As they passed by the scattered chains at the door, Liu Wen paused for a moment and picked up a piece from the ground.
"What are you doing?" Tian Fang asked, confused.
The next moment, Liu Wen grabbed both ends of the chain with force, her face turning red as she put all her strength into it. But the iron chain still didn't break.
"I'm just trying to see if it's really true," Liu Wen said, letting go of the chain, her voice a bit breathless.
The interior of the house was simple, suggesting that the former butler was a modest person.
On one side of the door was a storage bin with a few umbrellas inside.
Wen Xirou recognized them; they were identical to the one the black-clad man, who claimed to be the butler, had been holding.
As soon as Tian Fang and Liu Wen entered, they began looking for where the study was. To them, the diary was most likely to be found in the study.
They pushed open two doors in succession and finally found the study behind the third door.
Tian Fang and Liu Wen were overjoyed and quickly entered to search for the butler's diary.
Wen Xirou followed them in, but her goal was something else—the bondage contract. This is something mentioned in the farm female worker's diary.
Wen Xirou couldn't guess where the butler might have placed such documents, so she began opening one cabinet after another.
Luckily, her luck held, and after opening several cabinets, she finally found the so-called contracts. A thick stack of papers.
The text read: "Life, death, sickness, and disease are in the hands of fate; once the silver is paid, this contract is hereby established."
At the end of the document, the signature was a circle and a red thumbprint, since one party could not write.
Wen Xirou grabbed all the contracts and stood up. Her gaze then landed on a newspaper spread out on the desk.
The headline in bold Song font read: "Sucking the blood and draining the marrow of female workers, the biggest scam behind a local charity entrepreneur."
Wen Xirou instinctively brushed off the dust from the newspaper, picked it up, and held it in her arms along with these contracts.
Having done that, Wen Xirou turned around to find Wan Qian.
But just then, outside the house, a sudden burst of dog barking rang out.
Before Wen Xirou could react, Liu Wen, ignoring the diary they hadn't found yet, quickly dashed toward the small house's door.
When they had entered with Wan Qian earlier, they hadn't closed the door.
"That thing's following us! Quickly, shut the door!" Liu Wen's face was filled with fear, her voice cracked from the urgency.
"What thing?" Wen Xirou froze.
"The dog!"
However, Liu Wen was still a step too late; that thing had already reached outside the door. In the dim moonlight, a vague, indescribable outline could be seen, crawling toward the house in a twisted and bizarre posture.
"Where's Wan Qian?" Seeing that it was too late to close the door, Liu Wen instinctively looked for Wan Qian. Perhaps only Wan Qian could handle this creature.
Xiao Lin shrank timidly in the corner. When Wen Xirou and the others entered the study earlier, she didn't know what to do and didn't dare stray too far, so she simply stayed by the door, idly passing the time.
The sudden turn of events left her at a loss. Hearing Liu Wen's question, Xiao Lin seemed to snap out of her daze and quickly pointed toward the dark, pitch-black staircase.
"Wan Qian just said she was going upstairs to have a look."
The others looked toward the stairs. The staircase was pitch black, as if no light could penetrate it. The light that fell into it was swallowed completely.
The creature was getting closer. Half of its body was already inside the door.
Using the moonlight that filtered through the window, Wen Xirou vaguely saw it—its entire body covered in countless trembling, tendril-like appendages.
A dog? Wen Xirou thought it looked more like a mutated, gigantic, and deformed sea urchin.
Tian Fang, also seeing the creature, turned again to look at the stairs. There were no other choices left.
"We're going upstairs!"
Clearly, the second floor wasn't without windows, so why did it feel so dark? Wan Qian scratched her head, reluctantly turning on the flashlight on her phone.
This phone was also sent to her along with her great-uncle's letter. Wan Qian's own phone had mysteriously broken a few days before coming to the farm.
That day, she woke up and, out of habit, reached for her phone by the pillow, only to find her hand soaked with water. The 3,000-yuan domestic phone looked like it had been submerged in water for years, all rusty, and even the battery panel had swelled up.
Luckily, her great-uncle had sent her a new phone, which solved her urgent problem. However, it seems that great-uncle's memory is really failing him. He sent the phone but forgot the charging cable.
It was only in the past few days that the butler found a charging cable for her, allowing her to finally recharge the phone. That was why she was able to use her phone again, returning to her late-night internet-addicted lifestyle.
Using the light from the phone's flashlight, Wan Qian twisted open the door to the second-floor bedroom.
Like the rest of the second floor, the bedroom was simple. It was clear to see that the former butler had a modest and unpretentious style.
As she was about to enter, the entire building suddenly shook violently. Dust rained down from the ceiling. Wan Qian couldn't dodge in time, and the dust blinded her eyes.
Instantly, tears welled up in her eyes. She could only keep trembling her eyelids, but no matter how hard she blinked, she couldn't shake the dust out of her eyes.
At the same time, a series of high-pitched screams came from the staircase outside. Wan Qian felt a surge of panic. Damn! It couldn't be an earthquake, could it?
But an earthquake wouldn't just shake once and stop. With her heart racing and her vision blurry from the dust, she couldn't see the way clearly. Wan Qian could only stumble in the direction she remembered, running toward the stairs.
As she moved, the flashlight on her phone wobbled incessantly, casting shaky light into the pitch-black stairway. The darkness was instantly dispelled.
Wen Xirou looked up. The stairs, which had seemed endless moments ago, now only had seven or eight steps left to reach the top.
Wan Qian stood there, expressionless, half-closing her eyes and silently looking down at them. Although she didn't speak and her expression was indifferent, just seeing her standing there immediately dispelled all fear.