Horror Game Designer

I was a cowardly man. I never dared to go out at night because I felt like there was something waiting for me outside the door. Home was the only place where I felt safe. However, ever since father and mother went missing, everything changed. Father and mother went missing at home. That night, I was woken up by my parents. They told me to run and leave home. However, when I opened my eyes, my home was scarily quiet.

I hid under the blanket and peeked into the living room. The furniture and electronics were all there. Nothing was missing. If anything… There were additional shadows there. They stayed there quietly like coffins standing upright.

Finally, it was morning. I pulled open the curtain and ran into the living room, shouting my parent’s names. There was no answer. I opened the main bedroom door. My parents were gone. I quickly called the police, but the neighbours told the police that it was me who murdered my parents. They said they could hear arguments and pleas coming from my home throughout the night. They called me a crazed murderer. They said they heard my parents yelling my name through the night.

Even now, the police couldn’t find my parents. In this world, I should be the only one who knew where they were hidden. Look… They are here now…

The night enveloped Li San Hospital. After the last ray of light disappeared, the doors of the ICU units became coffins as they leaned on the walls. Shadows spread like moss. The man with the missing eyelids lay on the bed and slowly stopped struggling. After he fell asleep, white eyes appeared on the walls and doors. Various barely humanoid creatures crawled out. The horrors from the man’s imagination came true. They crawled towards his bed after he fell asleep.

This power was beyond that of a normal big ghost. The three patients crowded beside the bed. Su Mo, who hugged the heels, wanted to hide under the bed.

“Is the source of mutation his brain?”

The ground trembled like someone stomped heavily on the floor. Fingers clawed through the windows. Everyone could hear a shrill shriek. A giant face appeared at the ICU ward door. It was the face of a middle-aged woman. She was in deep pain and fatigue. Her cheeks billowed in and out like a sail.

“Chen Meng! Chen Meng!”

The face wanted to squeeze into the room. However, it was held back by the thin lines between the doors. The endless bells tinkled.

“Is this his mother?” Xuan Wen walked forward. However, she only took one step when she was assaulted by a sense of vertigo. The shadow on the ground seemed to have turned into a cliff. If she moved further, she would fall into the shadow world. The monster yelled sharper as she tried to enter the ward. The thin threads snapped one after another as blood splashed everywhere. Emotional fragments fluttered. The bells chimed faster. They matched the man’s racing heartbeat. It felt like the whole ward was shaking.

“These threads are not normal threads. They seem to represent the man’s taut nerves. When all of them snap, he will never wake up again.”

The real world was the reverse of the shadow world, but neither was less authentic than the other. The mother’s face finally entered the ward. It yanked off most of the lines. Her giant head kept expanding as she stared at the sleeping man in the bed. If the ward was the man’s heart, something his mother did in the past had fully dominated his heart, so that he couldn’t help but be haunted by it.

The man’s body curled up involuntarily. The load-bearing wall of the ward faded away to reveal the white bones underneath. It was a white spine, and the father lived inside it. The father had wasted away until only his skeleton remained. After the father appeared, the insomniac with the dragging head didn’t hesitate as he took out a bottle of pills. He climbed onto the bed and shoved all the pills into the man’s mouth. The sleeping man seemed to be infiltrated by something. His body convulsed violently. Two forces fought in his head.

The mother’s face started to grow age spots. It rapidly aged until it flaked away.

The father in the spine failed to struggle to get out before he was yanked back by some force. The wall slowly returned to normal. The screams and shrieks retreated to the shadows. The man in the bed took off the blindfold and woke up!

His ward before and after his sleep didn’t change much. The only change to him was that there were more snapped threads between the many doors.

“You saw the ghosts, right? They will come out once I fall asleep! They’ll come to find me!” The man pulled on his hair. His eyes were red.

“I think I’m close to healing you. However, to do that, I need your full cooperation.” Xuan Wen touched the lines between the door. “What was your occupation before you came here?”

The man calmed down after some time. He looked forward with his crimson eyes. “I was an actor. Many people loved me when I was young.”

“There were many eyeballs looking at you in your dream. Have you been stalked before?” Xuan Wen planned to reconstruct everything from his dream to figure out the correlation to the shadow world.

Many big ghosts possessed haunted houses. However, the scariest among them were people like Zhang Ding. They could replay their painful memory in their haunted houses. This man in the ICU appeared to be such a ghost. However, he still hadn’t gained full control of his power.

“How is that related to my illness?” The man was unwilling to answer.

“Every question I ask you now will be very difficult for you to answer. They will expose your heart and thoughts. However, we need to do that to cut the mutation out of your system.” Xuan Wen dragged Su Mo out of the bed. “You are too dangerous. If you don’t want to cooperate, I’ll leave now.”

“Before I fell sick, I was quite good-looking, but I was never famous. Therefore, I asked my friend to pretend to act as a paparazzi to follow me and to drive up some hype. I actually enjoyed the feeling of being stared at a lot. It felt like the world was my stage…”

“And then what happened?”

“My friend died in a car accident. Their eyes are still on me. I can’t seem to shake them. I start to suspect there are dead people in the corridor and dead bodies at the corner. I didn’t dare to go anywhere, so I only stayed at home.” The man widened his eyes with fear. “Then, the stalking eyes appeared in my home too. My parents became so strange, like something had taken over their bodies.”