Chen Hanlin had stopped twitching at some point. Emboldened, Yan Ao walked over and saw that Chen Hanlin's eyes were bulging with rage—he was already dead. There were numerous stab wounds on his body, mostly clustered around his chest, and blood had stained his clothes crimson.
"Ha-ha, we won! I killed the ghost, A-Ao! We can finally leave this mall now, ha-ha..."
Lan Zhijie’s crazed laughter rang out from behind. Yan Ao’s brow furrowed even deeper. Though he was glad Lan Zhijie was still alive, he could find no joy in Lan Zhijie's claim that Chen Hanlin was the ghost and that he had killed him.
He had a nagging sense that something was wrong, but what was it? Lan Zhijie picked up the knife from the floor again, walked over to Yan Ao, and said, "Let's go, A-Ao. I think the mall's entrance should be open again. Let's get out of here quick."
"Yeah," Yan Ao muttered, nodding. Although the sudden turn of events was a bit of a shock, getting out of here as fast as possible was the top priority. If Chen Hanlin really was the ghost, then they would definitely be able to leave the mall.
At this thought, Yan Ao felt a bit better and accompanied Lan Zhijie back to the first floor of the mall. Upon arriving there, however, Yan Ao was startled by something displayed right in the middle of the first-floor lobby.
"A-Ao, you see it, don't you? That's why I said Chen Hanlin was the ghost. Look, he's already dead, and his skin is hanging right there," Lan Zhijie said, walking over to Yan Ao with a pale face.
Yan Ao’s expression was equally grim, for in the center of the first-floor lobby, alongside those headless corpses, a bloody human skin was hanging.
The skin was stretched open in the shape of the character for "big" and hung over a row of clothing racks. It had clearly been peeled off very recently, still smeared with plenty of yellow fat and flesh, and had pooled into a horrifying puddle of blood on the floor below.
"A-Ao, look! The mall doors are really open!" Lan Zhijie's excited shout sounded in his ear. Yan Ao looked in the direction of the voice and sure enough, saw that the previously closed mall shutter had rolled up at some point, letting outside sunlight stream in.
At the sight, Yan Ao felt a wave of relief and prepared to head toward the exit with Lan Zhijie.
He could finally escape this ghost town. At the thought, Yan Ao felt a surge of excitement, and his pace naturally quickened.
Because the human skin hung in the center of the lobby, right near the mall exit, Yan Ao and Lan Zhijie had to pass right by it to leave. Although the skin hanging there was somewhat sickening, neither of them cared much since they were about to get out—especially Lan Zhijie, who actually gestured at it with the knife in his hand, as if immensely proud of having defeated the ghost.
Yan Ao wasn't that bold and tried his utmost to keep his eyes from wandering toward the human skin. Yet, the moment he brushed past it, his eyes inadvertently caught sight of a tattoo on the skin.
In that instant, Yan Ao's mind went completely blank. The tattoo was located on the chest of the skin, only about the size of an infant's palm, and featured the fierce head of a wolf. The moment he saw it, a memory instantly surfaced in his mind.
"A-Ao? A-Ao?" Lan Zhijie had already reached the mall exit and, noticing that Yan Ao hadn't followed, turned back to call out to him twice, still waving the blood-stained knife in his hand.
Yan Ao silently withdrew his gaze and walked step by step toward Lan Zhijie. His expression lacked all of its previous excitement; on the contrary, his eyes now held a trace of inexplicable sorrow.
"What is it?" Sensing Yan Ao's abnormality, the smile on Lan Zhijie's face gradually faded as he looked at him in confusion.
"Slash!" Without the slightest warning, a chopper suddenly appeared in Yan Ao's hand, and he brought it down straight onto Lan Zhijie's arm. The sharp blade sank entirely into the bone, showing that Yan Ao had held nothing back with that strike.
"Ah?" Lan Zhijie let out a miserable scream, clutched his bleeding arm, and stumbled back a few steps. Staring at Yan Ao in utter terror, he asked, "A-Ao, have... have you gone mad?"
Without a word, Yan Ao raised the chopper and swung it again toward Lan Zhijie's face.
"Roar!" Lan Zhijie let out a fierce roar and raised his only knife to counterattack.
Two consecutive sounds of blades biting into flesh rang out as they struck each other simultaneously. Yan Ao took a hit to the chest, but Lan Zhijie fared much worse: the chopper struck his neck, lodging deep in the bone and nearly severing his head entirely.
"How... when did you figure it out?" Lan Zhijie wheezed, leaning against the wall. Losing too much blood, his body was beginning to give out, and the look he gave Yan Ao was a mix of shock and fury.
"The skin," Yan Ao spat out two words, wincing slightly from pain as he clutched his bleeding chest and continued walking toward Lan Zhijie. "Brother Chen said he was a police officer, and a police officer would never have a tattoo—that's common sense. But there was a wolf head tattoo on that human skin, which meant it didn't belong to Brother Chen."
"Ha-ha, you saw through me just because of that? How could that be?" Lan Zhijie roared with a ferocious expression, blood continually spilling from his mouth. With his throat slashed open, speaking had become rather difficult.
"Of course not just that." At this moment, Yan Ao's expression suddenly turned cold. A faint purple light flickered across his left and right hands respectively, and two more knives materialized in his grip.
These were the knives he had scavenged from the supermarket earlier and stored away using his skill, One-Cubic-Meter Mobile Warehouse. Yan Ao hadn't expected to use them so soon. He looked coldly at Lan Zhijie and continued, "Do you know who the wolf head tattoo belonged to? It belonged to A-Jie. When we were still kids and didn't know any better, both of us got the exact same tattoo on our bodies." With that, Yan Ao ripped open his clothes, revealing a wolf head tattoo on his chest that was identical to the one on the human skin.
Upon seeing this, Lan Zhijie—no, the ghost disguised as Lan Zhijie—widened his eyes in sheer disbelief.
"You killed A-Jie, and now I'm going to make you pay with your life." Rage flooded Yan Ao's mind. He didn't care whether the entity before him was a ghost or a human; he lunged forward, and the knife in his left hand struck its face first, nearly cleaving its head in two.
"Ssssh!" A spray of blood mixed with brain matter splattered across Yan Ao's face, but he remained unfazed, slowly raising the other knife gripped in his right hand.
"No, you've 'found' me! You won the game, you can leave right now! Really, look, the real door is open..." The ghost shrieked continuously, its body blurring and twisting until it transformed into a horrifying, skinless shape with exposed muscles and blood vessels.
The ghost wasn't wrong. According to the rules of the game, Yan Ao had successfully found it. At the mall entrance, the invisible wall had vanished, and the real door was open—Yan Ao could leave right this instant.
Yet Yan Ao had no intention of letting the ghost go, especially after seeing the body it was currently possessing. Needless to say, this peeled, ghastly corpse undoubtedly belonged to the deceased Lan Zhijie.
At the thought of his best friend dying such a miserable death, Yan Ao cast all hesitation aside and brought his blade down ruthlessly, severing the ghost's head entirely.
"No..." Bound by certain rules, the discovered ghost could not leave its possessed vessel, and as a result, the ghost vanished into thin air along with Lan Zhijie's headless corpse.
Yan Ao sat dazed on the ground. After resting for a while, he dragged his exhausted body to his feet.
Before leaving, he cast one deep, lingering look at the mall and the corpse on the floor that had once belonged to Lan Zhijie, then stepped forward with unsteady strides and walked away.