Gamers Are Fierce-Chapter 83 Shadow Puppets

Cheng Wen sat in a chair in his rented room, restlessly tapping his feet against the floor. The vibrations from his shoe soles stirred up the ash on the ground.

The orange glow of the cigarette butt was the only light source in the room. Cheng Wen anxiously puffed smoke, occasionally sticking out his tongue to lick his dry lips.

Why hasn’t he come up yet?

Cheng Wen muttered to himself. He reached under the chair, pulled out a steel baseball bat, and walked towards the door to see where Cheng Wu was.

Before he reached the door, TAP, TAP, TAP. The knocking sound echoed.

He’s here!

Cheng Wen thought with relief. He bent his knees and put his eye to the Cat’s Eye, looking outside.

Through the Cat’s Eye, he saw nothing but a field of red.

Cheng Wen blinked. He looked through the Cat’s Eye again and still saw only red.

Is it a red good-luck paper from the Spring Festival pasted outside the door?

Unsure of his memory, Cheng Wen hesitated and spoke softly towards the door, "Cheng Wu, is that you?"

There was no response.

Cheng Wen licked his dry lips and tightened his grip on the steel baseball bat. He was about to open the door when he heard the sound of cloth shoes rubbing against the cement floor.

SCRAPE. SCRAPE.

The footsteps were not heavy but exceedingly slow. They easily conjured the image of an old woman with a hunched back and a staggering gait, pacing back and forth outside the door.

Cheng Wen raised his voice a little. "Cheng Wu?"

No reply. Instead, an old woman’s shrill, loud voice came from outside, "Erzhu, Erzhu? Is that you?"

This damn old hag, Cheng Wen cursed inwardly. Worried that the old woman’s noise would wake the other tenants, he placed the baseball bat in a corner where it couldn’t be seen from outside and pushed open the security door.

The door opened. An old woman with white hair, a wrinkled face, and a hunched back stood in the hallway, clutching a cloth bag tightly.

"Where’s Erzhu? Where is he?"

Cheng Wen saw the bulging bag in the old woman’s hand. His eyes widened as he hurriedly said, "Erzhu is inside. Granny, please come in."

"Oh, alright."

The old woman nodded slowly and lifted her foot. freewebnoveℓ.com

THUD.

A heavy object fell to the ground outside the security door.

RUMBLE. RUMBLE.

An irregular sphere dropped onto the cement floor of the hallway outside Cheng Wen’s room, rolling continuously.

Bathed in moonlight, Cheng Wen saw clearly what the sphere was.

It was a head.

Cheng Wu’s head.

There was no face Cheng Wen was more familiar with than that of his twin brother.

But now, Cheng Wu’s eyes were wide to their limits, bloodshot and filled with pure terror. His mouth gaped, as if he wanted to scream but could not make a sound.

From the severed neck, blood occasionally spurted from the blood vessels.

SPURT. SPURT.

In an instant, Cheng Wen understood what the field of red he’d seen through the Cat’s Eye was—it was one of Cheng Wu’s bloodshot eyes, from his severed head pressed against the outside of the security door.

His scalp tingled and his legs shook uncontrollably. He tried to scream at the old woman, who seemed to be smiling faintly, but his vocal cords were like a rusted conveyor belt, unmoving.

His usual bravado and penchant for bullying the weak had, at this moment, dissolved into the most primitive, essential cowardice and fear.

Panicked, he slammed the security door shut and, with trembling fingers, fumbled with the lock.

Grabbing the steel baseball bat from the corner, Cheng Wen stepped back and screamed, "Help! Fire! Fire!"

In the dead of night, calls for help often went unanswered by neighbors, but shouts about a fire usually drew the attention of all nearby residents.

Cheng Wen clutched the baseball bat and shouted, but he heard no footsteps from residents in the corridor. The entire building seemed to have fallen into an absolute, eerie silence.

He forced himself to calm down. Staring fixedly at the front door, he slowly retreated, grabbed the mobile phone from the coffee table, and dialed the emergency number.

As a local thug, he was usually the one driving ordinary people to call the police. But now, desperate, Cheng Wen could only cling to this call as his only lifeline.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

The call connected quickly. Cheng Wen yelled into the phone, "Hello?! This is Jing..."

"HEH, HEH... HEH, HEH..."

A stifled, slow cackle came from the other end of the phone, interrupting Cheng Wen.

"Heh, heh... heh, heh... good grandson, help Granny open the door."

The old woman’s aged voice came through the phone. Cheng Wen reflexively threw the device, as if his palm had been scorched by steam at a hundred degrees.

What is happening?!

Cheng Wen didn’t dare to breathe loudly. He quietly rushed to one end of the living room, pushed open the window, and looked down.

The drop of over twenty meters made his head spin. The residential building still had the rough, granular wall coating common last century, and the windowsill edge offered less than a palm’s width of space, making it extremely difficult to find a foothold for climbing.

Outside the security door, the gentle knocking gradually, almost imperceptibly, grew louder.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

It sounded as if a large iron sledgehammer was striking the security door.

The reinforced steel door was being bashed inwards, forming a dent. A sliver of moonlight leaked through the resulting gap, falling on the ash-covered floor.

The pain of his twin brother’s death was completely overwhelmed by his fear of his own.

Cheng Wen hesitated for a moment. He then tucked the steel baseball bat into his belt, bent down, and crawled onto the windowsill.

He awkwardly twisted his hand to grip the protruding windowsill. His upper body pressed against the window’s edge, while his lower body slowly extended outside the building.

His legs dangled. Cheng Wen struggled to maintain his balance, trying to swing his legs to reach the edge of the windowsill on the floor below.

As he struggled, the deathly knocking on the door abruptly ceased. Silence returned.

Cheng Wen stopped his downward climb. He sensed something, his gaze fixed on the door, which now had a visible crack from the bashing.

CRACK—

A hand, as flat as a sheet of paper, stretched in through the gap in the door.

It was followed by an arm, a head, a neck, an upper body, and a lower body.

The old woman—one hand bent forward, the other back, her face bearing a strange smile—slipped in diagonally through the door gap, thin as a sheet of paper.

Because she maintained this tilted position, Cheng Wen could only see half of her face.

The wrinkled skin on that half-face was unsettlingly "transparent." Its lines and contours were distinct, and the moonlight revealed all the tiny blood vessels beneath its surface.

Cheng Wen suddenly remembered a type of performance he’d seen in his childhood—this was like a shadow puppet from a shadow play.

"Grandson, where are you?"

The paper-thin old woman slowly turned, her body remaining horizontal. She revealed that half-smile to Cheng Wen. "Ah, so there you are."

The shadow-puppet old woman’s arms swung frantically, one forward and one back, but her entire body remained horizontal as she charged towards Cheng Wen.

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