After eating and drinking her fill, Rose returned to her own room.
She peeled off her innocent little white dress with disgust and tossed it carelessly onto the floor.
Then she changed into a plain white shirt and tied her hair up.
On the desk in her room sat the cold milk and cereal that her younger brother, Jeremy, had prepared for her.
This was her nightly ritual—she always needed a little something to eat and drink before bed.
Even if she’d just finished dinner, it didn’t matter.
She sat down at the table, but unlike most people, she didn’t mix the cereal and milk together.
Instead, she took a sip of milk, then a bite of cereal, repeating the motion like a machine.
She casually pulled out her laptop and opened a hidden folder—one filled entirely with photos of young Black men.
In the pictures, they were barely clothed, their bodies covered in all kinds of wounds and bruises, their faces twisted in terror as they stared into the lens.
As the bloody, miserable images flickered past her eyes, Rose’s otherwise expressionless face slowly curled into a hint of satisfaction.
The faint glow of the screen couldn’t reach the deep hollows beneath her eyes. With that cold, pale light and her ghostly white outfit, she looked like nothing more than a skeleton wrapped in skin—drooling over the normal human beings flickering across the monitor.
Just as she was about to close her collection and hunt for her next victim, she suddenly felt a chill brush past her—an icy draft that swept right beside her.
Rose instinctively looked up at the windows.
All three windows in the room were shut tight, and the door was closed as well.
There was no way wind could get in.
She didn’t dwell on it, though, and turned back to her computer to resume her search.
But the very next second, a faint, shadowy figure appeared not far away.
“Who’s there!”
Rose was immediately on guard, her head snapping up.
But all she saw were empty curtains swaying gently—nothing else.
Still, for some reason, those curtains seemed to take on a vaguely familiar outline.
A creeping unease began to settle in. She stood up and headed toward the nearest light switch.
With a soft click, light flooded every corner of the room.
She looked back toward the window—everything was perfectly normal.
【Words are not to be spoken lightly. Describing things too vividly can summon unwelcome events. Thoughts are born in the mind, then released through words—and words carry a strange power that can shape reality.】
For some reason, the young man’s words from earlier that day echoed in her mind.
At the time, she’d dismissed them as superstitious nonsense—but now, in hindsight, they sent a chilling shiver down her spine.
Her heart began to race, and her nerves tightened.
But Rose was no ordinary person—she had always been in firm control of her emotions, her mind sharper and more resilient than most. Before long, she managed to steady herself again.
Still, those words wouldn’t leave her alone. Like a cursed melody, they kept replaying in her head, over and over.
Frustrated, she grabbed a pair of earphones from the desk, plugged them into her laptop, and cranked the volume all the way up.
Heavy metal music pounded against her eardrums, so loud it made her scalp tingle.
At that moment, she didn’t care about damaging her hearing—she just wanted to drown out that haunting voice and reclaim her peace of mind.
But it was useless.
The young man’s voice persisted, as clear as ever.
And if she listened closely, it almost seemed laced with mockery—amusement, even.
“I must be tired,” Rose thought.
She abandoned her plans for the night and decided to head straight to bed.
She took off the earphones and shut the laptop.
But as the screen went dark, she caught a familiar silhouette reflected in the black surface.
A tall, strong Black youth stood there in the darkness, his face now fully visible.
Chris…
Rose’s eyes widened in disbelief.
His brain had been removed by her father and tossed into the trash—he was dead beyond all doubt.
So how could he be standing right in front of her?!
Was she hallucinating?!
She instinctively tried to get up and turn on the lights.
But the moment she turned around, the young man who had been at least a dozen meters away was suddenly right there, inches from her face!
At such close range, she could finally see his features clearly—and the sight sent a wave of terror crashing through her.
Most of Chris’s face looked just as she remembered it—but the other half had transformed into that of an elderly white man!
Two entirely different skin tones, two different faces, fused into one.
The sheer wrongness of it—the impossibility—was so overwhelming that Rose even forgot to scream.
A heavy slap cracked across her face.
Her mind went blank as her body toppled sideways, knocking over the table and crashing to the floor.
Then, a pair of ice-cold hands wrapped around her throat.
Instantly, she felt a bone-deep chill pierce through her, draining the strength from her limbs like water from a cracked vase. She couldn’t even lift her arm.
“Die! Die! Die!”
Chris’s half of the face snarled in fury, twisted with rage—while the old man’s half wore a wide, gleeful smile.
As the grip around her neck tightened, Rose’s face flushed red, then slowly turned purple…
Just as death seemed certain, a voice came from the doorway.
“Did you spill your milk again? I made it just like you asked—cold—so why are you still—”
Jeremy stopped mid-sentence when he saw his sister lying unconscious on the floor.
He rushed over to check on her, then immediately started shouting for his parents.
The dark estate villa erupted into light in an instant!
The first to arrive were the grandparents—who had already switched bodies—followed shortly by the couple, still in their pajamas.
Dean Armitage strode forward quickly. Seeing his daughter unconscious, and noticing the dark handprints bruised around her neck, he shot a fiery glare at his son beside him.
Realizing he was being misunderstood, Jeremy hurriedly stammered an explanation.
“I didn’t do it! She was already like this when I got here!”
Seeing that his son’s expression didn’t seem like a lie, Dean Armitage finally took a closer look.
He noticed that the handprints were oddly proportioned—no one in their family had hands that size.
Who had done this? Only Rose herself could tell them—once she woke up.
Having dealt in organs and bodies for so long, the estate was better equipped than most private hospitals—both in medical supplies and facilities.
It didn’t take long to bring Rose back to consciousness.
But the moment she woke up, she shot up from the bed like a coiled spring, her face contorted in sheer terror!
“It’s Chris! Chris’s ghost came for revenge!”
“No—and that old man who had the surgery! The artist!”
“They’re one person! They’ve become one person!!”
Rose’s complete loss of control, her frantic screams—so unlike her usual self—shocked everyone in the room.
“Rose, calm down… Ghosts don’t exist… And revenge isn’t real…”
“If they were coming for revenge, we would’ve met them long ago…”
The others tried to comfort her, but the fear in Rose’s eyes only deepened—it grew even worse!
She could see them. The villa was filled with them—dense, shadowy figures standing behind everyone, dangling upside down from the walls.
Their faces were all the same: grotesque blends of Black and white features, sewn together in unnatural union.
Suddenly, an inverted ghostly figure dropped down right in front of her face—and stuck out a tongue with blinking eyeballs on it…
