Chapter 776 743 Red Letter

Night had fallen, and the moment of immediate crisis had passed.

The ghosts that loitered inside the post office hadn’t shown up again after their failed attack—an encouraging sign. At least they weren’t constantly watching them; otherwise, the cost would have been much more than a single attempt.

Three people sat on the sofa in Room No. 7, each deep in thought.

Wang Shan, an ordinary person, didn’t dare to join in on such a topic and remained silent in the room.

“To imprison this ghost is very difficult. First, we can’t possibly go out after six in the evening. No one can be sure whether this will trigger the deadly rule of lights out; it’s quite possible that the moment we step outside, we could be dead. Therefore, we can’t take that risk,” Yang Jian answered Sun Rui’s earlier question.

“Since we can’t go out at night, we can only act during the day when the lights inside the post office are on, using this rule to avoid death by the lights being turned off.”

“But the problem is, ghosts won’t appear during the day.”

Li Yang immediately added, “So, it seems we can only find and detain the ghost during daylight. At night, it’s impossible to deal with the ghost.”

“The ghost isn’t on the first floor. It might be on the second or third, or even as high as the fifth,” Yang Jian spoke calmly. “It is hiding somewhere in this post office, but I personally speculate that it’s most likely on the fifth floor.”

The old man known as the Door Knocking Ghost had died falling from the fifth floor before.

This was a clue.

It suggested that the secret lay within the fifth floor of the post office.

The ghost might have wandered down from the fifth floor; it was just their bad luck on the first floor, or perhaps to the post office, they were regarded as invaders, hence the ghost targeted them.

Sun Rui pondered, “Indeed, to detain this ghost, we need to locate it during the day. But the post office is large, with thirty-five rooms, and each floor is segmented from the others. It’s not something we can do easily, going up or down; the difficulty of imprisonment is great.”

“At night we are at a disadvantage, as if bravely withstanding the ghost’s method of killing. We’d suffer too much, and it could easily lead to a team wipeout.”

“Going upstairs is key,” said Yang Jian. “For now, the ghost can be disregarded; it can’t handle all three of us.”

“But going upstairs requires sending letters. The three letters alone are not enough. Only Wang Shan and Wan Xing from another room have two letters, indicating that once we reach the second floor, we will be forced to split up,” Sun Rui added.

Yang Jian then looked around the room, “Wang Shan, is there no other way to go upstairs apart from this method?”

Wang Shan in the room hurriedly replied, “There might be, but the only method I know that’s more reasonable and faster is stealing letters. The messengers upstairs should know more than me—they might have a better way.”

The task of sending letters seems simple, yet it’s filled with various eerie changes.

It’s up to the messengers themselves to uncover these mysteries.

Some insights, gleaned through experience, are passed down by word of mouth among messengers, whereas others remain undiscovered.

“The messengers on the first floor have sent too few letters, and being mostly newcomers with a high mortality rate, the information they get is indeed limited. Even if there is some information, it’s quickly taken upstairs and unlikely to remain. Therefore, the older messengers who have survived longer know much more. To truly understand and find shortcuts, we must go upstairs,” Yang Jian conjectured, shaking his head slightly.

He felt he couldn’t afford to waste time staying on the first floor; he at least had to see what the second floor was like.

After all, the second floor was occupied by those who had successfully delivered letters at least three times, moving beyond the category of newcomers.

“Let’s leave it here for today. We’ll see how things are tomorrow; none of us should sleep tonight. Who knows if the ghosts roaming around the post office will reappear,” Yang Jian continued.

“That’s true. The post office is somewhat safer during the day. It’s too dangerous at night; we can’t do anything but stay in our room,” Sun Rui sighed and said.

Outside was pitch-dark, and with ghosts wandering about, who would dare to go out?

In the following period, the three of them sat idly in room number seven, each of them not daring to rest, needing to keep an ear out for any sounds outside the door.

No one could be sure whether the ghost that had failed its attack and left just now would attack a second time.

However, during his spare time, Yang Jian also took the chance to explore the room a bit to see if he could discover any clues or anything unusual.

“Captain Yang, this room is very normal, so normal it’s almost inconceivable. There’s nothing strange about it, which is in itself the strangest thing, because normally, after the previous messenger stayed here, they would leave something behind. Accumulating over time, it’s impossible for there to be no trace at all.”

Wang Shan hadn’t slept either; watching Yang Jian wander around the room, he spoke up, “When I first came here, I had the same idea as you, Captain Yang, to see if I could find any clues. But, unfortunately.”

“There are no clues, the room is very clean, as if not a single human trace has been left behind.”

“Can’t make sense of it, can you?” Yang Jian stopped, looked at him and said, “Now that you mention it, I pretty much understand the characteristics of this room.”

“It’s a kind of restart mechanism, at a certain specific time, or perhaps when the person staying in the room dies, the room will reset to a certain moment in the past, and any traces left by other people will be completely erased. So no matter what the people before us left behind, the room won’t keep it.”

“So that’s how it is.” Wang Shan pondered and felt that this explanation made a lot of sense.

Yang Jian then said, “It seems I don’t need to waste any more time, and just wait peacefully for daylight. When will your third letter probably come out?”

“Maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after, within these two days. It’s precisely because the letter is coming soon that I came to this post office ahead of time. But it’s said that the messengers upstairs can come back to the post office anytime and anywhere, unlike us who are forced to appear here,” Wang Shan said.

“Good, I hope to see your letter tomorrow.”

Having said this, he didn’t continue his search and simply sat on the sofa in the living room, closed his eyes, and started to rest.

Li Yang, on the other hand, was very bold; he leaned directly against the wooden door, always on guard for the appearance of ghosts.

Sun Rui didn’t speak but was holding a notebook, recording something unknown, perhaps establishing a file or analyzing the entire situation; in any case, he wasn’t idle either.

Time passed bit by bit.

The post office was so quiet there wasn’t a single noise, and the three of them sat in different places without speaking a word.

The night was long and arduous, but it would eventually pass.

Twelve hours went by.

At six o’clock in the morning.

The darkness in the post office dissipated, light seeped in from outside the door, and at the same time, the room’s lights turned off very punctually.

As the lights went out.

Everyone in the room was simultaneously startled, fearful of some unforeseen accident occurring.

But then they realized it was dawn, and the reason for the automatic lights turning off inside the room was part of the normal changes within the post office and posed no danger.

“Time’s up,” said Yang Jian, who had been sitting with eyes closed on the sofa, now speaking up.

He hadn’t slept, just tried to conserve as much energy and remain as cautious as possible.

Even though he could go several days without eating, drinking, or sleeping, in such a special environment, he still needed to be sparing and meticulous.

“Li Yang, open the door; let’s go out and take a look.” Sun Rui slowly stood up, supporting himself on a golden palm as he walked forward.

“I leaned against the door all night long and didn’t sense any danger; the ghost shouldn’t appear on the first floor anymore.” Li Yang nodded and took the initiative to open the door.

Though it was daytime, the inside of the post office wasn’t much different from the night. It was still dimly lit; the only difference was that the lights were on during the day, so it seemed slightly less oppressive and dark.

They all walked out.

Nothing had changed; the post office was exactly the same as when they had arrived the day before.

Yang Jian glanced back at the wooden door.

There were a few fine scratches on the doorknob, marks left by fingernails that had yet to disappear.

There was no doubt these were caused by the ghost hastily retracting its hand the night before.

The ghost had inflicted some damage to the wooden door.

That was unusual.

Keep in mind, the door had been twisted out of shape the night before but hadn’t shattered. Things in this place resided because of the supernatural and weren’t easily destroyed.

“Creak!”

The sound of doors opening came as the doors of the two adjacent rooms opened as well.

The emaciated man named Wan Xing touched his bruised face, his complexion sour as he stepped out. When he saw Yang Jian and the rest, he paused then quickly averted his gaze in fear.

At the first-door entrance, a woman named Qian Rong looked haggard and at a loss, standing at the doorstep. She was lonely and helpless, seemingly having given up all hope.

That’s because she used to depend a bit on Wan Xing, dating each other, helping one another.

But with Yang Jian’s arrival, Wan Xing had become unreliable, and these few people were even more dangerous; she didn’t dare approach them, fearing she might meet an untimely death.

“Did you receive any letters?” At that moment, Wang Shan finally walked out of his room and asked.

“No, no letters,” Wan Xing replied reluctantly, responding hastily under Yang Jian’s gaze.

Qian Rong also replied, “I haven’t received any either.”

“Team Leader Yang, something strange is happening. Normally, there would be letters in the morning, but none of us three has received a single letter today,” Wang Shan frowned, “This is different from before.”

“Where do the letters generally appear?” Yang Jian inquired.

Wang Shan explained, “Typically, they can be found in three places: on the nightstand inside the post office rooms, pinned to the doors of the rooms we stay in, and there is one more place… the counter.”

“Different locations suggest different methods of delivering the letters. Letters on the nightstand are personal tasks, letters on the doors are tasks for all the messengers in that room, and as for the letters on the counter, I can’t judge, but I assume they are tasks for all the messengers on that floor.”

“Similar to this, the three methods of delivering letters also increase in danger accordingly. This is something I’ve gathered from interacting with the messengers upstairs.”

“The counter is over there.”

Sun Rui’s gaze shifted as he looked toward an old counter set in the lobby.

The counter was vintage, covered in dust, clearly having not been wiped for a long time.

But unexpectedly, an unsealed envelope, neatly arranged, had found its way onto it at some unknown time.

However, what was different this time was that the envelope was not the yellow kind Yang Jian had encountered before, but rather a blood-red one.

This was a red-letter envelope.

Yang Jian also noticed the noticeably distinct red letter on the counter.

“A red letter?” Wang Shan was taken aback.

He had never encountered such a situation before. In the previous two deliveries and what he had learned from others, there had never been any mention of red letters.

Though he was witnessing it for the first time, it was clear that since the letter was placed on the counter, it meant that it was a task for all the messengers on the floor to act together.

And the red envelope obviously hinted at something unusual.

“The difficulty of delivering the letter has increased,” Wang Shan immediately thought.

Yang Jian walked over, staring at the red letter in front of him, “There’s no writing on it, not even an address. How can we deliver it?”

“The address should appear once you pick up the letter, but the way it appears is a bit special,” Wang Shan hurried over and cautioned.

Yang Jian reached out to take it, but Sun Rui interjected, “This could be a curse; it’s better not to touch it. I think we should just leave it here and ignore it.”

“Please, don’t do that. If we don’t take the envelope today, by tonight, everyone on the first floor might die.”

Wang Shan promptly warned, “I’ve seen newcomers refuse to deliver letters, but the next day, I found one of them dead on his bed, clutching the letter tightly, his face twisted in horror… The cost of refusing to deliver a letter is even greater than that of tearing it up. If you’re unsure, you can tear up the envelope.”

“But I’ve never seen this red letter before, and I don’t know what the cost of tearing it would be. Perhaps it would directly kill everyone on the first floor, or perhaps it would summon an even more terrifying ghost.”

Sun Rui stroked his chin, “Sounds like a lot of trouble.”

“Don’t worry, even if it’s a curse, I can bear it alone,” Yang Jian declared undeterred, extending his left hand to pick up the red letter.

As soon as the letter was picked up,

A cold breeze arose from the counter, blowing away the dust and revealing a crooked line of writing that formed a sentence.

It was an address denoting a strange and foreign location.

Deliver the letter to the owner of Fushou Garden No. 78.

Deadline: Seven days.

Clearly, it was a messenger’s task.

While there was no specific recipient named, nor were the consequences of failure outlined, and of course, no reward was mentioned,

It was simply a straightforward letter delivery task.

However, everyone there—Wang Shan, Wan Xing, and Qian Rong—knew that if the letter wasn’t delivered successfully, it would surely lead to death.

The cost was simple and didn’t even need to be explicitly stated.

As for the reward… since there was no precedence, no one knew what to expect.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by novlove.com

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