"Someone's in the stall!"
The moment he spotted the black leather shoes, Chen Ge thought of Teacher Bai from the east campus — she had worn a pair of pure black leather shoes just like these.
"Don't come any closer."
Chen Ge took two steps back and slipped Lin Sisi's phone into the gap of the stall, quickly snapping a photo.
He looked down at the screen. What he'd been worried about hadn't happened — the stall contained nothing but the pair of shoes, with no hidden "person."
"Lin Sisi's phone can photograph vengeful spirits and other special things. The photo shows nothing, which means there's only a pair of shoes in the stall. But if no one's inside, how did the door get locked from the inside?"
Stall doors could only be locked from within, and the position of the black leather shoes was exactly where a standing person would be. They didn't look like they'd been shoved in from outside.
"Teacher, are you sure you're not seeing things? Who would come up to the top floor of the teaching building to use the bathroom in the middle of the night? Just thinking about it gives me the creeps." The memories in Zhu Long's head had already begun to loosen — he'd recalled some things, hazy and indistinct, impossible to articulate clearly, but they had undeniably affected him, producing subtle changes that no one else had noticed. For instance, he'd started keeping his distance from the other club members, preferring to stay near Chen Ge, as though Chen Ge and he were the same kind of person.
"Stay here and guard the door. If anyone else approaches, let me know immediately."
Chen Ge grabbed the stall door and shook it hard, then forced it open with brute strength.
The narrow stall had been painted all over with ghostly faces in oil paint. Standing inside felt like being watched by dozens of eyes.
"Why would a pair of shoes be placed here?"
Finding nothing unusual in the first stall, Chen Ge moved to the second. Armed with experience now, he pulled out his phone and photographed through the gap right away.
The photo showed another pair of shoes in the second stall as well — not black leather shoes this time, but a worn-out pair of blue sneakers.
"They're all placed the same way. Is there some significance to this?"
Chen Ge checked each of the first six stalls in sequence. Every single one contained a pair of shoes. All men's shoes — sneakers, hiking shoes, flat shoes — all different sizes, clearly belonging to different people.
"The black leather shoes in the first stall look a lot like Teacher Bai's. They're probably an adult's. The shoes in the other five stalls are student-sized. Does each pair represent one person?"
"Lin Sisi was bullied by the entire class back then. Could the owners of these shoes have been the ones who targeted him the most?"
The greatest difference between vengeful spirits and the living was that spirits were composed of obsession and negative emotion. Words like forgiveness and kindness had absolutely nothing to do with them.
Regardless of what kind of person Lin Sisi had been in life, the moment he became a vengeful spirit, his mind and body would inevitably have been consumed by hatred and resentment — one of the obsessions that sustained a spirit's existence.
Locking the people who had tormented him inside stalls to keep him company — based on Chen Ge's understanding of vengeful spirits, that was entirely within the realm of possibility.
"Teacher! Someone's heading this way toward the teaching building!" Zhou Tu, supporting Wang Yicheng, stood at the bathroom entrance and called out to Chen Ge. "They seem to be coming from the direction of the experimental building!"