NFM Chapter 33

Compared to the Yan Xi he had been chasing, the one who told him to leave, this Yan Xi clearly had more bloodstains on him.

The blackened blood had coagulated on his cuffs and trouser legs, forming patches that dripped down his clothes. The black aura surrounding him was a shocking manifestation of obsession and malice.

And that white figure he was chasing…

It was far too weak.

He frowned as he thought about the body that had almost no bloodstains.

After a wandering spirit passes through the stages of thought, obsession, resentment, and ferocity, it enters the realm of “Gui” (Ghosts). The strength of a ghost is determined by the color and size of its bloodstains. The more powerful the ghost, the more bloodstains it has, and the deeper the red color.

These bloodstains are the physical manifestation of a ghost’s obsession or resentment. Very few ghosts can dye their clothes red through their own resentment and obsession alone. Most ghosts must devour other ghosts in a survival-of-the-fittest struggle to seize their “bloodstains.” When a ghost’s body is completely dyed red, under certain circumstances, they will form a red crystal.

This is known as the core of a ghost’s power, also called the “Ghost’s Heart.” Whether it’s a ferocious ghost, an evil spirit, or a specter, they all have the chance to form this core. However, low-level ghosts like Gui (伥鬼), Yin spirits, and small ghosts do not have this opportunity.

After forming the crystal, a ghost can further evolve. When the red reaches its peak and turns black, the ghost’s abilities will leap to a new level, achieving a qualitative transformation.

This was knowledge that had been imprinted in his mind when he woke up in Wen County.

No one had ever seen a ghost clad in black. Even Lin Huai had not. It was almost a creature of legend. When he woke up in Wen County with no memory, all he could recall was that he seemed to have been there for many years.

He devoured the blood mist around him. The mist, which was ominous to humans, was delicious to him. Slowly, he consumed all of the blood mist.

Slowly, he devoured all the ghosts around him.

He wasn’t picky. He felt as if he had been hungry for a long time, as if he had been lonely for a long time. He was a greedy ghost, and only enough ghosts could fill his stomach and warm his heart with the joy of hunting and devouring. He was a ghost who knew nothing about the world, so he ate everything.

The sinister ghosts kept coming, pouring into the range he could reach, so he was always eating.

Later, he became picky. At the same time, the blood mist was almost completely consumed by him.

He saw Wen County beyond the blood mist, and the humans who emitted a sweet and fresh scent.

But he didn’t want to eat them.

Thus, he and Wen County maintained a precious peace, not interfering with each other. He didn’t want to eat, and the people of Wen County didn’t dare approach him. Occasionally, a few Taoist priests came seeking death, but they were devoured by the other ghosts around him.

Until…

Until a little girl, crying, ran to his well, seeking his protection.

The cemetery where he resided was supposed to be a forbidden place teeming with ghosts. Countless sinister beings surrounded the dry well at the center, making him untouchable to all humans. Any adventurer who tried to destroy him would be consumed by the surrounding yin energy long before they could get close to him.

Until he, having devoured too much, forcibly consumed most of the sinister ghosts…

‘Save me.’ He still remembered the voice of that girl in his memory. ‘Save me, they want to sacrifice me…’

He had never seen a human, never eaten a human, and didn’t want to save anyone. But at that moment, he felt that the sound of this sweet little life crying…

Was quite pleasant.

As for devouring all the ghosts in Wen County, or the bloody storms that followed, those were all things that happened afterward.

After consuming such a massive number of ghosts, his original strength was still just one step away from turning black. After entering this body, his strength was limited by the body and dropped several levels, but it was still enough to dominate most creatures.

However, in the mirror world, freed from the constraints of this body, he could still unleash his full power.

But Yan Xi’s figure… Lin Huai frowned. He was clearly just the most ordinary white-clothed ghost, with only a few bloodstains that weren’t even enough to fill his teeth. Even at his most gluttonous, seeing such a small shrimp, he would only pick him up and tell him to get lost, not to pollute his dining area.

Could a white-clothed ghost like this really carry out a brutal revenge and kill Shen You? After all, the yang energy of humans and the evil energy of high-level ghosts, if not consciously restrained, could harm such a small ghost. At Yan Xi’s level, he should have been killed long before completing his revenge.

“How strange…” Lin Huai thought.

Thinking this, he crouched down and carefully observed the pots of flowers.

One of them was a banana plant.

‘Something about these leaves feels off…’

He touched the banana leaf and suddenly realized something.

Banana plants have parallel veins that run horizontally, with side veins that are vertical or nearly vertical to the main vein, running parallel to each other all the way to the leaf edge.

But this banana plant had…

Straight parallel veins.

It was a small detail, one that would be hard for most people to notice. However, because his roommate Tan Xiruo liked to cultivate plants, Lin Huai had been forced to listen to a lot of related knowledge.

Including the types of orchids, including the types of leaf veins.

Strange.

He looked through the pots of plants one by one and saw that the growth of their veins differed from what they should have been. Though from a distance, they looked no different from the plants commonly seen in the real world.

“Is this some kind of hint? Or…”

Lin Huai’s eyes showed a rare trace of confusion.

He walked past the corridor and went upstairs, his eyes once again catching sight of the ranking list posted at the stairwell.

The rankings were layered from January to December.

Lin Huai brushed past the ranking list and headed for the stairwell at the top.

Before starting his exploration, he decided to handle some post-event matters.

He climbed to the rooftop and observed the lights of the entire school from above.

In his vision, Minghua High School was orderly, perhaps due to the smog, and the sky was pitch black.

There was nothing unusual.

Half an hour later.

‘…Where does this screw go?’

What goes up must come down. Seeing that there was only one minute left before class ended, Lin Huai, after confirming that the iron door had been reattached (and wouldn’t fall off with a push), casually put the screw into his pocket. As he walked past empty classrooms 2 and 1 in his suit jacket, reaching the door of Class F, the “Für Elise” bell rang, signaling the end of class.

The students filed out of the classroom, quietly, without chatting. Lin Huai, holding his lesson plan, was the last to leave, heading downstairs to his dorm.

In terms of the cafeteria, Lin Huai enjoyed the privileges of a teacher, but he wasn’t so lucky with the dorm. Minghua High School only had one dormitory building, with girls living on the fifth and sixth floors, and boys on the first, second, third, and fourth floors. As the Dean of Students put it, because there wasn’t enough space in the faculty apartments, Lin Huai, as a new substitute teacher, had to temporarily share a floor with a few new transfer students.

“We’ll move the dorm in a month,” the Dean of Students said.

Rather than not having enough faculty apartments, it was more like the Game didn’t have enough budget to set up more horror scenes…

Thinking this, Lin Huai took his keys and climbed the stairs to the fourth floor.

Although he had already learned about the Seven Wonders of the School, Lin Huai had no plans to explore them today. Being new, he decided to conserve his energy for a few days, familiarize himself with the school’s schedule and map, and then tackle the mission.

His dorm was Room 424 at the end of the hallway, a double room that had been cleaned quite thoroughly. Since he was the only one in the room, it was relatively spacious.

He casually tidied up and got into bed before the lights went out, falling asleep.

Late at night, heavy rain.

Qiu Ran woke up from a nightmare as a bolt of lightning struck outside the window. She covered her head and looked at Xia Xingye and Li Fen on the next bed. The two were squeezed together, sleeping soundly.

As a female, her dorm was naturally separate from the two male players. However, when she entered her dorm and saw three expressionless roommates standing side by side in the hallway, she immediately made a decisive move and ran to the fourth-floor boys’ dorm, Room 420, to ask for shelter. Fortunately, her teammates were accommodating, squeezing into one bed and leaving the other bed in the double room for Qiu Ran.

Waking up in the middle of the night was not a good sign. She was about to close her eyes when she felt a gaze upon her.

By the light of the lightning, she saw a pale-faced boy looking through the glass window on the dorm door, observing everything in the room!

She was startled and quickly closed her eyes.

‘This really is a devil’s school…’ she thought to herself, ‘It’s the middle of the night, and they’re still doing room checks…’

Only when the sound of “dong dong dong” footsteps disappeared down the hallway did she fall back into a hazy sleep.

It wasn’t until the moment before she fell asleep that she realized—the glass window on the dorm door was three meters high. How did the dorm supervisor’s head appear in the window?

And why was the dorm supervisor a boy?

Outside, the wind and rain raged, but Lin Huai gradually sank into a deep and sweet sleep.

In his dream, he heard laughter, seemingly close by, yet also far away.

‘Yan Xi, Yan Xi, Yan Xi’

‘Calamity, Calamity, Calamity’

‘Trash, Trash, Trash’

The laughter was so piercing that it made him frown even in his dream. In the darkness, another voice rose from beneath the bed: “Back to back… back to back… back to back…”

The young man on the bed remained asleep, unmoving. The pale figure then climbed up the bed frame, clinging to the board above where Lin Huai slept.

Its hair fell down its face, dangling onto Lin Huai’s. Lin Huai thus sneezed softly in his dream.

“Face to face… face to face… face to face…”

Seeing that the other still showed no reaction, it hesitated, then changed its words: “Red hands, green hands, white hands…”

In the dream, the annoying voice continued. Half-asleep, Lin Huai didn’t want to open his eyes. His hands shot out like lightning, grabbing the ghost clinging to the bed frame above and pulling it into his arms.

“Red carp, green carp, red and green carp; red phoenix, pink phoenix, pink and red phoenix,” he mumbled, patting the ghost’s head. “Stop bothering me, let’s sleep!”

The ghost: …

At 5:50 in the morning, the shrill wake-up bell rang precisely in the dormitory building.

Li Fen and the others struggled to open their eyes, groping their way down from their beds. As soon as the bell rang, the surrounding dorms uniformly echoed with the sounds of people getting up.

At 6:10, morning exercises began; at 6:30, breakfast started; at 7:00 sharp, all classes began morning reading. When Li Fen, yawning, arrived at the misty, drizzling sports field, the students from all classes were already neatly lined up on the track in their blue and white uniforms.

They held vocabulary books in their hands, indifferent to the world around them. When the teacher gave the order, they kept their eyes buried in their books, only moving their feet to run. Li Fen, keeping pace with them, whispered to Xia Xingye beside him: “Hey, let’s go to Class F during lunch break and discuss the next steps with that teammate.”

Xia Xingye nodded, the earring on his single ear glinting softly. Qiu Ran ran beside them, rubbing her arms and complaining: “It’s really cold today.”

As she said this, she glanced back at the lines of students from other classes. She noticed that each class was led by a student, with no teachers in sight. The only adults on the field were the security guards holding batons. They looked extremely fierce, loudly scolding and hitting any student who fell behind with their batons.

Qiu Ran shivered and turned back, continuing to look straight ahead.

At that moment, a soft scarf fell onto her shoulders.

Qiu Ran looked up in surprise. From her perspective, the thin cashmere scarf that had belonged to Xia Xingye was now draped over her shoulders. The handsome young man with long lashes gently and carefully tied the scarf for her.

“All done,” he said.

Qiu Ran’s face flushed instantly. Xia Xingye let go, his lake-like eyes curving into a smile.

“You… I…” she stammered.

“It’s fine, we’re teammates, we should help each other,” he said.

Qiu Ran, clutching the scarf, was momentarily speechless. Her face red, she said: “Th-thank you! I’ll repay you!”

“No need to be so polite,” Xia Xingye smiled again. “As I said, we’re…”

“Teammates.”

Qiu Ran held the scarf tightly. After a long while, she nodded firmly: “Yes! I’ll do my best to help all of us clear the game!”

One formation behind them was Class C.

A short-haired girl lagged at the back, clutching her stomach in apparent pain. She stumbled as she ran, gradually falling from her original position to the very end.

“Hey! You, yes you!” someone at the edge of the field noticed the girl’s actions and shouted. “Lazy bones! Don’t think about slacking off!”

A burly man with a baton walked towards the girl. The girl bit her lip and tried her best to catch up with the group ahead.

However, as per Murphy’s Law, she slipped and fell onto the track.

The girl’s face showed extreme fear. The man was already approaching her, cursing and raising his baton to strike her. The girl covered her head, struggling weakly, and screamed under the blows.

As the next formation approached, two security guards dragged the girl off the track. Her original class, Class C, remained silent as she was dragged away, parting like the Red Sea as they ran past her.

She was pulled out of the bustling sports field, like a pitiful…

Heretic.

Meanwhile, on the fourth floor of the student dormitory.

All the students had left the dorm. Lin Huai walked through the six floors with his phone.

‘I don’t know why, but I feel damp when I woke up this morning…’ he tugged at his collar, feeling uncomfortable. ‘Did something happen while I was asleep last night?’

Thinking this, he inspected each floor of the dormitory and finally stopped at one dormitory door.

All the dorms, regardless of gender, had the names of all members posted on the doorplate. But the names on this dormitory’s doorplate had been blacked out with a marker.

Lin Huai frowned slightly.

He reached out and pushed the door open. Inside were worn-out beds and a desk.

On the desk lay an open exercise book, with a pen lying quietly beside it.

Lin Huai sat at the desk and closed the book. On the cover were the letters “yx.”

“yx… Yan Xi? Ye Xiu? You Xia?”

He looked around the old dorm room, still empty. Dust slowly fell in the air, eventually settling on the ground.

He opened the exercise book and was surprised to find that it contained a short story.

 

Chapter 1: The New Substitute Teacher

“…He arrived at this school in the autumn, a time when Minghua High School was still shrouded in the lingering haze of the mystery known as ‘The Death of a Youth.’ Yet, he, who came late, knew nothing of it, and instead harbored a fervent anticipation for his new life ahead.”