36 The Body in the Basement

A knife had just been thrown through Xiao Ying's body!

A knife had just been thrown through his ghost body!

Xiao Ying, fallen down on the floor, panting and scrambling wildly to put some distance between him and the crazy, terrifying woman in front of him, stumbled and fell, over and over again, as he tried his hardest to escape from her as quickly as possible.

He felt himself choking on the screams caught in his throat, his hands constantly slipping on the shiny, lacquered floor beneath him.

His legs shook, unable to support him, and his arms were on the verge of flailing out of sheer panic as it became harder and harder to breathe.

Xiao Ying risked a look behind him to see how far the door was from him, how far he would have to move to reach his escape and salvation.

However, as soon as he looked back, Concubine Jing had stood up, her posture hunched over and looming, taking slow and steady steps, moving closer and closer to Xiao Ying.

He couldn't help the scream that he had let out at her presence, and no matter how fast he desperately moved to get away from her, she always seemed to be moving closer and closer, the space between them shrinking rapidly.

Xiao Ying felt tears spring to his eyes as he tried to move even faster than he already had been moving, finding it more and more useless.

No matter what he did, Concubine Jing seemed to be always, without fail, faster than him.

He gulped and let himself finally choke and cry.

There was nowhere for him to run, his body too consumed by fear to possibly escape her, and there was nowhere to hide, considering she knew each and every nook and cranny of her palace.

Xiao Ying wished for the floor beneath him to open up and swallow him whole. He would give anything and everything to get out of the situation alive, and he needed to be.

He needed to give Ming Cheng his happy ending.

The happy ending that he deserved.

But now, Xiao Ying was going to die!

again....

Without any hope left to sustain him, Xiao Ying closed his eyes and expected the abyss to swallow him whole, submitting again, once more, to the cold and unfeeling clutches of death.

It was different this time, though.

The world - rather than fading to black as an inescapable, crushing exhaustion pressed down on Xiao Ying and forced his eyelids shut - began to feel as if it was rising all around Xiao Ying, as if he were falling for real down a dark pit.

Or, at least, that's what it felt like until Xiao Ying saw a bright flash of light, a shining gold that momentarily existed for a fraction of a second, his eyes opening on instinct to find his body falling.

He had been falling through the floors of the palace, and in front of him, responsible for the brief glimpse of that light within the darkness, was a giant window.

Plants of all kinds with blooming flowers, of all different kinds of species, surrounded him, their leaves large and voluminous, as the large swathes of the fabric that he wore passed through them effortlessly, his body still firmly within the motions of falling, even if the world around him seemed to pause for that small, tiny moment.

The most eye catching, and easily held brightest flowers in the room with glowing buds that shone out from the blackness of the shadows like stars in the night sky.

Xiao Ying only managed to get himself a glimpse of the image, before it was gone, the world around him suddenly nothing but dark, dark wood, before he realised that he was still falling.

He needed to stop.

He couldn't fall any further.

Pain bloomed in Xiao Ying's legs and back as he landed, the ghostly body that he possessed responding to his commands.

He brought up a hand to cradle where his head had hit the ground, feeling around the back of his scalp, and feeling nothing much.

The late Empress had hard a head then...

...

...

Suddenly, all the events of the what had just happened suddenly caught up to Xiao Ying.

He felt even more tears beginning to well up in his eyes as he recalled the utter terror of the knife that had passed through his body, the cold, harsh sharpness of the phantom pain that it seemed to cause him, as if his body had chosen that moment deliberately to become pervious to all sort of damage and mortal wounds.

He thought that he was going to die again, Concubine Jing standing tall over him, sneering down as if he wasn't worthy of even existing.

As if she was the one who had going to crush him under her heel and send his snivelling soul back to the oblivion that he had gone to, after being hit by that car.

She had seen him...

Concubine Jing had seen him!

She had seen him and hurt him!

She was... she was...

Xiao Ying coughed out and choked on his breath, over and over again, as his mind spiralled, thinking about what had happened to him, before rethinking it all over and over again.

His mind was chaos, trapped in a cycle of manically playing back the incident over and over again, giving himself no respite and peace.

He needed to think of something else.

He needed to change the subject.

The beautiful plant.

The flowers.

What was it again?

He needed to just think about anything else.

Now, what did he write about the plant.

The plant was one giant sprawling bush that had grown out of the plant pot that it had originally been planted in, when it was once just a small, tiny sapling. It's arms were vines that had reached out, crawling up over the walls of the room and were firmly confined to the shadows.

Xiao Ying recognised immediately what was in front of him, a species of his own creation: the six petalled wet cave bush.

They required a lot of water to grow and in low light environments, when little photosynthesis took place to produce glucose, the plant was forced to use another molecule as fuel for energy, and so created a particularly deadly poison as a waste product, able to kill a grown man minutes after drinking it with a dose as small as a tea spoon.

Xiao Ying looked up to see where he was, his eyes meeting the hollow vacuum holes of a skull.

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