I Revived My Maid, Now She Hungers for My Blood
Chapter 312: Run!

The basement of the Black Crow Mansion was cold and dank, the air thick with a clinging moisture.

It wasn’t the same dry chill as the ground floor. This was a damp, bone-creeping cold that seeped right through the skin.

The walls oozed a viscous, black liquid, greasy and thick like rendered fat. It crept slowly, dripping along the seams of the stone bricks, pooling on the floor as if the house itself were breathing.

At the bottom of the stone steps lay a subterranean hall—a banquet hall of unsettlingly vast proportions. There were no windows. The only illumination came from Milo’s lantern.

In the center of the hall stood a massive, rough-hewn stone table. Ringing it were thirteen high-backed stone chairs.

Elliot, the journalist, had followed only after a long hesitation. Stepping off the final stair, he saw this and his breath caught in his throat. His eyes locked onto that stone table and those thirteen chairs.

“‘It’ breathes from beyond the walls. Sings from beneath the floor…”

“Life here is nothing but a ribbon to be folded at will.”

“Tonight, I shall serve my family an eternal dinner. We shall become the heartbeat of this house. Never fading. Never ending.”

The words echoed in the frigid basement air—a low, dreamlike murmur.

“What?” Elliot heard the voice and whipped his head toward Milo, the veteran beside him.

But Milo was staring back at him, eyes heavy with an unspoken, profound dread.

It was only then Elliot realized—those words had not come from Milo. They had come from his own mouth.

As if those written lines, those mad and desperate thoughts, had crept silently into his brain while he’d read the diary, and now, they were borrowing his voice to speak again.

The sensation made his scalp crawl!

Just then, Elsa, still walking ahead, suddenly raised a hand, pressing her index finger to her lips. “Shh.”

The next moment—on the stone table, near each of the thirteen seats, thirteen candles lit up simultaneously. They were so old and withered, barely recognizable. From each wick, a cold, sickly green flame emerged, silent and heatless.

That glow threw the rough surface of the stone table into stark relief, illuminating a small circle of the floor around it.

Elsa, still leading the now-catatonic Wendy by the hand, continued walking toward the table.

Seeing this, Milo gritted his teeth and followed. His muscles were coiled tight; his body leaned forward, subtly positioning himself to shield both Elsa and the girl within his reach.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

Elliot trailed behind, inwardly cursing Milo’s stubborn, outdated sense of loyalty. But curse as he might, even with his heart drowning in terror and his legs feeling like lead, Elliot ultimately steeled himself and followed.

As they drew closer, the black, oily liquid oozing from the walls seemed to drip faster. It fell onto the stone table, but instead of splashing, it moved of its own accord, flowing like liquid guided by an unseen hand.

The black slime snaked across the rough, gray-white stone surface, twisting and merging to form intricate symbols—a distorted script. No known written language; they resembled ritualistic glyphs more than anything else.

More and more symbols appeared, growing increasingly complex until they nearly covered the entire tabletop.

Elsa stopped. She opened the leather notebook she’d been carrying, took up her pen, and tilted her head slightly.

By the green light, she silently, meticulously, began recording each of those grotesque glyphs onto paper. The nib scratched softly.

In some fleeting moment, Elliot’s journalistic curiosity overwhelmed his fear. His voice quivering, he peered at the symbols, eyes straining.

“This... this is…” he croaked, “The ritual... mentioned in the diary?”

His throat was painfully dry. But then, he noticed that at the table’s center, where the glyphs wove thickest, something else was taking shape. A silhouette. A humanoid outline, dark crimson and sticky.

It looked like the ghost of a young girl, once laid bare upon this icy stone, a dagger carved through her heart, her youthful blood tracing the curves of her body before pooling into this permanent stain.

The candle flames flickered. The ghastly green light made that dark-red silhouette appear more sinister still.

Suddenly, starting from the master’s seat at the head of the table, it was as if invisible bodies were being slain anew.

Blood—or something like it—spattered out from where a neck would be, painting a gruesome arc of spray across the table. Then came the next seat. And the next.

One after another, thirteen trails of crimson erupted in sequence, splashing across different positions, merging with the black glyphs into a pattern of visceral, ritualistic horror.

Elliot stared at the silent spectacle. And then, understanding struck him. This was a replay. A reenactment of a night long past.

That night, the master of the Black Crow Mansion had convened his mad ritual here in this very basement.

These black glyphs were the traces, the core of that ceremony. And the girl at the center of the stone table—she was both the sacrifice and the one the ritual sought to save.

But as the ritual took hold, something had gone terribly wrong.

Instead of curing the girl’s inexplicable affliction, it triggered a hideous mutation. It twisted her into a monster, and in the end, it caused the entire family of thirteen to die here in agony.

Their lingering influence, their hatred, or something worse, congealed into this haunted manor, a blight that persisted to this day, affecting all who dared enter.

In that instant, a spark kindled in Elliot’s eyes! Professional zeal. The fever of a journalist who’d just unearthed the truth.

Finally! After so much terror, so many bizarre events, even a potential death... this trip had not been in vain!

The truth from twenty years ago! A bloody, insane secret buried beneath an abandoned estate! This was what he’d wanted! The perfect material to make his name!

The excitement momentarily drowned out the fear, the danger. His body trembled with anticipation. On reflex, he raised his compact folding camera, pointing the lens at the stone table, at the thirteen trails of blood still materializing one by one.

Just as the final trail erupted—

He pressed the shutter.

Squelch.

Strange. That sound was wrong. It wasn’t the crisp click of a mechanical shutter. It was... wet. A tearing, organic rip.

Confused, Elliot looked down at the camera in his hands. But what he saw wasn’t a camera. It was a hand. A hand drenched in dark red slime, its skin deathly pale.

The hand burst out from the center of his own chest, five fingers slightly curved.

From the fingertips, warm liquid still dripped, perhaps mixed with tiny, torn fragments of his own internal organs...