Chapter 153: The Fluorescent Green Ocean

Chapter 153: The Sea of Flickering Green Light

Meng Siyou returned to the servant's room, intending to rest and prepare for the next day's exploration.

However, a faint rustling sound filtered through the wall from the neighboring room.

The noise was subtle, but in the quiet of the night, every tiny sound was magnified endlessly, like a pebble dropped into a smooth lake, rippling outward in endless circles.

At first, Meng Siyou tried to ignore it, clamping a thick pillow over his ears and silently praying for the noise to stop.

But the sound seemed endless—as if someone were scraping fingernails patiently across the wall, or as if myriad worms clung to every surface of the room, their tiny legs rhythmically scraping against the plaster...

The more Meng Siyou tried to ignore it, the louder the sounds became!

Cocooned in the blankets in a daze, he even began to imagine—his ears tingled as if tiny insects were crawling inside and out of his ear canals...

Near daybreak, Meng Siyou could no longer bear it. He threw off the covers and sat up.

First, he drowsily opened the Book of Fate, but this time, fate offered no vision. At the bottom of the page was only a single line:

"The rest of the story will be explored later"

Meng Siyou: "..."

With a resigned sigh, he climbed out of bed, lit the bedside kerosene lamp, and knocked on the door of the neighboring room.

The door was partially open, and with just a light push, it swung inward with a creak.

Peering through the gap, Meng Siyou saw only darkness inside, but the rustling noises grew clearer and more distinct.

"...Anna? Are you asleep?"

His guard up, Meng Siyou called out the girl's name while edging forward cautiously into the dark room, lamp in hand.

As he moved, the flame of the kerosene lamp guttered, casting dim light across the room—just enough to faintly outline Anna's figure.

Her posture was unnatural.

She stood facing the wall, her face pressed tightly against it, but her feet were planted a short distance away, her waist contorted downward unnaturally, forming a triangular gap between her lower body, the wall, and the floor.

In this impossible posture, her hands were squeezed into the narrow space in front of her, seemingly working at something—producing the eerie, rustling noise that had unsettled Meng Siyou.

Immediately, Meng Siyou retrieved a dagger-shaped artifact from his system inventory, its blade glinting coldly in the dim light.

The solid weight reassured him as he gripped the dagger. He steadied himself and cautiously approached Anna. "What are you doing?"

After a moment of silence—just as Meng Siyou thought he wouldn't get an answer—Anna finally spoke.

Her voice was like rusty cogwheels grinding, each word painstakingly wrenched free in the darkness:

"I'm... searching..."

"So... annoying... Why... can't I... find it?"

Meng Siyou followed up, "What are you looking for? Do you need help?"

"My eyes... There's something... inside..."

Anna's movements seemed to intensify, producing sickening, squelching noises—like fingers digging into something soft, or juice oozing from rotting fruit—drip by drip, splattering onto the floor.

Slowly, she turned around.

The dim glow of the kerosene lamp illuminated her face, and Meng Siyou drew a sharp breath.

Where Anna's eyes should have been, there were now only two yawning voids.

Dark blood spilled from the sockets, tracking down her cheeks in tear-like rivulets, staining the corners of her lips crimson—giving the illusion of a deranged, blood-painted grin.

"My eyes... itch so much—"

Anna stretched out her hands toward Meng Siyou, cradling a mutilated, pulped eyeball in her palms. Her fingertips were smeared with blood and fragments of eye matter—clearly, she had clawed the eye out herself.

She held the ruined eyeball up to Meng Siyou, and amid the cloying metallic reek of blood, he heard her shrieking between sobs, in a frantic voice:

"It itches it itches it ITCHES IT HURTS HURTS HURTS!!"

"Help me look... Look closely... What's inside my eyes...?"

"Why... Why does it hurt so much?!"

Seeing that Anna showed no immediate intent to attack, Meng Siyou soothed her as one would a crying child, coaxing in hushed tones to calm her.

Then, battling nausea, he leaned in to examine the eyeball.

Torn muscles, exposed nerves—the entire orb resembled a burst overripe tomato, its ocular fluid ruptured, the transparent fluid leaking from the gory cavities and dripping from Anna's hands onto the floor.

The eye was so mutilated that it took Meng Siyou some effort to locate the iris—

Within the dark center of the ruined pupil, a faint, sickly, pulsating glow glimmered, its unnatural emerald luminescence standing out starkly in the darkness.

Instantly, Meng Siyou recalled the same ghastly radiance in the eyes of the monstrous Mrs. Ethel before she vanished!

Then, Anna suddenly stepped forward and blew out the kerosene lamp in Meng Siyou's hand, plunging them into utter blackness.

"Look," she breathed against his ear. "Look at the wall... So many, many spots... These are all the things I dug out of my eyes..."

"Go back... Check your own eyes... Do you have them too?"

White-knuckling the lamp, Meng Siyou turned to the wall Anna had been facing.

Now, in the absence of light, he could see it clearly—countless pulsing green specks covered the surface like bioluminescent lichen, festering in thick clusters across the entire expanse!

At last, Meng Siyou understood:

Why had he heard that ceaseless scraping, as if fingers were dragging along the wall?

Why had Anna gouged out her own eye to such a horrific degree?

Because, just as she had said—she had been searching. She had been obsessively scooping out the contents of her eye and smearing them across the wall like paint.

The wall's phosphorescence was the result of her macabre harvest!

What were these alien verdant glimmers? Were they connected to this mansion in some way?

Questions flooded Meng Siyou's mind. Unconsciously, he raised a hand to touch the corner of his own eye, an insidious horror taking hold:

*Right now... are these glowing things already growing inside my eyes, spreading like moss?*

Anna paid him no further attention, returning to her task—head bowed, fingers rooting through the ocular ruin, digging deeper for more of the luminous substance. Dazed, Meng Siyou left the room and returned to his own, the night's events leaving him with a surreal, dissociative haze.

He lay back on the bed, but he'd barely closed his eyes when a chilling realization hit him—

Why had he only seen one of Anna’s eyeballs?

Where had her other eyeball gone?

Meng Siyou opened his eyes and pondered for a moment, recalling Anna’s strange posture earlier—plastered tightly against the wall. Honestly, it had almost seemed as if she were peeking through some gap in the wall, spying into his room…

No way…

…Was she actually watching him?

A sick dread pooled in his gut. Meng Siyou quietly rose from the bed once more and crept toward the wall, now standing just inches away from where Anna had stood.

Estimating her height, he bent slightly and leaned closer to the wall—and there it was. An almost invisible puncture, so small you'd easily dismiss it as a mere crack in the plaster.

"I must be overthinking this...?"

He tried to reassure himself, murmuring under his breath. "This hole's no bigger than a pinprick. It couldn’t possibly go all the way through to the other side…"

Yet despite his hesitation, curiosity won out. Cautiously, he pressed his eye to the hole and peered inside.

A speck of fluorescent green flooded his vision. So close, this tiny glow—smaller than a firefly—swelled into a sea of light, flooding his shrinking pupils.

His mind went blank for a moment before the horrifying truth registered—embedded deep within the wall was Anna’s other eye.

Somehow, that eye, brimming with eerie light, had wormed its way into the very structure of the wall. Now it trembled slightly, with grotesque eagerness, inching even closer to Meng Siyou.

It was just a bare eyeball—no lashes, no lids—yet from its flickering, ghostly pupil, he could discern something unmistakable: a freakish, predatory grin.

*‘Can you see me?’*

The eye nearly pressed against his cornea as it whispered the question, then answered itself, its voice seeping into his mind like spreading poison.

*‘—You see me now? Become my eyes.’*

The glowing green depths beckoned.