The passage, built from stacked corpses, was covered in blood-red moss.
Li Zheng hadn't told Chen Ge the specific reason, only that the school's staff had warned him as much.
"If the noise gets too loud, will it wake up the corpses sealed in the walls?"
His gaze swept across those faces, and Chen Ge moved with even greater caution, each step carefully measured.
With the white cat scouting ahead, he wasn't overly worried. But after only a few steps, Chen Ge suddenly heard a sound from behind — someone was running through the corridor.
"Those two crematorium workers are terrified of me. They'd never come into this passage to find me unless they had no other choice. It must be monsters rushing in — and quite a few of them."
The commotion was enormous. Chen Ge felt the entire passage trembling. As the footsteps drew closer, the "moss" on the walls began to seep a blood-red liquid. Overhead, on either side, beneath his feet — large clumps of "moss" kept sloughing off, and human faces emerged from beneath.
They were remarkably well-preserved, as though still alive.
Their eyelashes trembled faintly as the crimson fluid trickled down their cheeks. Color returned to their skin, their eyelids fluttered, as if at any moment they might open their eyes.
Chen Ge didn't dare linger in the passage. The space was narrow and cramped — if the corpses in the walls fully awakened, he'd be buried alive.
"Buried alive by corpses, trapped here forever, then becoming one of them?" Chen Ge drew a sharp breath, beginning to understand why there were so many bodies here.
He quickened his pace, following closely behind the white cat.
The passage stretched on. Everything around him had turned blood-red. The "moss" continued to fall away, the stacked corpses in the walls trembled faintly — those interlocked bodies had heard the sounds from outside, and they seemed to be trying to pull themselves free from one another.
The entire corridor was shaking. Gaps appeared in the walls of corpses, and arm after arm dangled down from the ceiling!
The sight was enough to make one's scalp go numb. Even Chen Ge's heart was pounding wildly, let alone what an ordinary person would have felt.
He raised his arm to shield his head and crawled forward almost flat on the ground. Overhead, limbs hung down, reaching as though they were about to grab him.
The sounds behind him were still closing in. The corpses in the walls were slowly awakening — Chen Ge could clearly feel them moving.
"This three-star scenario is far more dangerous than I imagined." If the passage collapsed right now, it wouldn't matter even if he released every ghost he had. He doubted any of them could help — except perhaps
Ghosts were only one measure of a scenario's danger level. Some scenarios were inherently perilous in their own right — like an underground corpse vault. This kind of place was deeply hostile to anyone trying to clear it.
Up ahead, the white cat's cries rang out. Ever since it had devoured the blood-silk that the Ghost Story Society had prepared for its Red-rank ghost, the white cat had grown increasingly clever. It too had sensed the changes in the passage, and its cries were urgent — it seemed to be urging Chen Ge onward.
The corpses in the walls were on the verge of waking anyway, so Chen Ge simply broke into a full sprint.
The deeper end of the passage was completely blocked by thick layers of red "moss." He couldn't see a thing and had to force his way through with his body.
If Chen Ge hadn't known the white cat was somewhere ahead of him, he probably wouldn't have charged in without a second thought.