Chapter 42
Chapter 42
Everyone turned to Wei Sen in shock.
“What secret does it have?” Xu You asked.
Wei Sen was just about to answer when Xia Susu caught up to them as well.
Seeing this, Huang Xinze and Xu You exchanged a look, then stepped forward and twisted Xia Susu’s arms behind her back from either side, restraining her movements.
“Let go of me! What right do you have to grab me?! Don’t even think about leaving me behind! Either we all leave together, or we all die together!” Xia Susu roared. When she said “we all die together,” her clothes turned completely bloodred, and her eyes grew even cloudier.
“Security guard, the missed call records from a year ago-did you call back?” Wei Sen looked at Huang Xinze.
Huang Xinze held Xia Susu’s arms down with all his strength and hurriedly said, “I forgot to update you guys. I called that number back. Principal Zhang answered!”
“That was the Principal’s Office number?” Chen Lin said in surprise. “A year ago, the Principal’s Office called the security room over and over, leaving so many missed calls. Why?”
Huang Xinze looked just as confused.
“Then that makes sense…” Wei Sen said slowly, understanding dawning in her eyes. Although she did not have absolute proof, the truth was already clear to her.
“So what exactly is its secret?” Xu You pressed again.
“The answer is under this pile of sand.” Wei Sen’s gaze fell on the pile they had seen on their very first day at the school, yet had completely overlooked.
Lin Xiaoxue rolled up her sleeves, stepped forward, and snatched up the shovel. “I’ll dig!”
“Let me.” Wei Sen glanced at Lin Xiaoxue’s thin arms and legs, then took the shovel from her.
Since there was only one shovel, Wei Sen began digging with all her might, scooping the sand aside one shovelful at a time.
Everyone watched nervously. Even Xia Susu, whose arms were pinned by Huang Xinze and Xu You, fell silent.
They all wanted to know what exactly was buried beneath that sand pile…
Before long, something stark white emerged.
Lin Xiaoxue stumbled backward in fright. “A body?!”
With a grim expression, Wei Sen continued digging away the sand. First, a hand that had already turned to bone was exposed, followed by a badly decayed school uniform that was still faintly recognizable.
At last, after the sand on top was cleared away, a skeleton in a school uniform, roughly one meter twenty or thirty in height, was fully exposed to the air. Its skull was visibly covered in cracks of varying depths.
“Is he…” Xu You said in disbelief, “Yu Ming?”
“Yes.” Wei Sen nodded. “He was killed by Wang Hua and Sun Qiang.”
Wei Sen’s words were brief and blunt, but everyone widened their eyes in shock.
“Sister Sen, but… Wang Hua is in third grade, and Sun Qiang is in fifth grade. They’re still just children. How could they possibly do something like murder?” Lin Xiaoxue covered her mouth, fighting back the churning in her stomach.
“The way they killed Zhou Junjie was even crueler than this.”
“How did you know the body was here?” Huang Xinze asked in confusion.
“The drawings we found in Zhao Yue’s dorm.” Wei Sen looked at Chen Lin. “Do you remember? Wang Hua drew a big mountain. I thought it was a mountain at first, but it wasn’t. What he drew was this pile of sand.”
Chen Lin realized it belatedly. Thinking back to that drawing, its shape really had been identical to the sand pile’s original outline!
Xu You said, “So Wang Hua and Sun Qiang were expelled but allowed to remain at school under observation because they killed someone?! But this is already a serious criminal case. No matter what, it shouldn’t have been up to the principal…”
Wei Sen said, “Because the principal concealed Yu Ming’s death from the outside world. That is his secret!”
“Why would he do that?”
“In the Principal’s Office, three walls are covered with Principal Zhang’s medals and honors from the past several decades. With his seniority, he could have gone to a better school to teach long ago, but he stayed here all this time. That means this school is extremely important to him. If word got out that a vicious campus bullying incident had caused a student’s death, then this school would be finished, and so would he.”
“No wonder… Even after becoming an Eerie Entity, he still wants to find Yu Ming’s soul and eat it. He wants to bury this secret forever!” Huang Xinze said excitedly.
Wei Sen nodded slightly and continued, “The principal may have more than one secret. After all, he won’t allow anything harmful to this school to happen.”
“Guo Xiaolan’s case too?” Xu You thought aloud.
“Mm.”
“What happened to Guo Xiaolan?” Huang Xinze asked. Because every meeting had been so short, he wasn’t fully caught up with everyone else.
Xu You sighed, anger hidden in her eyes. “The school’s original doctor was surnamed Xie, and he was a pervert! He must have used PE class as an opportunity to call Guo Xiaolan to the Infirmary alone, sexually assaulted her, and threatened her not to tell anyone.”
“Fuck! That animal! She was just a little kid! Goddamn it!” Huang Xinze instantly flew into a rage. “Where is that bastard?! I’ll kill him myself!”
“Dead,” Wei Sen said calmly. “In cafeteria worker Wang Mei’s dorm room, I found two heads. One belonged to Wang Wenlei. The other was an unfamiliar face, probably her husband, Doctor Xie.”
“Good riddance!” Chen Lin cursed under her breath, her fists clenched tight. “So the cafeteria worker wasn’t really a bad person, right? She must have found out what that beast did, and that’s why she killed him…”
“Mm, maybe. At the time, I didn’t just find the heads. I also found a notice saying Doctor Xie had been dismissed by the school. But the reason given was ‘failure to promptly mediate a student conflict.'”
As Wei Sen spoke, her gaze fell once more on the corpse that had already turned into a skeleton.
How desperate must Yu Ming have been back then? He had clearly…
Someone had seen him, yet he could only watch helplessly as his hope of survival was snuffed out like the last cold flicker of a candle.
Perhaps it was when Wang Hua and Sun Qiang smashed his skull with the shovels. Or perhaps it was when he had been buried in the sand pile, still clinging to a trace of consciousness.
Either way, that school doctor in a white coat, human on the outside and a beast within, had once witnessed this tragedy unfold. But he had chosen to turn a blind eye.
Everyone fell silent. Their faces showed a mix of pity and anger.
Wei Sen, however, remained unusually calm. She stepped forward slowly and lifted the small skeleton from the sand pile onto her back. “His wish is to go home and reunite with his grandmother. Even if he can’t tell us how to leave, that doesn’t matter anymore. Let’s send him back.”
They had now fulfilled the first Clearance Condition. As long as they opened the school gate, they could leave this place!
Wei Sen walked at the front with the skeleton on her back. Lin Xiaoxue and Chen Lin flanked her on either side. Xu You and Huang Xinze escorted Xia Susu, who had been completely corroded by the Eerie Entity and lost her reason. Together, they headed toward the school gate.
“Sister Sen, what was with the bones in the office?” Huang Xinze asked as they walked.
“Last night, Guo Xiaolan gave me an assignment. It was a stack of essays written by the whole class. In Guo Xiaolan’s essay, she wrote that she told Principal Lin her secret. After that, School Doctor Xie was no longer at the school, but Principal Lin disappeared too.”
Huang Xinze still couldn’t quite figure it out, his face full of confusion.
Seeing his expression, Xu You shook her head. “You still can’t understand that? Principal Lin found out about something like that, so of course she would tell Principal Zhang. But Principal Zhang wouldn’t allow anything that damaged the school’s reputation to happen, so he used any means necessary to suppress the news.”
Huang Xinze suddenly realized. “No wonder there was a skeleton in the Principal’s Office! Principal Zhang imprisoned Principal Lin in the Principal’s Office. Principal Lin called the security guard for help, but obviously, she wasn’t saved. In the end… she was trapped and died in the Principal’s Office!”
Wei Sen drew in a light breath. The air was still thick with the stench of decay. “That’s probably it, but we don’t have enough clues to infer the exact cause of Principal Lin’s death or the details.”
Lin Xiaoxue looked in Xia Susu’s direction and slowly said, “If Xia Susu hadn’t burned the clues in the Academic Affairs Office, maybe we could have pieced together the whole truth?”
Wei Sen gave Lin Xiaoxue an approving look. It was probably just as she said.
Before long, everyone arrived at the school gate.
Wei Sen looked at the heavy padlock on the iron sheet gate and said, “If everyone had worked together from the start and shared every clue they found, this Instance might not have been difficult at all.”
But none of them had done that.
And so, a C-rank Instance that should have had only a twenty percent death rate had been twisted by human nature itself into hell-level difficulty…