The street after leaving the alley was as quiet as ever.
So quiet that it felt like everything Xie Xishu had just experienced was nothing more than a nightmare.
But Xie Xishu knew that it wasn’t a dream.
No.
Nothing was right.
Occasionally, a vehicle would speed past Xie Xishu’s side, its driving path zigzagging dangerously, causing unease.
The gray-white smog was thicker than before, and a faint metallic smell lingered in the air. The ashen wind shook the trees lining the street, scattering yellowed leaves, some brushing past Xie Xishu’s shoulders and clothes.
But right now, it was supposed to be midsummer—should summer trees shed so many leaves?
Xie Xishu didn’t have time to think deeply.
After temporarily escaping from the now-monsterized Qi Wu, the first thing Xie Xishu did was run toward the school—heading home from where he was now would be a long distance. If he foolishly ran home, Qi Wu, who might regain his senses, could catch up before he even made it.
And Xie Xishu didn’t want to imagine what would happen if Qi Wu pounced on him again.
Not even in the most absurd and terrifying nightmares had he ever imagined someone turning into that grotesque form.
That thing, resembling an enlarged fleshy sea anemone—was it still human?
Qi Wu…
What was happening with Qi Wu? What had he turned into?
Driven by fear amidst his chaotic thoughts, Xie Xishu sprinted, and soon he saw the gates of Third High through the mist.
And for the first time in three years, he was overjoyed to see the familiar school gate.
“Is anyone here? I was… I was attacked, please help me call 110…”
Xie Xishu practically crawled to the window of the school’s security booth, shouting while pounding hard on the tightly shut glass.
But before he could finish his cry for help, his words stuck on the tip of his tongue. Because Xie Xishu realized the security booth was empty.
The middle-aged man who usually sat there with his legs crossed, lazily drinking tea and scrolling through Douyin, was clearly still there when Xie Xishu had left school earlier, but now, he was nowhere to be seen.
Moreover, the security booth was a mess. The yellow four-legged wooden chair had fallen over on the ground. The thermos on the table had tipped over, spilling swollen seeds mixed with tea leaves all over the table, and dark brown tea dripped steadily from the edge onto the floor.
Xie Xishu glanced inside through the fogged glass, and a chill ran up his spine.
Terrified, he turned his head to look at the school grounds, realizing the school seemed eerily quiet at the moment—students who usually loitered and skipped classes were nowhere to be seen.
And he couldn’t hear any of the usual chatter and laughter that should be coming from the classrooms.
The entire campus was as quiet as a graveyard.
Suddenly, Xie Xishu felt a bone-chilling cold.
He warily straightened his body, instinct screaming at him to leave immediately, but then he remembered the monstrous “Qi Wu” from the alley—perhaps that creature was still tailing him, its disgusting, ugly tongues waving as it inched closer and closer.
Yet, he didn’t dare to move forward into the school either.
There was… a feeling—one that couldn’t be described accurately in any language.
Hesitating at the gate, Xie Xishu’s cold sweat poured out even more.
And just as he gathered the courage to turn and leave, a familiar voice suddenly came from his side.
“Xie Xishu?!”
Xie Xishu whipped his head around to where the voice came from, and saw a thin figure standing not far away.
It was Teacher Li.
Xie Xishu had no idea when she had appeared there. The distance was clearly so close, yet he hadn’t noticed any movement. But regardless, seeing a familiar teacher in this situation, even if it startled him, made Xie Xishu breathe a long sigh of relief.
“Teacher Li, it’s me, please, please help me call the police!”
Xie Xishu quickly walked toward Teacher Li.
After being extremely tense for so long, his nerves suddenly relaxed, and Xie Xishu even felt a bit dizzy, his words coming out disjointed.
“I was attacked, Cheng An went crazy… and Qi Wu, yes, Qi Wu too, something’s wrong with him, he’s like… like a completely different person…”
“Xie Xishu, this isn’t the first time, is it? You’re skipping class again.”
But despite seeing a student covered in blood with disheveled clothes, Teacher Li acted as if she saw nothing.
Or rather, to be more accurate, the only thing she cared about was “class.”
Suddenly, Xie Xishu noticed that Teacher Li’s eyeballs were bulging out of their sockets, as if she had a thyroid condition, and they were bloodshot. Her voice also grew sharper and more piercing.
“If you keep this up, what’s going to happen to you? You’re in your senior year now, in such a crucial time, yet none of you are worried.”
“Teacher Li, you…”
Xie Xishu swallowed hard and instinctively stepped back, but a sharp pain shot through his shoulder.
Teacher Li grabbed him.
Her finger bones became extraordinarily long, with joints bulging out segment by segment. The nails at the tips of her fingers were long and sharp, but they weren’t clean and pretty like an ordinary woman’s manicure. On the contrary, Teacher Li’s nails were extremely filthy, with reddish-brown dirt visible between the nail crevices.
And now, her fingers were almost piercing through Xie Xishu’s skin through the fabric of his school uniform.
“It hurts!”
Xie Xishu let out a cry of pain.
As expected, Teacher Li paid no attention to it.
The woman lowered her head and sniffed beside Xie Xishu.
“Indeed, you’ve gone bad too.”
Then her lips moved slightly, uttering a hoarse whisper.
“Your body reeks of those bad students, it’s disgusting.”
She was clearly looking at Xie Xishu, but her pupils, embedded in her bloodshot eyes, appeared especially vacant and hollow.
“You’ve really let me down. All of you have let me down. You don’t even understand how much I sacrificed to be a teacher, yet you treat my efforts and sacrifices like garbage. It’s outrageous… despicable…”
Teacher Li muttered incessantly, her voice growing increasingly irritable and filled with rage, as if she were cursing something.
Xie Xishu struggled to break free, but the once small and frail Teacher Li now had incredible strength. Her bony, claw-like fingers held Xie Xishu in an iron grip.
Xie Xishu was practically being lifted off the ground and dragged directly into the classroom of Senior Class 1.
“Bang—”
After the door opened, Xie Xishu was thrown straight to the floor.
For a moment, his vision darkened, and he almost fainted.
But his instincts told him he absolutely couldn’t lose consciousness here. The woman who was once Teacher Li now stood at the podium, issuing a sharp warning like a banshee.
“It’s class time already. Get back to your seats quickly! Sit down! Don’t you know it’s time for class?! It’s time for class!”
Cold sweat poured from his body.
Xie Xishu propped himself up with his hands and struggled to stand.
He then made a terrifying discovery: the classroom was full of people—terrified, battered people.
Some of them were indeed students from Third High, but others were janitors, cleaning staff, and even teachers from other grades. Xie Xishu even saw the grade director, covered in blood with a pale face, among the crowd.
But whether they were students or adults, they all sat stiffly in the classroom like actual third-year students, afraid to move a muscle.
Each of them wore a school uniform. Those uniforms were stained with large patches of blood, making the wearers’ faces look as pale as corpses.
Upon seeing Teacher Li enter the classroom, their eyes filled with terror, and their bodies trembled… yet none of them dared to utter a single extra sound.
Teacher Li’s head swiveled around, her vacant gaze sweeping across the classroom. Seemingly satisfied with the “perfect” classroom discipline, she grinned with pleasure.
“Very good. It seems you’re not completely beyond redemption.”
She raised her hand, her arm extending unnaturally long from her sleeve.
Standing at the podium, Teacher Li effortlessly closed the classroom door that was two meters away.
“Now, let’s review the material from last time… Li Li, yes, you. Tell me, where did the teacher leave off last time?”
The “Li Li” who was called out trembled as he stood up from his seat.
Upon hearing Teacher Li’s question, his lips moved twice, but no sound came out. He could only stammer and look helplessly at the woman on the podium. As expected, Teacher Li’s expression darkened.
“See, another one who wasn’t paying attention.”
She sighed.
“No, no, Teacher Li, I—I—”
“Li Li” seemed to have sensed what was coming. The stench of urine rose from his seat as he wet his pants in fear.
And in the next moment, Xie Xishu finally understood why he was so terrified.
Teacher Li’s suddenly elongated arm wrapped around “Li Li’s” neck.
“Crack.”
The next moment, the muffled sound of bones being crushed under skin and flesh echoed in the room. Teacher Li, as if crushing a rotten tomato, snapped the boy’s skull in front of everyone. The boy’s face crumpled completely, and shattered eyeballs, along with white brain matter and crimson blood, spewed out from his disfigured orifices.
After doing all this, Teacher Li withdrew her hand and turned to face another “student” in the classroom.
“Li Li couldn’t answer. Wu Ke, your turn…”
Perhaps the man whose real name wasn’t actually “Wu Ke” stood up, gasping for breath, while others around him were trembling and gagging in fear.
The man’s face twisted as he looked at Teacher Li on the podium. After a brief silence, he let out a furious scream: “Screw you—You’re the one who should die! You monster!”
He then suddenly grabbed the desk and hurled it at Teacher Li.
“Squish—”
The next second, Teacher Li’s deformed, grey-yellow fingers pierced straight through his eye socket.
“Aaahhhh—”
“Help me! Ahhh—”
“Monster!”
“The monster is killing people! Ahhhh!”
…
The brutal deaths of two people in a row shattered the psychological defenses of everyone in the classroom. When fear accumulates to a certain level, it erupts into utter madness.
A few minutes ago, the crowd that barely managed to maintain some semblance of reason had now completely fallen into chaos.
Some were screaming and crying, others were frantically banging on the door, and some, in extreme terror, lunged at Teacher Li, only to be torn into pieces…
Amidst the chaos, Teacher Li’s neurotic murmurs were particularly clear.
“Bad students.”
“No saving you—none of you can be saved—”
“You are the worst students I’ve ever met in my life.”
The strange and muffled whispers emanated not from Teacher Li’s vocal cords but from deep within her body.
Xie Xishu sat rigidly in his seat, watching as a deep red seam appeared on the forehead of the small woman standing on the podium. The seam quickly extended from her forehead down to her chin, then to her neck and chest…
“Crack…”
The wet, tearing sound of flesh and tendons being pulled apart echoed, and within a few seconds, the frail woman standing on the podium completely “bloomed” open under Xie Xishu’s horrified gaze.
The body that once belonged to a human was now split in half as if by an invisible blade, with wet, bloody pieces of flesh hanging down to the waist on either side.
But Teacher Li remained standing steadily in place.
A fat, swollen, nearly translucent mass of flesh with segmented sections squeezed out from her bloodied abdomen.
It looked like a maggot that had been magnified countless times, except that on the head of this “maggot,” Teacher Li’s hideously distorted face was still attached.
“Teacher Li” looked at the crowd and let out a beast-like laugh.
“Such terrible students deserve to die sooner—”
“So noisy, so noisy, all of you, just die.”
“You’re all bad students, beyond saving.”
*
[All of you·just·die]
Teacher Li lowered her body.
Now, she could easily stand on the podium and extend her face all the way to the last row of the classroom.
She opened her mouth and bit down on the trembling headmaster hiding under a desk.
“L-Li… It’s me—look closely, do you know who I am—”
As the headmaster was dragged out, he let out a heart-wrenching scream.
But before he could finish speaking, “Teacher Li” suddenly snapped her jaws shut.
The headmaster’s body twitched once in mid-air before dropping to the ground, and blood sprayed from the severed neck like a fountain.
The few people who had been curled up beside the headmaster sat motionless, stunned, watching the scene unfold, as if still trapped in a dream.
“Teacher Li” shook her neck, then one by one, crushed their heads.
The walls of the classroom were dyed red, blood trickling down like a stream.
The shrill screams and cries filled every inch of the sealed classroom. Everyone wanted to escape, but in this sudden bloody hell, “Teacher Li’s” body moved with terrifying agility and brutality.
“Bad students.”
She whispered softly as she swallowed the still-twitching lower half of someone’s body.
“Bad students.”
Her teeth slid through someone’s abdomen, spilling out entrails that she quickly wrapped up with her tongue.
“You’re all just bad students.”
White spines were ripped from bodies, and dozens of female arms began to grow along the sides of the monster’s segmented body, moving dexterously in mid-air, catching, tearing apart the soft red flesh of ordinary humans.
…
…
…
Xie Xishu could hear the other people’s screams.
The stench of warm blood created a small indoor rain of red.
The “raindrops” fell, staining the floor into a sticky puddle of blood.
Xie Xishu curled up his body, hiding beneath a desk, pressing his hands tightly over his ears.
Perhaps because he had already witnessed Qi Wu’s transformation, Xie Xishu did not freeze in shock when Teacher Li began to mutate.
Almost immediately, he took advantage of the chaos to rush to the classroom door, trying to open it and escape, but as soon as his hand touched the doorknob, he realized the lock was completely deformed—it had been crushed by Teacher Li.
By then, the rear door of the classroom had already been blocked entirely by a pile of torn-up corpses.
In the end, all Xie Xishu could do was find a desk nearby, crawl underneath, close his eyes, cover his ears, and wait in utter fear and despair for everything to pass.
*
Xie Xishu didn’t know how long the massacre had lasted.
The screams, wails, and mad laughter in his ears gradually faded, and then, in a sudden instant, the entire classroom fell into a dead silence.
This is a dream…
This is a nightmare…
I’m just having a nightmare.
Xie Xishu’s fingers trembled as tears welled up in his eyes. He kept trying to convince himself.
But clearly, there was no sign of Xie Xishu waking from this nightmare.
“Ssss…”
Accompanied by the wet sound of mucus and flesh rubbing together, a pale woman’s face suddenly dropped beside Xie Xishu.
“Teacher Li’s” head dangled down, hanging right next to the edge of the desk. The blood-red eyeball, which had completely squeezed out of its socket, dangled at the end of a pale pink stalk, staring straight at Xie Xishu.
“Xie Xishu, what are you doing hiding here? Are you still not planning on listening in class properly?”
“Teacher Li” asked, each word spoken in a flat, emotionless tone.
Then, she grabbed Xie Xishu and dragged him out from under the desk.
