Entering Room 413 for the second time, Chen Ge wasn't too panicked now that he had Wang Xiaoming with him.
"Xiao Lin, do you never clean your room? You live here alone, but it feels like several people are staying here." It seemed to be Wang Xiaoming's first time inside Room 413, which only deepened Chen Ge's confusion. The two rooms were so close together—even if they'd never visited each other, they should have caught glimpses through the doorway whenever opening or closing their doors. Unless Xiao Lin had been deliberately blocking the view.
"My eyesight isn't great. Why don't you check what's on that wall for me?" Chen Ge didn't fully trust Wang Xiaoming and didn't dare leave the other man alone at the door. If he suddenly went berserk and locked Chen Ge inside the room again, that would be a disaster.
"Sure." Wang Xiaoming seemed completely unaware of how terrifying Room 413 was. In his eyes, it appeared to be nothing more than an ordinary dorm room.
Grabbing the bed frame, Wang Xiaoming climbed straight up onto the top bunk and reached out to touch the wall. "There aren't even any posters on this wall—why are there so many nails hammered in?"
"Nails?" While Wang Xiaoming was climbing onto the top bunk, Chen Ge quickly rushed over to the fourth bed, planning to grab all the notes and documents and get out of this room for good.
"Yeah. And what's with this shadow on the wall? It looks like a living person pressed against it. Doesn't that scare you when you sleep at night?" Wang Xiaoming felt uncomfortable just looking at it.
Chen Ge didn't respond. He was still turning over what Wang Xiaoming had just said.
The spot Wang Xiaoming had been touching had originally had a human-shaped shadow there too—only it had just fled from the room and vanished.
"Let me see." Chen Ge picked up his backpack and climbed onto the top bunk as well. He reached out and touched the wall. Beneath the white-painted surface, nails were embedded densely, row after row.
Every single nail was positioned exactly where a shadow figure had once appeared. Did that mean the nails were what pinned the shadow figures to the wall?
Chen Ge was pondering this when a sudden pain lanced through his lower abdomen.
"A bug?" He lifted his shirt and found a small wound on his stomach. It was so tiny that it wasn't bleeding.
"Did a bug crawl into my clothes?" He took off his jacket and inspected it thoroughly. He found no bug, but in his jacket pocket, he discovered a nail with a sharply pointed tip!
"Xiao Lin, why are you carrying nails around on you? Aren't you afraid of stabbing yourself?" Wang Xiaoming found it odd, but he didn't seem particularly surprised. Judging from his reaction, Chen Ge deduced that Xiao Lin must have been something of an oddball in class—no matter what he did, everyone just accepted it as normal.
"It's nothing." Outwardly he said it was nothing, but inside, Chen Ge's mind was anything but calm.
A nail that had been used to pin a ghost shadow to the wall had suddenly appeared in his pocket, and it had stabbed him too. This was absolutely no coincidence.
"That thing was trying to find a scapegoat?" Chen Ge silently thanked his luck. If he hadn't returned to the room, he probably wouldn't have realized where the problem lay until the nails had stabbed him to death and pinned him to the wall.
"I kindly opened the door for him, and he bites the hand that feeds him—trying to make me his scapegoat?" Chen Ge compared the nail in his pocket with the ones hidden beneath the wall surface and confirmed they were the exact same type.
"Finding a scapegoat is understandable, but at least give me some warning. Doing it like this, all quiet and sneaky—that's just rude." Chen Ge gradually calmed himself down. He took out a pair of scissors and tried to pry the nails out of the wall, but the nails were hammered in far too deep. With nothing but a pair of scissors, the efficiency was painfully low.
"This cursed place truly is deadly at every turn. One moment of inattention and you probably wouldn't even know how you died." In just a few minutes, Chen Ge felt himself get stabbed again—this time from his calf.
He shook his pant leg, and a short nail fell out.
"The frequency is still low right now, and the stabs don't hurt much. But as time goes on, will these nails appear faster and faster? Will each stab go deeper?"
Being pricked by a nail didn't bother Chen Ge all that much. What worried him was the unpredictability—the nails could appear at any moment, at any location. If he was in the middle of sprinting for his life and a nail suddenly materialized inside his shoe, he'd be done for.
On top of that, Chen Ge had considered another possibility: if he left the nails alone, they might even start appearing inside his body. When that happened, it wouldn't be a simple poke anymore.
"No wonder I've been feeling this constant sense of urgency. This place really is far too dangerous."
Without any clarity on his identity or his surroundings, Chen Ge had already fallen into the rhythm of a slow death. But even so, he kept his composure.
"When I woke up, I was in a classroom. Teacher Bai appeared and kept emphasizing that we weren't allowed to go outside, insisting we stay in our dorm rooms. Could that have been a form of psychological suggestion he was implanting in me? The discoveries in the desk and the contents of the notes all pointed toward the dorm room. To figure out my identity, the dorm room was the best choice—it was a place I had to go." Chen Ge had no choice. But looking back now, he noticed two details.
First, when he'd suggested returning to the dorm, Wang Xiaoming had said he wanted to go to the cafeteria instead.
Whether intentionally or not, if Chen Ge had followed him to the cafeteria, this whole situation could have been avoided for the time being.
That meant Wang Xiaoming hadn't been plotting against him—at least not in this instance. Of course, that didn't prove Wang Xiaoming was necessarily a good person. Perhaps something even more terrifying was waiting in the cafeteria, and he'd simply been trying to lure Chen Ge there to be killed.
Second, before lights-out, Teacher Bai had come specifically to check the rooms, making sure Chen Ge was in his dorm.
Teacher Bai's expression had been thoroughly terrified. He hadn't set foot even half a step inside Room 413, which meant he almost certainly knew the room was dangerous.
Knowing full well that Room 413 had problems, he'd still felt at ease letting Chen Ge sleep there. Something was definitely off about that man.
Taking it all together, Chen Ge reached a conclusion: Wang Xiaoming might not be a good person, but Teacher Bai was definitely harboring ulterior motives!
Chen Ge committed every person he'd encountered, along with every word they'd said and every expression and gesture they'd made, to memory. Not because he had a good memory—he simply had an overwhelming will to survive.
"Room 413 is dangerous, but after I entered, I wasn't killed outright. I was only used as a substitute by the scapegoat, and the method is a slow one at that. It seems like this mission isn't completely devoid of hope." Chen Ge looked at the other human-shaped shadows in the room. Beneath each shadow, there should be a large patch of nails.
"The scapegoat has targeted me. I'm being pricked by nails constantly. What if I pulled out all the nails in this room and then used them to stab someone else?"
Chen Ge had already been stabbed twice by nails that appeared out of thin air. Any other person would have thrown those terrifying nails away by now, or buried them deep in the ground.
But Chen Ge did no such thing. Instead, he pocketed the nails, intending to go find someone he didn't like and give them a few jabs to see what happened.
"These nails can pin ghost shadows. They should be able to deal some damage to obsessions and vengeful spirits too. They're useful things—though walking around in the dead of night with nails in hand, stabbing people, might cause a bit of a panic."
Chen Ge figured the plan was viable. "I'll keep a portion of the nails for now. My priority is to track down that scapegoat and try to convince him to cooperate with me so we can nail other people together. If that really doesn't work, I'll just have to try nailing him back to the wall."
He eyed the nails in the wall and made another few attempts with his scissors. Still couldn't get them out.
"To pull nails properly, you really need a nail puller and a claw hammer. The school should have a maintenance room. If only I could get my hands on some tools."