The Correct Way Of Feeding The Sick And Delicate Villain

The Ghost Knocks at Midnight (1)

No answer.

Ding Yi kept her eyes closed and felt the coldness clamped around her throat grow heavier. A cold draft blew through the window, causing the panels to creak.

The surrounding was overwhelmingly silent and eerie.

Suddenly, the candle on the shelf went out.

The room instantly descended into darkness. Ding Yi furrowed her brows in discomfort and called out a few times, but there was no answer from Mu Yueshi. And so, she cautiously opened her eyes…

The room was murky. The only thing visible was the moon-white canopy of the bed swaying in the wind, producing a ghastly ambience.

When her eyes finally came back into focus, she saw a shadowy figure in the corner of the room, hidden beyond the muslin canopy. The figure seemed to be staring straight at her.

A person?

It was the middle of the night. Who could possibly be there?

Ding Yi felt her drowsiness vanish abruptly, sending a chill running down her spine!

She suddenly sat up and screamed: “Who’s there!”

“I… I’m the owner of this house.” It was a raggedy woman whose voice sounded hoarse and tired. She looked around the room and muttered to herself: “…I’ve been tricked again. This is my real home.”

“What?” Ding Yi could not understand what the woman was saying.

“He tricked me! They all tricked me!” The woman suddenly became agitated, her voice rising into an accusatory shriek: “They tricked me into leaving and sold this place! They… told me to wait near the bridge, to keep waiting… I didn’t even have any clothes, cold, so cold…”

She then crouched down near the corner of the room and started to cry helplessly. Her desperate sobs sounded uncanny and were deeply unsettling.

After hearing the woman’s incoherent protests, Ding Yi felt a skull-numbing sense of exasperation. As she suspected, second-hand housing was unreliable.

The legal possessor was unclear, the original ownership disputed, and one of the claimants even broke into the house in the middle of the night!

“That… are you sure you aren’t mistaken? This house was seized as collateral, and I just bought it today. Look, I even have the deed right here,” said Ding Yi patiently. And to prevent any tantrums or denial, she added: “You are not the legal owner of this place any longer.”

The woman’s cries abruptly abated.

Half a second later, she rigidly turned towards Ding Yi, her eyes completely dead:

“But I have nowhere to go.”

Ding Yi suddenly felt angry. Is this lady trying to find a bone to pick? Acting all ignorant, she must think that outlanders are easy pickings!

Ding Yi was just about to explode when her eyes fell upon the wet rags, illuminated by moonlight, that the woman wore as clothes. There were pieces of sand and rock stuck to her rags, and her back and arms were covered in purplish wounds.

She was an absolutely destitute sight to behold.

And so Ding Yi hesitated. This poor homeless woman is such a pitiful person.

Ding Yi: “…Ah, never mind. Since you have nowhere to go, you can stay for the night. But, I’ll tell you now, I won’t let you stay forever…”

The woman stared at Ding Yi, not a single speck of light in her eyes.

“Can you stand?” asked Ding Yi.

The woman slowly stood up.

Ding Yi rubbed her temples. She felt like she should find something for the woman to wear, but just as she was about to get up, she felt a faint sense of incongruence as her eyes passed over the woman’s fragile figure.

As soon as she grasped what that feeling was, her heart froze.

Ding Yi’s sight casually settled on the space below the woman’s skirt…

She doesn’t… have any feet!

Ding Yi’s body seized up, her entire being surrounded by fear.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to move, it was that she couldn’t.

After waiting for Ding Yi to do something, the woman tilted her head in confusion, asking:

“Aren’t you coming over?”

Ding Yi felt her teeth uncontrollably chatter.

She was at her wits end, fervently pinging the system: Boss!!! Save me! There’s a ghost here!!!

But there was no reply.

Ding Yi fell into despair.

The atmosphere in the room had suddenly turned sinister, and Ding Yi dared not to make a sound.

It was then that a cold gale swept across the room. When the canopy was blown away, Ding Yi saw the woman in the corner of the room clearly for the first time. She had a pale, lifeless face, and her lips curled into a cruel, bloody smile-

“You’re… scared,” said the woman, smiling creepily. Her soft, delicate voice contained a curse-like resentment, and from her eyes, two trails of bloody tears flowed. She spoke as if to herself:

“You’re the one who told me to stay. So why don’t you- come and join me!”

As soon as the woman’s voice stopped, her twisting, ghastly figure quickly approached.

“Ah!!” Ding Yi was scared out of her wits, screaming at the top of her lungs: “Like hell I would!! I’m a living person! Ahhhhhhhh! It’s not real! It’s all fake! Socialist values* protect me!!”

*(Materialism is a core tenant of Marxist socialist thought.)

With a dull thud, the back of Ding Yi’s head collided with the ground as she fell off the bed in terror, sending a sharp pain through her head.

The grim specter’s figure suddenly became distorted.