"Where is my body?"
Lin Feng saw the words on the card, and every hair on his body stood on end.
Anyone encountering such a scene for the first time would feel uneasy. They were ghost hunters, not emotionless monsters. They couldn't remain indifferent to a corpse.
When Wang Qian saw Lin Feng place the severed head in a flower pot on the windowsill, he turned his face away, looking outside to ease his fear. However, upon reading the blood-red words on the card, he whispered, "This is probably some trick from the mirage realm to scare us."
Nie Chuxia took out an oil lamp. Standing beside Lin Feng, she glanced out the window into the dim haze. Figures were moving on the field below. There were quite a few of them. Suddenly, they turned around, staring at the three by the window and revealing eerie smiles.
"Lin Feng, what should we do?" Nie Chuxia recoiled back into the room, asking nervously.
Lin Feng was equally perplexed at the moment.
A "human-skin campus"?
Were they supposed to find missing human skin?
Where were the skins?
And what would they do after finding them?
Every development in an event followed cause and effect. When Lin Feng took on missions, he relied on unraveling these relationships to understand the pattern. However, this time, the mission's map was created by the Fu Sect and perfected by the system. Originally intended as a three-stage challenge, it had become the final stage, leaving Lin Feng struggling to make sense of it.
But Lin Feng had his own survival philosophy: If I can't figure out your game, I'll play by my rules.
"Since it's a campus, and there are people here, why not ask for directions? Whether these beings are humans or ghosts, real or fake, we should at least say hello. What's there to fear?"
Lin Feng lit a cigarette and sauntered out of the classroom, adopting a roguish demeanor.
Lin Feng walked in front, with Wang Qian and Nie Chuxia following behind.
The building was a five-story teaching block, and they were on the third floor. The corridor was empty and dim, with the wall clock showing 12:30. Most classrooms were deserted, as if it was lunchtime.
Reaching the fifth classroom, they saw a bespectacled boy eating lunch while a couple was passionately entangled in an uninhibited display.
Youthful vigor at its peak!
Lin Feng stood at the doorway watching for a moment. Hearing the girl's intense cries, he pushed the door open and entered. The couple turned around, furious:
"Which class are you from? What do you want?!"
They were wearing traditional school uniforms, their faces tinged with an unnatural bluish hue. Wang Qian sniffed the air and whispered, "They're already dead. It seems like they don't realize it yet. Their spirits are just puppeting their corpses."
With the cigarette in his mouth, Lin Feng noticed the boy hadn't even pulled up his pants yet. Without hesitation, Lin Feng slapped him across the face.
"Disciplinary office. Got a problem with that?"
Disciplinary... office?
Nie Chuxia and Wang Qian blinked in astonishment, struck speechless.
However, seeing the couple's terrified expressions, they secretly admired Lin Feng: This guy really knows his way around! He didn't even use a single artifact and already gained the upper hand.
The boy, dazed from the slap, lay on the floor hastily pulling up his pants, while the girl's once arrogant expression turned fearful. Lin Feng stepped on the boy's attempt to flee, grabbed his hair, and dragged him out of the room. He gave Nie Chuxia a signal, and she followed suit, grabbing the girl's hair and trailing behind.
"These two aren't from the disciplinary office... They're campus gangsters!"
Wang Qian watched in disbelief as even the usually refined Nie Chuxia executed her moves with practiced ease. Clearly, these two had done this more than once.
"You're not from the disciplinary office."
Before they could leave, the bespectacled boy eating lunch suddenly raised his head, smirking eerily as dark mist appeared on his face.
Lin Feng smiled back, "Smart kid! Wang Qian, take care of him."
The pudgy Wang Qian rubbed his hands together. This was the kind of task he enjoyed.
The couple was dragged to a corner of the hallway and stood side by side.
Now, what scared ghosts the most depended on their identities. For student ghosts like these, it was clear that "disciplinary office" was their ultimate nightmare.
"Now, I'll ask, and you'll answer," Lin Feng blew smoke into the boy's face. The boy's eyes flashed with hostility but, gritting his teeth, he nodded reluctantly.
"What is this school? How many students are there? Has anything strange happened lately?" Lin Feng asked in sequence.
The boy replied, "Yin Chuan County No.1 High School. I don't know the exact number of students; there are 36 classes combined between middle and high school. The strangest thing... is you! The disciplinary officers here all died years ago. Every new one that comes dies shortly after. Where did you even come from? Don't you even know the school's name?"
Lin Feng raised his foot and kicked the boy in the crotch, making him double over like a shrimp.
"Where I come from is none of your business! Get lost! And if I catch you breaking the rules again, you're dead."
The boy clutched his groin, ready to retort, but Lin Feng's menacing gaze made him shrink back and slink away.
In the hallway, the girl looked at Lin Feng warily. "What do you want? If you dare bully students, I'll call the police!"
Lin Feng pinched her cheek, making her eyes well up with tears.
"Call the police? Have some shame. After all the shady stuff you've done, you dare threaten me? Now tell me about the disciplinary officers—what's the story there?"
The girl freed herself from his grasp, rubbed her face, and snapped, "Give me a cigarette!"
Lin Feng smirked and tossed her one.
The girl lit it, puffing like a delinquent. "A few months ago, they were building a fountain behind the school and dug up three coffins. That place was sealed off as forbidden territory. The disciplinary officer went there to catch a couple sneaking in for a date and fell into the fountain, drowning. Since then, every new disciplinary officer has mysteriously died in the office. All heart attacks."
Lin Feng hadn't expected his fake identity to align so well with the school's eerie history.
"Where's the disciplinary office?" Lin Feng asked.
The girl pointed in a direction before being dismissed.
Not long after, Wang Qian returned, rubbing his hands together. Seeing Lin Feng had let the couple go, he asked, "Not killing them?"
Nie Chuxia added, "He's quite merciful—rarely deals with minor ghosts."
Seeing Lin Feng smoking silently, the two asked, "What's on your mind?"
Lin Feng stubbed out his cigarette and gazed at the field below. "Nothing... It's just... You might not believe me, but this is my school."
Yin Chuan County No. 1 High School—Lin Feng's alma mater. Three years of middle school and one year of high school were his entire youth. He had dropped out six years ago, and now he was back, albeit through the framework of a mission map. What a ridiculous twist of fate.
Lin Feng couldn't tell if his subconscious had influenced the construction of the map. Regardless, returning here felt oddly satisfying.
Outside the teaching building, students wandered in groups of two or three. Lin Feng activated his third eye and observed that all these kids were ghosts cloaked in corpses. Some bodies were already rotting, yet they behaved as if nothing was wrong. They read, ate, and chatted, their movements stiff and expressions bizarre, entirely unaware of their deaths.
"Could this human-skin campus refer to these corpse-cloaked ghosts? Maybe we just need to stick it out until they finish school to leave," Nie Chuxia speculated while they were in the student cafeteria.
Earlier, the trio had tried going to the school gate, only to find a pitch-black void beyond. It seemed an invisible barrier separated the campus from the outside world. Logically, they could only leave once the students were dismissed.
"That's possible, but it won't be that simple," Wang Qian added, sharing his clue. "When we were in the classroom earlier, I used the Death Interrogation Talisman on that boy eating lunch. He mentioned something... The school can't dismiss students."
"Can't... dismiss students?"
Nie Chuxia teased, "Lin Feng, your school sure was strict—students can't even leave?"
Lin Feng took a drag from his cigarette and scoffed, "Bullshit! Back then, I came and went as I pleased."
He checked the time. "There's still a while before dismissal. Let's keep exploring. Maybe we'll uncover something unexpected."
The cafeteria scene appeared no different from any regular school: students eating in small groups, chatting casually. But the food counter was enveloped in rolling black smoke, and the kitchen staff were nowhere to be seen. Lin Feng wasn't sure if this was a glitch in the map, but the aroma of the food was surprisingly enticing.
Seeing Wang Qian craning his neck to eye the meals in the students' bowls, Lin Feng smirked and turned to a boy eating nearby. "Hey! You! Go get me some food!"
The boy froze, his neck twisting 90 degrees as his face contorted into a grotesque snarl. "Who do you think you're ordering around?"
Smack!
Lin Feng slapped him across the face. "Quit whining. Are you going or not?"
The boy looked stunned. Lin Feng could tell that, in this cafeteria, the boy was a newly evolved wild ghost with significant hostility. However, compared to Lin Feng, Wang Qian, or Nie Chuxia, he was no match at all.
"I'll go!"
The boy began to cry, wiping his tears as he scurried toward the food counter.