Yang Siguang smelled that familiar scent.
Cold, faintly sweet with a metallic tang, mixed with disinfectant, the odor of formalin, and the faintly cloying stench of decaying corpses that no preservative could fully mask.
Cold sweat had completely soaked through his clothes. Time seemed to stretch endlessly at that moment, and everything around him appeared desaturated. The unique sensation of skin touching the corpse was so vivid it felt as if it could be etched into his brain.
The corpse’s hand crawled over his shoulder, moving forward. The coarse stitches at the elbow rubbed against Yang Siguang’s neck.
The chill seeped through his skin and into his throat, making it increasingly difficult for him to breathe.
He began to wonder if he was trapped in another nightmare or if some pathological cause was making him hallucinate… Yet everything around him felt so real.
Xu Lu’s terror-stricken, distorted face before him was real.
The icy, heavy weight of the corpse pressing against his back was real.
Even the corpse of Li Chen slowly opening its palm to reveal an eyeball in front of him was horrifyingly real.
Resting in the corpse’s grayish-blue, dry hand, the eyeball—severed from its body long ago—still appeared fresh and moist. Only the nerve bundle hanging from the back had discolored from dark red to a pale, grayish flesh tone after prolonged soaking.
“Li Chen” had returned his eyeball to Yang Siguang, as if using a ghostly method to remind him that he would never be let off.
Yang Siguang’s heart pounded so hard it began to ache, and his prolonged tension caused his muscles to cramp. At that moment, as the eyeball appeared before him, Xu Lu finally broke down completely.
“AAAAHHH! A GHOST! AAAAHHH!”
The boy let out a bloodcurdling scream and jumped up from the bed.
Yang Siguang barely had time to see Xu Lu grab a pillow and hurl it forcefully in some direction before the latter yanked him off the bed and dragged him to the floor.
“THERE’S A GHOST! AHHHH!”
Xu Lu kept screaming, his sweat-drenched palms gripping Yang Siguang’s wrist like iron clamps.
By now, the room was filled with white mist, the chill seeping into their bones.
Xu Lu dragged Yang Siguang, flinging open the dormitory door and escaping outside. As they left, Yang Siguang instinctively glanced back and caught sight of the shadow sprawled on the dormitory floor.
At the funeral earlier, Yang Siguang hadn’t seen Li Chen’s remains.
But now, he thought, this must be what the ghost looked like.
Before being cremated, Li Chen’s body had undergone difficult and expensive restoration. Severed limbs had been reattached, and his shattered, deflated skull had been stuffed full of filler. Yet his hollow left eye socket was still nothing but a gaping void, with sticky black blood continuously oozing out. The corpse’s stench came from there.
As if sensing Yang Siguang’s gaze, the ghost raised its head at that moment, staring deeply at its former childhood friend.
Yang Siguang’s heart skipped a beat, but before he could react, Xu Lu dragged him out the door entirely.
With a loud bang, Xu Lu kicked the dormitory door shut, slamming it heavily—perhaps out of fear the ghost would follow them.
Turning back, the night outside the dormitory remained eerily silent.
The dim yellow lights on the corridor ceiling cast a faint, gloomy glow.
Looking down the hallway, all the dormitory rooms were shrouded in darkness, as if no one inside had heard the terrified screams from outside.
Everything was too quiet.
Quiet like a graveyard.
But at this moment, neither Yang Siguang nor the terrified, nearly hysterical Xu Lu had time to care about that.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it! Why can’t I reach 110? Why is there no signal?”
Xu Lu dragged Yang Siguang as they sprinted toward the end of the hallway, trembling as he fiddled with his phone.
The screen kept displaying “Call cannot be connected.”
Xu Lu’s voice began to break with sobs.
“There’s a ghost, damn it, there’s really a ghost—”
He whimpered.
“Yang Siguang, what the hell is going on?!”
While running toward the outside of the dormitory building, Xu Lu incoherently explained to Yang Siguang the reason he was on his bed.
Xu Lu said that he had been woken up in the middle of the night by the sudden drop in temperature in the dormitory.
But he was too lazy to get new blankets, so he simply rolled up his bedding and went to Yang Siguang’s bed.
“…I pushed you for a long time, but you didn’t wake up, and I was so tired that I just lay down next to you.”
“As soon as I lay down, I felt like someone was watching me. At first, I thought it was you.”
“But after waiting for a while, I felt more and more uneasy, and when I turned my head to look, I found… there was someone at the edge of the bed.”
“It wasn’t you staring at me, it was… it.”
“Wuwuwu, that wasn’t a living person, right?! You could tell it wasn’t a living person! Oh my God, why is this happening to me? I never thought I’d run into a ghost, it’s so scary, wuwuwu…”
Halfway through his crying, Xu Lu’s voice suddenly faltered.
At the same moment, Yang Siguang also stopped abruptly.
He of course understood why Xu Lu had gone silent.
They were nearly at the stairs, ready to go downstairs, but just as they had descended halfway and were about to turn the corner to the next floor, they saw a jagged shadow lying at the stairwell.
Because all its joints had been broken and severely misaligned, and large areas of its limbs had been torn apart… it could only crawl on the ground.
A large amount of flesh had already been scraped off in the car accident, and it could only crawl up the steps, leaving a long trail of blood behind.
However, its movements were incredibly swift.
Swift enough that in the blink of an eye, it was directly in front of Yang Siguang and Xu Lu.
“AAAAAHHHH—”
Xu Lu let out a scream that seemed like it could tear his vocal cords.
Yang Siguang was also chilled to the bone.
He made a quick decision and immediately turned to run back the way they came.
However, the sticky sound of blood flowing behind them was hauntingly persistent…
“Drip..drip…”
In the dark, foul-smelling blood was rising in the air.
Yang Siguang caught a glimpse in his peripheral vision and saw black blood starting to flow down the stairs beside him.
A sudden, intense premonition of danger rose in his heart, and sure enough, just as they were about to go upstairs, he saw a familiar ghostly figure on the platform of the upper floor, slowly closing in on them.
“Ghost, a ghost—”
Xu Lu seemed to be truly crying in fear.
“Calm down.”
Yang Siguang’s headache was getting worse, and he gritted his teeth as he whispered to the almost breaking-down boy beside him.
But just as he was about to look for another escape route, Yang Siguang saw what had completely broken Xu Lu—still the ghostly figure.
With the stairs completely blocked, two bloody, grotesque shadows appeared at both ends of the dormitory hallway.
What made it even worse was that as the ghosts kept getting closer, the already dim hallway lights began to flicker and go out one by one, like candles in the wind.
“AAAAHHHHH—HELP! HELP!”
Xu Lu screamed.
The cold, heavy darkness slowly seeped into Yang Siguang’s skin.
At this moment, even Yang Siguang couldn’t help but let out a suppressed, low cry.
“Enough—shut up!”
Just before the darkness could completely swallow them, Yang Siguang shoved Xu Lu, grabbed him by the collar, and shouted.
Xu Lu finally quieted down.
Though he seemed completely out of it.
The boy was panting heavily, like a frog caught in the headlights, standing frozen in place, helplessly watching the ghosts closing in from all sides.
“We’re doomed, we’re dead… I… I’m dead… dead for sure…”
A thin, trembling cry escaped his lips.
Yang Siguang swallowed hard, grabbed Xu Lu’s wrist, and without hesitation, ran to the nearest dormitory door, banging on it frantically.
“Is anyone there? Anyone? Let us in—let us in to hide!!”
Yang Siguang shouted, praying in his heart that someone would open the door so they could hide inside.
Though, given the current situation, it seemed almost impossible, but just a few seconds later, he heard the sound of footsteps dragging.
“Creak.”
Then came the distinct sound of the door’s lock being turned.
The dormitory door suddenly opened.
Xu Lu and Yang Siguang, off balance, tumbled into the room.
Without time to thank anyone, Xu Lu slammed the door shut behind them and locked it.
“Bro, no need to thank me, this is so weird, you might not believe it but…”
Xu Lu turned around, and his expression suddenly changed drastically.
“…But we really ran into a ghost.”
He finished the last sentence out of sheer habit, his voice trembling almost out of tune.
The dormitory they were in was strangely familiar.
The person who had opened the door for them was already gone.
What they saw were only the blankets they had dropped in panic, askew and kicked to the side, along with a chair that had been knocked over.
Where the ghostly figure had been lying, there was now just a soft pillow, its fabric slightly faded from repeated washing.
*
Yang Siguang and Xu Lu felt as if they had run half a mile while being chased by a ghost.
But when they returned inside, they realized they were back in Xu Lu’s own dormitory.
They had been ghost-walled.
Yang Siguang, breathless from exertion, couldn’t understand why he wasn’t surprised anymore.
It was as if, in some unseen way, he had already anticipated that he might never escape.
*
“Bang—bang—bang.”
Just as Yang Siguang and Xu Lu exchanged glances, both shocked and horrified, a series of even knocks suddenly came from outside their dormitory door.
Xu Lu let out a sharp cry and jumped up.
It was as if he had grasped the last straw for survival, and he clung to Yang Siguang, repeatedly retreating, until they reached the window at the far end of the dormitory.
With no more space to retreat, Xu Lu finally stopped in despair.
His entire body was in a state of panic as he stared at the door, as if the seemingly ordinary door had turned into the bloodthirsty mouth of some monster, ready to swallow him whole if he got too close.
At some point, all the lights in the hallway had gone out, except for the one in front of their door, which was still on.
Through the poor-quality gap in the dormitory door, they could clearly see a shadow standing outside their door.
It was dark. Cold.
Motionless.
A small amount of black, foul-smelling blood slowly trickled through the gap into the dormitory.
At the same time, the “thing” that had arrived at their door continued to knock in a rhythmic, stiff manner.
“Bang—bang—bang—”
“Bang—bang—bang—”
…
“What is this…”
Yang Siguang heard Xu Lu muttering.
Xu Lu’s face had lost all color, and he looked as if he had completely lost his sanity from fear.
Before Yang Siguang could react, Xu Lu grabbed his hand, his voice piercingly sharp.
“You said before… you said you secretly hid part of someone’s body, didn’t you? You didn’t mean that, right? We’re not really… really haunted, are we?”
Xu Lu’s throat trembled.
“Every time I was with you, I felt like something was wrong…”
Xu Lu muttered, and because of his overwhelming fear, even Yang Siguang found it hard to tell if he was talking to himself or questioning him.
“That person… that person kept staring at me like it was going to eat me…”
“Xu Lu, calm down.”
Yang Siguang was about to speak to comfort him when the knocking outside the door suddenly became violent. The loud banging shook the entire dormitory, and at the same time, the thick black blood seemed to have a mind of its own, turning into a long bloodline that slowly crept toward Yang Siguang.
“No! No, we can’t stay here!”
Xu Lu, seeing the scene before him, was so scared that he jumped up and sat on the dormitory window sill.
“Bang, bang, bang, bang—”
“…%%#@ (… Si… Si… *&￥%#3…)”
The knocking became deafening, mixed with many indistinct, groaning sounds from the ghostly figure.
Yang Siguang couldn’t help but lean back.
Then he heard the sound of the window being opened.
It was Xu Lu opening the window.
At this point, half of his body was already over the window frame. When he saw Yang Siguang looking at him, he trembled and said, “It’s… it’s the second floor…”
“The ghosts have blocked the stairs and the hallway. The only way to escape now is to climb out the window.” At the end, as if to reassure himself, Xu Lu quickly explained, “It’s just the second floor, and there’s a flower bed below with a lot of flowers. Even if we jump, we’ll probably only break a bone, so… so… it’ll be fine… it’ll definitely be fine.”
With that, he extended his hand toward Yang Siguang.
“Come on, let’s jump together.”
He said.
*
Yang Siguang didn’t reach out.
His head was pounding so hard it felt like it was going to split, and every inch of skin that had been touched by Li Chen felt like it was immersed in liquid ammonia, frozen to the point of complete numbness.
Outside the door was the deafening sound of ghostly knocking.
Inside was his friend, who had lost all sanity, terrified to the point of a mental breakdown.
Yang Siguang panted heavily, knowing that Xu Lu wasn’t wrong. His dormitory was indeed on the second floor, with a thick grass mat below. Jumping down might be the best option, but for some reason, he just couldn’t bring himself to agree to Xu Lu’s suggestion.
“Bang, bang, bang—”
Then, just as this was happening, the knocking suddenly stopped.
Yang Siguang’s heart skipped a beat, and he quickly turned his head to look at the dormitory door.
Then he saw the doorknob slowly turning.
“Creak.”
The door lock clicked open on its own.
*
Yang Siguang’s breath almost stopped at that moment. Just then, the phone that had had no signal during their escape suddenly rang.
Then, without anyone touching it, the call was automatically answered.
“Hello, is this Yang… Yang Siguang?”
He didn’t put the phone on speaker, but in the eerie silence of the night, the voice on the other end was unusually clear.
Before Yang Siguang could answer, the person on the other end spoke urgently and helplessly, as if afraid Yang Siguang might hang up in the middle of the conversation.
“Sorry to disturb you, this is the Blue Sun Bar. Your friend, Mr. Xu, Xu Lu, is here and he’s drunk. He’s the only one we could contact. Could you please come and pick him up?”
*
“Xu Lu?”
Yang Siguang stared blankly at his phone, completely stunned.
He repeated the name, but the person on the other end of the line clearly misunderstood the meaning of his voice. They sighed in relief and continued speaking.
“Yes, yes, it’s Xu Lu. He’s a regular here, but… well, this is a bar, so we can’t really keep him overnight. You see, the bar is about to close, and he’s really drunk… and he’s been waiting for you here all night…”
…
Yang Siguang couldn’t hear clearly what the person from the bar was saying.
He only felt extremely weak and cold.
If what was said on the phone was true…
If Xu Lu had been at the bar all night, then who was the “Xu Lu” who had been with him earlier?
As he thought about this, Yang Siguang slowly turned his head and looked beside him.
There was no one there.
A warm night breeze, tinged with the faint smell of grass and wood, blew in from the open window.
The room was completely empty, and near the wall, faint traces of the iron-framed double bed that had been there for years were visible, but now, the beds had long been removed.
The place had been cleaned thoroughly, and there was still a faint smell of disinfectant, likely from 84 disinfectant.
Clearly, the cleaning had been done not long ago.
At this moment, Yang Siguang looked out the window, following the night breeze.
This was not the second-floor dormitory where he had been just a few minutes ago.
It was located on the top floor of the entire dormitory building.
And directly below was a cement area used for parking bicycles.
*
Yang Siguang pressed his hand to his temple.
The chill left by the ghostly figure still lingered on his body, his fingertips as cold as ice. The veins at his temples pulsed, sending sharp pain that made his head spin.
He staggered away from the window.
Once again, he questioned everything around him.
Was this reality? Or was it a dream?
He couldn’t tell… not at all…
A wave of intense fear washed over his already fragile mind, and at that moment, the night breeze passed through the window frame, as if an invisible hand slowly pushed the window shut, the same one that he had almost leaped through.
Yang Siguang shuddered violently.
“Don’t, don’t come closer.”
He uncontrollably shouted toward the empty window.
Then, he suddenly turned and forcefully pushed open the unfamiliar dormitory door, rushing out.
But as soon as he stepped outside, he kicked something, losing control and falling to the ground. Dried flowers were crushed beneath him, and the sound of breaking glass echoed.
As the pain hit, Yang Siguang looked down in terror and realized what had tripped him.
It was a somewhat stale white bouquet, along with various white candles enclosed in windproof glass holders, and small and large photo frames surrounded by the flowers and candles. The people in the frames were from various competitions, sports events, and award ceremonies at A University, but the person in every scene was always the same.
Li Chen.
*
“Who’s there? Breaking things early in the morning, are you crazy—”
At that moment, a door not far from Yang Siguang opened.
A male student, still half-asleep, poked his head out and cursed impatiently.
However, when he saw Yang Siguang lying on the ground, his face changed dramatically, and he screamed in terror.
“Holy shit! Holy shit! Who are you?!”
…
The person was clearly terrified.
Yang Siguang, however, now clearly understood why the person was so scared.
The reason was simple to the point of being almost laughable.
After Li Chen died in such a tragic manner, his dormitory was cleared out. Only many of his admirers would leave flowers and candles in front of his room as a tribute.
It was warm and touching.
But on this day… the door to the deceased’s dormitory, which had been tightly locked, was mysteriously opened.
And from inside, someone had run out, fallen to the ground with a deathly pale face, covered in blood.
*
…
A few hours later—
A University, Counselor’s Office.
Yang Siguang hunched his body, motionless, curled up in the corner of the office.
“Xiao Yang, are you feeling better now?”
The counselor stared at Yang Siguang for a moment, sighed silently, and then forced a fake smile.
He pulled a computer chair over and sat down in front of Yang Siguang.
Despite Yang Siguang’s silence, the counselor continued speaking to himself.
“You were cut by glass, right? The infirmary treated it, but I think you should still go to the hospital.”
“…”
“Don’t resist so much. You’ve always been an exemplary student, and the school knows that, so don’t be afraid… I just want to hear your feelings and thoughts. Li Chen’s dorm has been cleared and locked up. What made you suddenly want to go in? Were you… curious, or were you looking for some excitement?”
The counselor spoke cautiously, his gaze fixed on Yang Siguang’s face, trying to find some clue.
But he failed.
The young man in front of him looked absent-minded, and his face was so pale that it made the counselor’s heart race with fear.
“I understand. You probably don’t want to talk right now, but I really do care about you. After all, based on your usual performance, you don’t seem like the type to do something like this.”
Still no response.
The counselor sighed inwardly.
When he spoke again, his tone had become more serious.
“I know about Li Chen’s death… it was a huge blow to many students. But the school had already issued a clear notice that no one should stir up trouble about the death of a fellow student. Anyone who violates this will be penalized. Yang, you’re in your senior year, and to cause such an incident at this crucial time… it really puts me in a difficult position…”
Seeing that Yang Siguang still had that vacant expression, the counselor frowned. Just as he was about to continue trying to understand what had happened, the door to the office was knocked on.
Before the counselor could respond, someone from the administration office pushed the door open and led a tall man into the room.
“Xiao Wang, you’re not needed here for now.”
In a tone that was much gentler and more urgent than usual, the person from the administration office spoke to the counselor.
“Li Chen’s family has arrived… they want to talk to Yang Siguang.”
With that, the person from the administration office gave a flattering smile to the man, then forcefully dragged the counselor out of the room.
