Chapter 79 Old Campus: "Is He the Ouija Board Spirit?"
His back sank slightly again, and his long, grass-like hair spread out, almost encircling him. The phone rang in the dense hair, ringing softly.
The female ghost didn't leave; she stayed on his back and went into the bathroom with him.
If the murderer shouts something, the female ghost can clearly see his face... Xue Chao, who was kneeling on one knee behind the bathroom door, suddenly reached up and quickly touched his scalp along his long hair—sure enough, there was a stitched scar.
Her face was stitched up at this moment, and it was still unknown whether it would come back on naturally from time to time.
She was a victim of the "organ incident," and the person hiding in the closet was one of the perpetrators. Knowing that someone inside was turning against them and preparing to report them, she took the initiative to find the evidence materials collected by the other party and eliminated them as soon as possible.
"You're here for revenge?" Xue Chao steadily supported the female ghost with his back. He tilted his head, and the female ghost stretched her neck, pressing her pale face, with faint stitches visible, against his face. Unexpectedly, this fearless man leaned close to her ear and whispered in a hoarse voice even worse than hers, "...Do you want to try, to cut him to pieces like he cut you to pieces?"
The phone rang until it automatically disconnected, and the murderer's excited laughter echoed in the quiet dormitory.
"No wonder it's so dirty and smelly, it really is a rat hole, hahaha!" He walked towards another prey that had trapped him, stopped in front of the bathroom door, and coaxed in a strange tone, "Little mouse, are you home? I'm Uncle Cat, I brought you a present!"
The bathroom was quiet. The murderer was screaming hysterically, but I remained on guard. I pressed the handle and pushed the frosted glass door open a little. There was nothing inside.
Just as I was about to push it open completely, the door suddenly closed by itself, as if blown by the wind.
But the windows are closed, so there's no wind. There must be someone inside!
The murderer excitedly shook the head of the machete, the blade clanging and thrashing. Student number 2's blood was still slowly flowing from the blade. He knocked on the door: "Don't be shy, come out and let your uncle see! Your uncle loves pretty glass beads the most. What color are your eyes? Let your uncle play with them!"
With his other hand, he turned on the bathroom light, first admiring the prey's cowering appearance. Sure enough, he saw a huddled shadow in the corner. He kept shaking the locked door, making the shadow tremble in fright, and couldn't help but burst into laughter.
"You won't open the door? Fine, I'll do it myself. Wait until I gouge your eyes out!" He went to get the nearest iron chair, and when he came back, the bathroom light was somehow off, but he didn't care. He picked up the chair and smashed it against the glass door.
Just as he was about to reach the glass door, the lights suddenly came on, and behind the frosted glass door stood a tall, dark figure, three heads taller than him, with his head touching the top edge of the door. His messy, long hair cascaded down to his ankles in a sinister manner, like a legendary humanoid water monster.
The murderer was startled, but it was too late to stop. The chair smashed through the glass, and the glass shattered instantly, but it didn't scatter everywhere. It was as if it was held in place by something behind the door. Then it suddenly turned, with countless sharp points pointing outwards, as if it were being gripped by countless hands—it was hair!
The hair got tangled in every shard, and the long hair that dragged to the ground stretched out, wrapped around the murderer's ankle, and pulled him down onto the entire face of hair that looked like countless "thorns." Before he could even scream, his body was riddled with holes by the glass shards.
The machete head finally stopped in front of his hair, reflecting a pair of cold, dark, solid eyes beneath his hair—his favorite "glass beads."
The murderer's body was wrapped in hair and dragged towards the bathtub. Xue Chao, who had been carrying the female ghost as a human support, pushed aside the "hair curtain" and crawled out of the bathroom.
The lights went out again, and the crisp sound of a neck being snapped echoed from the bathroom. A cleaver was gripped by hair and plunged into flesh again and again, accompanied by a scream even stranger than that of a murderer, like a high-pitched woman's laugh made from someone else's vocal cords, punctuated by pauses.
Xue Chao didn't want to disturb the young lady's enjoyment, so he locked the door for her.
The body of student number 2 was gruesome but offered no clues. Instead, the empty bed number 1 was quite interesting. I hadn't had time to search it before, but now I found three work clothes and a leaky mascot costume in the closet alone. It was probably discarded by the shop owner because it was damaged. The rest were a few old clothes that had been worn through countless springs, summers, autumns, and winters, faded from washing. The only pair of sneakers I had were worn through at the edges.
Even the tattered mascot costumes were neatly folded. Bed number 1 had the most "junk" but was also the tidiest. Half of the bookshelf was filled with books, and the other half was stuffed with instant noodles. Xue Chao pulled out a draft notebook, and student number 1 wrote a diary on the back of the used draft notebook.
The dates are skipped, and student number 1 doesn't have much time to write them down. The content is mostly about precautions for working part-time, as well as detailed accounting down to the decimal point.
There are also simple line drawings interspersed throughout the hustle and bustle of life: a sunflower on the windowsill of grandma's hospital room, a shrunken mascot costume, a stray cat on the roadside that has taken half a sausage... and no matter what it is, you have to draw a little smiley face on it, which gives off a silly vibe.
Xue Chao found two useful clues in "Jiang Ming's" record of his hard work and life.
One reason was that Grandma's health was deteriorating. In order to earn more money, "Jiang Ming" worked the night shift at a bar, where he could earn high commissions by selling certain types of alcohol. One of them was a low-alcohol sweet wine with a faint tea aroma.
Jiang Ming wrote in his notes that he thought the wine was very ordinary, tasting like a sweet drink from the supermarket. However, because of its low alcohol content, the addition of a hollowed-out ice ball, fancy design, and poetic name, its value soared by a hundred, making it quite popular with girls.
Moreover, although one glass can cost as much as a week's worth of "Jiangming" liquor, it is still considered very cost-effective among all kinds of liquors.
However, when the diary mentions the wine again later, it only adds a question mark next to the wine's name and writes the character "敏" (Min).
Jiang Ming began to suspect that there was something wrong with the wine, and that he might know that Minmin was in trouble.
The murderer was looking for "Jiang Ming," and as for tipping him off... that was in the last letter "Jiang Ming" sent to "Pu Fengchun."
When writing that letter, "Jiang Ming" realized he had been discovered. The desk was so clean, probably because he was hiding there to avoid being chased to the school. The letter to "Pu Fengchun" probably contained more than just the word "help". It also contained some evidence that he had come into contact with as an employee.
But fate played a cruel trick; the characters "Pu Fengchun" were not separated. Xue Chao had a vague premonition that the first protagonist's fate would also be death.
Another clue is that when he was taking care of his grandmother in the hospital, he received help from many people, including patients, patients' families, doctors and nurses, and even employees who delivered boxed meals and delivery guys who delivered fruit. He remembered who they were and what they helped him with, but there was one person whose name he still couldn't get. He only knew that the person was about the same age as him, two or three years older, and that he couldn't go to school because of illness and had been hospitalized.
When he made a foolish mistake that made the little girl in the other ward cry, it was this person who folded paper butterflies to make her laugh.
Jiang Ming was unknown, but Xue Chao knew who this person was—it was Xue Chao.
His face was a little troubled. His identity was becoming more and more complete, and his entanglements with the protagonist were becoming more and more numerous... He was in the same hospital room as "Jiang Ming's" grandmother and had helped "Jiang Ming" soothe a child; as a senior academic genius, he had given "Pu Fengchun" his notebooks; the butterfly that was suspected to be drawn by him was copied by "Deng Dayun" who was trying to avoid being bullied...
The main characters in all three episodes are connected to "him," completely deviating from the initial assumption that he was just a "background character," which seems like a sign of trouble.
Moreover, he originally thought it was a clue about the protagonist of the fifth unit, but it turned out to be the protagonist of the first unit. What bothered him the most was that Jiang Ming really fit the character setting of the protagonist of the first unit.
...The fifth protagonist must be quite eccentric, otherwise he wouldn't be able to defeat the first protagonist and become Jiang Ming's original match.
Jiang Ming was living in poverty and probably only had one school uniform, which he always wore. Xue Chao couldn't find any others, so he had to "borrow" the spare school uniform that classmate No. 3 had left in the closet.
He pushed open the door and cautiously peered into the dormitory corridor. He hadn't forgotten about the monster who could disguise himself as student number 3, but he didn't know where it had gone.
Both corridors were dimly lit, but the dormitory corridors felt more oppressive. Unlike the teaching building corridors which only had a few classrooms, the dormitories were densely packed, with a dark brown door every short distance, making them look like two rows of coffins from a distance.
He went up the stairs, but the doors on each floor were closed. On the third or fourth floor, there was a lone desk.
There was nothing on the table. Xue Chao went around to the back of the table to see if there was anything in the desk compartment, but found that the other side was also made of solid wood – there was no desk compartment, it was a “wooden box” sealed on all six sides.
Xue Chao stopped giving him a look and continued upstairs. He heard a thud from the wooden box, as if something inside was hitting the wooden planks.
The commotion was quite significant, and the moment it was made, the atmosphere around them subtly shifted.
Seemingly sensing Xue Chao's pause in his footsteps, the objects in the desk clattered several times, like the drumbeats at the climax of a ritual, almost eerie in the school corridor.
The dormitory building has six floors in total. Floors four through six are probably the girls' dorms. That set of desks and chairs is probably for female students to sign in or sign out for the weekend... So what's inside?
Xue Chao quickly went upstairs. When he reached the fifth floor, a tennis ball rolled down and stopped at his feet.
A clear wind howled upstairs in the night. Xue Chao went up to the fifth or sixth floor landing and found that the window on the landing was broken and covered with shards of glass, probably from a tennis ball.
But he didn't hear the sound of glass breaking; the tennis ball had just rolled down.
...Perhaps the glass was already broken, and something upstairs had just pushed down a tennis ball.
Xue Chao, holding the tennis ball, continued upstairs, not seeing any of the mischievous people or ghosts.
The sixth floor was as dark and quiet as ever. Most of the dorm rooms were locked, with only a few doors still in the lock. The last dorm room he saw in the teaching building to turn off its lights, though without a key in the lock, had its door ajar.
Xue Chao took each step very slowly to avoid making a sound. He stopped at the door of room 624 and listened quietly for a while. There was no sound from inside; it was deathly silent.
He originally intended to knock on the door out of politeness, to let everyone know whether it was a person or a ghost, but when he thought that a monster disguised as a human would also knock on the door, he felt it was a bit like trying to hide something, so he simply opened the door.
Inside the dormitory, four girls sat around a table with a piece of paper covered in writing on it. The large area in the middle of the paper listed the twenty-six letters, the top row of words was "Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing", the bottom row was Arabic numerals "1-9", the left side was written "male and female" and "true and false", and the right side was written "whether" and "good and bad".
Each of them stretched out one hand, clasped it together, and held a pen with the tip pointing downwards, stopping at the character "是" (yes). At this moment, all their different heads looked at Xue Chao, who had suddenly appeared in the doorway. Even without facial features, their stunned and terrified expressions were enough to show that they were scared out of their wits.
After a brief silence, screams erupted one after another, as if they had seen a living ghost.
Xue Chao was stunned, unable to move forward or backward. The girl closest to the door, in a moment of panic, grabbed the kettle and threw it at Xue Chao. He then stepped back to avoid the splashing hot water. The door was pulled back a little, and the girl, with great courage, slammed the door shut.
He stood outside the door and could still hear soft sobs of surprise and disbelief coming from inside the dormitory. They said things like, "Is there really a ghost?", "Is he the spirit of the Ouija board?", "What should we do now?", "Quickly, ask him to leave." Then they would fall silent in fear.
He also wanted to know what to do.
From his perspective, what he saw wasn't just four girls, but also a bloodshot, wide-open eye behind a floor-length table curtain.
The real ghost was under their table.
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