"Why is he wearing another school's uniform?" Cui Ming froze for a moment. "Muyang Middle School? I've never even heard of that place. Did some visitor sneak in? But how come I didn't hear any footsteps?"
While Cui Ming stood rooted in place, footsteps sounded again in the pitch-black classroom, and that blurry figure drew closer.
The temperature seemed to drop. The cold blast from the air conditioner slipped across the back of his neck and crawled inside his collar, sending a chill down his spine.
"Gou Ge?"
No one answered. Cui Ming drew a deep breath. The indescribable sense of pressure was growing stronger and stronger, and his body was screaming at him on instinct to flee.
"What's going on?" He was inside a haunted house—he was one of the haunted house actors. So why did he suddenly feel like he was the tourist?
He widened his eyes. The more he stared, the more wrong it felt. The person trailing behind him was definitely not Xiao Gou—she was wearing another school's uniform.
The unknown was the most terrifying thing of all, and Cui Ming had walked straight into it. He knew someone was right behind him, but he had no idea who it was.
This familiar scenario, because of the stranger lurking at his back, had become something nightmarish.
Darkness closed over him like a tide. His chest heaved, his breathing turned ragged, and it felt as though the entire room held nothing but him—no coworkers, no tourists, just an endless expanse of black.
A normal person who had grown accustomed to a world full of color would experience a flash of panic upon being plunged into darkness, as if they had been ripped from reality itself.
Cui Ming had scared tourists in this scene so many times, but now he was finally on the receiving end of that terror.
The phone in his palm vibrated again. Someone had sent him a message.
Suppressing the fear clawing at his chest, he shielded the screen's glow with his body and glanced down—Put on your headphones!
Another message from Xiao Gou. Short—just four words.
"If you need to tell me something, just say it! You're making me even more nervous!" Cui Ming muttered to himself. He held the phone in one hand and fished into his pocket with the other, groping for the earbuds. Just as he had them out and was about to slide them in, a cold puff of air brushed against the back of his neck.
He whipped around, and the phone screen's faint light illuminated what was behind him.
He didn't lower his gaze. Cui Ming stared straight ahead at whatever stood at his back. There was no living person—just a pair of worn-out women's shoes. What had grazed his neck moments ago had been a shoelace.
"Why are these shoes floating behind me?" Following the line of the shoe upward, Cui Ming slowly raised his head—and saw a figure cloaked in black standing almost directly on his shoulder.
When he looked up, that figure was looking down at him.
His heart seemed to skip a beat. His entire body went rigid, as if turned to stone. He braced himself against the wall. His brain scrambled to offer some last shred of rational comfort, but after racing through every thought it could find, it came up completely blank.
An abandoned classroom, a séance game, darkness so thick you couldn't see your hand in front of your face, and a person standing on your shoulder—pick any two of those keywords and combine them and you could give someone a heart attack, let alone when Cui Ming had managed to collect all of them at once.
His neck, half-raised and stiff, refused to move. Cui Ming screamed—though whether from pure terror, the sound that came out was slurred and incoherent, and the people around him couldn't even make out what he'd said before he shot forward like a bolt.
Screw the script. Screw the acting. Screw the haunted house. It all flew out of Cui Ming's mind. There was only one thought left inside his head—run! Get out of here now!
No destination, no direction—as long as he could leave this classroom, anywhere would do.
"Cui Ming!" Xiao Gou shouted, trying to calm him down. The only answer was the crash of desks and chairs being knocked flying.
There wasn't a single light in the classroom. Cui Ming couldn't see a thing. He barreled blindly forward and finally burst out through the front door.
Xiao Gou knew the figure trailing behind Cui Ming was the ghost. Seeing Cui Ming's reaction, he immediately understood that whatever it was had to be terrifying.
"Where are you going! Cui Ming!" Xiao Gou yelled, but Cui Ming didn't even look back. He vanished in an instant.
"What happened to him? Why did he suddenly bolt outside? Is he going to be okay?" There was a note of genuine concern in Chen Ge's eyes as he fired off three questions in quick succession. Everyone else in the room could hear the worry in his voice.
"I don't know. I don't think we can keep going with this game. I need to go find Cui Ming." Xiao Gou was starting to get scared himself now. The surroundings were pitch black, and he had no idea whether the ghost had followed Cui Ming out or not.
"No!"
The word rang out simultaneously from the earbuds and from the last row of the classroom—Chen Ge and the Nightmare Academy boss, both speaking at the same time.
"What do you two think you're doing? Follow the script like you're supposed to! Don't screw it up right out the gate and give that guy something to laugh about!"
The boss's voice crackled through Xiao Gou's earbuds. Before Xiao Gou could even reply, Chen Ge's voice came from the back of the classroom: "Once you start a séance game, you can't quit halfway, or the ghosts will haunt you for the rest of your life! Whether this is just a haunted house storyline or actual spirits, if you don't want ghosts pounding on your door in the middle of the night, you'd better finish what you started!"
Hearing both his boss and Chen Ge at the same time, Xiao Gou felt like he was about to lose his mind. What kind of people had he stumbled into?
Whoever heard of a tourist inside a haunted house insisting on playing the séance game all the way through? He had never encountered anything like this before.
Chen Ge was the tourist. The boss was on the other end of the line. Both of them were dead set on continuing the game. Xiao Gou had no choice but to grit his teeth and keep going.
"Fine, then… let's continue." He was clenching his jaw just to hold on, betting everything on the hope that the ghost had left with Cui Ming.
"One person's gone, leaving an empty corner. So let's adjust the rules a bit." Chen Ge was probably the first person in history to walk into someone else's haunted house and start rewriting the game rules, but he didn't seem the least bit bothered.
"The basic rules stay the same—we keep going clockwise. If you reach a corner where nobody is, just cough once, leave that corner empty, and move on."
"Fine, whatever you say." Xiao Gou's mind was nowhere near the game anymore. He agreed with a dismissive wave.
"Then I'll go first again." Chen Ge counted down from three, then pulled the manga volume from his backpack, ran his hand along the wall, and made his way toward the corner in front of him.
He didn't bother muffling his footsteps. In the darkness, you could just make out a person moving along the wall.
Xiao Gou kept his eyes locked on Chen Ge. The corner Chen Ge was heading toward was uncomfortably close to the spot where Cui Ming's incident had happened.
His nerves were stretched taut, his attention razor-sharp.
Before long, Chen Ge reached the next corner. He didn't cough. He stopped right where he was.
"No cough! Someone's still in that corner!" Xiao Gou's body trembled faintly. His unease was spiking.
Chen Ge stood in that corner, but the footsteps didn't stop. A shadowy figure swayed its way from the last row of the classroom toward Li Po.
Among everyone present, only Li Po—the chubby little fellow—was still completely in the dark, faithfully playing along.
His shoulder was tapped gently. Li Po felt his way along the wall until he reached Xiao Gou.
The haunted house actors had a coded signal between them. Li Po stepped up behind Xiao Gou, tapped his left shoulder, then his right. "Gou Ge, what's going on with Cui Ming?"