Chapter 56: The Name That Must Not Be Spoken
With too few clues to work with, Chen Ge couldn’t piece together the truth of what had happened.
He placed the three chairs back in their original positions and glanced around. Because of the mirrors, the dance studio felt especially empty.
“Cleaned up so thoroughly—probably swept more than once.” There wasn’t a speck of trash on the floor, which wasn’t good news for Chen Ge. “The scene’s been cleaned. Hopefully, that special pair of red dance shoes hasn’t been thrown away.”
Chen Ge moved away from the mirrors and walked to a corner of the dance studio. The walls were plastered with various certificates of honor, along with something resembling a ranking board.
After a couple of glances, Chen Ge suddenly noticed a problem: the first-place name on this board had been blacked out with a marker pen.
“A ranking board with no first place?” Chen Ge spotted names like Qian Yujiao and a few other girls on the board, but Zhang Ya’s name was conspicuously absent.
He shifted his gaze. The walls also displayed photos of award winners, one of which caught his attention.
It appeared to be a group photo of six people. Five of them were huddled together, their faces beaming with bright, sunny smiles. The sixth person stood off to the side, separated from the others by a gap. Her image had been cut out with scissors. If not for the small sliver of a white dance shoe visible at the bottom edge of the photo, Chen Ge might have assumed it was originally a five-person shot.
“All individual photos and small group shots—why isn’t there a class photo?” Chen Ge pulled out his phone, snapped a picture of the honor wall, then continued forward, running his hand along the wall. Soon, he found a room with no markings at all.
Curious, he pushed the door open and entered.
Inside, the room held a desk, a wardrobe, and a single bed.
“Looks like a tutor’s office, but why is there a bed? Does a teacher need to stay overnight?” Chen Ge rummaged through the drawers and cabinets, clinging to a faint hope of finding the red dance shoes. Unfortunately, the wardrobe was empty, and the drawers only contained a stack of photocopied certificates of honor.
“Seems like the dance students at West City Private Academy were pretty impressive—won a lot of awards.” Chen Ge flipped through a few at random. One of them bore the names of Qian Yujiao and the others: “City-level Swan Lake Ballet Group Championship, qualified for provincial competition.”
This photocopy hadn’t been posted on the honor wall outside. Stranger still, the award should have listed six names, but the last one had been blacked out.
“Same as the ranking board.”
Chen Ge lingered in the room for a while longer. Finding nothing else, he stepped out.
The moment he pulled the door open, his heart skipped a beat. The three chairs had shifted from their original positions and followed him over.
“Here we go again!”
Chen Ge forced himself not to look at the chairs. He walked quickly, deciding that if he found nothing in three minutes, he would leave the activity center.
Using his phone as a flashlight, he made his way to the deepest part of the dance studio, where he finally spotted a sign for the women’s changing room.
“The women’s changing room and the girls’ dormitory bathroom—supposedly the most yin-heavy spots in a school. I need to be careful.” He gently pushed open the door to the women’s changing room. Two rows of metal lockers lined the walls, with a long wooden bench running down the middle.
“So this is what a women’s changing room looks like.”
It was Chen Ge’s first time in such a place. He left the door half-open and casually opened a locker.
On the top shelf of the locker lay a set of girls’ school uniforms. Unlike public schools, private academies like this one designed their uniforms to be more elegant and attractive.
“The skirt only reaches my knees—isn’t that a bit short?”
Chen Ge searched the uniform’s pockets but found nothing. He then looked at the bottom shelf, where a pair of white dance shoes sat.
“Wrong color. Not what I’m looking for.” He closed the locker door and noticed a small card on the lock, bearing a girl’s name. “That makes it easier to search.”
He held up his phone, scanning the lockers one by one. But after searching the entire row, he couldn’t find Zhang Ya’s name. Only in the corner of the changing room did he spot a solitary locker with no markings at all.
“This locker seems isolated from all the others, tossed alone in the corner.” Chen Ge opened its door. The top shelf held a dirty ballet dress, while the bottom shelf was empty.
“No name, ostracized by everyone else—whose locker could this be?” Chen Ge already had an answer in mind. He pulled out the dress and discovered five boxes of long-spoiled fruit gift bags underneath.
“What’s this? Gifts?” Chen Ge placed the ballet dress on the wooden bench and examined the fruit boxes. Each box was wrapped in a handmade bag, and every small bag bore a carefully written girl’s name.
The names were different, but the handwriting was identical—clearly all written by the same person.
“The fruit boxes must have been gifts she prepared specially.” When Chen Ge picked up the last box, he spotted a photo lying at the very bottom of the locker.
This was the complete version of the photo on the honor wall. On the back, it read: “Congratulations to Dorm 414 for qualifying for the provincial competition.” On the front were six girls.
Five of them were clustered together on the far right of the photo, their smiles bright and cheerful. Standing half a palm’s width apart from them was the sixth girl.
She had a tall, flawless figure, around 1.7 meters. She looked like a true white swan—elegant, pure, soft, and beautiful. Even as she tried her best to fit in with the others, her very aura set her apart from them.
“Could this be Zhang Ya?”
Chen Ge couldn’t bring himself to connect the vengeful, malevolent, and cruel red-clad ghost with the girl in the photo. He muttered to himself, inadvertently speaking Zhang Ya’s name aloud.
To Chen Ge, it was just an offhand remark. But the moment he uttered “Zhang Ya,” several lockers in the women’s changing room began to creak and groan, as if straining under immense pressure, on the verge of bursting. What shocked him even more was that, at the same time, a rapid series of thuds came from the doorway of the changing room, as if something had charged over.
“Who’s there?”
Stuffing the photo into his pocket, Chen Ge grabbed his tool hammer and headed for the door. He pushed the half-closed wooden door open to find the three chairs lined up outside, blocking his exit from the women’s changing room.
“You really think I wouldn’t dare tear you apart?” Cold sweat soaked Chen Ge’s back, but his expression remained steady. He gripped his tool hammer and strode toward the chairs.
The women’s changing room had no other exits. If he didn’t break out, the situation would only worsen.
Chen Ge’s gaze darted outside, planning an escape route. But when his eyes landed on the mirrors in the dance studio, his raised foot froze mid-step.
In the mirrors, the scene at the doorway of the women’s changing room was reflected—except, in the mirror, three female students were sitting on those three chairs.