The sixth stall only had eyes painted on the partition wall — the actual walls bore no markings, which struck
He circled back to the fourth stall. The fourth stall had no graffiti at all.
"Could this be some kind of student prank? But why specifically the fifth stall? It's neither the last one nor the first."
Determined to get to the bottom of it, Chen Ge returned to the entrance of the sixth stall. After a moment's hesitation, he raised his tool hammer and stepped inside.
The drainage pipes were concentrated in the sixth stall, making it feel noticeably more cramped than the others.
"Nothing seems out of place here either? Do I actually have to go into the fifth stall to find anything?" Chen Ge stared at the eyes painted on the partition, then raised his hand and lightly touched one.
"It really is just paint — looks scary, that's all." He stared into the painted eye for a long while. "The fourth stall is completely normal. Only the fifth and sixth stalls have graffiti, and between them is a wooden partition with eyes painted on both sides..."
He felt as though he'd latched onto something. He reached out again, running his fingers over the eye patterns one by one. When his fingertip touched an eye near knee level, Chen Ge's expression changed.
"Just as I thought!"
He crouched down and aimed the flashlight at the partition.
Right where his finger had touched, there was a hole exactly the same size and shape as the painted eyes.
Someone had bored a small hole clean through the partition. Because it matched the size and shape of the eye patterns, and because it sat in a corner, it was nearly impossible to spot.
"Every single eye drawing was there to conceal this one hole." Chen Ge stared at the hole in the middle of the partition, and the more he thought about it, the more unsettling it became. "A real hole hidden among the painted eyes — a hole that connects the fifth and sixth stalls directly. That means someone used this hole to spy on the fifth stall from here!"
Who would ever imagine that among all the painted eyes on the bathroom walls, one of them was an actual eye?
"The drainage pipes are all in the sixth stall. As long as you stand on top of them, nobody outside could spot you through the gap at the bottom of the partition. This person planned it very carefully." To be watched without ever knowing — that was what Chen Ge found most terrifying.
Thinking back to the side mission description, that person had hidden in the fifth stall waiting for the Red Shadow to arrive. In reality, he had probably been observed by the Red Shadow for a long time already.
"The secret of the fifth stall is solved, but how am I supposed to complete the side mission? Am I supposed to just stand in the fifth stall and wait for the Red Shadow to show up, then let it peek through the hole?" Chen Ge hefted his tool hammer. If that really was how this was going to play out, he had no qualms about putting a hammer straight through its eye.
While Chen Ge was wrestling with how to complete the side mission, those paired footsteps in the corridor rang out once more. This time they were headed straight for the third floor — and they were moving fast.
"What's going on? They seem even more anxious than I am — is it because I opened the fifth stall? But that doesn't make sense either. I opened it ages ago. Why are they rushing up only now?"
Before he could figure it out, the footsteps had already arrived on the third floor. Chen Ge was standing inside the sixth stall and barely managed to pull the door mostly shut before the footsteps entered the third-floor bathroom.
"Here we go. Face to face at last."
Chen Ge switched off his flashlight and raised his tool hammer high. But what happened next was nothing like what he'd imagined. After entering the bathroom, the footsteps didn't open each stall door one by one to search — instead, they went straight into the fifth stall.
As the door of the fifth stall slowly swung shut, the bathroom fell abruptly silent.