Peace Medical College has a long history, founded in wartime and dedicated to saving lives. The school gate, shaped like a scale, is simple and imposing, its dry-hanging stone facade bearing traces of its gray-brown history.
From the outside, the campus is lush with centuries-old trees, shading the sky and creating a cool, shady vista.
Xia Bai and Lin Xiang stood still outside the gate, not to stand out, but because Hua Haoming was standing there, observing the area around the gate.
Today was freshman registration time, and the campus was bustling with people, all dressed in different clothes, representing different classes and with different expressions.
Seeing Hua Haoming's intense scrutiny, the chatterbox Lin Xiang fell silent for a moment. He was about to speak when Hua Haoming lowered the brim of his hat, "Let's go."
The three of them then entered the school gate.
The campus was exceptionally bustling today. Banners welcoming new students were visible upon entering the gate, and along the main road, various clubs were recruiting, with a bustling flow of people. Across this road was the registration area, the gymnasium.
Lin Xiang and Hua Haoming were waiting outside, while Xia Bai went in alone with his schoolbag on his back to report.
All the people in the academy reported here. Xia Bai waited in line for more than 40 minutes, reported with the admission letter, paid the tuition on the spot, received the dormitory list, and ran across to get bedding.
The three of them went to his dormitory together, and everything went smoothly there.
The dormitory is a four-person room with a bed above and a desk below. The room is not new, but fortunately it is spacious.
Xia Bai is a local and was the last to arrive. The other three beds had already been put down by people.
When they came in, a woman who looked to be about 40 years old was making the bed for bed number one, and a father and son were having dinner diagonally opposite. Only bed number four, which was next to the toilet, was left. As soon as
they came in, several people looked up. The woman had a warm smile on her face. She said, "The last student is here. Is it Xia Bai?"
Xia Bai nodded, walked to the bed number one where she was, and said to her, "Hello, Auntie, this is my bed."
The woman pointed to the label on the bed number four and said, "Student Xia Bai, look, that's your bed. It has your name and student number on it."
Hua Haoming and Lin Xiang looked in the direction of her finger. They saw the familiar two-line label with white and blue edges. On the top was Xia Bai's name, and on the bottom was Xia Bai's student number.
Xia Bai stood there without moving. "The labels for beds number one and four are different from those for beds number two and three. They must have been torn off and replaced with new ones."
Lin Xiang took a closer look. "Sure enough! The blue edges of the labels for beds number one and four are lighter!"
"Maybe the school has run out of labels, and the new ones are printed lighter than the previous ones," said the woman.
Xia Bai said slowly and seriously, "The school should have divided the beds according to student numbers. The student number on bed number two is in front of the student number on bed number three. My student number is the first, so I won't be bed number four."
"You said to divide them according to student numbers, so we divide them according to student numbers?" The woman's face began to become unnatural, and she was slightly angry.
"Come down, or I'll find the dormitory manager and ask him to check how the beds are divided." Hua Haoming frowned.
The woman sat on the bed awkwardly, the color flushed on her weather-beaten face, her voice became much louder, and she laughed angrily, "Little classmate, you just came to the dormitory and you don't give face to your classmates' families. You quarrel with your classmates. You have never thought about getting along well with your classmates, right? If you continue like this, which classmate will dare to play with you in the future?"
As she spoke, she glanced at the father and son across from her.
The boy in the father and son pair had been concentrating on eating without saying a word. The father laughed and said, "It's not a big deal, there's no need to quarrel, there's no need to quarrel."
"Bang!——"
The doors of the bathroom and dormitory were pushed open at the same time. The overly loud sound didn't know where it came from.
A man and a woman came in from the door. They looked like a brother and sister. They were holding basins and supermarket shopping bags. They must have just come back from the supermarket to buy daily necessities.
A boy came out of the bathroom. The woman on bed number one grabbed the sheets as soon as she saw him, and called "son" with a wronged look on her
face. The boy must have heard the conversation outside in the bathroom. He glanced at the two snakeskin bags beside Xia Bai, walked to the table under bed number one calmly, opened the wallet on the table, took out a wad of money and handed it to Xia Bai, "Classmate Xia, the accommodation fee is 1,200 yuan a year. I will double it to change your bed. Is that enough?"
"Huh?" Lin Xiang was stimulated by the money, "A little bit of dirty money is not a big deal?"
As he said, he was about to take off the watch on his wrist.
The sister at the door saw his movements and looked as if he was about to throw his watch back. She was startled. "Eh? A watch worth millions, what are you going to do with it?"
Xia Bai, his father at the table, and his mother on the bed all looked at the watch in Lin Xiang's hand.
The boy, taken aback, looked over as if he'd noticed something. He'd hoped to settle the matter with money, but he didn't expect the other party to be much richer than him. He muttered awkwardly, "Who knows if it's fake?"
Lin Xiang felt insulted. "I'd rather paint my hand than wear fake shoes. Unlike some people who think they're superior by wearing fake shoes!"
Xia Bai's head spun around and he looked at the boy's shoes again. Besides him, two other people's eyes also fell on him.
The boy's face flushed. "You're the one wearing fakes!"
Seeing that the two were about to argue, Hua Haoming pinched his nose and walked to the door with a headache. He grabbed the doorknob and said, "Let's go find the dorm supervisor."
The woman was about to call him back when the boy said, "Go find her!"
Hua Haoming turned the doorknob, his hand frozen in place, and his face darkened.
Seeing him standing still at the door, the boy said stubbornly, "Go find the dorm supervisor? Why aren't you going?"
Hua Haoming returned with a cold face and sat on the bed board of bed number four. After a few seconds, he cursed. Confused
, Lin Xiang instinctively glanced at Xia Bai, who was staring out the window. "What's wrong?" "It 's so quiet," Lin Xiang thought.
"How could it be so quiet? It's so noisy!" He quickly realized that Xia Bai wasn't talking about the dormitory, but outside. He listened carefully. Sure enough, there was no sound outside, not even the faintest sound of people passing by. It was as if everything had been absorbed. This was the hallway of the freshman dormitory for university registration, and it was eerily quiet. He had heard a commotion outside earlier—not only from the freshmen, but also from many parents. Today might be the busiest day of the year for the dormitory. When did the silence begin? There had been an argument in their dormitory earlier, and perhaps no one had noticed. The boy continued to ask Hua Haoming why he hadn't gone to the dorm supervisor, as if he could regain some of his lost face by questioning him. "The dormitory door won't open," the sister at the door said with a stern face. Everyone in the dormitory looked over except Hua Haoming. The younger brother also grabbed the doorknob and tried to open it. He was a head taller than his sister, and his strength was so great that the door shook when he tried, but it didn't budge. "How could it be?" The father, who was still eating, put down his chopsticks and walked to the door to try and open it, but it didn't budge.
The boy who had questioned Hua Haoming also tried, with the same result. He continued to question Hua Haoming, "Did you do that? The door won't open after you touched the doorknob."
Hua Haoming didn't look at him.
He angrily pulled out his phone and called someone. Just as he was about to raise it to his ear, he froze, staring at it.
The others also took out their phones. Xia Bai looked at his own, with a broken screen, and silently put it back.
"No signal."
"Me too." "I
can't even open the app."
"What the hell is going on?"
Lin Xiang looked at the window, walked over to try. "The window won't open either,"
he said, and then he lifted the chair under bunk number two and smashed the window glass. The chairs provided by Heping Medical College for the dormitories had iron legs. A 187cm tall boy used the two slender iron legs to smash the glass.
"Bang! — Squeak! —"
The glass remained intact.
After the sharp banging subsided, the dormitory was silent and still.
The dormitory fell silent, and only then did they realize how quiet it was outside. The world was completely devoid of sound.
The happy faces, excited voices, and bustling hallways they had seen before entering the dormitory all receded like a tide.
Or perhaps, in an instant, they were pulled away from the bustling world and swept into a silent, unknown space.
Lin Xiang walked over to Xia Bai, wiping his hands, which had been holding the chair, on the hem of his pants before moving closer.
"What's going on?" the woman nervously got off the bed. No one answered, so she ran to the door, banging hard and shouting, "Is anyone out there? We're trapped! Open the door!"
Her strength wasn't as great as some of the boys', but her voice was shrill, but still, there was no response.
They could hear her voice, but it seemed to be absorbed by the endless darkness once it reached the door.
By then, it was almost dark outside.
Even though the Heping Medical College dormitory was spacious, nine people squeezed into a four-person room was a bit cramped. They sat on their beds or stood beside them, each tense.
"What on earth is going on?" The father wiped the sweat from his forehead and asked in a trembling voice.
He had originally happily brought his son to report to Heping Medical College. This should have been one of the proudest days of his life. Who knew that he encountered this situation in a dormitory where so many people wanted to live.
Anyone would be scared if they were trapped in the dormitory and couldn't feel any movement from the outside world, as if they were abandoned and isolated by the world.
Several people in the dormitory had such doubts, but they didn't know who could answer them.
Hua Haoming said coldly: "We are in lockdown."
Someone responded, and everyone looked at him.
Lin Xiang: "Brother, what lockdown?"
Hua Haoming's eyes swept across these people one by one, and when he passed by the sister, he paused for a few seconds, then touched his hair irritably and sat up straight.
Seeing that he was going to talk to them properly, the others also held their breath and waited.
"This isn't easy to explain; it goes back a long time," Hua Haoming began. "The initial anomaly occurred in Qili Village, a remote mountain village in the south of Ximian City."
Ximian City is located in the southwest, economically underdeveloped and with limited transportation. The remote mountain villages within the city are even more impoverished and backward.
Qili Village has a primary school, a cluster of mud houses. From preschool to sixth grade, there are only about thirty students, taught by two teachers.
That day, one of the teachers was out, fetching textbooks from a distant town. As he rode his bicycle up the mountain, he heard the loudspeaker broadcasting gymnastics. He exhaled, rubbed his hands, and pushed open the rickety wooden door of the school, but saw no students on the dirt playground.
The entire school was deserted, with only the loudspeaker announcing the gymnastics, echoing through the empty school and the entire impoverished village.
It was indeed gymnastics time. Normally, thirty or so students would stand there, performing their unconventional movements.
But now, they were gone.
They had vanished into thin air.
How could over thirty living people simply vanish into thin air?
This remote, remote mountain village lacks even a handful of surveillance cameras, leaving investigators baffled. They repeatedly dispatched additional personnel and expanded the scope of the investigation, but still found no leads.
They knew only that some students should have been at the school before 10:30 a.m., the time for the village elementary school's radio calisthenics. Another teacher must have turned on the broadcast.
Before the broadcast ended, they vanished, including the teacher.
"Later, these students appeared in a photo."
"This incident caused a sensation in the local area. A reporter rushed to the school three days later and took this photo at night."
"Here's the photo."
Hua Haoming pulled out his phone and opened a photo. Several people gathered around.
Xia Bai, being closest to him, had the clearest view.
Qili Village still retained its original appearance. The school buildings were all earthen huts with pitted walls, but the playground was quite large, a patch of untouched yellow earth.
The photo was taken at night, and it captured the scene at night. The dim light of the school made the photo less vivid, but it was clear enough to see over thirty students doing exercises on the playground.
The photo was frozen in the moment of their leaping.
It was the dead of winter, and most of the village's elementary school boys wore gray cotton jackets, while the girls wore brighter ones, with a few sporting vibrant red floral jackets.
For the elementary school students, doing radio calisthenics should have been a time of joy, but in the photo, they were leaping together, not even smiling.
Grayish-purple, rotting ghostly hands were gripping their necks.
They hadn't jumped off the ground, but were being lifted.
The ghostly hands' long fingers completely encircled their necks, making it look like a group of students being suspended at night, their gray, red, and green colors frozen in the cold night wind.
A closer look at the photo revealed much, but the abrupt presence of the ghostly hands captivated everyone's attention. The dormitories could feel the chill of the hands seeping into their necks.
"This, this is photoshopped!" the father shouted, "It's photoshopped, I know it's photoshopped!"
Hua Haoming said nothing, swiping the photo to the right, and a video appeared below.
In the video, three days later, more than thirty students were still doing the "jumping exercise". They had been doing it for three days, and it seemed that they would do it endlessly, never stopping.
They could see outside the video that it was not them who were jumping, but those ghost hands that were moving.
Those ghost hands moved from their necks to their hair, grabbing their hair and pulling it up, again and again.
The video trembled and zoomed in to the front. The faces of two students suddenly appeared in the video, and their terrified and stiff faces were reflected in the eyes of everyone present.
"Ah!" the mother screamed, covering her face in fear.
The father remained unconvinced. "I've been following this. They can't still be at school. The report said another female teacher abducted the children!"
Hua Haoming, seemingly accustomed to such situations, continued slowly, "Last fall, Lingle Amusement Park suddenly closed. A group held up blood-stained banners at the entrance, demanding the park's return of the children."
"Everyone in the haunted house at the time vanished without a trace,"
Lin Xiang said. "I saw this online. There was a problem with the haunted house's equipment, resulting in serious casualties, and the park was closed."
Hua Haoming clicked on his phone, and another video appeared. "Since you've seen it, you've at least seen a photo of one of the missing people, right?"
The video was clearly of the haunted house at Lingle Amusement Park. The eerie atmosphere was beautifully created, with bloodstains on the walls and broken limbs scattered across the ground. The person filming the video pushed open a door and was caught off guard by a dead body hanging upside down.
Xia Bai's eyes brightened. Perhaps he was dazzled, but a tear fell from the corpse's eye.
The face of the corpse puppet was as lifelike as a real person, but the body was obviously made of artificial cloth. The contrast was obvious and it was eerie and creepy.
Lin Xiang froze there. As more and more prop corpses and ghosts appeared in the video, his lips began to tremble. He didn't speak for a long time, and one hand tightly grasped Xia Bai's shoulder.
It was too heavy. Xia Bai suspected that the weight of Lin Xiang was on himself.
"Later, the prop ghosts in that amusement park changed their faces. They were the faces of the group of people who disappeared."
No one spoke, and they all looked at him.
Seeing Xia Bai's overly bright eyes, Hua Haoming, who had been at ease, paused for a few seconds. When he spoke again, he was no longer talking about the corpses in the amusement park.
"The day before yesterday, Quanguang City was sealed off overnight. You all know about this."
The father added, "That's because a serious infectious disease broke out in Quanguang City, and the source of pollution was difficult to deal with. It was reported in the news yesterday!"
Hua Haoming put his mobile phone in his pocket and lifted his baseball cap up, revealing a pair of narrow eyes. He looked at the father and said with a smile, "After Quanguang City was sealed off, I only heard that the people inside were transferred to hospitals outside, but I didn't hear of any ordinary people going in. Uncle, have you heard of a city that was blocked due to an infectious disease, where people can only leave but not enter?"
This sentence revealed something, and several people were stunned. The atmosphere suddenly became silent, and uneasiness fermented in the dimness.
The mother's face turned pale, still unwilling to believe it, "Why should we believe you? This is outrageous!"
Hua Haoming looked at the people in front, "If those students in Qili Village were abducted, with so many targets, would it take so long to investigate? If there was a problem with the equipment in the amusement park, why has it been blocked until now? In the past two years, one thing after another that doesn't make sense has happened. Do you really not believe it, or... are you deceiving yourself?"
"Are you saying that we, have we 'disappeared' too?" The younger brother spoke for the first time, "Just like the students in Qili Village, the people in the haunted house in the amusement park, and many people in Quanguang City."
"You can say that." Hua Haoming said.
"Qili Village was the earliest confirmed abnormal incident. Later, abnormalities occurred one after another all over the world. Not all the disappeared people never came back. From the people who came back, we learned that those places where abnormalities occurred were actually involved in a weird game, and they came out of the game."
"Qili Village Primary School is one, Xunle Amusement Park is also one, and the most serious one is Quanguang City, where the game has spread to most parts of the city."
"Those places were blocked to prevent more people from being involved in the horror game. They said something about malfunctions and infectious diseases. This is to avoid large-scale uncontrollable panic and collapse of order in a short period of time."
Hua Haoming stuffed his phone into his trouser pocket, leaving his hand in it. "Everyone, the game has come to the dormitory, and now we are also locked in by the game."