Chapter 1

Chapter 1

It was around three in the morning.

My two remaining roommates and I huddled by the window, our hands and feet ice-cold.

We had just tried calling the police, but everyone’s phones had lost signal at the exact same moment.

Even stranger was what happened after Chen Ling jumped.

She vanished. Instantly.

“What… what is going on?”

Huang Xuexue, the youngest in our dorm, asked in a trembling voice.

“Why would she suddenly jump off the building? Didn’t we agree to go out for barbecue tomorrow?”

Chen Ling had always loved making up bizarre rules for us, but as a friend, she had been beyond dependable. Big or small, almost anything that happened in the dorm could be solved by her, so we had put up with that odd habit of hers.

None of us had ever imagined she would do something this extreme.

“What are you screaming for? What are you screaming for! Are you not sleeping in the middle of the night?”

Maybe the screams from the dorms downstairs had been too loud, because even Dormitory Auntie had been woken up. Her booming voice carried with terrifying force.

“All of you, go to sleep! Let me catch anyone still awake and your dorm can forget about keeping its points!”

I heard the students who knew what had happened trying to explain it to Dormitory Auntie, but she told them to look carefully. There was nothing downstairs. It was their own problem.

And as she shouted, she issued a final warning in the dorm group chat.

“I’m going door to door right now. Anyone not asleep within ten minutes gets points deducted, one by one!”

My two roommates and I looked at each other.

“What do we do now…?”

“For now, we can only pretend to sleep.”

Wan Yue held Huang Xuexue and forced herself to sound calm.

That had been my plan too, but just as I was about to climb into bed, my gaze caught on something sitting on Chen Ling’s desk in the moonlight.

Her diary.

She treasured that diary like her life depended on it. Once, Huang Xuexue had accidentally knocked it onto the floor, and Chen Ling had forced her to apologize to the diary ten times.

In that split second, I remembered something.

“Don’t get into bed yet!”

I rushed over and yanked the two of them back.

“What are you doing? Can’t whatever it is wait until Dormitory Auntie leaves?”

I scared Huang Xuexue so badly that her voice came out thick with tears.

But I didn’t soften my tone at all.

“Do you remember what Chen Ling said last night after lights-out?”

“Why do you keep bringing her up…? What else could she have said? She just said…”

Huang Xuexue’s voice stopped abruptly.

“No way…”

Last night, Chen Ling had given us another new rule.

She told us that if someone died one night, we absolutely, absolutely could not sleep. And we must not touch the beds, or all of us would die.

At the time, we had all thought she was joking.

“No matter what, tonight is way too strange. I think we’d better be careful.”

“But the points…”

Wan Yue hesitated.

She had the best grades in our dorm and won scholarship evaluations every year, but if our dorm lost points, she would be affected too.

I pinched the back of my own hand, forcing myself to calm down and analyze the situation.

“The dorm uses access cards, and everyone’s entries and exits are strictly recorded. Chen Ling didn’t leave, and she isn’t inside the dorm building either. That means we can explain what happened just now to Dormitory Auntie.”

Huang Xuexue and Wan Yue thought I made sense, so they waited with me across from the beds.

We were terrified, but none of us dared turn on any kind of light.

Because the dorm power shut off at exactly eleven every night, and Chen Ling had reminded us every single day that after the power was cut, we absolutely could not use any light source.

We didn’t dare take that gamble.