"This ghost realm sure is huge—how much energy would it require to create something like this, and just how terrifying is the entity that did it?"
Duncan spoke to himself while sitting on the bare ground, his body covered completely in dirt and sweat.
Raising a dirty hand, Duncan wiped the beads of sweat that dotted his forehead, his face clearly marked with exhaustion as his eyes stared far off into the foggy distance in contemplation, looking like someone with a severe case of homesickness.
The handkerchief over Duncan's face was already black in color, but he didn't care as it was the only thing keeping the horrible stench at bay, making it much easier to cope in this vile environment.
Several hours had already passed since Duncan escaped from his grave, and following the compass, he had traversed a considerable distance from his original location.
By his estimates, Duncan thought he'd traveled about ten kilometers, a feat that left his legs sore and his neck and shoulders aching with stiffness.
But this wasn't the reason Duncan was tired and sitting down taking a break. No, the reason for that was entirely different and completely unwarranted.
Thinking about what he was doing, Duncan gradually stood up, dusted himself off a little, then proceeded to turn around and walk a few steps ahead.
There was a small mound of dirt just in front of Duncan, and climbing it revealed a freshly dug hole which was the result of Duncan's efforts over the last hour.
This was the reason for Duncan's current disheveled and dirty appearance.
For the last hour, he had been digging this pit entirely by hand, and despite how crazy it sounded, there was a perfectly good reason why he was doing so in the first place.
"I think I've dug deep enough by now," Duncan said to himself.
"I should be coming up on something after digging just a few feet deeper, though I can't be entirely sure if I'll actually find what I am expecting."
While expressing his own doubts, Duncan jumped back into the pit he had dug and began scooping the soil with his bare hands.
The pit was about eight feet down and three feet wide, with most of the space inside being occupied by loose soil. At this depth, Duncan couldn't carry the soil he had dug out of the pit, so he opted to throw it to the side for now and deal with it later if the need arose.
One thing to note was that the pit was completely uneven, in the same manner a tub of ice cream would be if somebody had eaten from it while scooping from different directions instead of one.
Rustle!
Waist bent and knee-deep in dirt, Duncan continued digging for a few more minutes until suddenly…
Tap!
Feeling something unusual, Duncan suddenly paused before immediately digging his hand deeper in that location, his eyes gleaming with repressed anticipation as he prayed for his expectations to be met.
"Please let this be what I expect it to be. I can't have wasted all this time for nothing."
Digging faster without caring if his fingers would be injured in the process, Duncan dug for a few seconds until there was a glint of something glowing in the dirt.
Quickly reaching for it, he felt a slight metallic sensation similar to finely polished iron. It was attached to something and felt sturdy, so he directly yanked it out of the ground with force until it was free from the dirt.
The darkness in the pit made it hard for Duncan to see what he had dug out, so he quickly scrambled in his pocket to bring out his lighter. Although he had a guess what it was, Duncan still wanted to confirm it with his own eyes to be completely certain.
In the end, after lighting his lighter, Duncan finally confirmed the identity of what he held in his hand.
It was a belt buckle, one that was still attached and fastened around the waist of a pair of jeans, which themselves were being worn by a body that was still partly buried in the dirt.
The fact that this body was found eight feet under the earth, and hadn't moved even with how Duncan had rough-handled it, proved that the owner was obviously dead, and the discovery brought a somber mood over Duncan's heart.
Sigh!
Feeling heavy-hearted, Duncan sighed remorsefully for the unlucky individual, despite already expecting to discover something like this.
Indeed, Duncan had been expecting to find something like this all along, and it was the very reason he had begun digging in the dirt in the first place instead of hurrying along to escape this place.
…
During the time Duncan was still following the direction of the compass, he had come across a vast, empty wilderness that had nothing but barren land, and this had caused him to fall into deep contemplation.
Remembering the rumors of several people who had gone missing in that street, Duncan had wondered where all of them had gone.
If they had all disappeared after being accidentally pulled into this ghost realm, then Duncan should have spotted several signs of them as he traveled in the ghost realm, yet he didn't see anything at all.
Once, while Duncan had been moving, he had heard the same windless howling sound that had sounded earlier back when he'd suddenly lost all of his strength. At the same time, the sound of a clock ticking rapidly sounded loudly in the air like a speaker was blasting in full bass, drowning out every other sound in the area.
As soon as Duncan had heard the ticking sound, without even thinking, he had thrown himself to the ground, covering his head with his hands until the ticking sound finally subsided.
At the same time, the windless howling also vanished, and only then did Duncan pick himself up from the ground.
This time, he hadn't encountered the same chilling sensation of something penetrating and exiting his body, and his strength hadn't completely left him on the verge of freezing.
It seemed that Duncan had managed to escape whatever it was that had caused the previous incident in the first place, but he knew that he had only done so because of the locket that had warned him just in time.
Speaking of the locket, Duncan turned it over to reveal its clock face, and this time the hour hand had moved another degree to the right.
Fortunately, it hadn't been a significant increase, and Duncan had felt very relieved for that.
But he wouldn't be feeling very relieved anymore because as he continued his journey, the chance of encountering the invisible howling entity increased, and with every encounter, the clock hand would move another degree forward.
It seemed that the howling entities were the main dangers of this ghost realm. Duncan suspected that they were ghosts that moved about in this ghost realm, attacking any living being that was trapped here and sucking all their vitality away.
This made Duncan even more suspicious as to why he hadn't seen any traces of the missing people. With this many ghosts in the ghost realm, it seemed unlikely that any of them would've survived and hidden away unless they were like Duncan, who had special means of keeping himself safe.
All of that continued until it finally led up to the point where Duncan had discovered his first clue… that was a grave which he had suddenly stumbled upon while trying to evade a howling ghost.
The moment he saw the grave, that was when Duncan decided to dig it up to directly confirm a suspicion that he'd held in his heart for some time.
Now, seeing the corpse inside the grave—this finally confirmed it—the missing people had definitely ended up inside this ghost realm by a stroke of bad luck, and like Duncan, they had all found themselves buried as soon as they appeared.
While this solved the mystery of where the missing people disappeared to, Duncan wasn't happy. Far from it…
Instead of clearing all his doubts, this only raised a lot more questions that remained unanswered.
Why was the corpse buried instead of out in the open?
Why didn't the victim dig his way out of the grave?
These were the two prominent questions in Duncan's mind at that moment.
The second question sort of answered the first, in the sense that the corpse was buried because the victim hadn't dug himself out of the grave before dying… but why hadn't he done so?
Duncan himself had been buried in much the same way as this victim; the depth was similar and the soil was almost identical—a soft loamy soil that offered little resistance when digging. Duncan had been able to dig himself out quite easily, so why hadn't he?
It couldn't be that the victim lacked the strength to do so, could it?
Judging from what Duncan could see, he concluded that the victim was probably a burly male, most likely an adult who appeared well-fed without any fat on his waist, suggesting he worked out a bit.
There was no way a man like this would've lacked the strength needed to dig himself out of the grave when Duncan could manage just fine.