Detective Agency of the Bizarre
Chapter 656 - 656 One hundred seventy-five

656: One hundred seventy-five.

It’s coming.

656: One hundred seventy-five.

It’s coming.

Even in the dim light, her eyes, always bright, suddenly lost their sparkle, “I didn’t hear…”

“I know.”

Lu Li put an end to Anna’s panic, “Go check if the door is open.”

An instinctive drift carried Anna forward, but she forgot she now inhabited a human body and staggered a bit.

She walked silently to the door, turned slowly, and a never-before-seen frailty and despair clung to her cheeks.

“The door…is open…”

It came in…

If it were the Uninvited Guests, Lu Li would have triggered death—

“It’s not the Uninvited Guests,” Lu Li replied in a low voice.

The ritual of the Uninvited Guests ends differently, not with the sound of a door opening.

Anna couldn’t feel it, couldn’t hear it, which should be a characteristic of “the door,” but “the door” shouldn’t affect reality, or at least it couldn’t the last time it masqueraded as the Uninvited Guests.

So that means…

Suddenly, a head sneakily peeked out from behind the door, looking around curiously.

“York?” Anna was enveloped in an indescribable great relief, so much so that she forgot about the eerie knocking sounds.

“Anna?

Is that you?” York too was filled with relief, sighing with ease as he stumbled into the dining room.

“Red has made a new discovery; he sent me to call you all back…

Where’s Lu Li?”

“He’s inside,” Anna said, furrowing her brow, one corner missing from her crescent-moon eyes, “What was that knocking sound about?”

“What knocking?” York froze, suddenly uneasy, stammering, “When I came in, the lights seemed off, like no one was here, so I just pushed the door open…”

Anna suddenly turned back, only to see that Lu Li, who should have been at the basement entrance, was nowhere to be seen.

Deep inside the dark basement, an arm grabbed the wooden door

He retreated into the basement.

Realizing immediately, Anna hurried to close the kitchen door, reminding York who had just entered the kitchen, “It’s coming for Lu Li, keep quiet.”

York had no choice but to hold back the questions he wanted to ask, pressing against the door and covering his mouth.

He inexplicably felt a chilling breeze behind him, as if a draft were blowing…

or as if someone were touching his backside.

York turned his head cautiously and saw a dry claw reaching out of a dark crack, caressing his buttock!

“Hmm!”

York’s eyes widened as he jumped up, nearly shouting out loud.

Anna listened in silence to the sounds around her, feeling the subtle changes in the air flow, but apart from the heartbeat of this body, she couldn’t feel anything else, as if an invisible presence was wandering in the dining room.

“The door” had always been shrouded in enough mystery and insolubility—

The eerie silence and unease lasted for a few minutes before the basement wooden door finally opened slowly.

“It has left.”

Lu Li appeared behind the door, speaking with his usual calm.

The situation was more perilous than imagined; by the time Anna reacted and closed the kitchen door, it had already walked into the kitchen, Lu Li could even hear its muffled footsteps there.

Fortunately, the basement door stopped it, and after three intervals of knocking, the presence of “the door” disappeared from outside.

“Did I cause trouble?” York still dared not speak loudly, asking in a hushed voice.

“It has nothing to do with you.”

However, “the door” indeed used York as bait in the trap they had set for them: imagine, when Lu Li and Anna mistook it for Uninvited Guests breaking in, they couldn’t escape or hide.

In the end, Lu Li was seen by “the door.”

Don’t let it hear you, for it can see you.

Don’t let it see you, for it can touch you.

Don’t let it touch you, for it can take you back…

The traps set by “the door” were even more difficult to guard against and malevolent than before.

“What did Red discover?” As the person involved, Lu Li emerged from the shadows sooner than Anna and York, or it might be said, he was never shrouded in shadows at all.

York remembered the matter at hand and hurriedly said, “He didn’t say, he just urgently told me to call you back.”

“Let’s go back,” said Lu Li, closing the wooden door of the basement gently as if covering it with a blanket.

This might have been related to the soft whisper he heard while hiding in the basement.

Back in the clothing store, a steady, warm glow had been kindled in the fireplace.

Gemini Reed sat in front of the fire, his face flickering between light and dark in the flames, mostly serious: “I remember something about ‘Prada.’

Anna, who was last, closed the door and sat down next to the display case with Lu Li, listening to Gemini Reed’s narration.

He hadn’t associated Lu Li’s mention of “Prada” with that incident: people would care about the noise, the erratic tuning, the eerie mutterings like a prayer coming from the radio, but they usually wouldn’t remember the intricate whisperings.

The reason Gemini Reed remembered it was because the prayers repeated a verbose phrase frequently, which included the pronunciation of “Prada.” So when he discovered the radio in the clothing store, he immediately thought of it and had York call Lu Li back.

“Here’s the radio, but I’m not sure if it still works,” Gemini Reed gestured with his mouth towards the radio on the counter, covered in a thick layer of dust and marked with several handprints from when it was moved.

Royal City was still powered, at least the street lamps were lit as usual, albeit dimly subdued by the gloomy environment.

“When did you hear it?”

“It was almost during the time that Royal City turned into a playground; they almost appeared simultaneously.”

Lu Li came up to the counter and switched on the radio; for a moment, the grating static noise filled the first floor of the store.

Turning down the volume, Lu Li asked Gemini Reed for the frequency.

“Uh…

I was listening to the Exorcist channel, then they suddenly burst into the broadcast.”

Lu Li tuned close to the frequency of the Exorcist channel.

Suddenly, amidst the static noise, a human voice emerged, but it was like shouts in a torrential downpour, all drowned by the rain, with only snippets piercing through the veil of sound, faintly surfacing amidst the cacophony.

[To…

survivors…

shh…

evacuate…

from…

zone…

shh…

at dawn…

this…

last warning…]

Tick—

The quartz clock within the store chimed dully at that moment.

It was four o’clock.

There would be two hours left until dawn.

Unfortunately, the content masked by the noise played only once, then the radio went back to emitting a piercing static.

Fortunately, they heard part of it.

Lu Li pieced together the disrupted, missing puzzle, trying to reconstruct several possible meanings: all survivors go to a certain area for evacuation, something will happen at dawn, this is the last notice; all survivors evacuate away from this area, something will happen at dawn, this is the last warning.

However, it might not be accurate; it might also mean the opposite: informing all survivors, the Exorcists’ United Organization has evacuated and will commence rescue at dawn, stay away from a dangerous zone, this is the last notice; informing all survivors, the Exorcists’ United Organization has evacuated to a place far from this area, something will happen at dawn, this is the last warning.

Anyway, “at dawn” is the key point.