With too few clues at hand,
He put the three chairs back in their original positions and glanced around. The mirrors lining the walls made the dance studio feel unnervingly spacious.
"The place is cleaned up so well, they must have gone over it more than once." There was no trash visible on the floor, which wasn't good news for Chen Ge. "The scene has been tidied up. I just hope those special red dance shoes haven't been thrown away."
Chen Ge moved away from the mirrors and walked to the corner of the dance studio. Various honor certificates were posted on the wall, along with something that looked like a ranking board.
After a brief look, Chen Ge noticed something odd — the first-place slot on the board had been scribbled over with a black pen.
"A ranking board with no first place?" Chen Ge scanned the list and saw several names, including Qian Yujiao, but
He shifted his gaze. On the wall nearby were several photos of award ceremonies, and one of them caught his attention.
It appeared to be a group photo of six people. Five of them were clustered together, beaming with bright, sunny smiles. The sixth person, however, stood off to the side, separated from the other five by a noticeable gap. Her image had been cut out with scissors — if not for the small sliver of a snow-white dance shoe visible at the bottom edge of the photo, even Chen Ge would have assumed it had originally been a five-person shot.
"All individual photos and small group shots. Why is there no full-class photo?" Chen Ge took out his phone and snapped a picture of the honor wall, then continued along it, running his hand across the surface. Before long, he found a door with no label.
Driven by curiosity, he pushed it open.
Inside were a desk, a wardrobe, and a single bed.
"Looks like an instructor's office. But why is there a bed? Do teachers pull night shifts here?" Chen Ge rummaged through the cabinets and drawers, clinging to a sliver of hope that he might find the red dance shoes. Unfortunately, the wardrobe was empty, and the drawers were stuffed with nothing but photocopied honor certificates.
"Looks like the dance program students at Xicheng Private Academy were pretty impressive — so many awards." He flipped through a few at random. One of them bore the names of Qian Yujiao and the others: "Champion of the Municipal Swan Lake Ballet Team Competition. Qualified for the provincial-level competition."
This particular photocopied certificate hadn't been posted on the honor wall outside. What was stranger still was that the award should have had six names on it, but the last name had been smudged out.
"Same as the ranking board."
Chen Ge wandered around the room for a while longer. Finding nothing else of use, he walked back out.
The moment he pulled the door open, his heart lurched. The three chairs had shifted from their original positions — they had followed him.
"Not again!"
Chen Ge forced himself not to look at the chairs. He quickened his pace. If he found nothing useful within three more minutes, he would leave the activity center.
Using his phone as a flashlight, he walked all the way to the far end of the dance studio before spotting a sign for the women's changing room in the corner.
"Women's changing rooms and girls' dormitory bathrooms are supposedly places with heavy Yin energy in any school. I need to be careful." He gently pushed open the door to the women's changing room. Two rows of metal lockers lined the walls, with a long wooden bench running down the middle.
"So this is what a women's changing room looks like."
It was Chen Ge's first time setting foot in one. He left the door half-open and casually yanked open a locker.