Unlike Huang Li earlier, Cao Xuedong had inadvertently betrayed his fear of me. Smiling wryly at the former instructor’s inability to fully rein in his emotions, I said, “I’m fine, Instructor Cao. I believe you need our help to see what’s wrong with your house?”

“Of course,” Cao Xuedong chuckled and said, “Huang Li told me about your visit. I have been expecting you. Come on in.” He whirled around and began walking deeper into the darkness of the house and we followed just behind.

The last of us had barely entered through the threshold when the door swung with an invisible force and clicked shut, plunging all of us into pitch-black darkness that I could not see anything. Blasted hell! I cursed quietly, It’s all because of the bloody liquor that I have become careless and clumsy to have fallen into such a trivial trap!

“Godd*mmit!” Lin Feng was the first to burst with an expletive, “It’s a trap! *hick*” His knees began to give way and with Chongxi weighing him down, he began leaning to the back suddenly. Having just entered the villa, he should have been able to lean on the door, but instead, he crashed to the floor with Chongxi down with him. “D*mmit!” He hissed and I scrambled over to him, juggling between helping him up to his feet while struggling to pull a completely-stoned Chongxi back up. It was a marvel that despite the crash, Chongxi still showed no signs of waking up.

“What should we do now?” Lin Feng barked at me once he got up and I extracted my Spirit Gourd and released my Spirit Wolves. I needed them to search for Cao Xuedong’s scent.

Half a dozen of silvery, spectral forms of wolves appeared at my heels. With my instructions, they lowered their snouts and got to work sniffing around at once,.

Within minutes, the alpha male of the pack stopped to look back at me before it dashed forward into the darkness with the rest of its pack in tow, snarling as they padded after their leader. The six spectral wolves formed a neat file that we followed behind quickly and it oddly reminded me of the time when Master Six hurled me back through Time, although I was accompanied by countless of twinkling stars during my travel through the wormhole instead of a scary and abyssal blackness of complete oblivion!

I set alight a cigarette and flicked it away from me. We watched it flying away, leaving a short tail of burning embers until it suddenly disappeared. There was nothing of it hitting a wall or ground, otherwise we would have seen a tiny explosion of embers, and we saw nothing in the miniscule glow. Not even the foot of a table or the leg of a chair! We were standing in an empty expanse of nothing! Sh*t, I cursed, This is not the inside of the villa! And I don’t even know where we are now!? And the staggering darkness threatening to engulf us whole only made the trepidation stronger.

I had once heard that most people had nyctophobia. The intense and persistent fear of darkness, or more accurately the fear of the vast emptiness around us. This was mostly due to the fear of the unknown. The fear of possible or imagined dangers concealed by the darkness that might pop out and catch us unawares. Hence the darkness was a substance of fear itself, more so, since humans could see nothing or feel nothing in the dark. I, for one, might already be frightened and terrified if not for the fact that my feet are still feeling the sensation of hard ground and the sight of my spirit wolves pacing before me in a straight line. Lin Feng was just behind me, still carrying Chongxi. I could hear his heavy pants, although I could not say if he was getting afraid or he was getting tired bearing Chongxi.

I frowned and lighted another cigarette, welcoming its flavor that supplied me with a brief bout of relaxation and calm. But I knew for sure that I was getting afraid, for even my fingers were trembling as I struggled to hold on to my burning stub. With no Shiyan Blade with me and the complete unfamiliarity to our enemy this time, I could hardly say that I was confident.

We meandered on in the darkness until I finished my cigarette, then I saw it. Two dim dots of light in the far distance ahead of my wolves. But it was not a comforting sight as I felt myself growing tense. It looked like the eyes of some beasts or monsters, identical to the gleaming eyes in dark I saw at Mount Changbai!

The wolves seemed to notice my caution and they shared my wariness. Moving coherently, they formed up in a spearhead formation in front of me and crouched, their backs arched menacingly in full readiness to charge. Breathing slowly but heavily, we moved step by step forward carefully. My steps were still wobbly due to the lingering hangover that I was teetering on the edge of collapsing. Absolute Vodka, I reflected in the dark, It’s a good drink, all right! But never again before work!

Our slow and gingerly approach of the pair of dim glows, concomitant with the low growls of my wolves, ended ignominiously with the discovery of what emitted the glows. It was not the eyes of a monstrous behemoth, but rather, two simple lamps smoldering harmlessly. In between both lamps, flanked by both of them, was a door, closed and locked.

With a look at Lin Feng, who swallowed a gulp of saliva in disquiet, I heard his voice asking me in the dark, “Open it?” which I responded with a nod and a wordless assent. He walked up to the door and before I could stop him, he slammed his foot into the door with a deep Bang! and it burst open, swiveling wildly on its hinges that threatened to give way. Cold winds rushed around us like the rapids of a raging river, coming from outside the door and the air made me shiver. Picking up my anxiety through my telepathic link with them, the wolves assembled and charged like an arrow out the door, their long jaws agape, sharp teeth bared, ready to snap at any foe they find!

I peered out the door carefully and found nothing wrong outside. The snarls of my wolves came to an end as my emotions began to simmer down. They stood outside the door, vigilantly keeping watch.

I walked out the door. Everything seemed fine outside, but in truth, nothing was fine at all and I was utterly shocked beyond words when I beheld the view outside. Lin Feng trailed just behind but unlike my more-reticent disposition, he spat and cursed when he saw what was waiting outside, “Sh*t! What in the godd*mned world is happening here?!”

The lonesome street lamp outside, which dull and dim glow did merely a perfunctory job in illuminating the darkened street that was howling ominously in the chilly air and the number blocks on the wall of the villa opposite that said “105” left me awestruck. Did we just walked out of Huang Li’s villa!? What the hell is this!? Why am I always caught in something like this?! But we had not been walking in circles just now; we were only walking in a straight file behind the line formed up by my wolves! I was fully alert now, despite the uncanny creepiness of our situation. Whatever this was, Huang Li and Cao Xuedong were making sure we were making every effort to earn our fee!

Feeling slightly angered, I instinctively looked back at the door we just walked through and what I saw made me shed cold sweat!

The door that we had just walked out of had closed without us knowing it and the lock that Lin Feng had savagely kicked on to open it looked utterly intact just like how it was when we first came! Lin Feng, with his eyes wide with disbelief, uttered, “What the hell?!” If we were not yet fully awake by all the shocking and inexplicable epiphany unfurling around us, we definitely were now. Being able to think more clearly, the first thing I did was to check the time. I dug for my cell phone and saw the time: A half-hour past midnight and still ticking. So whatever this is, time is not yet suspended.

Biting my lips, I thought hard. Everything about our entry into the house must be true and I was confident that the same could be said for exiting the building. So, something must have happened in the darkness. We must have either turned without knowing or somehow our directions had been switched when we had just entered the house by some unknown witchery! That could explain the reason why Lin Feng was suddenly crashing to the floor when he should be able to lean on the door right after coming in.

This reminded me of the time when we were at Mount San Feng Zi. Undoubtedly, this would never be any technique similar to Zhu Mei’s Windchaser magic or Ghost Barriers. So that left only one possibility: some sort of metaphysical bounded field! The pitch-black darkness inside the villa just now had rendered us vulnerable to spells and beguilement and it could just as easily be done by manipulating the scent of Cao Xuedong which was our only indication of any bearing to my wolves earlier.

Seeing my reserved taciturnity and mistaking me as being at a loss for solutions only made Lin Feng more irritable. He walked up to the door without so much as a word to me and rapped on the door. The knocking sound of him hitting the door awakened me from my thoughts and I spun around. There was nothing. Lin Feng applied more strength and banged on the door again and the door opened again, revealing Cao Xuedong.

“Good evening, Plat… I mean, former Platoon Leader.” Cao Xuedong greeting with a salute. Lin Feng’s eyes twitched, his brimming annoyance beginning to spill over. “What tricks are you playing at?!” He demanded but a seemingly-dubious Cao Xuedong merely gave a thin smile. “You know me, former Platoon Leader? I don’t believe we’ve met.” “Humph,” Lin Feng snorted derisively and said, “Stop faking it!”

But Cao Xuedong chuckled weakly and gave us an expression as if he was truly unclear of what we meant. I froze. Wait a minute. This sense of deja vu! The very same happened just now when we first came! And Cao Xuedong now looks as if he had never seen us before!