Chapter 3 Peace Medical School 1

Peace Medical College has a long history. It was founded in the war to save the dying and the wounded. The school gate is symmetrical in shape, simple and elegant, with gray-brown historical traces on the dry-hanging stone facade.

Looking from the outside, the campus is lined with lush, century-old trees that block out the sun and provide a cool visual experience.

Xia Bai and Lin Xiang stood outside the school gate without moving, not to attract attention, but because Hua Haoming was standing there motionless, looking around the school gate.

Today is the reporting time for freshmen. People are coming and going outside the school, with different clothes, different classes and different expressions.

Seeing how seriously Hua Haoming was looking at him, the chatterbox Lin Xiang was silent for a while. Just as he was about to speak, Hua Haoming lowered the brim of his hat and said, "Let's go."

The three of them then walked into the school gate.

Today's campus is particularly lively. As soon as you enter the school gate, you can see the banners welcoming new students. On the main road at the school gate, various clubs are recruiting new members, and people are coming and going. Across this road is the enrollment registration location, the gymnasium.

Lin Xiang and Hua Haoming were waiting outside, while Xia Bai went in alone with his schoolbag on his back to report.

All the students in the academy reported here. Xia Bai waited in line for more than 40 minutes, reported with the admission letter, paid the tuition fee on the spot, received the dormitory slip, and ran to the opposite side to get the bedding.

The three of them went to his dormitory together, and everything went smoothly there.

The dormitory is a four-person room with a bed and a desk underneath. The room is not new, but it is spacious.

Xia Bai is a local and was the last to arrive. Someone had already put down their things on the other three beds.

When they came in, a woman who looked to be about 40 years old was making bed number one, and a father and son were having dinner diagonally opposite. The only bed left was bed number four, which was near the toilet.

As soon as they came in, several people looked up. The woman smiled warmly and said, "The last student is here. Is it Xia Bai?"

Xia Bai nodded, walked to bed number one where she was, and said to her, "Hello, auntie, this is my bed."

The woman pointed to the label on bed number four and said, "Xia Bai, look, that's your bed. It has your name and student number on it."

Hua Haoming and Lin Xiang looked in the direction where her finger pointed and saw the common two-line label with white and blue borders. On the top was Xia Bai's name, and below was Xia Bai's student number.

Xia Bai stood there without moving. "The labels on beds one and four are different from those on beds two and three. The original labels must have been torn off and replaced with new ones."

Lin Xiang took a closer look. "Sure enough! The blue edges of the number one and number four labels are lighter!"

"Maybe the school ran out of labels, and the new one is printed a little lighter than the previous one," said the woman.

Xia Bai said calmly and seriously, "The school should have divided the beds according to the student numbers. The student number on bed number two is before the student number on bed number three. My student number is at the front, so I won't be bed number four."

"You said we should classify them according to their student numbers, so we should classify them according to their student numbers?" The woman's face began to become unnatural, with a hint of anger.

"Come down, or I'll go find the dormitory manager and ask him to check how the beds are allocated." Hua Haoming said with a frown.

The woman sat on the bed awkwardly, the color rushing to her weather-beaten face. Her voice became much louder, and she laughed angrily, "Little classmate, you just came to the dormitory and you don't give face to your classmates' families. You quarrel with your classmates. You have never thought about getting along well with your classmates, right? If you are like this, which classmate will dare to play with you in the future?"

As she spoke, she glanced at the father and son across from her.

The boy in the father-son pair was eating without saying a word. The father laughed and said, "It's not a big deal, there's no need to argue, no need to argue."

“Bang!——”

The doors of the bathroom and dormitory were pushed open at the same time, and it was unclear where the overly loud sound came from.

A man and a woman came in from the door. They looked like a pair of siblings. They were holding basins and shopping bags. They must have just returned from the supermarket to buy daily necessities.

A boy came out of the bathroom. The woman on bed number one grabbed the bed sheet as soon as she saw him, and called out "son" with a wronged look on her face.

The boy in the bathroom must have heard the conversation outside. He glanced at the two snakeskin bags beside Xia Bai, walked to the table under bed number one calmly, opened the wallet on the table, took out a wad of money and handed it to Xia Bai, "Xia classmate, the accommodation fee is 1200 per year. I will double the amount to change your bed. Is that enough?"

"Huh?" Lin Xiang was stimulated by the small amount of money, "Is it a big deal to have a little bit of dirty money?"

As he said this, he was about to take off the watch on his hand.

The sister at the door saw his action and looked like he was going to hit her back with the watch. She was shocked and asked, "Huh? What are you going to do with a watch worth millions?"

Xia Bai, his father at the table, and his mother on the bed immediately looked at the watch in Lin Xiang's hand.

The boy was stunned for a moment, and also looked over, as if he saw something. He wanted to solve the problem with money, but he didn't expect that the other party was much richer than him. He muttered awkwardly: "Who knows if it's a fake?"

Lin Xiang felt insulted. "I would rather draw a picture on my hand than wear fake shoes. Some people think they are superior just because they wear a pair of fake shoes!"

Xia Bai turned his head and looked at the boy's shoes again. Besides him, two other people also looked over there.

The boy blushed, "You're the one wearing fakes!"

Seeing that the two were about to quarrel, Hua Haoming pinched his nose, walked to the door with a headache, and held the door handle, "Let's find the dormitory supervisor."

Just as the woman was about to call him to stop, the boy said, "Look for it!"

Hua Haoming turned the door handle, but his hand froze there and his expression became increasingly ugly.

Seeing him standing still at the door, the boy said stubbornly, "Go find the dormitory manager. Why don't you go?"

Hua Haoming came back with a cold face, sat on the bed board of bed number four, and cursed after a few seconds.

Lin Xiang didn't understand and subconsciously looked at Xia Bai, and saw Xia Bai staring out the window.

"What's wrong?"

“It’s so quiet.”

Lin Xiang thought, where can I find peace? It's so noisy. Soon, he realized that Xia Bai was not talking about the dormitory, but outside the dormitory.

He calmed down and listened. Sure enough, there was no sound outside, not even the slightest sound of people passing by. It seemed that all the sounds were absorbed by something.

This is the dormitory corridor for freshmen reporting to the university. It is eerily quiet.

He had heard some noise outside. There were not only freshmen but also many parents. Today might be the busiest day in the dormitory this year.

When did the silence begin? They were arguing in the dormitory just now, and no one might have noticed.

The boy was still asking Hua Haoming why he didn't go find the dormitory manager, and it seemed that he could regain some of his lost face through questioning.

"The dormitory door can't be opened." The sister at the door said with a stern face.

Except Hua Haoming, everyone in the dormitory looked over.

The younger brother also grabbed the door handle and tried to open the door. He was a head taller than his sister and was very strong. The door shook when he tried to open it, but he still couldn't open it.

"How could that be?" The father who was eating put down his chopsticks, walked to the door and tried to open it, but it didn't open.

The boy who questioned Hua Haoming also tried it, and the result was the same. He continued to question Hua Haoming: "Did you do that? The door couldn't be opened after you touched the door handle just now."

Hua Haoming didn't look at him.

He angrily took out his cell phone and called someone. When he was about to raise it to his ear, he stared at the phone and froze.

Everyone else also took out their phones. Xia Bai looked at his own broken phone and put it back silently.

"No signal."

"Me too."

“I can’t even open the app.”

"What on earth is going on?"

Lin Xiang looked towards the window, walked over and tried, "The window can't be opened either."

After he finished speaking, he lifted the chair under the second bed and smashed the window glass. The chairs provided by Heping Medical College for the dormitory had iron legs. A 187cm tall boy smashed the glass with two thin iron chair legs.

"Bang! ——Squeak!——"

The glass is intact.

After the sharp banging sound faded away, the dormitory fell silent.

The dormitory was quiet, and they realized how quiet it was outside. The whole world was silent.

The happy faces, excited voices, and bustling corridors that I saw before entering the dormitory all receded like the tide.

Or, they were suddenly pulled away from the noisy world and swept into a silent space where no one knew about it.

Lin Xiang walked to Xia Bai, wiped the chair with his hands on the edge of his pants twice, and moved closer to Xia Bai.

"What, what's going on?" The woman got off the bed nervously. No one answered her. She ran to the door and knocked on it hard, shouting to the outside: "Is there anyone outside? We are trapped inside, open the door!"

She was not as strong as some of the boys, but her voice was sharp, but she still didn't get any response.

They could hear her voice, but it seemed as if the sound was absorbed by the endless darkness as it reached the door.

At this time, it was getting dark outside.

Even though the dormitory of Heping Medical College was spacious, nine people squeezed into a four-person room was still a bit crowded. They all sat on their beds or stood beside their beds, all of them tense.

"What, what is going on?" The father wiped the sweat from his forehead and asked in a trembling voice.

He had been happily bringing his son to report to Peace Medical College, which should have been one of the proudest days of his life. But who knew he would encounter this situation in a dormitory where so many people wanted to live.

No matter who you are, being trapped in a dormitory, unable to feel any movement from the outside world, feeling as if abandoned and isolated by the world, you would be afraid.

Several people in the dormitory have the same question, but they don’t know who can answer them.

Hua Haoming said coldly: "We are in lockdown."

Someone responded and everyone looked at him.

Lin Xiang: "Brother, what is the locked state?"

Hua Haoming's eyes swept across these people one by one, paused for a few seconds when passing by the sister, then he touched his hair irritably and sat up straight.

Seeing that he was going to talk to them properly, the others waited with bated breath.

"This matter is not easy to understand. It has to start a long time ago." Hua Haoming said: "The initial abnormality occurred in Qili Village, a remote mountain village in the south of Ximian City."

Ximian City is located in the southwest, with an underdeveloped economy and inconvenient transportation. The remote mountain villages in the city are even poorer and more backward.

There is a primary school in Qili Village, which is surrounded by several earthen houses. There are only about thirty students from kindergarten to sixth grade, taught by two teachers.

One of the teachers went out that day to a faraway town to get textbooks for the students. When he came up the mountain on his bicycle, he heard the radio gymnastics on the loudspeaker. He exhaled a breath of white air and rubbed his hands, then pushed open the rickety wooden door of the school, but did not see any students on the dirt playground.

There was no one in the entire school. Only the broadcast of gymnastics on the loudspeaker could be heard in the empty school and then spread to the entire poor village.

This is indeed the time for the school to do radio gymnastics. On weekdays, more than thirty students would stand here, doing some not-so-standard movements in a scattered manner.

But now, they are all gone.

They disappeared into thin air.

How could more than thirty living people just disappear out of thin air?

The remote and backward mountain village had very few surveillance cameras, and no trace of them could be found. The investigators were confused and repeatedly sent more people and expanded the scope of the investigation, but still no clues were found after a long time.

All I know is that there should have been people still in the school before 10:30 in the morning. 10:30 is the time for the village primary school to do radio gymnastics. Another teacher should have turned on the radio for them.

Before the broadcast was over, they disappeared into thin air, including the teacher.

"Later these students appeared in a photograph."

"This incident caused a sensation in the local area. A reporter rushed to the school three days later and took this photo at night."

“Here are the photos.”

Hua Haoming took out his cell phone, opened a photo, and several people came over.

Xia Bai was closest to him and could see the most clearly.

Qili Village still maintains its original village appearance. The school buildings are all earthen houses with bumpy walls. The playground is quite large, a piece of yellow land that has not been treated in any way.

The photo was taken at night, and it also captured a night scene. Under the dim lights of the school, the photo is not that bright, but it can be clearly seen that more than 30 students are doing exercises on the playground.

The photo is frozen at the moment they are doing the jumping exercise.

It was the middle of winter, and most of the elementary school boys in the village wore gray cotton-padded jackets, while the girls wore slightly brighter ones, with a few girls wearing bright red flowered cotton-padded jackets.

For primary school students, doing radio gymnastics should be the happiest time for them. In the photo, they are jumping together but there is no smile on their faces.

Gray-purple rotten ghost hands were holding them by the necks.

Their feet left the ground not because they jumped but because they were lifted up.

The fingers of the ghost hand were very long, completely wrapped around their necks, making it look like a group of students were hung up at night, gray, red and green, standing stiff in the cold wind.

This photo can reveal a lot of information if you think about it carefully, but those sudden ghost hands occupied everyone's mind. It seemed that several people in the dormitory could feel the coldness of the hands seeping into their bodies.

"This, this is photoshopped!" The father shouted, "It is photoshopped, I know it is photoshopped!"

Hua Haoming didn't say anything, swiped the photo to the right, and there was a video below.

In the video, three days later, more than thirty students were still doing the "jumping exercise". They had been doing it for three days, and it seemed that they would do it endlessly and would never stop.

Those outside the video can see that it's not them who are dancing, but the ghost hands that are moving.

The ghost hands moved from their necks to their hair, grabbing their hair and pulling it up, again and again.

The video shook and zoomed in forward, and the faces of the two students suddenly appeared in the video. Their terrified and stiff faces were reflected in the eyes of everyone present.

"Ah!" The mother screamed and covered her face in fear.

The father still didn't believe it. "I've been following this matter. They can't still be in school. The report said that another female teacher abducted the children!"

Hua Haoming seemed to be accustomed to this situation. He continued slowly: "Last fall, Lingle Amusement Park was suddenly closed. A group of people held up a bloody banner at the entrance of the amusement park, demanding that the amusement park return the people."

"Everyone who was playing in the haunted house at the amusement park disappeared into thin air."

Lin Xiang said: "I saw this online. There was a problem with the haunted house equipment. There were serious casualties and the amusement park was shut down."

Hua Haoming clicked on his phone and another video popped up. "Since you've seen it, you must have seen at least a photo of one of the missing people, right?"

This video is obviously shot of the haunted house in Lingle Amusement Park. The eerie atmosphere of the haunted house is well created, with bloodstains on the walls and broken limbs everywhere on the ground. The person shooting the video pushed open a door and was caught off guard to see a dead body hanging upside down.

Xia Bai's eyes brightened a lot. It was not known whether he was dazzled, but a tear fell from the corner of the dead body's eye.

The face of the corpse doll is as realistic as a real person, but its body is obviously a man-made puppet. The contrast is obvious and eerie.

Lin Xiang froze there. As more and more prop corpses and ghosts appeared in the video, his lips began to tremble. He was speechless for a long time, and one hand tightly grasped Xia Bai's shoulders.

It was too heavy. Xia Bai suspected that all the weight of Lin Xiang was on him.

"Later, the prop ghosts in that amusement park all had new faces, the faces of the people who disappeared."

No one spoke, everyone looked at him.

Seeing Xia Bai's overly bright eyes, Hua Haoming, who had been at ease, paused for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he no longer mentioned the corpse in the amusement park.

"The day before yesterday, Quanguang City was locked down overnight. You guys know about this, right?"

The father added: "That's because a serious infectious disease has occurred in Quanguang City, and the source of the pollution is difficult to deal with. It was reported in the news yesterday!"

Hua Haoming put his phone in his pocket and lifted his cap up, revealing a pair of narrow eyes. He looked at the father and said with a half-smile, "After Quanguang City was sealed off, I only heard that the people inside were transferred to hospitals outside, but I didn't hear that any ordinary people went in. Uncle, have you ever heard of a city that was sealed off due to an infectious disease, where only people can leave but not enter?"

This sentence revealed something. Several people were stunned. The atmosphere suddenly became silent, and uneasiness fermented in the darkness.

The mother turned pale, still unwilling to believe, "Why should we believe you? This is outrageous!"

Hua Haoming looked at the people in front of him, "If the students in Qili Village were abducted, with so many targets, would it take so long to investigate? If there was something wrong with the equipment in the playground, why has it been blocked until now? In the past two years, so many unreasonable things have happened. Do you really not believe it, or... are you deceiving yourselves?"

"Are you trying to say that we, we have also 'disappeared'?" The younger sibling spoke for the first time, "Just like the students in Qili Village, the people in the haunted house in the amusement park, and many people in Quanguang City."

"You can say that." Hua Haoming said.

"Qili Village was the earliest confirmed anomaly event. Later, anomalies occurred one after another around the world. Not all the people who disappeared never came back. From the people who came back, we learned that those places where anomalies occurred were actually involved in a weird game, and they got out of the game."

"Qilicun Primary School is the problem, Xunle Amusement Park is the problem, and the worst-hit city is Quanguang. The game has spread to most areas of the city."

"Blocking those places is to prevent more people from getting involved in horror games, saying things like malfunctions and infectious diseases, in order to avoid large-scale uncontrollable panic and breakdown of order in a short period of time."

Hua Haoming stuffed his phone into his trouser pocket, leaving his hand inside. "Everyone, the game has come to the dormitory. At this moment, we are also locked in by the game."