The Strange Case Files

[No System + No Cultivation + No Foolish Protagonist + Traditional Supernatural Horror + Mystery and Suspense]

My name is Shang Tian, and I’m a man cursed by an evil spirit.

It was a lottery ticket that should never have existed. Its dark, yellow-black background looked soaked in old blood and night; the glaring red lettering wasn’t a set of lucky numbers, but an invitation to hell.

When I scratched it off, overjoyed and thinking I’d found a lifeline to a hundred-thousand-yuan jackpot, my fingertips felt the chill of my life rapidly draining away. This cursed object, the “Spirit-Time Ticket,” set a brutal countdown in motion: I would die within ten days.

I fled back to the familiar apartment building. On the seventh floor, where my front door should have been, a pitch-black staircase that had never existed stretched upward from the corner, silently swallowing the dim light in the hallway.

An invisible “girlfriend” hounded me, a copy of “myself” hunted me, and in the midst of familiar everyday surroundings, I plunged into the abyss again and again. The warnings of my chubby neighbor Auntie and the pronouncement of the mysterious master Zhang Lao both pointed to the only way to survive: find Liu Si, the lottery shop owner who had given me the ticket.

But when I finally tracked down the clues after enduring every hardship, the deepest chill froze my blood in an instant. Every record and every witness, including Liu Si’s elderly mother, told me the same thing, with irrefutable proof: Liu Si had died in a car accident a year ago.

Then who or what had pressed the “Spirit-Time Ticket” into my hand seven days ago? And when the death countdown that follows me everywhere, constantly ringing in my ears, finally reaches its end, will it toll the bell of truth, or the death knell of my eternal descent into darkness?