Chapter 161: Chapter 147: Find Someone_2
"Sure, who’s coming with me?" Yang Xiao turned and asked.
The most dangerous places are often the safest, and Yang Xiao thought it was most likely that they would discover Tang Cui’s body in the bathroom, where the chances of the ghost still being there was very low.
"Let’s not talk like that, let’s all stick together," Song Yan decided for the group.
The group approached the women’s restroom with caution, pushed open the door, and Lu Ji took a deep breath, relieved that there was no scent of blood.
However, considering the way the ghost had died, Lu Ji suspected that Tang Cui might have been strangled to death as well.
The bathroom wasn’t large, with seven stalls. The doors of the first six stalls were either half or fully open, only the last one was tightly closed.
A sense of unrest began to ferment; writing everything off as coincidence seemed self-deceptive. When they stopped at a distance, Song Yan slowly squatted down, trying to peer through the gap under the stall door, preparing himself for the sight of tension-filled shoe tips or even a twisted ghostly face. But, in the end, he saw nothing. The last stall was boarded up on all sides with wood as if to hide some secret.
Yang Xiao noticed too; the wood that sealed off the stall was very old and showed signs of decay, clearly having been there for a long time.
"Should we form a human ladder and look over the top?" Yu Mi cautiously suggested.
Before she finished speaking, Yang Xiao stood in front of the door to the last stall, lifted his leg, and kicked open the already flimsy door.
Yu Mi: "!!!"
Upon seeing what was inside, Song Yan and others breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing inside but a storage room filled with cleaning supplies, mops, brooms, and a few broken sacks. Through the holes in the sacks, it was evident they contained a collection of bottles and jars.
"Could they be in the men’s restroom?" Pei Qiuyu was the first to react.
Yet, as they headed to the men’s restroom, there was still nothing out of the ordinary. The missing Tang Cui, and "Jian," were nowhere to be seen.
The most crucial point was that, on inspecting the scene, neither restroom bore any evidence to prove that Tang Cui had been there.
"Pei Qiuyu, are you sure they came here to shoot the film?" Lu Ji looked at Pei Qiuyu with skepticism, seeking confirmation.
"That’s what they said, I... I mean Screenwriter Sun." After struggling for a while, Pei Qiuyu still didn’t dare to utter the word "ghost."
"So you didn’t actually see it yourself, right?" Yang Xiao cut off Lu Ji, who wanted to continue questioning, his attitude still decent.
"I didn’t see it. After he told me, he asked me to stay in the classroom to practice on my own and find the feeling, and then he left with Tang Cui," Pei Qiuyu explained.
"Let’s check upstairs," Song Yan decided, knowing it would be difficult. According to their earlier conjecture, the sealed-off third floor must have witnessed something, most likely the male teacher committing suicide there.
During the filming, Director Ding had hinted, intentionally or unintentionally, that the classroom they were in had been the scene of the incident. But to Yang Xiao and the others, it seemed more likely that it was the corresponding classroom above their second-floor classroom, on the third floor, that was the real crime scene.
Yu Mi and Pei Qiuyu hadn’t yet given their position when Lu Ji objected, "If you want to go, then go. I won’t. What can we find there right now? Aren’t you worried about..."
"Then stay here. We’ll go," Song Yan said, patting Yang Xiao on the shoulder, considering Lu Ji as someone who was dispensable.
Lu Ji was still resisting at first, but to his utter surprise, Yu Mi and Pei Qiuyu firmly followed Song Yan and Yang Xiao’s steps. He had never seen such reckless newcomers before.
After confirming that they were not just bluffing, Lu Ji decisively followed them. After all, in such circumstances, being alone was almost tantamount to being dead.
"Song, Chu, we all need to stick together. It’s better that way." Lu Ji believed in survivalism, and as for pride, that was something he could worry about only if he managed to stay alive first.
Upon reaching the third floor, it was clear it was much more dilapidated. Old tables and chairs were piled up along the corridors, and they hadn’t gone far when a blackboard lying across the corridor blocked their path. Oddly enough, there was a weirdly shaped stick figure drawn on the blackboard, with one hand extended as if pointing further down the corridor.
There was a white frame above the stick figure’s head, inside which was written "This way is impassable."
Overall, the appearance of the stick figure was quite jarring. The drawing style was rather eerie, not at all like something you would find in a school.
"Should we keep going? I have a bad feeling about this place," Lu Ji couldn’t help but look around. As he walked here, he clearly felt the temperature dropping.
Yang Xiao and Song Yan made their stance clear through their actions, moving the blackboard to one side. Behind the blackboard, the stretch of corridor was covered in dust, which gave the impression that it hadn’t been cleaned for at least five or six years.
Their goal was the classroom at the end of the corridor, which corresponded to the classroom directly below where they had been filming.
As he walked, a faint image flashed through Yang Xiao’s mind. It was a picture on the script box, showing a three-story old building at dusk, with a light on in the window at the very edge of the third floor.
And the room with the light on was their current destination—the classroom.
"There are no footprints on the floor; they probably haven’t been here," Lu Ji observed as he walked. He surmised that the ghost had most likely taken Tang Cui downstairs to kill her, and judging from the previous disappearances, it was unlikely they would be able to find her body.
In a mission like this, bodies were not the worst thing to find; disappearances were, as they often meant a break in the chain of clues.
Finding a body could always yield some useful insights, such as the ghost’s method of murder, its habits, or even deeper layers of clues.
Finally, they reached the last classroom. Sure enough, this classroom was different from all others in the building; newspapers sealed the glass observation windows on both the front and back doors.
The newspapers that had been stuck on were yellowed and brittle, clearly many years old. Yang Xiao found the date of issuance on the newspaper and estimated that it dated back at least 15 years, which matched the time of the male teacher’s death.
Song Yan started to remove the newspapers from the glass window, only to be surprised that he couldn’t see anything through the glass behind it. There was a wall standing right behind the classroom door!
It was a red brick wall, constructed in a crude manner. Even a layman like Yang Xiao could tell it was shoddily made, hastily erected following the tragedy that had likely occurred here to prevent discovery.
With the front door bricked up, Yang Xiao and his group had to try their luck and go around to the back door. The back was also blocked by a brick wall, but this time the hasty workmanship was even more apparent. Between some of the red bricks was a crack, and peering through the gap into the classroom, Song Yan suddenly widened his eyes in shock.
There was a woman with disheveled hair hanging from the ceiling, her clothes torn to shreds with one shoulder exposed, the pale skin scarred with marks from a whipping, a gruesome sight.
Even though the woman had her back to them and her face could not be seen, from her clothes, they recognized that the one who had died was the missing Tang Cui.
She was hung by a brown, severely worn belt, the same "prop" that "Jian" had taken from Yang Xiao’s hands.
Tang Cui was dead, which was expected. What they didn’t expect was to find her in this classroom, with both the front and back doors walled up. How on earth did she get inside?
Yu Mi, who was looking through the observation window into the room, started to cry, unable to hold back her sobs, "Qiuyu, she suffered too much. She’s crying, just like in the movie, beaten with a belt, her face... her face still has tear marks. It’s too terrifying!"
The last two sentences made Yang Xiao pause, "Tear marks on her face? But isn’t she facing away from us? How can you see her face?"
