"Where did that extra person come from?" Chen Ge froze for a moment, then immediately bolted toward the girls' dormitory.
The woman trailing behind Liu Xianxian and Ma Ying seemed to notice him too, turning her head to glance back.
Her skin was ashen, radiating an aura of death, and her eyes held a complex mix of emotions.
"That face—" Chen Ge could see it clearly. The woman walking behind Liu Xianxian and Ma Ying was the same woman who had appeared on the windowsill at the end of the video on Ma Ying's phone!
Her features and gaze were an exact match. There was no time to think — Chen Ge charged straight at them.
"Watch out!"
He shouted, but Liu Xianxian and Ma Ying didn't seem to hear him at all.
The gray-skinned woman rested her hands on both their shoulders, leaned close to their ears, and whispered something to them.
The distance was too great for Chen Ge to make out the woman's words. He could only watch as Liu Xianxian and Ma Ying's bodies grew increasingly stiff, their eyes glazing over like sleepwalkers as they continued forward with their eyes shut.
"Ma Ying! Liu Xianxian!"
It seemed like Chen Ge's shouting had some effect — the two girls slowed down, and subtle changes flickered across their faces, as though trapped in nightmares.
They were struggling, but the outcome wasn't what Chen Ge had hoped for. The two girls still didn't wake up. After a few more steps, they collapsed to the ground unconscious.
The woman behind them gave Chen Ge a long, deep look, pointed to the area over her own heart, made a strange hand gesture, then turned and ran into the girls' dormitory building.
She vanished in an instant. All Chen Ge noticed was a hole in the fabric near her shoulder, as if a bullet had torn through it.
"Why did she point at her own heart? Was that a threat?"
Chen Ge reached the entrance of the girls' dormitory and pounded on the dorm supervisor's window. His earlier shouting had already woken her.
"Someone collapsed! Right outside the dormitory entrance!"
At three or four in the morning, a man hammering on the window of a girls' dormitory — the supervisor was too terrified to come out and simply called security and school staff on her phone.
…
A cup of long-cold water sat on the table. Chen Ge glanced at the clock on the wall — it was now five forty in the morning.
The overhead light beat down on him as he braced both hands on the table, calmly facing the seven or eight people seated across from him.
Among them were police officers, security guards, and school teachers.
"I've told you over and over — I'm not a pervert, and I didn't knock those two girls unconscious. You can doubt me all you want, but remember what you're saying right now, because when those two girls wake up, I expect each and every one of you to come apologize to me personally."
"Chen Ge, we believe there's nothing wrong with you — otherwise Captain Yan wouldn't have personally arranged for me to come." Li Zheng had dark circles under his eyes. The two had parted ways just over a dozen hours ago, and now here they were meeting again in an entirely different setting. At this point, seeing Chen Ge felt like running into a coworker at the office.
"Those two girls came to my haunted house yesterday during the day. I could tell something was weighing on them, and after asking around, I learned that the taller girl's older sister had gone missing — it's been eating at her." Chen Ge pressed his hand to his chest. "Maybe you think my behavior is strange — why go out of your way for complete strangers? But I want you to know that my own parents also disappeared under mysterious circumstances over half a year ago. Sometimes you can only truly understand someone else's pain if you've been through it yourself. That's why I wanted to help her!"
Chen Ge's voice echoed through the office, resonating with genuine conviction.
"At around three in the morning, two girls collapsed right outside the entrance to the girls' dormitory. We reviewed the security footage — you were the only person following them on campus at the time. If the culprit isn't you, then who is it?" The speaker was a man in his thirties, dressed with a sense of style. He lived in the faculty housing on campus, so he had rushed over the moment word got out.
"I didn't see anything. It could've been anyone — including you." Chen Ge showed no intention of backing down, pushing back at whoever confronted him. "Two girls collapsed — the case might seem minor on the surface, but there's a much larger case lurking underneath."
Chen Ge's eyes glinted with cold intent. Aside from the police officers, the others in the room felt a chill creep up their spines.
"I said earlier that those two girls had come to the haunted house looking for me. The one named Ma Ying — her older sister went missing. The sole reason she got into Jiujiang Forensic University was to search for her missing sister, because her sister had once been a student here…"
Chen Ge went on to tell them about how Liu Xianxian and Ma Ying went out every night in the early hours to search for the statue from the campus urban legend.
"Most urban legends are fabricated, but a small handful do have a basis in fact — they just get exaggerated as the story gets passed around." Chen Ge took a sip of water from the cup, his voice steady even as his mind raced, trying to figure out how to redirect everyone's attention.
"You're saying the legend about the statue weeping tears of blood actually has a real story behind it?" Li Zheng was more familiar with Chen Ge and knew he wouldn't make claims lightly.
"There's a video on Ma Ying's phone — her sister sent it to her before she disappeared. That sculpture in the underground warehouse, the one that cries, appeared in the video. If we can find the owner of that statue, we can follow the trail and catch the person who killed her sister!" Chen Ge gripped the cup with both hands, veins rising on the backs of his fists.
The people in the room struggled to process this. They had assumed this was just a case of a pervert stalking female students. They never expected it to drag in a murder.
"We've already located that video you mentioned." Li Zheng looked oddly uncomfortable. "The video wasn't filmed on Ma Ying's phone. When Ma Ying's sister went missing a few years ago, her parents came to Jiujiang specifically to request our help in the search. At the time, they provided that video, but after analysis by our technical specialists, it turned out the video was never sent by Ma Ying's sister — Ma Ying filmed it herself."
"Ma Ying filmed it herself?" Things weren't lining up with what Chen Ge had expected.
"That's right. To be precise, on the day Ma Ying's sister disappeared, Ma Ying was with her. But no matter how hard she tries, she can't recall anything from that day." Li Zheng scrolled through his phone. "We have the case file here. Her parents used to come ask about it regularly in the years after, until they finally gave up not long ago."
Li Zheng sighed softly. "When Ma Ying's sister went missing, Ma Ying hadn't even started college yet. Now she herself is almost ready to graduate."
"No wonder she's been so desperate to find her sister recently." After hearing Li Zheng out, a faint unease settled in Chen Ge's chest. He turned the cup in his hands, then suddenly thought of something. "The video was shot from a first-person perspective. It was clear that a murder had taken place inside that room. The moment I saw the video, I was certain there had been other victims in that room."
"Now we know for certain that the video wasn't sent to her by her sister — she filmed it herself."
"That means the person hiding under the bed, filming — was her. And the victim inside that room was her sister!"
"The killer was right there in the room. How did she manage to escape alive?"
"In the very last second of the video, she saw the woman perched on the windowsill. Could that strange woman have been the one who saved her?"