After getting Chen Ge's confirmation, Li Zheng's tone relaxed considerably. He didn't understand why, but every time he called Chen Ge, he felt a strange sense of pressure.
"If there's nothing else, I'll hang up now. Get some rest early."
Li Zheng was about to end the call when Chen Ge spoke up: "Hold on, I have one more question."
"What question?"
"Liu Zhe turned himself in—did he reveal where he hid the body in the end? Did you find the corpse?"
"It's pretty much what we'd deduced. Liu Zhe was a school employee, and he used his position to have students move the sculptures into the warehouse. Then he'd sneak in at night, extract the bodies from inside the sculptures, and hide them in the underground morgue." Li Zheng's voice dropped, as though recalling a deeply unpleasant scene.
"So you entered the underground morgue?" Chen Ge perked up, listening intently. The underground morgue was a three-star horror scenario on the scream index, and it was also the final prerequisite quest for the four-star horror scenario, the Spirit Channeling School. Any information related to the underground morgue was invaluable to him.
"We went in today during the day with school staff. We found the body in Storage Room Five. We ran a DNA comparison, and she is indeed Ma Ying's missing sister."
The moment Li Zheng said those words, the black phone buzzed suddenly. Chen Ge pulled it out and saw that he had received a message.
He didn't open it, instead continuing to question Li Zheng: "Brother Zheng, can you tell me about the layout of the underground morgue? Do you have a map of the Jiujiang West Campus underground morgue?"
The underground environment was extremely complex. A map was far too important for him.
Li Zheng was in his thirtis, so calling him Brother Zheng was perfectly fine, but for some reason, when Li Zheng heard Chen Ge address him that way, his hair stood on end for no apparent reason, and a foreboding sense of dread welled up inside him: "No map, but I know the general route. There were school staff members with us at the time—why are you asking about this?"
"Just pure curiosity." Chen Ge chatted aimlessly for a good while before Li Zheng finally relayed the layout of the underground morgue.
"The West Campus underground morgue is the largest underground morgue in Jiujiang, and arguably in the entire south-central region. It's been in use ever since Jiujiang Medical University was founded—decades of history at this point. When we went in, the school staff specifically warned us not to wander around. The passages in there crisscross in every direction, and they're broadly divided into three types based on function."
"There are the transport corridors painted with white wall paint, the unpainted corridors meant for foot traffic, and then there are corridors painted red. The staff member didn't tell me what the red corridors are for—just said that if we encountered one, we should go around it and never enter."
Li Zheng's words caught Chen Ge's attention. This was the first time he'd heard of corridors being painted red. "Could it be because of the 'Gate'—the influence it's exerted on the surrounding area?"
"What are you talking about?" Li Zheng hadn't heard Chen Ge's muttering clearly.
"Nothing, go on."
"Nobody could say exactly how large the underground morgue is. On record there are six storage rooms, but in reality, we'd only covered about a third of the distance before we'd already encountered three small storage rooms and two medium-sized ones." Li Zheng seemed to have other matters to deal with, because he picked up his pace: "The large storage rooms are at the very back. Apparently they're all cadaver pools—basically large vats filled with formalin, with all sorts of specimens preserved inside. When they needed to do experiments, they'd fish them out. But those are all from many years ago and have long been abandoned. Now they've been replaced with specialized freezers for preserving corpses."
Li Zheng gave Chen Ge a rough overview of the underground morgue's layout, but it was practically useless—the routes were far too complex and there were no landmarks to speak of. Chen Ge felt that going in alone would still be extremely dangerous.
"Brother Zheng, when you were in there, did you hear any strange sounds? Or did anything strange happen?" The underground morgue was a lot like the underground parking garage of his haunted house—no sunlight, so ghosts could very well appear even during the day.
"Strange things?" Li Zheng thought about it. "Actually, there were a few. We entered through the unpainted corridors meant for the living. While passing through a white-painted corridor, we heard clapping sounds coming from inside."
Chen Ge's interest was piqued: "Can you describe it in detail?"
"It was like someone standing at the other end of the corridor clapping, but when we went to check, there was nothing there. The strange thing was that the white-painted corridors looked much cleaner than the unpainted ones—as though people regularly walked through them."
Chen Ge pulled out paper and pen and jotted down every key point Li Zheng mentioned.
"The second strange thing was that when we passed by Storage Room One, one of my team members saw someone moving around inside. But the iron door to Storage Room One was clearly locked, and the only people who should have been in the underground morgue at that time were us."
"We asked the staff about it, and they said it was just nerves. The underground morgue is incredibly oppressive—it easily triggers all kinds of negative emotions. The person even comforted my team member, saying he'd get used to it over time."
"The third strange incident happened when we entered Storage Room Five. Everyone was searching for the body Liu Zhe had mentioned, but the door to Storage Room Five closed on its own. It felt as though someone outside had shut it, trying to trap us all inside to die."
"The last thing happened when we found the body and were getting ready to leave. We walked out of Storage Room Five and followed the same route back, the exact same path, but it took us twice as long as when we'd gone in." This fourth oddity troubled Li Zheng the most, and he still couldn't figure out why it had happened. "Don't dismiss this—it was a very strange feeling, as though the same road had been stretched out."
"That's actually pretty terrifying." Chen Ge looked at the information recorded on the sheet of white paper, confirmed everything was correct, and put it away.
"Terrifying is a bit much." Li Zheng seemed to catch something in Chen Ge's tone and immediately shifted his manner of speaking: "Chen Ge, that place is extremely dangerous. Don't get any funny ideas."
"What funny ideas would I get?" Chen Ge was exasperated. "Am I that kind of person?"
"Just a heads-up—absolutely do not go there alone. I've got things to do, so I'll stop chatting." With that, Li Zheng hung up.
Chen Ge sat alone in the employee break room, realizing he had underestimated just how dangerous the underground morgue truly was.
"Living Coffin Village and the Third Sick Ward are both three-star horror scenarios, but the most terrifying presence in each of those had been weakened for various reasons. That's the opening I exploited."
When Chen Ge went to the Third Sick Ward, only three of the ten patients had been present in the scenario. Living Coffin Village went without saying—the most terrifying entity, the well-jumping female ghost, had latched onto Jiang Ling and bore him no ill will whatsoever.
"A three-star scenario at full strength is still quite dangerous given my current abilities." Chen Ge turned his head to look at his shadow, conflicted.