Rustle, rustle, rustle. The footsteps of the flashlight ghost sounded right beside her. Tan Shuyue held her breath, feeling the noise slowly approach her, then continue moving forward.
That ghost hadn’t noticed her...
Letting out a slight sigh of relief, Tan Shuyue didn’t immediately let her guard down. Instead, she lifted her head slightly and cast her gaze forward.
Xing Yina was hiding behind the teacher’s desk.
For some reason, when Tan Shuyue looked at that desk, she felt as if a darker shadow enveloped it in the pitch-black classroom, blurry and indistinct.
Could Xing Yina be in trouble?
Tan Shuyue’s heart suddenly raced. She couldn’t explain why she had this uneasy feeling.
Clearly... the flashlight ghost hadn’t found her.
Hidden beneath the teacher’s desk, Xing Yina also felt a strong sense of palpitation. But since the flashlight ghost hadn’t discovered Tan Shuyue under the desk, it meant the invisibility talisman was still effective.
Yet why did she still feel so strange?
Xing Yina, stay calm. You have to stay calm.
Xing Yina closed her eyes, trying to suppress the unease and palpitation. But just then, the footsteps passing by stopped.
A dim yellow light suddenly shone over.
The beam from the flashlight directly illuminated the inside of the desk, shining right on her face!
In that instant, Xing Yina felt as if she had fallen into an ice cave. She had been discovered!
But how was that possible?
The invisibility talisman’s perception-blocking effect lasted at least five minutes. Why had the flashlight ghost found her?
She inadvertently looked up and saw the ghost holding the flashlight, dressed in a stiff Zhongshan suit, its face shrouded in a black mist, its features unclear. Only that terrifying sensation remained...
That deep horror etched itself into Xing Yina’s pupils!
In that moment, she understood—the ghost had found her. Without hesitation, she reached into her pocket to retrieve another item.
It was a fragment of a mirror. When the reflective side faced the ghost, it could seal the spirit into the mirror world. But this item had a weakness: after sealing the ghost into the mirror world, the mirror side must never face another mirror, or the ghost within would be released.
In the previous horror story, Xing Yina had coincidentally obtained this ghost mirror. Unfortunately, at the end of the mission, she accidentally shattered it, leaving only a fragment. To her surprise, the broken ghost mirror still retained the ability to seal ghosts, though its power was somewhat weakened.
In the last mission, using this ghost mirror fragment, Xing Yina had sealed a ghost into the mirror world. To avoid accidentally releasing it, the fragment had been kept covered with black cloth in her pocket.
As her hand reached into her pocket, she immediately touched the sharp fragment. But before she could pull it out, Xing Yina suddenly felt an overwhelmingly cold aura envelop her entire body. Her hand inside the pocket couldn’t move the ghost mirror fragment.
How... how could this be...
Enveloped by the cold aura, her whole body seemed controlled by an invisible force, unable to move. Not only that, when Xing Yina opened her mouth to scream for help, she found she couldn’t make a sound either!
At this moment, though terrified to the extreme, Xing Yina couldn’t flee or even utter a single sound. She stared wide-eyed at the ghost before her as the dim yellow light from the flashlight shone on her.
Was this... the ghost’s ability?
Once caught in the flashlight’s beam, she lost all ability to move, even to speak!
Though its face was unclear, from its appearance, this flashlight ghost didn’t seem to be a student’s spirit but rather a school employee, like a faculty member...
When the ghost discovered Xing Yina, Liu Yuan and the others nearby also witnessed the scene. But partly because the ghost’s ability was so bizarre, and partly because the ninth group’s participants didn’t have many powerful exorcism items, everyone hesitated. No one immediately stepped forward to use a exorcism tool on the ghost!
In that moment of hesitation, the ghost teacher with the flashlight suddenly took a fountain pen from its coat pocket, uncapped it, and viciously stabbed it toward Xing Yina.
“Ah!”
With Tan Shuyue’s scream, the pen tip plunged into Xing Yina’s left eye. As the pen was pulled out, blood immediately spurted forth!
The pen pierced through her left eye, yet Xing Yina’s body remained like a puppet, without even a struggle, standing motionless in front of the desk. This scene appeared both eerie and horrifying to the others. But if the perspective shifted to the ghost teacher’s view, one could see Xing Yina’s once-beautiful face now twisted in extreme pain, utterly grotesque!
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to struggle—she simply couldn’t!
After pulling out the pen, the ghost teacher seemed unsatisfied. It then viciously stabbed the sharp tip into Xing Yina’s other eye socket, splattering blood all over the blackboard!
The ghost seemed completely oblivious to Tan Shuyue’s screams or the others’ presence. Again and again, it relentlessly drove the sharp pen tip into Xing Yina’s body, finally plunging it into her throat.
From Xing Yina’s neck, a torrent of blood gushed out. As the blood flowed, a corpse slowly collapsed onto the podium. In front of the body, a mist darker than the night reappeared. The patrolling ghost teacher gradually faded into the black mist and eventually vanished entirely.
The dark classroom fell silent again, as if nothing had happened, leaving only the bloodied corpse of a girl lying on the desk.
The ghost had completed its kill.
--
“That girl named Xing Yina might be dead.”
Sensing that palpitation, the other participants could more or less feel that one of them had died in this team mission.
For Su Mu, she strongly felt that the deceased was likely the ninth-group participant who had used the student card to check in.
In other words, checking in was both a way to obtain crucial clues and a trigger for death, inviting ghostly pursuit. Calculating the time, from completing the check-in to sensing that palpitation, it was about ten minutes.
Put differently, that red machine was a death check-in device. Anyone who used it would inevitably be hunted by a ghost for at least ten minutes.
Each of them had some means to deal with ghosts, yet this girl had been silently killed by the ghost in the same building without making a sound.
This also proved that this ghost was indeed formidable.