Chang Wenyu was the most extraordinary existence within the Medium-Sensitive Ghost School. She refused to follow the rules, tore things apart at will, and refused to be bound.
And yet, it was precisely this personality of hers that won the admiration of many students within the Ghost School.
Perhaps their "lives" had grown too dull—her arrival gave those children mired in despair a sliver of light.
That light was not bright; it merely stood out from the darkness.
Her temperament was the complete opposite of the Painter's. Neither had deliberately set out to oppose the other, yet the two gradually found themselves walking entirely divergent paths.
Interestingly, the students of the Ghost School did not overwhelmingly rally behind one side. The two of them split the will of the student body evenly between them.
In theory, so long as one of them made the other vanish completely, they would gain the full will of the Ghost School and become the new Door Opener.
Their struggle had begun from that point and continued right up to the present.
The man at the center of the storm endured the Painter's attacks while launching frenzied assaults on Chang Wenyu. The strange characters on Chang Wenyu's back were destroying the Ghost School's gate while simultaneously guarding against the man at the center of the storm.
Of the three, the one currently holding the initiative was the Painter.
He still had one use of his ability remaining—the power to strip any one vengeful ghost of everything.
This ability had no effect on the man in the hospital gown at the center of the storm, but it could be used on Chang Wenyu.
The Painter was hesitating. If he dealt with Chang Wenyu and lost his last trump card, he would face the man at the center of the storm alone—though that was not the most critical concern.
At this moment, the one closest to the gate was Chang Wenyu, followed by the man in the hospital gown inside the storm. The instant Chang Wenyu could hold out no longer, the man in the hospital gown might immediately seize the unclaimed gate for himself.
If he became the Door Opener, everything the Painter had done would be for nothing.
Blood threads once again wrapped around the "canvas." The Painter did not use his ability on Chang Wenyu. Having fought her for so many years, he knew her temperament well—if she had dared to appear, she surely still had hidden means she had yet to reveal. Going after Chang Wenyu now was not safe enough.
The Painter was waiting for Chang Wenyu and the man at the center of the storm to fight each other to the death, and inside the teaching building,
"What are those characters on Chang Wenyu's back? Why can they widen the cracks on the gate? In all my dealings with the Paranormal Society, I never found anything that could damage the gate—unless the Door Opener chose to bear all the sins behind it themselves." Chen Ge was deeply curious about the characters on Chang Wenyu's back, but unfortunately, from his vantage point, he could not make them out clearly.
Chang Wenyu had her back pressed against the door, using her own body to block most of the characters from view.
"These symbols appear to be drawn in blood. They don't look like Chinese characters—they look more like individual fragments produced when a complete painting has been torn to pieces."
As seconds and minutes ticked by, the characters on Chang Wenyu's back gradually diminished. The newly emerging symbols looked as though they were boring their way out from deep within her body, trailing her flesh and blood, and when they were pressed onto the gate, they clung to her with threads of blood.
The symbols on the gate multiplied. Slowly, Chen Ge realized that these characters had not been arranged at random—they followed a fixed sequence, ultimately forming a blood-red painting.
It was a fiendish demon with three heads, its body covered in shackles, entwined in chains, its eyes glowing with a bloody light. Most unsettling of all, the demon's eyes looked almost identical to those of a living person—as though they had just been gouged from a living face.
"A painting like this… I think I've seen something similar somewhere…" Chen Ge activated his Yin Eye, his pupils contracting as a sharp gleam flashed through his gaze. "Before I entered the underground corpse vault, the Paranormal Society came to my haunted house!