Campus waste was generally collected at designated points and then transported out of the school by garbage trucks. The room
All of the school's trash was gathered here, sorted, and then hauled away.
"This small building sits between the two campuses. Does that mean both the east and west campuses share the same waste sorting facility?"
Chen Ge held up his phone and looked around, spotting several oddities.
The building contained eight compartments, each marked with a wooden sign bearing a different label.
The first compartment was labeled "waste paper." Scraps of white paper, kraft paper, and a number of paper cups and paper takeout containers were scattered around the entrance.
The second was labeled "plastics." Cola bottles and mineral water bottles littered the ground in disarray.
The third compartment's door read "metals," and the fourth read "tin foil packaging." All of this seemed normal enough, but starting from the fifth compartment, the content on the wooden signs took a sudden, unsettling turn.
The wooden sign on the fifth compartment bore just a single character: "Humans."
"Humans count as a kind of waste too?"
The door to the fifth compartment wasn't locked. Chen Ge pushed it open gently.
"Hiss..."
Narrow as it was, the compartment was filled with "people" whose bodies were missing parts, hanging from the ceiling with their feet bound by rope, heads dangling downward. Their heads swayed faintly in the breeze.
Chen Ge drew in a sharp breath. The cramped compartment was packed with at least twenty or thirty "bodies."
"These must be mannequins or dolls."
Raising his phone, he snapped a photo of the hanging figures. In the blurry image, aside from those "people," nothing else appeared.
Wiping the sweat from his palm, Chen Ge reached out and lightly touched the suspended "bodies."
The sensation under his fingertips wasn't rubber, and it was completely different from dead skin either. It felt much more like a living person.
Warm to the touch. Pores that seemed to breathe. Blood still flowing beneath the skin.
"Very similar to a living person, just… it feels like they no longer have a soul." He took a step back and studied the hanging "people." All of their eyes were closed, as though they were merely asleep.
"Better to keep my distance." Chen Ge was about to leave when he noticed, in the deepest part of the compartment, a figure whose silhouette was almost identical to the shadow in Room 413.
One meter sixty tall. Gaunt and frail, with virtually no flesh on its body — it looked like a skeleton draped in a thin layer of skin.
"The build is very close to the shadow. Could it be that the shadow told me to come to the wall because it has some connection to this 'person'?"
He couldn't be one hundred percent certain that the figure in the back of the compartment was the shadow's body. The space inside was cramped and crammed wall-to-wall with hanging bodies, so he could only make out a rough shape.
"For now, I'll leave it alone. Let me see if I can get over the wall first. If I can move freely between the east and west campuses, the space I have to work with expands considerably."
Stepping back, Chen Ge turned his attention to the other compartments.
The sixth compartment's door was labeled "experimental waste." It was locked, and he couldn't open it.
The seventh bore the label "non-recyclable waste." The moment he drew near, a thick, overpowering stench hit him, almost suffocating.
"That reeks."
The seventh compartment was locked as well. Chen Ge quickened his pace past the doorway, heading for the last compartment. But just as he was passing the door, a man's voice suddenly rang out from inside.