Kuang Feifan stared at the wobbly, black-and-red humanoid before him, his head swimming, and muttered under his breath, "Is this ever going to end?"

Every step the humanoid took seemed like a sudden teleportation forward in his vision, yet seeing the body on the verge of collapse, Kuang Feifan felt surprisingly little fear; rather, he found a strange amusement in it.

He casually adopted a boxing stance, waiting for the figure to approach, imagining that when it got a bit closer, he'd land a left hook.

Unexpectedly, while he was intently focused on the humanoid directly in front of him, he heard a slow but steady "clack, clack" of footsteps approaching him from behind.

Kuang Feifan jumped in alarm. He whipped his head around to look behind him, but saw no figure, only the increasingly proximate footsteps. In the empty room, this unseen approach was far more chilling than the black-and-red figure before him.

He swallowed nervously, glanced back at the humanoid, made a sudden resolution, and charged toward it, swinging his left fist directly into its head.

It was that same sensation of shattering jelly; he even heard a wet squelch. Having landed the blow, Kuang Feifan quickly sidestepped, wary of any countermove from the figure.

To his utter shock, as its head broke apart, the humanoid that had looked ready to fall to pieces instantly collapsed like a pile of scattered building blocks, shattering into pieces that fell to the floor. Immediately, they dissolved into pools of black-and-red sludge, releasing a nauseating, fetid odor. Kuang Feifan scrambled backward, putting distance between himself and the mess.

After retreating a few paces, a cold gust of wind swept past his back, and he felt something flash by behind him. Before he could turn, a red shadow drifted across his peripheral vision. With a slight sideways glance, he saw a red dress fluttering in the air, billowing as if an invisible person were wearing it and floating around. As the red skirt appeared, a chilling, hair-raising laugh echoed out.

His gaze locked onto the red dress, following its hypnotic movements. Cold gusts continued to brush past him, and he instinctively flinched away, feeling as if numerous invisible entities were brushing past his body.

He couldn't help but shiver uncontrollably. He tried to turn his head to look, but felt utterly unable to tear his eyes away from the red dress. He desperately wanted to lunge forward, grab the garment, and rip it to shreds, but every time he got close, the dress would eerily recoil backward. And with every cold gust that grazed his skin, he felt the chill within him deepen.

Though he couldn't see his own face, he was certain his complexion must have turned frighteningly pale. Several times, he felt a face pressing right against the back of his head, blowing short, cold breaths onto his neck.

Kuang Feifan moved his feet almost unconsciously, and suddenly felt his sole press against something. He instinctively looked down, his eyes snapping wide open. At his feet lay a pair of a woman's feet, severed cleanly at the ankle. From their curve, they were unmistakably feminine. The toenails were dark purple, and the skin, stretched tightly over the bone, was bloodless, as if bleached.

The sudden appearance of the severed feet nearly made Kuang Feifan cry out. He jumped aside, but his swinging right hand caught onto something fuzzy. He instinctively grasped it, and the texture immediately felt wrong. Turning his head, he saw he was clutching a long, black clump of hair—and dangling from the roots was a human head.

Because he was only holding a section of the long hair, all that was visible of the head—its face obscured by the cascading strands—was one open eye. It was a vast eye, seemingly without eyelids, the huge, ghastly white orb rolled upward, staring fixedly at Kuang Feifan, who held its hair.

Kuang Feifan tried to shake his hand free and throw the head away, but the long hair in his grip writhed unnervingly, instantly coiling around his wrist, making it impossible to shake off.

As he swung his arm violently, the white eyeball in the head rolled crazily, while the hair wrapped around his wrist seemed to multiply, threatening to creep further up his arm. A series of terrifyingly sharp laughs erupted from the head, piercing his eardrums.

Kuang Feifan forced himself to ignore the headache caused by the piercing laughter. He lunged toward the nearest wall and violently flung the head toward the plaster with his right hand. Just as the head was about to strike the wall, he instinctively shut his eyes, unwilling to watch it shatter like a melon.

To his surprise, there was no expected sound of impact or breakage. Instead, his hand slammed hard against the wall, and a sharp jolt of pain shot up his wrist. Kuang Feifan let out an involuntary scream, briefly convinced his hand had snapped.

He instinctively cradled his wrist, gasping from the pain, only then realizing the head was gone, as if it had never been there.

He almost dismissed the entire episode as a hallucination, but when he looked up, he saw that on the previously blank wall, exactly where he had struck it, there was now a smear of black-and-red blood, shaped uncannily like a face with wild, flying hair.

Kuang Feifan squeezed his eyes shut, unable to process what he was seeing. Just then, he felt something approaching him from behind.

Something pressed against his back. He snapped his eyes open and looked down to see a pair of deathly white arms stretch out from under his armpits, locking tightly around his waist, their distorted fingers interlocked.

Kuang Feifan immediately felt suffocated. The arms possessed a strength that nearly felt like it was crushing him.

"You... can't... escape..."

A lifeless, toneless voice echoed right beside his ear, sounding nothing human—hollow and icy, like a shard of frost pressed against him.

He could even feel the cold breath exhaled from the speaker against his skin, raising goosebumps across his entire body. The grip around his waist tightened further, and he was barely able to draw breath.

Without looking back, Kuang Feifan grabbed the arms locked around his waist, straining to pry the fingers apart. But the harder he pulled, the tighter the grip became. Prying them together was useless. He started trying to break the fingers one by one. With a crisp snap, the little finger of the arm broke off like a dry twig and dropped to the floor.

The arm behind him seemed enraged, constricting even more tightly, like a serpent. Kuang Feifan realized his consciousness was starting to fade; if he didn't act soon, the arms would crush the air out of him entirely. To keep himself lucid, he bit down hard on his tongue again.

Blood trickled from his mouth, dripping down his chin onto the prayer beads on his left wrist. In that instant, a blinding flash of white light erupted from the beads. Kuang Feifan instinctively closed his eyes as he pitched forward, falling stiffly onto the ground, face down.