Midnight Tenant: No One Lives Next Door

I rented the top-floor apartment in an old residential building for next to nothing, and realized something was wrong on the very night I moved in.

Every night, the room next door, vacant for three years, echoed with the scrape of slippers, dripping water, and low whispers.

The motion-activated hallway light came on by itself. I could never see clearly through the peephole, and the water meter spun wildly in the middle of the night.

The property manager told me there had never been any neighbors on this top floor.

Three years ago, a family of three in the neighboring apartment mysteriously died overnight. The doors and windows were locked from the inside. The police ruled it a suicide, but never found a single reasonable clue. No one who rented on the top floor ever lived longer than seven days.

I wanted to move out that very night, but then I found a strange clause hidden in the lease:

Tenants may not terminate their lease or move out. The rental period ends only after they have survived thirty days.

From that night on, one strange incident after another haunted me:

A face in the crack beneath the door at two in the morning, the sound of someone combing their hair in an empty room, an extra shadow in the mirror, a diary that rewrote itself, and stairs that went on forever.

Everyone urged me to run.

But gradually, I realized...

I was never the one who was going to die.

The "thing" next door had been shielding me from the death that threatened the entire building.

Only after I uncovered the layers of secrets buried in the old building did I understand:

This wasn't a haunting.

It was a building-sealing ritual that had lasted ten years, using tenants' lives as sacrifices.

And I was the only person in the ritual who survived and broke the game.