Trembling At A High Altitude

"I saw him drawing an unlock pattern once," he told me his skin was too dry, and the fingerprint sensor wasn't responsive, so most of the time he used a pattern to unlock it,"

a man who had a long conversation with the chubby student earlier suddenly said to Li Teng.

"What was the pattern?" Li Teng asked.

"From what I remember, his unlock pattern was quite simple, just three strokes, sort of like this… Huh? No, that's not it. It should be like this… Still wrong? Then it's... like this... Hahaha! I got it right this time!" The man tried three times and actually managed to unlock the phone!

"Good job, if you've found any useful clues, you've made a great contribution," Li Teng patted the man's shoulder, then opened the phone's photo gallery and found the video the chubby man had recorded before his death.

Everyone crowded around, eager to see what the chubby man had encountered before his demise.

The video was over half an hour long; it seemed to keep recording after the chubby man had died until the phone's battery ran out and shut down.

At the start of the video, the few women present turned their heads away as soon as they saw what was being filmed.

Several men, however, continued to watch the video intently.

"Look at these shoes, this foot, it's that female staff member! She must have seen the chubby guy dead there; why didn't she say anything when we were looking for him?" someone pointed at the screen and said.

"Do you expect her to react like a normal person?" someone retorted.

The video continued to play, and soon everyone fell silent.

In the frame, there were no upright blood-red eyes that the chubby man had seen, but rather what the chubby man wanted to see but didn't—the phone had captured it all.

But in the next moment, there came a scream of fear from the chubby man, and the phone screen began to shake violently.

It was as if the chubby man had seen something terrifying.

"Hasn't he seen it before? Why such an intense reaction?"

"What exactly did he see? It must be different from what we saw, right?"

"Rewind the footage, freeze it and see if we missed any details."

"What details are you looking to see?"

The crowd buzzed with speculation.

Li Teng did rewind the video, back to the part that everyone enjoyed watching, played it over and over, and all the men began to study it carefully together.

"Did you guys see anything?" someone asked.

"We did."

"Oh? Let's hear it."

"I realized that if a person is beautiful, they're beautiful all over."

"I meant, did you see any valuable clues?!"

"I saw something."

"You go ahead and tell it."

"I noticed, unmarried, childless."

"You can tell that? You're amazing!"

The crowd discussed various things.

The women overheard the men's discussion and, thinking they had discovered important clues, quickly came over to look, only to quickly avert their gaze after seeing the screen.

"Boring! Shameless! You guys really have no limits…"

Feminist criticism came from behind.

"What do you know!" a man shot back.

"Stop bickering, did you notice this detail?" Li Teng finally spoke up.

"What detail?" the others quickly asked.

"At the 27-second mark, just before this frame appeared, there was a flicker in the entire video. It seemed like another image flashed during the flicker," Li Teng adjusted the video footage.

Unfortunately, the phone's video player had limited functions and couldn't freeze on the exact frame Li Teng wanted.

"Is there a laptop somewhere in the Mountain Villa we can use?" Li Teng asked two female staff members.

"Inside villa 6, there is a desktop computer," one of the female staff members answered Li Teng.

"Can you take us there to use it?" Li Teng made the request to the female staff member.

"Sure, please follow us," the female staff member gestured for Li Teng and the others to follow.

Li Teng, carrying the charger and charging cable along with the chubby man's phone, followed the female staff out of the villa and headed towards villa 6.

The others quickly followed suit.

The two female staff members led the way, with the rest following behind; they soon arrived in front of villa 6.

The female staff member unlocked villa 6 and ushered everyone inside.

Villa 6 was obviously much larger than the other villas.

Because, it also served as the conference hall for the Mountain Villa.

The first and second floors were no different from the other ordinary villas, just with more rooms.

The third floor housed the conference hall and took up more than three hundred square meters, being one vast hall without any other rooms.

The ceiling of the third floor was eight meters high, almost as tall as three levels of a standard residence.

Though called a conference hall, it could also be used as a cinema hall. A professional projection screen hung on the front wall, twelve meters wide and eight meters high, almost the size of a small theater screen in a cinema.

This screen was mainly used in conjunction with a projector.

The computer mentioned by the female staff member was the one connected to the projector.

There was no monitor, just a tower; if Li Teng wanted to use this computer, he would have to turn on the projector and use the large screen as a display.

Determined to figure out the mysterious clues hidden in the video filmed by the chubby man before his death, Li Teng had the female staff turn on all the equipment, connected the phone to the computer tower, transferred the video of more than half-hour into the computer's hard drive, and then started playing it on the huge screen.

Upon starting the playback, several men watched the screen with rapt attention.

And they occasionally glanced at the female staff member.

To search for clues, Li Teng had to magnify certain key frames in the video, making the onlooking men even more focused.

"This… hey… aren't you guys a bit too frivolous?"

The women started to protest.

This Li Teng, always looking so serious and earnest on the surface—had he gathered everyone here just to project these images onto such a large screen for leisurely viewing? Wasn't that just too frivolous and shameless?

Even Yuki Noto showed an embarrassed expression after looking at the screen.

Li Teng, of course, was not that kind of frivolous and shameless man.

He searched through the computer and found some video editing tools.

After editing the video, he began to play the suspicious segment frame by frame.

When played directly, that suspicious segment of the video showed interference ripples which were too blurry to see clearly on the phone.

But once he copied it into the computer, processed it with professional video editing software, and projected it onto the huge screen, Li Teng quickly found the hidden image within the video.

A gigantic, vertical, blood-red eye!

The men, who had been concentrating on the screen, suddenly saw this huge blood-red eye and couldn't help but jump in fright, with some retreating several steps and nearly sitting down on the ground with a thud.

When the women saw this gigantic, vertical, blood-red eye, fearful expressions also appeared on their faces.

Wasn't this eye too terrifying?

They had misunderstood Li Teng! Li Teng wasn't being frivolous and shameless, but was actually looking for clues, and he had indeed found something hidden!

After seeing the vertical, blood-red eye, Li Teng stole a glance at the female staff member.

The female staff member still stood there with a pleasant smile, as if all of this had nothing to do with her.

"What's with this blood-red eye?" someone asked in a low voice after regaining composure.

"I don't know, it was clearly that thing, how did it turn into this?"

"Yeah! We were watching just fine, why bring up such a scary thing?"

"It's not like he did it, it was originally in the video. That fat guy must have been scared to death by this eye, right?"

"Now that you mention it, the eye isn't that scary, but I was still startled at first glance, my back started to feel cold."

"This eye must be haunted."

"I don't know if the eye is haunted, but I do know there's definitely a hole behind this eye."

"I suspect you're driving at something, but I have no proof."

"..."

The crowd buzzed with discussion.

Li Teng stared intently at the blood-red eye, and after a while, he zoomed in on the image again, enlarging the blood-red eyeball to fill the entire screen.

"Wow!"

The crowd screamed.

Once the blood-red eyeball was enlarged to fill the entire screen, the mirrored surface formed by the pupil reflected the image outside the grid.

It was the image of the petrified fat man, retreating and sitting on the ground in terror.

The image was so clear that one could see the fat man's expression of terror, and even his shadow on the ground was distinctly visible.

"There's something wrong with this video," a man walked up to Li Teng and muttered.

"What's wrong with it?" Li Teng asked, as he had yet to find any valuable clues. These cannon fodder... companions might provide him with significant help if they had discovered something.

"The video shot on a cellphone can't be this clear, how many times have you enlarged it? How can it still be so clear?" the man pointed out the inconsistency he had noticed to Li Teng.

"Indeed," Li Teng nodded. He had realized this fact even without the man mentioning it.

And he knew even more than the man.

In Li Teng's view, this video clip had likely been altered by mysterious powers.

This mysterious power could possibly be the scriptwriter behind the mission, who had hidden important clues within this video in such a manner.

Now, Li Teng had keenly discovered this clue, but unfortunately, he had not yet decoded its deeper meaning.

Li Teng reckoned that once he found the crucial clue within the video, he might be able to find the hidden path to escape. Only by finding that path could he lead everyone out of the villa alive.

But what exactly was the clue?

Li Teng enlarged the video, enlarged it, and enlarged it further, inviting everyone to observe closely, but they found nothing useful.

Li Teng then shrank the video, shrunk it, and shrank it again, still inviting everyone to observe closely, but again they found nothing useful.

They could only temporarily give up on researching the blood-red eyes.

Let's see if there's anything abnormal in the rest of the video.

Was the chubby man really scared to death?

The rest of the video may provide an answer.

Unfortunately,

since the cell phone was held in the chubby man's hand, facing the direction of the lattice door, the screen did not capture him.

The image of the blood-red eyes in the form of interference patterns did not appear again later.

Thus, it was not possible to observe what happened to the chubby man through the reflection in his pupils.

All that could be heard were the chubby man's cries for help from the video.

After a while, the lattice door opened.

A female staff member walked out from inside.

She glanced at the chubby man with a calm expression, the video still unable to capture the chubby man, but his screams could be heard clearly, as if he had encountered something extremely terrifying.

Li Teng quickly captured a frame and then enlarged the female staff member's eyes, trying to view what the chubby man was going through at that moment through the reflection in her pupils.

Unfortunately,

only the image of the upright blood-red eyes was clear when enlarged, reflecting the chubby man, whereas the enlarged eyes of the female staff member in these frames turned into gray blurry spots, with nothing discernible.

After glancing at the chubby man, the female staff member disappeared from the camera's view, her footsteps indicating she had left the bathroom.

"You saw our chubby companion die with your own eyes, how did he die?" Li Teng walked over and straightforwardly asked the female staff member.

"I'm sorry, I'm not very clear about this matter," the female staff member replied to Li Teng with a smile.

Li Teng figured that no matter how much he questioned these two female staff members, he was unlikely to get any useful answers, which was probably a setup of the plot.

If this segment of the video was shot normally, it at least indicated one thing.

That is, the chubby man did not die at the hands of the female staff member, but at the hands of another mysterious person, or Ghostly Entity.

The two female staff members were probably not the most terrifying presence in Xianyu Villa.

There was another mysterious and horrifying presence lurking behind the scenes, controlling the life and death of these people.

This Mysterious Power was capable of invisibility and could kill easily, and it seemed its attacks were not limited by the presence of others—it appeared to have only one restriction: after killing someone, there would be a cooldown period of one or two hours before the next person would be killed.

Of course, all this was just Li Teng's preliminary judgment, which might not necessarily be accurate.

"Something's wrong! Very wrong! There's something off about this place! I know what's happening! I know how they died! Ah..."

The man who had earlier come over to talk to Li Teng about the video resolution was now standing one or two meters in front of the screen; he suddenly began pointing at the screen very frantically, shouting and screaming.

But his shouting turned into screams after only a couple of shouts.

Then, his screaming stopped, and he forcefully grabbed at his own neck.

Li Teng happened to have the chubby man's cell phone at hand; seeing the scene in front of the screen, Li Teng quickly picked up the phone and started filming.

A moment later, the man in front of the screen suddenly flew up, head first, and slammed into the exceedingly hard ceiling at high speed.

When his body fell heavily back to the ground, his entire head had been smashed to pieces...