"Children's thoughts are simple and direct—they wouldn't draw anything abstract or layered with hidden meaning. Could it be that the scene in the drawing is the crime scene
"The house is black, meaning the crime happened at night. The little figures inside are red, possibly signifying the parents were already dead. That's the most straightforward interpretation."
"Wait—that can't be right. The red figures probably don't represent the victims. There are too many of them in this house." Chen Ge tried counting the red figures inside the black room, but he got a different number every time, and it felt like the more he counted, the more there were. "The drawing is too vague. What is this kid trying to say?"
Back in the room, Fan Yu had repeatedly drawn several pictures—always the same: a house and little figures. But after each attempt, he crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it away, as though he hadn't managed to capture what he wanted to depict.
"Regardless, this drawing is an important clue." After studying it for a while without finding anything more, Chen Ge tucked the paper away and glanced back at the two-story building behind him. The door that had been open was now closed.
"Both the aunt and the boy have issues—it's just hard to say who has the bigger one." After navigating the maze of narrow alleys, Chen Ge caught a bus back. He was worrying about tonight's mission. If everything the dark, thin woman had told him was true, then he was about to face an extremely severe trial.
Just to be safe, Chen Ge took out his phone and searched online for information about Muyang Middle School. There was quite a bit, most of it buried in the discussion forums of various schools. Judging by the timestamps, the children who made these posts were likely former students of Muyang Middle School. After the school was shut down, they were forced to transfer, and as they left, they carried the legends of Muyang Middle School to other campuses.
As he skimmed through the results, a few posts did catch Chen Ge's attention. Just one year ago, five students had arranged to visit Muyang Middle School on a courage-testing dare. They brought their phones and live-posted their experience in the forums, uploading a new entry every few minutes. The original posts had long been deleted, but Chen Ge found re-posts of them. According to the accounts, the five had entered the sealed classroom and even played the Pen Spirit game inside. Five students sat at the desks and summoned the Pen Spirit. By the end, there were seven people standing in the classroom. No one knew where the two extra people had come from. The five students were terrified out of their wits and bolted straight out of the school.
Fortunately, none of the five came to any real harm—though two of them suffered lasting consequences. One became violently short-tempered, his personality changing drastically. The other developed a fear of sunlight and eventually transferred out of Jiujiang altogether, reportedly moving to another province.
"Young calves don't fear tigers, all right." Chen Ge read through the comments beneath the post. One anonymous commenter analyzed it like this: five people played a game, two extra appeared, and after they fled, two students happened to develop problems. He suspected that the two who escaped might already have been someone else entirely—while the real two had probably been left behind in that classroom forever.
This comment received quite a few likes. Others offered a different perspective, suggesting that all five might have been replaced, but those two were simply strong-willed and harder to subdue—which was why they showed signs of abnormality instead of blending in seamlessly.
The second piece of information was posted by a teacher, who strictly forbade any discussion of Muyang Middle School. Among the replies, there was one comment that had been collapsed. The content was peculiar: it said his father's company had been planning to purchase the land where Muyang Middle School stood at a low price, and his father was the one in charge of the project. At first, nothing happened. But as the contract neared completion, his father began having the same dream every night—dozens of students wearing Muyang Middle School uniforms coming to their house to attend class.