"Time to go."
He retrieved the backpack he had used last time and packed
It looked lumpy and unappealing, but at least it put his mind at ease.
Once everything was packed, Chen Ge locked the haunted house's front door and hurried out of the amusement park.
It was 12:15 AM. There were very few vehicles on the road, and after waiting another ten minutes, he finally flagged down a taxi at an intersection.
"Near the Xicheng Private School, please. I'm in a rush—could you hurry?"
"Sure, hop in." The driver was an easygoing middle-aged man, and a few-year-old DJ track was blasting inside the car.
The car pulled away. Chen Ge sat in the backseat and used the time to search online for information related to tonight's mission.
The moment he opened the favorability mission, the first thing that appeared was Andersen's fairy tale "The Red Dancing Shoes." He found the original version online, skimmed through it, and felt a chill run down his spine.
The story was about a girl who obtained a pair of beautiful red dancing shoes. She wore them to church regularly, and perhaps because she had blasphemed against God, the shoes could never be taken off. She was forced to dance endlessly—terrified, helpless, and utterly exhausted—until she finally begged a woodcutter to chop off her legs. And then came the most terrifying part of the entire fairy tale: the severed legs, still wearing the red dancing shoes, went hopping away on their own…
"Is this supposed to be a children's story?" Chen Ge didn't dare visualize that image in his head. His mission tonight was to find Zhang Ya's red dancing shoes.
"When I drew the cursed love letter, the black phone had a description of Zhang Ya—she was wearing a blood-stained school uniform and a pair of red dancing shoes, and she still looked the same when she died. Could the fairy tale about the red dancing shoes actually be true? Once you put them on, they can never come off?"
Chen Ge's heart tightened with unease. This mission was different from anything he had faced before. His opponent was a Red-coat Ghost with her own dedicated page—one of the most deeply resentful and vicious types of specters that existed.
"Looks like the red dancing shoes are the key tonight." Chen Ge reread the fairy tale several times. Its core message was a warning against vanity, a call to remain humble and reverent at all times. "The black phone brought out this fairy tale right at the start of the mission. What's the deeper meaning behind that?"
He couldn't figure it out for now, so he closed the page and began searching for information about the Xicheng Private School.
The school had only been open for two and a half years before being shut down, and it had been abandoned for a long time.
As for the reason for its closure, there were all sorts of rumors online—some said it was because of unreasonable tuition fees, others claimed it was due to incomplete licensing.
Chen Ge patiently read through all the information. The name Zhang Ya never appeared anywhere, as if she had absolutely no connection to the school.
"Something's off. The truth is definitely not what these online guesses suggest—there could be something much deeper underneath." Chen Ge stared at the streetlights receding past the window and narrowed his eyes. "What kind of experience could turn a woman into a Red-coat Ghost? Where did all that resentment come from? And what does it have to do with the red dancing shoes?"
While Chen Ge was lost in thought, the DJ music inside the car suddenly grew louder. When he looked up in surprise toward the driver's seat, the driver was also studying him through the rearview mirror.
"Something bothering you? You're awful young to be wearing such a gloomy expression." The driver was the talkative type. He had chatted with Chen Ge briefly when he first got in, but Chen Ge had been preoccupied with searching for information and hadn't really responded.