Chapter 196: Chapter 168: Arrival
The female assistant suddenly stopped talking, her expression becoming hesitant.
"At this point, what can’t you say?" Song Yan was anxious. Downstairs were two dead bodies, and after such an incident, the police would soon arrive.
"She... she is not Ms. Shengnan. She’s called Tang Ya Ling, Ms. Shengnan’s personal stylist."
"Ms. Shengnan met her on a talk show and, because of a similar body shape and facial structure, later recruited her to her team."
"You should know, there has always been a lot of controversy surrounding Ms. Shengnan, many envious of her success and attacking her. Male chauvinists and flatterers couldn’t stand her independent personality. On social media, trolls continuously stirred up trouble, so for some occasions where it was inconvenient for her to appear herself, Tang Ya Ling would step in. This collaboration has been going on for... for several years now." The female assistant confessed in one breath.
"So apart from you, those investors also didn’t know that this Ms. Shengnan was a fake?" Yang Xiao, a little troll herself, had also left a comment on Sun Shengnan’s social media account yesterday, but alas, she was deleted within a minute and then blocked.
"The main investors are aware, but they don’t care. After all, anyone familiar with Ms. Shengnan knows she has a carefree character, dislikes being constrained, and is a very genuine person." The female assistant spoke of Ms. Shengnan with evident admiration.
"A purely bad person, right?" Yang Xiao cursed inwardly. With Tang Ya Ling dead, Sun Shengnan couldn’t be uninvolved with this human life.
"Ah... Ahhhh!!"
Suddenly, a piercing scream erupted from outside the window, coming from downstairs. Yang Xiao and Song Yan left the distraught assistant behind and ran down.
As soon as they dashed out of the teaching building’s main entrance, they saw a crowd gathered below, the scene in utter chaos.
In the chaos, they found Lu Ji and Yu Mi, who had hurried downstairs very early on.
"What happened just now?" Song Yan pressed Lu Ji for an answer. Yu Mi, beside him, had a face full of shock; surely, she was too rattled to respond.
Lu Ji also looked pale, as if he had been frightened. "I don’t know. Just now, I heard someone shouting about a corpse coming back to life, so I ran. Just got back myself."
"A corpse coming back to life?" Yang Xiao’s heart skipped a beat. Could it be that Nie Hexiang had risen again?
Searching through the crowd, they spotted a male teacher sitting collapsed on the ground, talking non-stop, with several other teachers watching over him, and some were desperately making phone calls. Yang Xiao and the rest immediately approached to eavesdrop.
"Oh, it scared me to death. Just now, Teacher Wang from the second year thought to check if the one lying on top could still be saved, but... but who knew, just as he flipped the body over, that face... that face..." The male teacher’s expression contorted as though he was a duck being strangled by its neck.
"What happened to that face?" A nearby female teacher asked quietly.
"That face was smiling, she was smiling!!" The male teacher recalled the scene at that moment, his whole body involuntarily shuddering.
And in the male teacher’s narrative, Teacher Wang, the one who had turned the body, was so frightened that he fell to the ground, nearly passing out.
"Have you looked at the body?" Yang Xiao suddenly turned to Lu Ji.
Lu Ji curled his lip. "You think too highly of me. I’m quite a coward, plus that Nie Hexiang..."
Lu Ji was a cautious person; Nie Hexiang was a ghost, and he was not about to provoke her.
"What are you all gathering here for? Homeroom teachers, go back to your classes and count the students, comfort them, and wait for further notice. School will be dismissed early today."
"The rest of the teachers, prevent the students from getting close to the site and escort any students found alone back to their classes."
"Director Sun and Teacher Zhang, you and a few others stay with me to guard the site until the police arrive and handle it."
Principal Wu showed the bearing of a commanding officer, managing to control the chaotic scene with just a few words, and the originally disordered situation gradually calmed down.
The sound of police sirens grew louder as they neared, and two ambulances sped towards the site, not even fully stopped before several medical staff leaped out.
Of the two bodies, Tang Ya Ling’s was one that, at a glance, was obviously beyond help, but as they moved Nie Hexiang’s body and lifted it, the onlookers, including Yang Xiao, couldn’t help but gasp.
Nie Hexiang was smiling, but not in a usual sense; her mouth corners were upturned, her eyes slightly curved into arcs, the outer corners drooping as if mimicking a crescent moon.
Yang Xiao had never seen such an expression on a living person, but it was oddly familiar to him, as if he had seen it somewhere before.
Moments later, he suddenly recalled. He had once seen a hand-drawn illustration in a book about strange tales; the "yellow skin" begging for a seal had this very look.
Being much closer, the medical staff were struck by a greater shock than Yang Xiao and the others, one of them staggering and almost crashing onto the body.
The leading middle-aged man, after the initial panic, seemed to discover something. He squatted down by Nie Hexiang’s body, first prodding her skin with his hand, then pulling up her sleeve, checking her arm.
"What are you prodding at? She’s obviously stone-dead; can’t you see?" Yu Mi found the middle-aged doctor’s actions baffling.
"Don’t talk if you don’t understand. This doctor must have noticed something amiss. Prodding the skin is to judge the time of death based on muscle elasticity, and pulling on the clothes is likely to check for livor mortis. This is getting troublesome; he must have realized this body wasn’t freshly dead." Song Yan’s words had just ceased when the male doctor suddenly stood up and began looking around.
