Heshan had been pleading and reasoning for quite some time, but the upperclassmen remained utterly unmoved. They all assumed he was deliberately exaggerating the situation to cover up his own cowardice.
As the saying goes — hearing is believing, seeing is truth. After wandering through the haunted house for a few minutes, they'd concluded it was nothing special.
"Xiao Shan, if you're scared, just hide behind me." The woman called Sister Hui took the lead and walked into a nearby room on her own. "The setups are all pretty much the same. Not half as interesting as watching crime scene footage back in the dorm."
"Then let's stick with the groups we just made," Monkey said, trotting eagerly after Sister Hui. "Find the door, get out early. I'm already getting bored."
Old Song and another quiet girl named Shiling followed behind them. In the corridor, only Heshan, Brother Feng, and Old Zhao were left.
"Honestly, pretty disappointing." Old Zhao was a chubby guy with skin paler than most girls'. His physical conditioning was terrible — after just a few steps, his forehead would break out in a cold sweat.
"Alright, enough talk. Let's move out too." Brother Feng waved his hand and strode forward. Old Zhao trailed closely behind.
Soon Heshan was alone in the corridor. The bitterness sat lodged in his throat with no way out — he was the only one still maintaining a state of high alert. "At this rate, something bad is definitely going to happen."
He took two steps forward, then suddenly stopped. "The background music seems to have changed. There's something strangely familiar about it."
There was no time to dwell on it. A crisp, clear sound reached his ears — intermittent, seeming to come from the direction they'd originally come from.
"Someone's coming after us?" Not daring to linger, Heshan hurried to catch up with the students.
When Black Friday started playing, the midnight escape game truly began in earnest. The light grew dimmer, and debris in the corridor occasionally rolled away on its own. In the distance, the clinking of chains on the staircase was slowly drawing closer.
"I found something!" Sister Hui, who was leading the group, pulled a cloth doll out of a room. "Look — there's a cloth doll right in the center of this room."
"Senior, don't touch anything in the haunted house! Last time we touched a coffin and it triggered a trap." Heshan was trying to pass along his experience, but seeing that no one was paying attention to him, he could only stand silently at the very edge, watching helplessly as the upperclassmen recklessly courted disaster.
"This doll definitely has something off about it. The fact that it's placed right in the middle of the room — could it be some kind of symbol?" Monkey lifted the doll's head. The doll was shaped like a five- or six-year-old girl, except it had no eyes, and its body had been blackened by fire. "No eyes probably represents darkness. Body burned by fire — does that mean it went to hell?"
"Maybe it's foreshadowing murder?" Brother Feng pressed on the doll's body. "The stuffing inside isn't cotton. It's a bit hard. Let's open it up and see."
Monkey unzipped the back of the cloth doll. Its body was stuffed with scraps of paper. He pulled one out at random — the handwriting was sloppy and childish, clearly not from a grown hand.
"What does it say?"
Monkey, the only one who'd read the note, looked distinctly uncomfortable. He held the paper up in front of the others. It bore just five words: YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE!
"Every slip of paper seems to have the same thing written on it."
"What kind of grudge is that?"
"Throw it away already. That's seriously bad luck." Shiling, who had barely spoken the entire time, seemed to harbor a particular fear of the doll. She glanced at it once and quickly backed away from the group.
"It's just a doll. Don't make such a big deal out of it. It's probably just a haunted house prop." Monkey stuffed the slips of paper back into the doll's body, then tossed it casually into the corridor. "Let's go to the next room."