"He didn't follow me in."
Gao Ruxue finally let out a breath of relief. Without even bothering to change her shoes, she turned on every light in the house first.
The brightness drove away the darkness and eased her nerves somewhat.
"The front door's security lock isn't closed, but opening the inner door and going out now would be too dangerous. If that person is hiding in a blind spot the peephole can't see, it'd be over."
She drew the curtains shut and picked up the fruit knife from the coffee table. As a student at the forensic medicine academy, she was well acquainted with every vital point on the human body.
With the knife in hand, she finally felt a little less panicked.
Sitting in the middle of the living room, Gao Ruxue took out her phone and called
"Still nothing? It's already ten o'clock." She stared at the messages on her phone. She'd tried every possible way to reach Chen Ge, but none of them had gotten through.
"Could something have happened to him? Every single call comes back busy. No matter who he's talking to, it can't be this long, unless—" A thought struck her. "Unless he's on the phone with a ghost."
Gao Ruxue clearly remembered that her phone had malfunctioned. The previous night, when her two roommates returned to the dorm, something had followed them in. At the time, when she used her phone to message people, everyone who replied to her sent back the same words: "Look behind you." Chen Ge's phone was the only one that returned a normal system reply.
"That figure lying behind me last night—it seems like it can't alter things related to Chen Ge. It doesn't seem able to impersonate Chen Ge to reply to me." A sudden thought flashed through Gao Ruxue's mind, and the phone slipped from between her fingers, dropping straight to the floor.
"The ghost can't change anything related to Chen Ge. It can't imitate Chen Ge replying to me, so whenever I call Chen Ge's number, it always comes back busy—there's no way to get through."
"Which means that during the time I haven't been able to reach Chen Ge, it's possible that the ghost has been controlling my phone."
"If that's really the case, then when I called my dad earlier, the person who answered might not have been my father at all."
"It was the ghost pretending to be my father, replying to me." Cold sweat rolled down her back. She had deliberately avoided her roommates and snuck back home precisely because she was worried something like this might happen.
But in that earlier phone call, she had personally told her "father" that she was planning to come home tonight.
If her guess was right, the ghost now knew she wasn't in the dorm—she was in her own house.
Her eyes fixed on the phone on the floor. Gao Ruxue didn't dare move. She suddenly felt very cold.
Just as she was lost in thought, the phone screen on the ground lit up. Someone was calling her.
The phone vibrated on the cold floor, the sound making her deeply uneasy. After a moment of hesitation, Gao Ruxue picked it up.
It was Dr. Gao calling!
Her finger hovered between answering and rejecting. In the end, Gao Ruxue chose to answer.
"What's going on? Why'd it take you so long to pick up?" The familiar, warm voice brought Gao Ruxue a long-missed sense of security.
"I had my phone on silent. Didn't see it."
She gave the excuse she'd prepared in advance, wanting to test the person on the other end. She was just about to ask about something only Dr. Gao and she would know, but the Dr. Gao on the other end spoke first: "As long as you got home safe. It's been pretty chaotic lately at night, so just stay home like a good girl. I've still got some things to deal with over here, so I'll probably be a bit late getting back."
"Okay, I understand."
The call ended. The person on the other end seemed to have guessed what she was about to do and didn't give her the chance to ask anything.
"It feels like something is watching me."