Li Xiu stared at Fang Qianan. The tall boy was now in front of him. Under the dim light of the mobile phone, the boy's figure looked very tall - or, bloated.
Li Xiu didn't pay much attention to it before, but now it seems that the reason why Fang Qianan's shadow is so large is because there seems to be a "person" lying on Fang Qianan's arm.
Li Xiu's heart beat faster instantly. He clenched his teeth and was desperately thinking about how to deal with this situation when Fang Qianan turned around.
"Hey, why don't you say—"
It seemed that because of Li Xiu's silence, he also felt that something was wrong.
While muttering, Fang Qianan pointed the phone in his hand to his side.
Then he saw the "person".
The body shape is similar to that of a human, but the head resting on Fang Qianan's shoulder has only half of its face intact. A strange smile is embedded in the pale face, and on the other half of the face, the red muscles not covered by skin are twitching slightly, and the bulging eyeballs are rolling, covered with scarlet bloodshot.
It was grabbing Fang Qian'an's arm.
When Fang Qianan lowered his head, he could see the internal organs constantly falling out of its body.
…
The 1.9-meter-tall boy opened his mouth slightly. He thought he would let out a hysterical scream, but when he really opened his mouth, he could only squeeze out a breath from his throat.
My mind went blank.
"Bang--"
When rational thinking completely failed, only the most primitive physiological instincts occupied Fang Qianan's body.
In other words, it's muscle memory.
Fang Qianan gasped, then suddenly raised his hand and attacked the blood-soaked "person." Years of boxing experience had made his punches fast and fierce. The shadow clinging to Fang Qianan's body made only a crisp sound under such a fierce attack, and then was kicked directly into the darkness in the corner of the corridor with a standard Muay Thai high kick.
There seemed to be a strange crisp sound coming from the shadows.
"Fuck, fuck, what the hell is that—"
It wasn't until this moment that Fang Qianan suddenly gasped for breath and screamed. He was clearly a 1.9-meter-tall boy, but his face was already blue with fear.
"I, I don't know either."
It has to be said that Li Xiu was also stunned by what happened just now: whether it was the ghost with half a face suddenly appearing on his classmate, or the fact that the ghost was punched away by his classmate... both were beyond the scope of the brain's comprehension.
"I only realized it was next to you when you said I'd been pinching you."
Li Xiu murmured, actually not knowing what he was saying at all.
Fang Qianan said nothing.
In the next few seconds, the corridor was silent. Fang Qianan looked at the incoherent Li Xiu with a pale face, and Li Xiu could only look back at Fang Qianan in panic.
Li Xiu suddenly felt something was strange.
Fang Qianan now looks a little... a little bit wrong.
The boy remained in his previous position, staring at Li Xiu straight in the eye. However, the color on his face had completely drained away, making him look even worse than when he first saw the ghost. Fang Qianan's gaze was fixed, and his eyes were getting wider and wider...
His eyes were full of fear.
Wait, wait a minute.
Li Xiu soon realized that Fang Qianan was not looking at him, which was why he had such a frightened expression.
Fang Qianan was looking behind him.
Li Xiu's body suddenly stiffened.
...Why didn't I realize it sooner?
Li Xiu thought.
When I saw a shadow beside Fang Qianan, my shoulders felt very heavy too.
Li Xiu's breathing became very heavy.
Don't look, don't look, don't look, don't look--
There seemed to be a voice screaming in his head, but Li Xiu couldn't help but glance at his shoulder out of the corner of his eye.
A hand was resting there.
Bluish and grayish-white hands.
Like a mummy, the skin of that hand was completely dull and stretched tightly over the thick bones.
There are no nails, only a pitch-black nail bed behind the fingertips and a small piece of white bone protruding slightly from under the skin.
"A Xiu."
He didn't know whether it was hallucination caused by excessive fear or whether the "thing" really called him.
Li Xiu heard an extremely hoarse and strange murmur.
"My Ah Xiu."
Like a python, the hand began to reach towards Li Xiu's chest, and the biting cold continued to spread along the place where their skin touched. Although he knew that he should move and escape, Li Xiu was completely unable to move except trembling, as if his body had been completely separated from his soul.
The chill that could almost freeze the bone marrow soon spread over his entire back. Although he didn't dare to look back, Li Xiu knew that he had been completely embraced by "that thing".
He was about to be eaten.
Li Xiu was more keenly aware of this than ever before.
"Woo..."
In the dark corridor, the only cry for help the frail boy could make was a weak whimper.
Cold drops of water slowly fell down his cheeks. They were the tears that filled Li Xiu's eyes because of extreme fear. Of course, they could also be his cold sweat.
The dry fingers slowly moved up along his neck, gently caressing the wetness on the soft cheek of the living man.
In overwhelming fear, Li Xiu watched Fang Qianan stagger backwards.
Unlike himself who had been completely captured by the ghost, Fang Qianan still had a chance to escape.
Li Xiu was not surprised that the boy ran away.
But what he didn't expect was that just when he thought Fang Qianan would turn around and leave, he suddenly let out an unpleasant and shrill scream, and then...
Then she suddenly rushed towards him and hugged him.
"Fang Qianan?!"
When Fang Qianan threw Li Xiu on his shoulder like a sack, he almost fainted.
After a violent jolt, Li Xiucai realized belatedly that he was being held tightly by Fang Qianan and running wildly in this strange and gloomy corridor.
"Hu…Hu…"
Fang Qianan ran very fast. Li Xiu could hear his heavy breathing and feel his uncontrolled heartbeat. The darkness around Li Xiu seemed to stretch out continuously. This corridor was so long that it completely defied the laws of reality.
There was still an extreme coldness on Li Xiu's back from "that thing" before, but the place where it touched Fang Qianan was burning hot.
"Ahem... Fang... Fang Qianan... stop... put me down... quickly..."
Li Xiu raised her hand and patted Fang Qianan on the back.
He called out weakly.
However, the boy under him was so scared that he collapsed. Even after hearing his voice, he continued to run desperately.
"Stop, stop, stop, what should I do if that thing catches up with me? What the hell is that—"
Should we say he's worthy of being a star member of the school basketball team? Fang Qianan was able to shout out such a long sentence in one breath after running all this way.
It's just that his words were a bit incoherent when he was shouting.
By the time Fang Qianan finally ran out of energy and had to stop, more than ten minutes had passed. Li Xiu didn't wait for him to let go, but struggled to jump off him, then half-knelt on the ground and began to retch.
——With Fang Qianan's shoulder pressing against his stomach and his head bouncing all the way, Li Xiu felt that he did not vomit directly on Fang Qianan, simply because he saw that this man still remembered to take him with him to escape.
"You...next time you run away...can you try a better posture?"
After finally catching his breath, Li Xiu murmured weakly to Fang Qianan.
"Hey, your demands are too high. Just look at the situation just now. You were almost dragged away by the ghost. Why are you still fussing about it?" Fang Qianan's face was still very bad. He muttered breathlessly, and at the same time, he nervously shook the mobile phone in his hand to check around.
Li Xiu could see that Fang Qianan was still in a state of shock.
After a moment's silence, a very soft "thank you" was heard in the darkness.
Hearing Li Xiu's thanks, Fang Qianan was stunned, and then he avoided Li Xiu's eyes uncomfortably.
"There's nothing to thank me for. You're a cripple and can't run..."
The boy responded stiffly, completely unaware that the slight softening in Li Xiu's expression instantly disappeared when he heard the word "cripple" again.
Li Xiu's face tightened: "I really didn't expect you to be such a nice person."
…
"call..."
Almost at the same time as Li Xiu finished speaking, an extremely cold wind suddenly blew up in the closed corridor.
Li Xiu felt a pain in his wrist, but it was Fang Qian'an who screamed and grabbed him. Another round of desperate sprints was about to begin. At the end of the darkness, a "click" sounded, and then the lights above their heads all lit up.
A figure suddenly appeared in front of them.
Fang Qianan braked suddenly and almost fell to the ground with Li Xiu.
On the other side, the figure also let out an "ouch" and took several steps back.
"Oh my god, I'm going to die!!"
An elderly janitor held a toolbox in one hand and pressed the main switch of the corridor light with the other, looking at Li Xiu and Fang Qianan in front of him in astonishment.
"How old are you? Why are you here?! Don't you know this floor is sealed off? You come to a place like this without any electricity. Are you afraid of not living long enough—"
After recovering from the initial shock, the janitor raised his eyebrows and started yelling angrily.
*
The floor that trapped Li Xiu and Fang Qianan was certainly not the strange underground thirteenth floor, but the underground third floor of the comprehensive building.
Because of perennial water leakage, the electrical wires on this floor are always short-circuited and are under constant maintenance. Taking this into consideration, the underground third floor of the complex has not been used normally since the building was built.
That is, the school replaces teaching aids every year. After the old teaching aids and desks and chairs are replaced, if no scrap company is found to dispose of them, they will be temporarily stored in the vacant offices on this floor.
The elevators in the complex had long been set up so that they would not stop on this floor.
...It was precisely because of this that Li Xiu explained for a long time but still failed to explain to the school worker why he and Fang Qianan appeared here.
Well, it was hard for him to explain clearly, after all, he himself didn't understand what had just happened in the corridor. After turning on the lights, he immediately realized that the corridor on the third floor below ground wasn't very long. But he and Fang Qianan had just run for a long time. Even now, Li Xiu felt a dull pain in his heart, and his already defective right foot was so swollen that he could hardly lift it.
To make matters worse, when the school worker was questioning the two of them, he discovered that the miscellaneous items that were originally piled in the corridor had also been overturned.
"Are you two here to cause trouble on purpose?! How can students these days be so boring? It's so infuriating..."
The janitor rushed to the fallen cardboard box angrily, looking at the scattered things on the ground and kept muttering.
"Which class are you in? I'm going to tell your homeroom teacher that you'll have to pay for any damage to school property!"
It was only after the janitor reminded him that Li Xiu noticed the debris behind them. When the janitor was packing up the things while cursing, his expression became extremely stiff.
He could see clearly that the things the janitor picked up from the ground one by one were the human body models often used in biology classes.
Qiming Middle School is wealthy, and this human body model is also the most exquisite one. It is the same height as a normal person, and the plastic body has half a normal appearance, while the other half is muscle tissue without skin, and below the abdomen are clear internal organs.
Of course, now these parts have become incomplete plastic blocks rolling around on the ground due to visible damage.
In particular, there was a large, glaring hole on the chest of the human model. Through the uneven plastic gap, one could see the empty interior of the model.
Li Xiu couldn't help but look at Fang Qianan.
…
With the reputation of Young Master Fang, appearing on the underground third floor where the school was not allowed to enter and "accidentally" destroying the human body model that was replaced in the biology class was not a big problem at all.
Li Xiu and Fang Qianan quickly returned to the first floor exit of the complex building - of course, this time they both chose to take the fire escape instead of taking the elevator on the basement floor.
Just as he reached the flower bed at the exit, Fang Qianan suddenly staggered and fell onto the outdoor bench.
"Fang Qianan, what's wrong with you?"
"I...I'm fine, I just want to sit down."
Fang Qianan gritted his teeth and tried hard to hide the fact that his legs were weak. He pretended to be calm and spoke to Li Xiu.
"oh."
Li Xiu said sullenly.
Then he turned and prepared to leave.
"Hey, where are you going—"
Before he could take a step, Fang Qianan pounced on Li Xiu and stopped him.
"After all, we are comrades who have shared weal and woe. Are you planning to abandon me now?"
Fang Qianan looked at Li Xiu in great embarrassment. No matter how hard he tried to act tough, he couldn't hide the fact that he was so scared that he didn't dare to stay alone.
"I'm going to class."
Li Xiu replied sullenly.
After coming out of the comprehensive building, he discovered that although he and Fang Qianan had been wandering helplessly in the dark corridor for a long time, they felt that they had been trapped there.
But in fact, from the time they entered the elevator, only a dozen minutes had passed in the outside world.
He can still make it to his last class this morning.
Li Xiu had just finished speaking when he saw Fang Qianan's eyes widen in disbelief: "You, you go to class? After what happened just now, you still want to go to class now?"
Fang Qianan's voice was sharp and he looked very upset.
Li Xiu lowered her eyes and looked at Fang Qian'an's hand stuck on her wrist: "It's because of what happened just now...just now that I have to go to class."
The midday sun was shining brightly, but under the light, Li Xiu's face was still pale without a trace of blood, and even his lips were covered with a thin layer of dust.
"The fourth period is politics."
Li Xiu murmured as he explained.
"...I think I need this class to calm myself down."
He said to Fang Qianan.
The author has something to say:
Li Xiu: I think the basic viewpoints of Marxism can effectively dispel all superstitions.
Fang Xiaogou: ...Huh?
elder brother:...
In short, the most important thing on campus is to study.