Lu Zizhen froze for a second, then sighed dramatically.
"Yeah, yeah… you really are a buzzkill. We're supposed to be doing a haunted house exploration, and you've turned it into a home inspection show."
Dou Tang calmly retracted his fist and turned toward the grand hall. The first thing he saw was a massive staircase.
A red carpet—once bright, now dulled to nearly black—ran up the middle, blanketed with thick
dust.
Everything around them was smothered in gray, like the place hadn't seen a single living soul in years.
Only the floor was clean.
Across it stretched countless enormous bare footprints, each sticky and dark.
The mansion's owner, it seemed, had plenty of time—but not a shred of discipline.
Whatever wandered these halls did so every day, leaving its heavy, wet tracks behind but never bothering to erase them.
Two corridors branched left and right toward the wings of the building. The central staircase rose upward toward the higher floors.
In the middle of the hall stood a bronze statue—a goddess raising a sword toward the heavens. The tip of that blade pierced the air all the way up to the clock tower dome.
Plip… plip…
Something thick dripped from above.
Dou Tang frowned and walked beneath the statue, tilting his head upward.
Through the hollow stairwell, all the way up to the fourth floor, he saw where the viscous crimson droplets came from.
A bloody coil of intestine was strung across the open void like butchered meat hanging to dry. It had belonged to someone once—someone alive.
Now it dangled there, torn out by brute force, swinging gently like a grotesque garland.
"Looks like someone's already met their end," Lu Zizhen murmured. She took one horrified glance upward, then quickly stepped back to cover Huaiyin's eyes. "Well… serves them right. The curious die early."
"Don't be so blunt," Dou Tang said evenly, his gaze fixed on the dangling gut. Then, with a long, steady breath, he prepared himself.
The muscles across his body tensed and swelled, veins bulging along his temples and forearms like coiled serpents.
He stomped once, exhaling with a thunderous roar that reverberated through the entire mansion.
"—HRAAAAH!"
The sound tore through every corridor, rattling the windows and echoing off the walls.
If kicking the door open earlier had been a polite greeting, then this roar was a declaration of war.
I'm here, Ao Oni.
For a heartbeat, the mansion held its breath.
Then, from somewhere deep within, came an answering roar—warped and trembling, half-bird shriek, half-animal whimper, carrying a bone-piercing eeriness that made the forest outside erupt into chaos.
Birds burst from the treetops in flocks, screeching as they fled far, far away. Dou Tang bared his teeth in a grin. Excitement flickered in his eyes.
Elsewhere in the mansion.
Running.
Running without end.
Every hallway looked the same.
Every room connected to another wrong door.
The mansion's interior was a labyrinth that defied its outer shape—walls shifting, twisting, mocking their attempts to escape.
Three figures stumbled through the dim corridors, panting hard, their steps uneven and frantic.
The woman's hair was a tangled mess. The man's shirt clung to him, drenched in sweat. A camera bounced wildly against his chest; the mic clipped to his collar was soaked through.
They no longer cared about the shoot, their image, or the show. They just wanted to run.
The three survivors had once been four—the same group Dou Tang had seen the day before. Now, one of them was dead.
They had come to Nagano for the same reason—to investigate the so-called Ao Oni Mansion.
The intel had come from a self-proclaimed onmyōji, who had warned them repeatedly not to seek the truth of the legend.
But for the sake of their ghost-hunting channel's next viral hit, they ignored him.
That morning, they'd hiked into the mountains again, slipping past park rangers along a closed-off trail.
And what they found didn't disappoint.
The deeper they went, the colder, damper, and heavier the air became.
It reminded them of the old Sugar Bean Channel videos—every site Dou Tang had "cleansed" still exuded that lingering, chilling energy.
They mistook it for authenticity.
"This is it!" they'd said, thrilled by the eerie tension that set their nerves alight.
When the decaying mansion appeared through the fog, they hadn't hesitated. One of them pulled out a pair of bolt cutters and snapped open the rusty lock.
They shoved open the heavy redwood doors and burst in with nervous laughter, cameras rolling.
None of them noticed that, a few minutes later, as they hurried up the grand staircase, the massive doors behind them slowly, silently swung shut.
The nightmare began soon after.
They were exploring an empty guest room when footsteps echoed through the hallway outside.
Thud… thud… thud…
The sound froze them in place. Their hearts jumped into their throats. "What the hell is that?" one whispered.
"Is—Is someone else here?" another stammered.
The steps were heavy. Too heavy—each one sounded like it belonged to something gigantic. Slowly, they faded down the hall.
"W-we should just go," the cameraman whispered.
"It's—it's probably nothing," the male host said, voice shaking. "Middle of the day, remember? There's no such thing as an 'Ao Oni.' Maybe it's… I dunno, a homeless guy living here."
Even as he said it, he didn't believe a word. No one would choose to live this deep in the mountains.
"Let's just leave before it comes back—oh, for god's sake, stop filming!" the female host snapped, glaring at the cameraman still recording.
The scriptwriter, trying to lighten the mood, forced a laugh.
"Hey, maybe it's good footage, right? We can edit this into something great—" He cut himself off. His grin faded.
"But yeah. Let's get the hell out."
They crept to the door, cracked it open, and peeked down the hall. Nothing.
The corridor stretched empty and silent.
The carpet was so worn and dark they couldn't tell if any footprints marked it.
They stepped out cautiously, moving in the opposite direction from where the footsteps had gone.
Then came the scream.
The scriptwriter—who had glanced back over his shoulder—let out a cry so high and sharp it pierced the air.
The others turned—
—and froze.
At the corner of the hallway, something leaned out.
A massive, malformed head slid into view, one enormous hand gripping the wall. The head nearly reached the ceiling.
Its skin was an impossible shade of dark indigo.
Two bulging eyes—each the size of a child's fist—stared straight ahead. Below them, a hooked nose and narrow, lipless mouth twisted upward.
Its hand—wide enough to crush a basketball—rested lightly on the corner, as though it were a child playing hide-and-seek.
When its gaze met the scriptwriter's, its thin lips stretched wider, almost shyly, into a smile— one both bashful and curious, like a predator savoring its first look at prey.
Its glossy black eyes reflected all four of their trembling figures. "Ao Oni—Ao Oni!!"
The scriptwriter's scream echoed through the halls.
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