In a fleeting moment, Lin Tianheng and Dai Minghan had already reached the first floor. The wide-open main entrance faced the courtyard directly.
Just as the two were about to rush out the door, a loud shout came from behind them: "Stop! Don't go out!"
Lin Tianheng froze, one foot already stepping through the doorway, barely able to stop himself. But Dai Minghan, quick-eyed and swift-handed, grabbed him and steadied him, turning his head to look at Chen Mo, whose face had turned somewhat pale. "What's wrong?"
"Wait, let me think. There's something off about this place, I can feel it!"
"Something off?" Lin Tianheng widened his eyes, looking around in confusion. Dai Minghan also wore a puzzled expression. Neither of them noticed anything strange in their surroundings.
It was just an ordinary teaching building.
"It's not the building itself, but our own sensations. Something feels wrong."
"Bro Mo, what do you mean? I don't quite get it."
Something felt off. The sensation of running down the stairs just now—it seemed different from the usual experience of going downstairs.
That difference was why, even after stopping, he was still gasping for breath.
"Did either of you feel that running down the stairs was more exhausting than running up?"
"Huh? Really?" Dai Minghan looked bewildered. "I didn't notice anything."
"Bro Mo, now that you mention it, I am a bit tired."
Chen Mo looked up, glancing above. They had just run down from the fifth floor. Although sprinting down four flights of stairs, since it was all downward, it shouldn't have taken much energy. So why were they panting from exertion?
Dai Minghan, with the best physical condition, felt almost nothing. Lin Tianheng was next, but Chen Mo himself felt the strain most acutely.
It was as if they hadn't been going downstairs but had instead been climbing up five or six floors with all their might.
Wait...
Climbing up?
Chen Mo froze. A thought that had been inexplicable just moments ago suddenly clicked into place!
Why was he so tired? Could it be that...
This jumping ghost's trick was an upside-down ghost wall. Everything they saw was actually reversed. What they thought was going downstairs was really going up, which explained why it felt so exhausting!
In other words, everything they were seeing now was an illusion from the ghost wall. The place where he stood wasn't the first floor of the teaching building but the rooftop from which the jumping ghost had fallen.
If Lin Tianheng had taken that step forward, he would have fallen into the ghost's trap and plummeted to his death from the rooftop!
"Chen Mo, what are you saying?! We're not on the first floor now, but on the rooftop of the teaching building?"
Dai Minghan looked at him in disbelief. As he said, human instinct still trusted what the eyes saw. Being told that everything he saw was just an illusion, a falsehood, was hard to accept.
If it was an illusion, it was far too realistic!
"Trust me, we absolutely cannot go out from here! This place, without a doubt, is not the first floor! Look carefully—there's no body of the student who jumped outside. That's also a clue: this isn't the first floor!"
"Wait, Bro Mo, have you seen Su Mu?"
Reminded by Lin Tianheng, Chen Mo suddenly realized. He had been so focused on the upside-down staircase issue that he hadn't noticed Su Mu hadn't followed them down.
Su Mu, that mysterious woman—had she sensed something and seen through the ghost wall's trick from the start?
In a place Chen Mo couldn't see, at that very moment, the woman floating like a phantom in the night sky had a red-dressed female ghost hovering beside her. After a moment of stillness, the ghost, keeping its feet off the ground, began to drift slowly upward along the stairs. Su Mu opened her eyes, frowned slightly, and followed the ghost upward.
"So, it's up there..."
This U-shaped building had only six floors. The classroom they had been in was on the fifth floor, meaning there should have been just one floor above. But now, when she looked up, she saw the stairs extending upward, endlessly repeating...
"This ghost probably doesn't have the ability to alter space, so it's an illusion."
"Even if it creates illusions, the ghost I control should be able to find the true location of the spirit."
However, controlling a ghost required complete concentration. Ghosts had no consciousness. After experiencing so many horror stories, Su Mu increasingly felt that it was an indescribable existence, an inexplicable phenomenon. Even the red-dressed female ghost she controlled was utterly impossible to communicate with. More often than not, rather than controlling the ghost, it felt like her own consciousness was attaching itself to the spirit, using its ethereal state to do things humans couldn't.
Right now, for instance, her consciousness seemed split in two. One part remained in her own body, while the other clung to the red-dressed ghost's spirit, constantly searching for that faint sensation.
That was the true body of the ghost in this paranormal event.
At this moment, she had to use all her strength to control the ghost, naturally unable to focus on anything else. So she didn't know what was happening with Chen Mo, nor did she realize that the ghost had created an upside-down ghost wall, nearly luring Lin Tianheng into its trap.
"One, two, three, four, five..."
As she climbed, she counted the floors. When she reached the fifth, a sudden clamor reached her ears, seemingly from the rooftop above.
"Xu Meiqian, do you think you can escape punishment like this?"
"Do you think your crimes are unknown to anyone?"
It was the angry voice of a man.
"Not only did you cause Sun Jingyan's death, but you also shifted the blame onto Jiang Xiaohui, driving him to suicide. They were your classmates, day in and day out!"
"Even if you can fool others with that innocent face, you can't fool the teacher, Xu Meiqian. I never thought I'd teach such a venomous student. If you don't confess, the teacher will have no choice but to report you to the police!"
"Hehehehehehe..."
After a piercing laugh, a girl's shrill voice rang out.
"Teacher Chen, don't act so innocent! Think carefully—what have you done yourself? All this sin, isn't it precisely because of your favoritism and jealousy that things spiraled out of control?"
-- PS: Still two updates today. The second one isn't finished yet; it'll be sent later.