CNC: Chapter 45

Candleman Festival (15)

Tonight’s ‘Excellent Volunteer’ randomly went to Old Yu and Xia Wei’s Room 103, so Chi Nan and Ye Chang switched rooms with them.

Xia Wei slept in Ye Chang’s bed as he wished, but he developed a fever again due to overworking. At this moment, he rolled up in Ye Chang’s quilt in a daze and shouted, “Uncle, I have a bad feeling. Tonight…”

“Don’t have a crow’s mouth.” Old Yu brought him a box of anti-fever and anti-inflammatory medicine from Chi Nan and slammed the medicine into this person’s mouth to stop his nonsense. “Go to sleep. The nightmare might come to an end at dawn.”

The last night of the mission was always the hardest. Everyone prayed that after dawn, the shadows they had locked up in the exhibition hall would starve to death due to a lack of light source.

Yet in the end, it wasn’t a 100% certainty, so it was a gamble that bet the lives of the eight sleepwalkers left.

The waiting made time seem extremely torturous. On this night, Wu Ying lost sleep.

Currently, she was tossing and turning in her bed.

The sheets and bedding might’ve been changed but last night, they exchanged dormitories and two men lived here. Wu Ying was someone who was naturally a bit resistant to men. The thought of a man living in her room made her physiologically uncomfortable.

Still, there was no way. She knew that the two people from Room 101 were just trying to help them…

Wu Ying sighed softly and turned over. The windows in the dormitory were sealed with tape and cotton sheets, and there was no light in the room.

In fact, Wu Ying was most afraid of the dark. She had to turn on a night light since she was a child in order to fall asleep at ease. Yet in this nightmare, the light source was the same as the source of danger. She could only suppress her fear.

She was afraid of the darkness and she was afraid of being locked up. This completely dark and sealed environment made her very uneasy.

She hadn’t been able to sleep for the last few days and nights.

“Dyson? Are you asleep?” she turned and whispered a question to her roommate in the darkness.

“Dyson, can I talk to you? I can’t sleep?”

Dyson Sen slept well. There was only the sound of breathing and she didn’t give Wu Ying an answer.

Wu Ying felt that this was fine. At the very least, the sound of the other person breathing reminded her that she wasn’t alone in this dark room.

“I’m actually most afraid of the darkness, but I haven’t dared to say it. I feel ashamed…”

“I am afraid of the dark and of confined spaces. I’m afraid of being alone. I’m so timid…”

“Say, do you think the residents of Candleman Town are also afraid of the darkness, so they light candles day and night without stopping?”

“Oh, they just want to turn us into human wax and use us to complete the sacrifices of the candle people… I was thinking too romantically.”

Wu Ying couldn’t fall asleep, so she talked to herself nervously. It was in a very quiet voice so as to not wake up her roommates. She just talked to herself for comfort.

“I don’t know if we can successfully stop the Candleman Festival by demolishing the wall today, although it might be useless to think about it now…” Her voice lowered and she curled up on the bed. “I don’t know if the process of turning to wax hurts. I am afraid of pain, more afraid than of death.”

“I imagine that if I have to die one day, I would choose the least painful way to die. I want to close my eyes and then die.”

“Forget it, saying these things is bad luck, bah.”

Wu Ying sighed. She was just about to close her eyes when she felt a ray of light shining from above her head.

She had been in the darkness for so long that this glimmer of light was particularly dazzling and instantly captured her full attention.

She sat up vigilantly and looked in the direction of the light, but it was dark in front of her and there was no trace of light at all.

Was it because she was afraid of the darkness and she saw a hallucination?

Wu Ying rubbed her eyes and continued to stare in that direction. If she remembered correctly, the place where the light had just flashed should be the location of the door.

Was there someone hiding outside the door? She had been talking to herself before, but now she couldn’t make a sound due to nervous tension.

She stared like this for more than 10 seconds, but there was nothing but darkness. Wu Ying became even more certain that she was hallucinating.

Sure enough, poor rest would affect her awakening value. It was easy to make mistakes in judgment…

Just as she was about to lie down again and have a good rest, the strange light reappeared!

Wu Ying’s shoulders tensed and her heart jumped to her throat. “…Who…who’s there?”

It was like her voice fell into a muddy swamp, slowly falling and disappearing without any response.

At the same time, the light leaking in through the crack in the door spread little by little. It widened from a line to a whole stream, flooding into the house like water.

“Who is it? Dyson, Dyson, wake up. Something is wrong outside the door!” Wu Ying started to call out to her roommate.

Something strange was happening, but Dyson Sen still slept in a deaf manner.

There was only the sound of Dyson Sen’s heavy breathing and Wu Ying’s heart beating wildly.

Wu Ying gritted her teeth, got out of the bed barefoot, and groped her way to Dyson Sen’s bed using the light from the crack in the door. “Dyson, wake up!”

She pulled, dragged, and even slapped Dyson Sen, but the other person showed no signs of waking up.

Wu Ying had some experience and she noticed that something was wrong. She knew she was in an unknown crisis and she was the only one who could save herself!

She forced herself to calm down as soon as possible, but her rhythmic breathing could no longer be calmed. She almost bit her lip before she remembered that Dyson Sen had hidden a weapon!

No one knew about it except for her and Dyson Sen. This secret weapon was like a life-saving charm for them…

Wu Ying pushed away the sleeping Dyson Sen and hurriedly rummaged through this person’s bed to search for it

In an instant, she felt the gun under her pillow.

Wu Ying gripped the gun and loaded it. She raised it toward the gradually expanding light and made a gesture of pulling the trigger. “Who is it? If you don’t say, then I will shoot.”

She stared at the widening crack in the door. There was a creak and the light became more dazzling. She blinked a few times, and her tear glands that were stimulated by the strong light kept secreting liquid.

The light was approaching her and the shadows flickered, like a monster handling a candlestick to patrol the night, quietly sneaking into her dormitory in the middle of the night.

“Please stop. No matter who it is, I will shoot if you take one step closer!” Wu Ying issued a final warning.

Unfortunately, the uninvited guest who approached with the light source ignored her warning.

Wu Ying’s hands shook so badly that she could barely hold the gun in her hand. She had never fired a gun before…nor did she think that one day she would shoot someone. However, she couldn’t wait any longer. Once the light reached her, she would turn to wax!

3, 2, 1—

Wu Ying closed her eyes the moment she pulled the trigger, but she didn’t hear the expected cry. The silence in the room didn’t seem to change due to the bullet she fired.

If it wasn’t for the pain of the recoil when the bullet was fired, she would’ve almost thought that she hadn’t pressed the trigger just now, and everything was an illusion..

It was quiet, as if the fired bullet had fallen into the mud.

The light continued to move in her direction. Wu Ying fired the gun frantically and screamed with despair, “Don’t come heeeeeeere!”

She didn’t notice that when she raised her hand, the shadow of the gun was cast on the wall behind her.

The shadow went against the principles of optics and human common sense, and made a motion to change the direction and aim the gun at Wu Ying’s abdomen.

Bang!

Wu Ying shook violently before bending down to cover her abdomen that had been pierced by the bullet. Blood dripped out between her fingers and she turned her head in disbelief. Her shadow on the wall was holding a gun and aiming the gun at her forehead.

Wu Ying’s eyes widened with horror, but the feeling of being shot through her skull didn’t come. Instead, there was a familiar voice.

“Shh, don’t let her die so soon. I need her to help me convey some important information to the volunteers.”

“This way, the special volunteer can make their final decision.”

---

Dyson Sen had a dream in which Wu Ying kept calling her name. It was just that the distance was too far so she couldn’t hear it clearly.

There seemed to be continuous gunshots in the dream, but she was trapped in a weird maze and couldn’t identify the source of the gunshots.

It wasn’t until four in the morning that Dyson Sen woke up from a series of bizarre dreams.

The dormitory was quiet, and there was no sound except for her breathing. Dyson Sen didn’t think much of it and was ready to go to sleep again.

Her consciousness had just become a bit dazed when she was suddenly awakened by a gust of wind blowing in from the corridor.

The door and windows were locked so no wind could come in!

Dyson Sen shot up from the bed. “Wu Ying, wake up! Wu Ying?”

To her surprise, the always alert Wu Ying didn’t respond. There wasn’t even the sound of her breathing… The unusual silence rang alarm bells in Dyson Sen’s heart.

“Wu Ying?”

She grabbed her mobile phone beside her pillow and didn’t care about anything else as she directly turned on the torch and aimed it in the direction of Wu Ying’s bed. She repeatedly confirmed it several times. The bed was empty and Wu Ying was gone.

The folds of the quilt showed obvious traces of someone sleeping there, but Wu Ying, like the boys in Room 107, had disappeared without a trace from the dormitory.

She immediately searched under the pillow, but the gun she had been carrying with her was gone.

What was going on?

Dyson Sen took out a Swiss Army knife as a substitute for the gun and walked toward the door with the phone’s torch. She found it ironic. On the one hand, she knew that light was a source of danger in this instance. On the other hand, as a human being, she had to rely on light to find someone. However, why did Wu Ying disappear silently?

Wu Ying definitely wasn’t someone who would move alone without much noise. If there were any new clues, she would definitely inform Dyson Sen, unless…

Dyson Sen tried her best to drive these horrible thoughts out of her mind. She grabbed the doorknob and looked stunned. The door was unlocked…

She pushed open the door, and the creaking sound spread in the dark corridor, making her feel numb.

“Wu Ying? Where are you? Answer me.” Dyson Sen cautiously raised her torch to look around. “If you can’t speak, make a little noise and I’ll go find you.”

She was an experienced sleepwalker and knew there were many extreme situations where the victim was put in a situation where they couldn’t call for help.

Sure enough, the moment she finished speaking, there was a thumping sound in the dark corridor.

The sound was strangely dull, as if someone was knocking on an iron door with their head.

If she judged correctly, the sound came from the direction of Room 103, Old Yu and Xia Wei’s dormitory.

Thump thump thump.

Dyson Sen aimed the torch toward Room 103. In the pale beam of light, a head was banging against the iron door.

“Wu Ying!”

Dyson Sen rushed over like crazy. She accidentally stepped on a big pool of blood on the ground and the blood splashed, hitting Wu Ying’s stiff, half-wax face

Blood was flowing from her abdomen and stopped as her body turned to wax. Dyson Sen approached and determined that Wu Ying had been shot in the abdomen. Her incompletely waxed left hand was holding the culprit, the gun.

“What is going on? What happened?!” Dyson Sen almost threw herself in front of Wu Ying and asked in a trembling voice.

Wu Ying’s half-wax lips trembled a few times. Unfortunately, her tongue was completely turned to wax and she couldn’t make a sound.

“Don’t worry, tell me slowly. Don’t worry…” Dyson Sen suppressed her sadness and tears and tried to calm herself down in order to dig out the truth while Wu Ying was still breathing.

Wu Ying’s right index finger trembled. She moved it to touch the blood on the ground and write a few sentences one by one with difficulty.

[Ye Chang’s shadow]

[Had me tell everyone he is going to kill them all…]

Dyson Sen’s breathing paused and her pupils shrank. She stared in horror at the bloody words that Wu Ying tried her best to leave behind.

[Everyone]

[Before the Candleman Festival.]

[I’m only the first.]

[Kill Ye…]

Wu Ying didn’t have the strength to write the last word ‘Chang.’ She lowered her hand in pain and looked at Dyson Sen with eyes full of despair and pleading. Her lips trembled wildly, and her left hand holding the gun also trembled.

Dyson Sen couldn’t read lips, but at this moment, she seemed to understand the words that Wu Ying was trying to express.

She was saying: Please shoot me. It hurts too much. It really hurts.

Proofreader: Kat