The two girls huddled together, their backs pressed tight against the wall, nodding repeatedly after hearing what
"Don't be nervous. Just answer whatever I ask — the truth, nothing but the truth." Chen Ge waved the Skull Crusher Hammer in his hand. "I won't hurt you, unless you deliberately lie to me."
"Go ahead, we'll tell you everything we know." Ma Ying and Liu Xianxian were pale-faced, their bodies trembling slightly, their voices unsteady.
"What are your names? Which dorm do you live in? Who's your counselor?" Chen Ge wanted to use information he already knew to test whether they were telling the truth.
The two girls obediently fed him every detail — whether he asked for it or not, they laid everything out.
"Seems like you're just ordinary students. So why did you come to a place like this in the middle of the night?"
"There's a legend about a statue on campus. If you find it after midnight, you can ask it one question." Ma Ying told Chen Ge the reason she and Liu Xianxian had come here. To prove she wasn't lying, she even took out her phone and showed him the video.
It was Chen Ge's first time seeing the video Ma Ying's sister had recorded before she disappeared. The victim had been hiding under the bed, filming secretly. The room appeared to have just been the scene of a violent incident — bloodstains were everywhere.
The entire video was only thirteen seconds long. In the final second, the footage froze on the woman at the windowsill.
"My sister's disappearance must have something to do with that woman with the skin condition," Ma Ying said quietly.
"Don't jump to conclusions. The victim was hiding under the bed to film, the quilt hung down, and a blood-soaked bedsheet peeked out through the gap in the closet door — clearly a murder had just taken place in this room. In other words, besides the person filming, there were other victims." Chen Ge watched the video once more. "There's a rope hanging in the middle of the room. The impression is that someone was going to hang themselves, but there's nothing on the floor — no chair or anything to stand on. Was the killer trying to stage a suicide? The room is a mess, but strangely, the decorative objects on the bookshelf are arranged perfectly neatly, and the sculpture beside it is completely undamaged. This bedroom probably wasn't the primary crime scene."
Here was a guy who looked like a deranged serial killer, earnestly analyzing a crime scene on a phone screen. Ma Ying and Liu Xianxian didn't quite know how to react — they couldn't tell whether they should be terrified or feel something else entirely.
"That woman on the windowsill is definitely suspicious. Judging by her muscle definition and the points of exertion, her feet had to be standing on something. If there's no ledge or protrusion outside this room for someone to step on, that means this room is on the ground floor of some building." Chen Ge locked eyes with the woman's face on the screen. "Of course, all of this is predicated on the assumption that the woman isn't a ghost."
He had been analyzing everything so methodically that Ma Ying was almost starting to rethink her impression of him — and then he suddenly dropped something incomprehensible.
"A ghost?"
"Look at her skin tone. Does she look like a normal person to you?" Chen Ge handed the phone back to Ma Ying.
"Then according to you, the killer must be her!" Ma Ying had regained a little strength.
"Do you have some kind of misconception about ghosts? Not all of them harm people. Look carefully at this woman's eyes — there's no malice in them. Besides, if she were the real killer, why wouldn't she leave immediately after the murder instead of lying there peeping through the window?"
Ma Ying didn't know how to argue with Chen Ge. It was the first time she had ever met someone who defended ghosts.
Her palms slick with sweat, she quietly wondered whether this man standing in front of her might be a ghost too.
Chen Ge noticed that Ma Ying seemed even more frightened, but he had no idea which of his words had hit a nerve. "All right, no more questions. Take me to see the statue."
"The statue is inside the warehouse. It's… not very clean in there," Ma Ying stammered. "It's supposedly haunted."
"What kinds of ghosts are in there?" Chen Ge asked the question instinctively — but it only stunned Ma Ying and Liu Xianxian even further.
How were they supposed to answer that?