"I'll take the risk."
He did not explain further, hung the notebook back on the wall, and returned to his dormitory, with Zhao Zhenzhen hurrying back as well.
The hallway fell into silence.
Click.
A dormitory door opened, and the pitch-black room revealed nothing of what was inside.
"Sister, he didn't go to find Director Wu."
"He really deserves to die. If he had gone to find Director Wu, she would have ordered everyone out. Once she found that everyone was present, he would have been finished."
"How could he not have gone..."
A crisp, childish voice drifted from the doorway, yet the tone and cadence were identical, sounding exactly like one person speaking.
If Xu Yuan had entered their dormitory at this moment, he would have seen the student cards of the two people inside.
【Beibei】
【Peipei】
【Twins】
【Situation Description: The twins have severe pathological lying and violent tendencies, usually murdering their targets after deceiving them with lies.】
Zhao Zhenzhen lay down after returning to her dormitory. Nan Yue and the others asked her a couple of questions, but she had no heart to answer.
She lay on the bed with her heart pounding like a drum, but the sound of the others breathing in the room helped dissipate her panic slightly.
She eventually drifted into a hazy sleep.
Zhao Zhenzhen was woken by the sound of knocking on the door. She rolled over and ignored it, but the person outside kept knocking.
"So annoying."
Zhao Zhenzhen grumbled, "Who is it in the middle of the night?"
After saying those words, she was completely awake, her previously muddled brain suddenly feeling as if it had been struck by lightning.
That was right!
She was in a mission; who would be knocking on the door in the middle of the night?
Cold sweat instantly drenched Zhao Zhenzhen's body. She shrunk into her quilt and peeked toward the door.
Knock, knock.
Knock, knock.
Knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock, knock.
The knocking outside continued without pause, with not a second's difference in the intervals. Listening to it for too long felt like a form of psychological torture.
No human could knock like a machine forever.
Zhao Zhenzhen poked her head out. "Sister Nan, Sister Nan!"
Nan Yue, sleeping opposite her, was sound asleep, not disturbed by the knocking in the slightest.
"Zhu Xi Ning!"
Zhao Zhenzhen's voice carried a hint of a sob. The knocking outside was still slow and steady, but a heavy sense of unease suddenly flooded her heart.
It felt as if...
Something terrifying was about to happen.
She crept out of bed and went to push Nan Yue.
But no matter how hard she tried, Nan Yue remained in a deep sleep.
Zhao Zhenzhen was isolated from the other three by an invisible barrier.
The knocking continued. Zhao Zhenzhen suddenly began to wail. Under normal circumstances, the entire school would likely have been woken by her crying.
But on this night, the silent school felt as if she were the only living person.
In the excessively quiet night, only her desperate sobs could be heard, interspersed with...
The extremely regular, eerily rhythmic knocking.
Click.
Zhao Zhenzhen keenly heard the faint sound of a lock cylinder turning. She instinctively stopped crying and crawled under the bed.
She knew very well that if she had violated a rule, no one could save her.
But the narrow space under the bed provided the greatest psychological comfort.
She covered her mouth, trying her best to suppress her sobs while breathing slowly.
She was originally paying attention to the movement outside, but suddenly, her gaze was drawn to something under the bed.
She had heard that there were many curse-like words written in blood under the beds. Nan Yue had used this to determine that there were three factions in the school.
But when she saw it with her own eyes, she suddenly realized that the people who wrote these words...
Must have been just like her, hiding under the bed and looking up to write.
"Hell! This place is hell!"
"How could they... children... poor... the teachers... how could they..."
"Do not believe! Liars! Lies!"
Because the dormitory was very dark, Zhao Zhenzhen could only half-guess the words. These were all clues Nan Yue and the others had found before.
But as Zhao Zhenzhen felt around, she touched something else.
Those were words carved into the wooden board with fingernails. If one wasn't so close, they wouldn't be visible at all.
Zhao Zhenzhen tried her best to feel the patterns under her hand, piecing the words together.
"How could they put these devils together? The children are all devils. Poor us, we were all deceived. The teachers were all killed by them. How could they be so cruel..."
"Do not trust the children! They are liars! Their appearance is a lie!"
The more Zhao Zhenzhen touched, the more her hands shook.
It turned out these weren't written haphazardly. Rather, some of the handwriting had been erased by the rules, and she could only perceive them when she was in the same situation.
Zhao Zhenzhen wanted to keep feeling around, but her intuition told her something was wrong.
By the time she realized what it was, her entire body shook as if she had been electrocuted.
The knocking outside... had vanished.
A crisp, childish voice spoke from a place extremely close to Zhao Zhenzhen.
"Found you."
"Hee."
...
When Nan Yue woke up and didn't see Zhao Zhenzhen, she knew something had happened. The scene of the death was extremely brutal, with blood everywhere and even traces of crawling.
Following the marks led to the dormitory where Gu Xiang Kai and the others stayed. Zhao Zhenzhen's corpse, with eyes wide in a lingering grudge, was right there.
Gu Yun woke up to see Zhao Zhenzhen's mangled corpse and vomited until he felt like his organs were tearing.
"When did she come in!"
Gu Yun was going mad. He felt like he was on the verge of a complete breakdown.
"How could I not feel it!"
There was even a bloody handprint on Gu Yun's hand. Zhao Zhenzhen had even grabbed him before she died, yet he knew nothing.
Nan Yue instantly thought of that eerie game of hide and seek in the Chinese Language and Literature textbook.
The protagonist always felt like someone was following him, but no matter how much noise that thing made, his roommates could not hear it.
Just thinking about the despair of having companions right beside you who wouldn't wake up, leaving you to face the horror alone, made everyone's blood run cold.
Gu Yun jumped up. "I can't take it anymore! I'm leaving this place!"
Xu Yuan looked weary. He hadn't slept all night, worrying about violating the rules, but he never expected that even then, he wouldn't know Zhao Zhenzhen was being tortured and killed in his own dormitory.
He tried to stop Gu Yun. "Where are you going?"
"I'm going to find Director Wu and make her sign for me."
"Calm down. The person in charge isn't Director Wu."
Gu Yun shoved Xu Yuan aside, his eyes bloodshot. "It's my turn for the Dormitory Inspection tonight. You were lucky to survive, but what if I die!"
"I probably know who the person in charge is. Calm down."
Nan Yue couldn't stand Gu Yun's behavior. A single sentence made him stop in his tracks as if he had been frozen.
"Then what are you waiting for!"
Nan Yue sneered. "This involves all our lives. Naturally, I need to confirm certain things. If you're in a hurry to die, you can go."
Whether it was because the path to survival was ahead or because Nan Yue's words gave him hope, Gu Yun actually quieted down.
"What happened last night?"
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