started rummaging through the cabinet.

There weren't many things in the cabinet—a stack of ledgers, a bunch of keys, and a rusty utility knife. He casually flipped through the ledgers; they recorded the guesthouse's daily expenses, nothing special. He put the keys away.

"Brother Lang, look at this."

Zhao Qiang squatted down beside the bed and dragged a tin box out from under the bed. The box was locked, but the lock was rusted beyond recognition, and Zhao Qiang pulled it off with force.

The box contained a pile of documents, including household registration records, copies of marriage certificates, and several police reports.

Zhou Lang picked up the police report receipt, and the contents of it made him frown.

First report: Complainant: Zhang Xiulan; Report details: Daughter missing, suspected of being abducted. Case status: Unresolved.

Second report: Complainant: Li Xiaoman; Report details: Being followed and harassed; Case status: Case closed.

The third report: No information about the person who reported the incident; the report stated that a fire had occurred at the guesthouse, resulting in seven deaths.

"Seven people," Han Yingying said softly. "There are exactly seven people in the photo."

Zhou Lang carefully put away the police report receipt. Connecting these pieces of information, the outline of the story was beginning to emerge.

The guesthouse owner sold his daughter, and when his wife found out... she died. She drowned because the woman's ghost appeared by the lake.

What about the woman carrying the lantern? She wasn't mentioned in the police report. But the phrase "human skin lantern" suddenly popped into Zhou Lang's mind. He had noticed the lanterns hanging in the corridor on his way here; they were strangely styled, and the material of the lantern surface didn't resemble paper or cloth.

He didn't think any further.

"Let's go check out the boiler room."

The three left the room, returned to the fork in the road, and turned into the middle road.

The boiler room door was made of iron and had no lock. Zhou Lang opened the door, and a blast of hot air hit him.

The boiler room was large, with an old-fashioned coal-fired boiler in the center, which had long been shut down. Next to the boiler were several thick water pipes leading in all directions. There was standing water on the ground, with a layer of greasy substance floating on the surface.

Zhou Lang walked around the boiler and found something that shouldn't be there on the back of the boiler.

A sewer manhole cover.

This wasn't an ordinary manhole cover. It was welded shut, the weld points densely packed, as if someone had desperately tried to seal the entrance. But now, several weld points had cracked, the edges were curling up, and you could see a dark hole underneath.

What seeped up from the crack was not water, but a viscous black liquid that gleamed strangely under green light.

"There's something down there," Zhao Qiang said, uttering a pointless remark.

Zhou Lang squatted down and brought the oil lamp close to the gap.

The moment the green light shone in, the black liquid abruptly receded.

It didn't flow away, it shrank back. It's like it's alive.

Zhou Lang stood up and took two steps back. He didn't intend to open the manhole cover right now. Without sufficient information, acting rashly would only lead to certain death.

"It's almost time to go back." He glanced at the clock in his inventory; it was almost one in the morning.

The three returned the way they came. When they went upstairs, the ghosts in the corridor were still there. There were many more of them than when they came, and some of them were faces that Zhou Lang had never seen before—a woman with cement smeared on her face, a short, fat figure with her body soaking wet, and two young people who were tightly hugging each other and whose bodies were charred black.

The green light of the oil lamp kept them away, but Zhou Lang noticed a detail.

Their gazes weren't all fixed on him. Several ghosts were staring at the door of a room at the end of the corridor.

That was the room he noticed on the first day that was always locked.

Zhou Lang remembered this detail and led Zhao Qiang and Han Yingying back to their respective rooms.

After closing the door, he didn't go to sleep immediately. He went through the information he had gathered that day in his mind.

There are seven people in the photo. The police report mentions a fire that killed seven people. These ghosts lived in this guesthouse before they died, or were connected to it.

They appear every night, repeating their past lives: a woman carrying a lantern in the corridor, a wet figure by the lake, and a charred couple embracing.