Looking at the expectation in
He muttered to himself: this teacher was perfectly nice, just a bit odd — the sort of person who probably didn't have many friends in real life either.
"Teacher, I'm just a really ordinary student. I've never experienced anything unusual in my life, let alone witnessed anything supernatural." Wang Yicheng looked a little embarrassed. "I'm not very smart, and there's something wrong with my leg, too. Maybe I should just join the calligraphy club instead. They agreed earlier — it's just that the senior who spoke to me didn't have the best attitude."
"When I ask you a question, you answer it honestly." Chen Ge's expression turned serious.
The moment Chen Ge put on that stern face, Wang Yicheng immediately caved. He sat on the steps and thought hard for a while.
"I really have never seen anything supernatural. But when I first enrolled, a senior student told me an urban legend."
"An urban legend?" Those two words piqued Chen Ge's interest at once.
"That senior was on the student council. He was the one who guided us to our dorms during the assignment. He seemed to have it in for me, so he probably told the story on purpose just to scare me."
"What did he tell you? Hurry up and say it."
"The dorm I was assigned to was Room 413. Normally, six people live in each dorm room, but ours only had five. One bed has been empty this whole time." Wang Yicheng began recounting the legend he had heard.
"At first I figured the person assigned to bed four just hadn't shown up yet — maybe something had delayed them and they missed freshman orientation."
"But that senior told me no one had ever lived in bed four of Room 413."
"When I asked him why, he said that a long time ago, a student with a physical disability had been assigned to that bed. Nobody wanted to befriend him, so he resorted to pranks to get attention, which only made everyone hate him more. In the end, all the people he had played tricks on banded together and played a joke of their own."
Wang Yicheng was about to keep going, but Chen Ge cut him off. "Do you know what kind of joke they played on him?"
Chen Ge wanted to confirm a certain suspicion in his mind, which was why he pressed the question.
Wang Yicheng scratched his head and frowned. "According to the senior, those students lured the boy in bed four into the bathroom late at night and dressed up as ghosts to scare him. They scared him to death."
"And after that?"
"After that, bed four in Room 413 has remained permanently empty. The senior said that boy sometimes comes back in the dead of night. If you get up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night and see that there's an extra person in the room, under no circumstances should you talk to him."
"That's it? Just that?" Chen Ge wasn't satisfied. "Think harder — has anything unusual happened to you personally? For instance, have you been having the same dream over and over lately, or have strange memories been popping into your head that you don't recognize?"
Wang Yicheng looked at Chen Ge with a pained expression. Once he confirmed the teacher wasn't joking, he said: "Teacher, I sleep like a log. I never dream. I'm the easygoing type — even when people bully me, I don't hold grudges."
"That's not going to cut it. There are good people in this world, and there are bad ones. Your tolerance, in the eyes of those bad people, is nothing but weakness, and they'll only bully you harder next time." Chen Ge looked at Wang Yicheng, his pupils slowly contracting. He had just realized that Wang Yicheng was exactly the kind of student he had been looking for all along.
The boy had a favorable impression of him, trusted him, had a mild temperament, and — most importantly — was very obedient.
The students in the West Campus had clearly lost a great deal of their memories. Chen Ge wanted to probe more deeply. He planned to ask him some provocative questions.