"What's wrong with him?!"
"Help me hold him down!"
The noise was way too loud. The lab building's administrator would probably show up any second.
"Let's take the freight elevator and get out. We'll bring him to the infirmary." Chen Ge had Wang Yicheng, whose leg was still giving him trouble, lead the way while he and Zhou Tu and Zhang Ju restrained Zhu Long and steered him toward the freight elevator.
"Mr. Bai, what happened to Zhu Long? Did he just snap like that out of nowhere? Is there something wrong with his head?" Zhou Tu wanted less and less to have anything to do with Chen Ge's group. A growing unease gnawed at him.
"Hurry up. Don't let anyone see us." Zhang Ju said that line, but his expression was oddly strained — he didn't know why he had worded it that way, as though some deep part of him was afraid of something.
Once they were out of the anatomy lab, Chen Ge clamped a hand over Zhu Long's mouth. The group dragged him by force toward the freight elevator.
At almost the same moment, he heard rapid footsteps echoing from the corridor — someone was running up the stairs.
He hit the elevator button. Fortunately, no one had been using the freight elevator recently, so it was still parked on their floor.
"Get in, quick!"
The elevator doors slid slowly shut. The footsteps in the corridor drew closer and closer. Only when the number on the display changed did the footsteps finally stop — it sounded like the person had halted right in front of the freight elevator.
"Mr. Bai, weren't you guys going to investigate the supernatural phenomenon? Why did Zhu Long suddenly go crazy like that? Was he… possessed?" Zhou Tu and Zhang Ju had Zhu Long pressed against the inner wall of the elevator. Both of them still had traces of boyish innocence on their faces, now overlaid with unmistakable panic.
"I don't know. This kid was hiding something from us." The freight elevator descended with a low rumble. Chen Ge pulled the pink smartphone out of his backpack.
The phone had originally been sitting under the anatomy table. When Zhu Long had knocked the table over, the phone and a stack of documents had tumbled out with it.
"It belongs to a girl."
Chen Ge pressed the power button. The phone buzzed once and booted up normally.
"Battery's still at a hundred percent. Someone's been charging this thing every day — or are their memories all stuck on one particular moment of this day?"
No lock screen password. The wallpaper was a sweet-looking girl with delicate features and a petite build — the kind of face that made you instinctively want to protect her.
"Contacts, text messages, chat logs…" Chen Ge scrolled through them casually at first, but his gaze gradually became fixed on the phone's contents.
For all her cute and adorable appearance, the girl's personality was anything but sweet. On the surface she maintained the image of a well-behaved girl, but in reality her phone's photo album was filled with pictures of animals being dissected.
"A lunatic."
Photography was absolutely forbidden in the anatomy lab, but this girl had never followed the school's rules.
Looking through her photo album produced a deeply unsettling feeling — cute selfies alternating with graphic dissection photos of flesh and bone, the jarring juxtaposition creating an atmosphere of pure, distilled wrongness.
"You never really know what's going on inside someone…" Chen Ge glanced over at Zhu Long. Honestly, when this whole thing started, he had suspected that Zhu Long might have done something terrible to this girl. But after going through her phone, he was beginning to suspect the truth was something else entirely.