Ying Hong hid behind the old principal and refused to come out. She looked very nervous, but Chen Ge couldn't find much genuine fear on her face. In other words, even facing three Red-Robed ghosts, Ying Hong might still have had the confidence to escape.
Chen Ge didn't know what Ying Hong was relying on. He could only proceed with caution.
"Principal?" Chen Ge noticed that the old principal kept silent, as though there was something difficult to say.
"Both of these children are Li Xueying. They are one and the same person." The principal looked at the two girls with eyes full of tenderness and guilt. "I know one is called Ying Hong and the other is called Ying White, but no matter what they are called, they are both my family."
He reached out and gently patted Ying Hong's head, pulling her behind him to shield her.
Being patted on the head, a flash of disgust crossed Ying Hong's eyes, but perhaps because the current situation was far too unfavorable for her, and she still needed the old principal as her protector, she didn't resist. Instead, she deliberately put on a well-behaved act.
"If anything, Ying Hong is more like the Xueying of back then. Facing a father who drank and gambled recklessly, and a mother who was frail and couldn't leave her wheelchair, she had no choice but to protect herself." The old principal took all the blame upon himself. "This is all my fault. I was blind enough to believe that Xueying's father's lies. I was the one who pushed them into the fire with my own hands."
Ying White appeared to know nothing of what the old principal was describing. She stared at him blankly, her beautiful, clean eyes filled with confusion, murmuring the word "Grandpa" over and over.
Ying Hong's reaction was entirely different from Ying White's. She was straining to suppress the fury inside her. Her expression hadn't changed much, but a reddish tint had crept into her pupils.
The memories of the past had wounded her deeply. Her body was slowly beginning to change.
"Principal, I'm afraid things aren't as simple as you think." Chen Ge didn't want to hide anything from the old principal. He opened Ying Hong's backpack and rummaged out the crumpled wad of papers he had found in her desk drawer.
Seeing those crumpled balls of paper, the calm on Ying Hong's face shattered — it was the look of a murderer who had just learned that the body they'd buried had been discovered by the police.
The papers contained Ying Hong's dissatisfaction with the world, along with words expressing her desire to kill the old principal.
Holding the sheets one by one, Chen Ge looked at the old principal who was so determined to protect Ying Hong, and at Ying Hong herself, whose reddened eyes clutched tightly at the principal's clothes. He hesitated once more.
Gently shaking his head, Chen Ge placed the few sheets of paper back into the backpack. "Principal, could you tell me in detail how Xueying ended up like this?"
Taking back those sheets of white paper covered in mad ravings, Chen Ge noticed that both Ying Hong and the old principal let out a quiet breath of relief.
He vaguely understood — the old principal actually knew everything.
"Ying White is the purest side buried deep within Xueying's heart. She is innocent, kind, and naive, but the only reason she can live that way is because all the unease, fear, hatred, and every other negative emotion is borne by Ying Hong." There was a note of remorse and anger in the old principal's voice. "Xueying's mother was the first child I ever adopted. She was in poor health and couldn't bear children, so she adopted Xueying. I was the one who went with the couple to do it. Xueying was still very small back then. I watched the three of them laughing and chatting together, so happy, and I was happy too. But afterwards I learned that things were nothing at all like I'd imagined."
Chen Ge heard genuine hatred in the old principal's voice, which surprised him. A man with such a mild temperament could feel such deep loathing toward another person.
"Never judge a person by their face — Xueying's father was an absolute fraud. From the very beginning, he hadn't gotten close to Xueying's mother because he loved her. He wanted to get his hands on several properties under my name. He knew I had no biological children, so he deliberately targeted us. The adoption of Xueying, everything — it was all a performance staged for our benefit."
If that had been all, the old principal probably wouldn't have been this furious. What he said next was the true reason for his rage: "After he learned that I intended to donate all my property and had already drawn up a will with a lawyer, he flew into a jealous fury. Every day he found some excuse to start a fight, beat Xueying's mother. He even tried to target Xueying once, but fortunately Xueying's mother caught him in time."
The old man's voice trembled. He was a good person, but that didn't mean he was incapable of anger.
Looking at it from another angle, given the old principal's character, he probably wouldn't have devoured other malicious ghosts. For him to have become a half-body Red-Robed under these circumstances could only mean his obsession ran extremely deep — there was something he absolutely had to accomplish.
"I learned all of this after Xueying died, from the diary in her room. Do you have any idea how it felt to hold that diary in my hands?" The old principal gently pulled Ying Hong closer to his side. "Ying White couldn't survive in that kind of place. That's why Ying Hong came into being."
After hearing the old principal's account, Chen Ge was somewhat relieved that he hadn't directly pulled out those crumpled papers. He looked at Ying Hong, and another matter suddenly surfaced in his mind.
Ying White had said that her father left home at some point and never returned. At first, Chen Ge hadn't thought much of it, but now, having seen Ying Hong, he could roughly guess what that man's ultimate fate had been.
He definitely wouldn't be coming back. He would never come back.
Ying Hong had originally held a great grudge against the old principal — she had even harbored radical thoughts of hurting him.
But what happened afterward was something she never anticipated. When targeted by three Red-Robed ghosts, the old principal hadn't yielded a single step, shielding her behind him, and had instead become her lifeline. That shifted her view of him entirely.
Then, when she saw the old principal's remorseful, anguished expression, an uncomfortable feeling welled up inside her, as though a tiny crack had appeared in the hardened scar over her heart.
"I had no idea she had that kind of past. I can understand, but…" Chen Ge didn't finish the rest of his sentence. He put away the Headless Female Ghost and the Red High Heels. These two couldn't yet be considered real employees of the haunted house. The Headless Female Ghost was very reluctant, and the Red High Heels were even less obedient — though the shoes had been stowed in his backpack, the blood-red footprints on the table kept multiplying.
Putting away the two Red-Robeds was a statement of his attitude. Chen Ge decided to let the old principal handle this matter on his own. Ying Hong might be brutal at heart and filled with negative emotions, but she was still one and the same as Ying White.
He placed both hands on Ying White's shoulders, his gaze shifting between Ying Hong and Ying White. He was about to ask the old principal a few more questions when he suddenly realized something.
"This situation with Ying Hong and Ying White feels a little familiar — almost like me and the shadow from Liwan Town?"
More precisely, Chen Ge was thinking of himself and the Netherborn. One was nothing more than an optimistic, cheerful haunted house owner, while the other was the most terrifying entity in a four-star scenario.
"Wait, wait…" Chen Ge rubbed his temples hard. "My family told the old principal that Xueying was inside the Spiritual Haunted School — which means he knew full well what had happened to Xueying. Could this be yet another hint they're giving me?"