“Qin Shu, what are you looking at?”
“…”
“Qin Shu! Hey, don’t tell me this kid fell asleep with his eyes open?”
“…”
“Is the academic representative Pei Zhao? Right, Pei Zhao, hurry and help your deskmate wake up. If this keeps going, he’ll have conduct points deducted.”
At three in the afternoon, during a Chinese class that made everyone drowsy, Qin Shu once again became the teacher’s negative example.
But he could not help it. His attention was stretched taut and could not be withdrawn, entirely fixed outside the corridor.
The hanged ghost that had suddenly appeared in the morning to frighten people was now gone. Under normal circumstances, Qin Shu should have been happy about that. But at this point… this was absolutely not something worth celebrating.
The world in his eyes was becoming clearer and clearer, so the traces left behind by that hanged ghost also became more and more abrupt and shocking.
Qin Shu stared at the damp, rotting wall skin on the ceiling, at the grayish-black liquid dripping down with constant drip, drip, drip sounds, then looked at the scattered fragments of some unidentified creature all over the floor, soft yet cold in texture. Discovering that they were mixed together with tiny bits of what seemed to be flesh and blood, a terrifying guess could not help surfacing in his heart.
—The hanged ghost had been killed by something else, dying without even an intact “corpse” left. It had been extremely miserable, and perhaps had not even had the strength to resist.
If something could easily kill a hanged ghost filled with towering resentment, then that meant… no matter what this thing was, it could only be even more terrifying than the hanged ghost.
Even more terrifying was the fact that a swarm of little ghosts resembling carrion-eating creatures had appeared. They had wings and pitch-black claws, and no one knew which nook or cranny they had rushed out from. Screeching loudly, they swarmed into the corridor.
They landed around those fragments and liquid like flies. In order to fight over a few mouthfuls of leftovers, they actually began clawing and tearing at their companions with hideous expressions, then directly ate their dead companions as well.
Their sharp-beaked mouths stretched open in an exaggerated way, revealing more than a dozen rows of dense, fine, pointed teeth, along with long, thin tongues like drinking straws. A strong stench of rot wafted from them.
The most disgusting part was that these grotesquely shaped little ghosts all had proper human faces. There were men and women among them, and their facial features were all different. Even the fine hairs and tiny moles on their faces were clearly visible.
Lifelike human faces, dried-out eagle bodies, paired with bizarre bird beaks. The uncanny valley effect they had mentioned in class before—Qin Shu finally gained a deep understanding of it at this moment.
They ran riot through Jiangcheng No. 2 High School beneath the cloud-covered sky, devouring prey whole and swallowing one another without restraint, their cries nearly mournful.
The longer Qin Shu looked, the more completely he lost himself in it. He realized that he seemed possessed. Even though this sight had already stimulated him until his heart was pounding like thunder, every muscle in his body was tense and aching, and his eyes were burning with stabbing pain… no matter what, he could not look away.
His mind was perfectly clear, and he also knew in his heart that this was bad, but he truly could not move his eyes away.
This so-called “opening of the Heavenly Eye” seemed to be a kind of talent with an extremely high operational priority. Ever since Qin Shu had gained this ability, that talent had uncontrollably become his instinct.
Whenever there was an opportunity for him to continue growing stronger, his instinct could directly ignore his personal safety, engage in a fierce struggle against his reason, and come out slightly ahead.
“Wake up, Qin Shu.”
“Mm, hm?”
Only when Pei Zhao’s cool, calm voice sounded by his ear did Qin Shu abruptly come back to himself in a daze.
He followed the sound hazily and looked over, meeting those beautiful pale eyes like golden amber. They were close at hand, like a cool lake surface kissed by sunlight.
“Zhaozhao…”
Qin Shu fell into another brief daze. Then, after a moment of silence, he struggled to tear his gaze away from those eyes and weakly looked toward Teacher Zhang, who stood there with her arms crossed and her face ashen.
Fortunately, he had learned his lesson from the morning. Otherwise, at this moment, he truly would have wanted to grab his good deskmate into his arms again and hug him hard.
But that would also trouble Pei Zhao. After all, he did not like this sort of lively scene where the whole class watched and cheered. Pei Zhao had never liked noise and excitement.
“Sorry, Teacher Zhang. I didn’t sleep much last night.” Qin Shu quickly stood up, doing his best to ignore the little ghosts still making noise outside the corridor, and took the initiative to admit his mistake.
Teacher Zhang shook her head helplessly. Seeing that his attitude was all right, she did not keep hounding him over it. After two and a half years of high school together, everyone was already very familiar with one another, and the teachers also had a clear idea in their hearts—Qin Shu had a pretty steady personality, his attitude toward studying was also good, and he had never had the sort of strange temper that liked stirring up trouble.
If he had suddenly acted abnormally, it definitely was not intentional. But they still needed to pay more attention.
“All right. Come to my office after class.”
Teacher Zhang let the matter pass lightly and continued explaining the major reading-comprehension questions on the mock exam paper.
Qin Shu let out a breath of relief, but his racing heartbeat still did not calm down. Earlier, he had been too tense for a while. Now that he relaxed even slightly, he instead felt dizzy and lightheaded, unable to settle his mind no matter what.
“Drink some water.”
Pei Zhao sat beside him, so naturally, he could sense that Qin Shu’s state was off. He slowly pushed his thermos to Qin Shu’s hand, his light, airy voice falling against the tip of Qin Shu’s ear like a feather.
“Thanks.” Qin Shu drank a large mouthful without the slightest politeness, letting the warm tea flow down his throat, and revealed a slightly forced smile.
In truth, he really wanted to talk to Pei Zhao about what he had encountered, but Pei Zhao had not asked him a single word.
Although Pei Zhao had not treated him as a lunatic, he had not reacted much to Qin Shu’s abnormal behavior either. From morning until now, he had been exceptionally calm, remaining quiet and no different from usual.
Being able to push his thermos over and tell him to drink water… perhaps that was already the limit of what Pei Zhao could do when trying to express goodwill.
Thinking about it from this angle, Qin Shu’s mood suddenly improved a little.
So he decisively said, “Zhaozhao, I’ll treat you to dinner tonight.”
“…Hm?”
Pei Zhao turned his head blankly. The meaning in his eyes did not need to be expressed in words; Qin Shu could immediately see it.
—You already asked once this morning and got rejected. Why are you asking a second time now?
“I feel a little unwell. I feel awful… so keep me company.” Qin Shu gently pinched his wrist and shamelessly shook it. “Zhaozhao, you choose the place. We’ll eat whatever you want, and I’ll pay. After we eat, I’ll send you back to school, okay?”
Pei Zhao was silent for a short while, as if he wanted to say something but stopped himself. Only then did he softly say, “Tang Rui Cheng can keep you company.”
“How could he be the same as you? Just seeing that guy makes me mad.”
“Mm. Then all right.” Pei Zhao seemed to smile a little. The corners of his lips curved up faintly, then vanished in an instant.
“You agreed?”
“I agreed.”
Qin Shu let go of his hand in satisfaction, and the discomfort caused by the dense ghostly aura and noise gradually eased as well.
Everyone said Pei Zhao was difficult to get along with, but in the end, they simply had not found the right way to interact with him.
In truth, as long as one praised him more, said more pleasant things, and troubled him a little more often to help with small favors… after going back and forth like that and getting familiar, one would discover that Pei Zhao was a very reasonable person, especially kind and especially gentle.
More importantly, every time Qin Shu interacted with Pei Zhao, the psychological pressure on him would lessen. Now that he had run into ghosts, the effect was the same.
Qin Shu could not give a specific reason. Perhaps it was like drinking mint ice water so cold it chilled to the bone in the middle of summer.
No matter how restless and chaotic the thoughts he carried were, as long as he chatted with Pei Zhao and looked into those beautiful, rippleless eyes, Qin Shu would very quickly be able to calm himself down.
After adjusting his mood, Qin Shu began trying to find a solution.
After class, he secretly took out a yellow talisman meant for salvation rites from his schoolbag, quickly slipped it behind the honor roll posted in the corridor, then immediately acted as though nothing had happened and strolled toward Teacher Zhang’s office.
The sinister and eerie ghostly aura had originally still been spreading, but very soon, it was wrapped in the white mist seeping out from the talisman paper.
The little ghosts crawling all over the floor stopped moving in unison, uncomfortable creak, creak growls coming from their throats. After exchanging glances with the surviving companions around them for a moment, they raised their sticky, pitch-black wings in groups and directly chose to withdraw from the senior-year corridor. In the blink of an eye, they had vanished without a trace.
Qin Shu had been secretly observing them while forcing up his courage, but the more he watched, the colder his heart grew.
Because not a single little ghost had been successfully sent on. They had not even had so much as a hair harmed.
The talisman Daoist Priest Xu had given him was not useless, but its effect was too small. At most, it could only drive them away.
If given to friends and family who could not see ghosts and monsters at all, perhaps it would be quite suitable. But for Qin Shu himself, it still treated the symptom rather than the root.
He sighed helplessly, went around the faintly visible, icy “corpse” beside the water dispenser, avoided the elementary-school ghost staggering as it sprinted wildly down the corridor, and went to the teachers’ office to receive five minutes of scolding, along with a doubled set of practice problems…
When he came out again, Qin Shu even ran into another brand-new hanged ghost, hanging outside the window by Teacher Zhang’s desk. This time, it was a female ghost. Her long hair and the hanging rope were tangled together, tightening around her deathly pale neck, making her look even more hideous.
“Just how many people have hanged themselves at our school?”
Qin Shu muttered numbly, already without the strength to show much of a reaction. He turned and hurried to the bathroom while he still had time.
He decided to use the talismans to purify the boys’ bathroom, because there were actually more demons and monsters in the boys’ bathroom than outside.
One ordinary drowned ghost lay beside the tiles, dressed in the No. 2 High School uniform, half its face buried in the blackened mop sink, as if it might turn its head to look over at any moment.
One little ghost with a human face and an eagle body had folded its wings and was crouching behind the drowned ghost, secretly pecking and biting at its ankle.
There was also a lecherous ghost clinging to the stall door. From the moment Qin Shu entered, it had been staring at him, its lips exaggeratedly curved and drool running from its mouth. Its narrow, willow-leaf eyes were squeezed into thin slits, and its lecherous stare was almost tangible.
Qin Shu felt a wave of discomfort in his heart from being stared at, but he was not particularly afraid. He simply narrowed his eyes too and walked closer, standing outside the stall to observe it at close range.
This lecherous ghost was actually wearing the Jiangcheng No. 2 High School uniform. Even after dying, it was still no good.
Qin Shu’s fist hardened slightly. With a stern face, he took three talismans from the pocket of his jacket, wanting to paste a few more around this filthy thing… Yet precisely at this moment, that lecherous ghost suddenly began to move.
It was not moving to dodge the talismans. It was simply leering at Qin Shu.
Its semi-transparent hands and feet clung steadily to the door panel like a spider, with a strange, damp-looking downy texture. As they rubbed against the surface, they made wet squelch, squelch sounds.
The lecherous ghost crawled quickly down the doorframe, its mouth pursed into an exaggerated curve. Its neck suddenly stretched long and thin like a noodle, and its head lunged straight toward Qin Shu’s butt.
Elio’s Notes: Two characters are missing in the original text here (□□), so the exact description of the ghost’s face can’t be recovered. Fortunately, the surrounding action is still clear.
Qin Shu: …
Qin Shu truly could not endure it anymore.
He already had a great many emotions to begin with.
That fear, doubt, irritability, and unease that refused to disperse had once been soothed, adjusted, and repeatedly forced back down into the bottom of his heart by his own restraint.
But in the end, as long as the problem remained unresolved, all those emotions would turn him into… a gas cylinder pressurized to its limit.
Once it could no longer be contained, it would explode. And when it exploded, he would not be able to care about anything at all.
Qin Shu raised his fist, his solid core and hips snapping into the turn.
He said nothing and showed almost no expression. He simply threw a clean, full right hook, recklessly putting all his strength into trying to beat it to death.
Bang—!
Gaaaaahhhhhh—!
A clear, tremendous sound, like finger bones smashing through a watermelon, rang violently in Qin Shu’s ears alongside the lecherous ghost’s incomparably shrill, gradually weakening scream.
Qin Shu stood where he was without moving. He rubbed his slightly aching hand, lips pressed together, his black eyes cold and unwavering as he stared in the direction where the lecherous ghost had been sent flying and dissolved into nothing.
In the boys’ bathroom that had been shrouded in ghostly aura, several ordinary colors suddenly stood out: a patch of snow-white floor tile, a stretch of pure white wall, and a pale wooden door.
…No, perhaps that had been the original color of the boys’ bathroom stall.
That punch had not only beaten the lecherous ghost into complete annihilation, leaving no trace of a corpse, but had also directly dispersed part of the increasingly oppressive, gloomy ghostly aura surrounding it.
Against the contrast of light and shadow, the change was especially obvious.
Qin Shu lowered his eyes to his slightly reddened knuckles. He had hit too hard; the skin between the joints was lightly split, and a few bright-red beads of blood slid quietly down the back of his hand. But in the blink of an eye, the injury had already healed.
It healed especially fast, and it did not hurt all that much either.
Qin Shu slowly took a deep breath and heard the sound of his own heartbeat, growing more and more powerful, louder and louder.
“Wait… So all I have to do is beat them to death with my fists?”