Chapter 114: The Witness

Yes, Su Mian found herself transformed.

She was unable to move, unable to utter a sound.

Chen Wan’s neck was tightly constricted by the curtain fabric.

As the fabric tightened, her struggles gradually weakened, until eventually, everything descended into a deathly silence.

The girl named Zhou Li finally released her hand, her face a complex mix of lingering fear, madness, and the ruthless determination of someone resolving a “nuisance.”

The other three accomplices were already paralyzed with fear, their faces ashen, collapsing to the ground.

Su Mian felt a violent surge of revulsion. Even as a conscious entity, the act of witnessing a life being extinguished brought with it an incredibly real sense of disgust and fear.

This was her first time in her life to “personally” witness a murder scene. The sheer cruelty far surpassed anything depicted in a horror film or imagined.

Just as she, overwhelmed by this intense discomfort, found herself an absolute bystander, unable even to close her eyes, a wave of nausea surged in her stomach, threatening to escape her throat.

Even though she was merely an observer, the physiological response to such brutal trampling and strangulation of life was profound.

At the moment her consciousness flickered, she caught a glimpse of a figure shivering in the chemical preparation room doorway from the corner of her eye.

It was a girl wearing a dress from the same era, with delicate features, but her face was utterly bloodless, her lips trembling, and her wide eyes filled with an almost overflowing terror.

Her legs trembled ceaselessly, as if she might collapse at any moment.

Lin Juan!

Su Mian recognized her instantly.

Qin Xuan had shown her old photos of Lin Juan. This was also the original owner of the dilapidated female restroom on the east side of the third floor…

Just then, Zhou Li also noticed Lin Juan at the door.

A sinister glint flashed across her face, quickly replaced by a more dominant, threatening aura.

She instructed the three accomplices, still slumped on the ground, to watch Chen Wan’s corpse, while she herself strode towards the doorway, radiating an undissipated malevolence.

Zhou Li closed in on Lin Juan, her voice lowered, each word seemingly squeezed from between her teeth:

“Lin Juan, you saw everything clearly.”

“Even though you didn’t directly participate, you helped us watch the door, and you forgot to close it.”

“From the moment you agreed to stand at the door, we’ve been grasshoppers on the same rope.”

She leaned in slightly, her voice barely a whisper audible only to the two of them, but the threat was stark and chilling:

“You know what kind of power my family wields, don’t you?”

“Today’s incident, my family can make you out to be an unfortunate accident, or perhaps, a psychologically fragile student who committed suicide.”

“But the premise is, you must guard your mouth.”

Zhou Li’s finger almost poked Lin Juan’s nose:

“If you dare to entertain any inappropriate thoughts, dare to utter even half a word outside… I guarantee, your fate won’t be any better than Chen Wan’s in there.”

“Making you vanish from this world is no difficult feat for me. Understand?”

Lin Juan’s pupils constricted to pinpricks, and immense fear completely seized her.

She looked at Zhou Li’s vicious eyes, then glanced at the lifeless corpse on the floor, and finally, like a drowning person clutching at a last straw, she desperately shook her head.

Tears and cold sweat mixed, streaming down her face in a pathetic mess.

The scene before her eyes abruptly went dark, like a screen losing power.

All sounds, sights, and that suffocating oppression instantly withdrew.

“Mianzi! Mianzi! What’s wrong with you? Don’t scare me!”

Lu Yang’s alarmed shouts seemed to come from deep underwater, growing clearer and more urgent.

“Oh my god! How could she just faint out of nowhere?”

“Her face is as white as paper! This place… this place couldn’t really be that sinister, could it?”

Lu Yang’s voice now carried genuine fear. He was half-kneeling, shaking Su Mian’s shoulders.

Su Mian felt herself leaning against the cold corridor floor, her back pressed against the mottled wall.

She laboriously lifted her heavy eyelids, her vision gradually focusing from a blur.

First, she saw Lu Yang’s face, etched with worry and a hint of panic. Then, Qin Xuan’s tightly furrowed brows, and a little further away, Hua Liang’s pensive gaze and Xue Li’s calm, ice-blue eyes, which held an implicit concern.

“She’s awake! She’s awake!”

Lu Yang breathed a sigh of relief, though his voice was still trembling.

“My ancestor, you’re finally awake! You didn’t respond for ages; you scared me to death!”

Su Mian took a deep breath. The cool, real air of the corridor filled her lungs, dispelling some of the bloody smell from thirty-four years ago.

She pushed against the ground, trying to stand, but her limbs still felt weak.

“I…”

She opened her mouth, her voice hoarse and severely cracked.

“I just… it felt like I went back thirty-four years…”

She looked up, her gaze fixed on the still-closed, rust-locked door of the mottled chemical preparation room.

The style and position of the door were identical to what she had just “seen”!

The only difference was that the door now accumulated a thicker layer of dust, a testament to the passage of time.

“Yes, it should be thirty-four years ago, right here.”

Su Mian’s voice gradually regained some strength, though it still carried an uncontrollable tremor.

Qin Xuan immediately squatted down, seemingly intrigued:

“Don’t rush, speak slowly. Tell me everything you can remember, everything you saw. Every detail could be very important.”

Lu Yang also held his breath, staring intently at Su Mian.

Su Mian closed her eyes, trying to organize the surging, chaotic fragments of memory.

She recounted everything she had “observed”—Chen Wan being cornered, the argument, the shoving, the impact, and finally, the process of being strangled to death by Zhou Li’s own hands.

She also described Lin Juan’s appearance at the door and Zhou Li’s threats—telling them everything in painstaking detail.

When she described the details of Chen Wan’s murder, that intense feeling of nausea struck her again, forcing her to pause, her face growing even paler.

“However, it felt like I was watching a movie, or an untouchable dream,” Su Mian’s voice dropped, tinged with a sense of helplessness.

“I could only observe. I couldn’t do anything, couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, and even less… save her.”

As she spoke the last sentence, her eyes suddenly reddened, her voice filled with suppressed sobs and emotion.

“I really… really wanted to pull her away, really wanted to shout out… but I couldn’t…”

That feeling of powerlessly watching a tragedy unfold was more agonizing than simple fear.

A cool yet gentle hand lightly and rhythmically patted her back.

It was Xue Li.

She said nothing, merely using this gesture to soothe Su Mian’s tumultuous emotions.

After listening, Qin Xuan fell into a brief contemplation, his fingers unconsciously tapping on his knee.

Moments later, he pushed up his glasses and spoke in his characteristic calm tone:

“While we can’t yet determine the specific reasons and mechanisms for you seeing these visions—it’s possible it’s related to your constitution.”

“Perhaps it’s a magnetic field induction, creating a resonance. But based on your description and the information we’ve gathered so far, the logical chain is basically consistent.”

He swept his gaze across the door:

“What you saw was very likely the first scene of the real murder that happened in this chemical preparation room thirty-four years ago. Chen Wan… Zhou Li… and Lin Juan, who was threatened as a cowardly bystander.”

He stood up, brushing dust from his hands.

“I’ve noted down both key names you mentioned: Chen Wan and Zhou Li. Later, I’ll find a way to verify these names and basic relationships from the school’s sealed archives, old newspapers, or any student information from that year that can still be found.”

“If it truly is a murder case concealed for thirty-four years, as you ‘saw,’ then this is the root of all the supernatural phenomena and the strong residual magnetic field in this place.”

Qin Xuan glanced at everyone, especially Su Mian, whose face still looked unwell, and made a decision:

“Let’s stop here for today. The amount of information is already significant, and Su Mian’s condition also needs to recover. We need time to digest and verify this information.”

“Then… that staircase leading to the sixth floor, are we not investigating it?”

Su Mian couldn’t help but ask, her mind still preoccupied with that even more bizarre rumor.

Lu Yang immediately interjected, his voice sounding a bit shaky:

“When you fainted, Old Qin and we carefully checked this entire floor, especially this area. We didn’t see any extra staircase at all.”

“The end of the corridor is just a wall, and the signs for the staircase going down are clearly marked as the fifth floor.”

Su Mian was startled. She subconsciously pulled out her phone to check the time, and at the same time, asked:

“Then… how long was I unconscious for?”

Lu Yang glanced at his watch:

“Not long, about… ten-odd minutes, I guess? It felt pretty short.”

Su Mian lit up her phone screen, her gaze falling on the time display.

She frowned, a strange feeling rising in her heart:

“That’s not right… didn’t we just come in at eight o’clock?”

“I felt like we’d only been in here for about half an hour at most, no more than forty minutes.”

“How is it suddenly 10:20?”

Her words made everyone pause.

Qin Xuan, Lu Yang, Hua Liang, and Xue Li almost simultaneously looked at their phones or watches.

Lu Yang mumbled:

“Yeah, I also felt like not that much time had passed…”

“Huh? Why is my phone showing no signal?”

Qin Xuan looked at the time display in the corner of his instrument screen, his brows tightly furrowed:

“My device also shows the time as 22:20.”

“But based on my internal sense of time and my estimation of the investigation’s progress, from the moment we entered the teaching building until now, it definitely shouldn’t have exceeded one hour. This doesn’t add up.”

Hua Liang looked stunned. As he gripped his phone, its screen also displayed no signal, the usual smile on his lips faded a little, and his eyes became somewhat profound.

“Interesting.”

Xue Li didn’t look at her phone, but she tilted her head slightly, as if sensing something, a faint trace of alertness appearing in her ice-blue eyes.

Just as everyone felt a creeping doubt due to this temporal disorientation, an abrupt change occurred!

The time digits on their phone screens, as if controlled by an invisible hand, began to spin rapidly, then suddenly started jumping wildly!

The numbers increased at a frantic pace, each minute corresponding to real-time seconds!

“Oh my god! This is haunted! My phone’s time is going crazy!”

Lu Yang was so scared he almost threw his phone, his voice completely changed pitch.

Qin Xuan quickly tried to operate his instrument, but the time display on its screen also spun wildly, completely out of control.

He tried to turn it off and restart it, but to no avail.

Hua Liang clicked his tongue, put his phone back in his pocket, and sharply scanned the surrounding corridor and shadows.

Xue Li, meanwhile, subtly moved half a step forward, positioning herself slightly in front of Hua Liang. This was an unconscious protective stance. The chilling aura around her seemed to become somewhat more pronounced.

Su Mian tightly clutched her phone, a cold premonition crawling up her spine.

Just as Lu Yang’s words “This is haunted!” had barely left his lips, a sudden, heavy, drawn-out bell chime echoed through the entire old teaching building!

It wasn’t from outside the building, but from deep within the structure itself, from the cracks in the bricks, from beneath their feet.

The sound made their eardrums throb and their hearts pound.

“What was that sound?!”

Lu Yang looked around frantically, his voice filled with terror.

Qin Xuan’s face finally darkened completely, his voice also tinged with tension:

“It’s the clock on the top floor of the old teaching building. It should have rusted and stopped long ago!”

As if to confirm his words, as he spoke, the time digits on everyone’s phone screens suddenly froze—

00:00.

Midnight.

Su Mian’s heart tightened, and she blurted out:

“Old Qin! That staircase…”

That staircase gave her an extremely ominous feeling.

Lu Yang also snapped back to reality, pleading with a choked voice:

“Yeah, Old Qin! Let’s not investigate it! That thing clearly isn’t meant for people to walk on! Let’s go back! Let’s get out of this haunted place quickly!”

Qin Xuan’s steps stopped about two or three meters from the staircase entrance.

He pushed up his glasses, his eyes behind the lenses fixed on that eerie staircase, as if engaged in an intense internal struggle. Ultimately, rationality gained the upper hand.

He slowly backed away, nodded, and said:

“The situation is unclear. Let’s retreat first. We’ll leave this building.”

Everyone immediately turned around and hurried along the way they came, towards the stairwell.

No one looked at that seemingly conjured staircase again.

However, when they hastily descended to the next floor, their hearts sank to the bottom—

A large, glowing “5” was clearly visible on the wall at the stairwell entrance.

They were still on the fifth floor.

“Impossible!” Lu Yang cried out, “We clearly went downstairs!”

“Try again.” Qin Xuan’s voice was still steady, but his pace had quickened considerably.

The group rushed into the stairwell once more, speeding down.

One floor, two floors… they saw the “sixth step” of the staircase again.

Then, they went down another floor, and when they saw the floor number on the wall at the stairwell entrance, everyone’s hearts sank—

“5.”

Down again. Running. Panting echoed in the empty stairwell.

“5.”

Continue. Sweat began to seep from their foreheads.

“5.”

After repeating this seven or eight times, Lu Yang leaned against the cold wall, gasping for air, his face covered in sweat and a normal flush.

“I can’t do it anymore! Are we… are we stuck in a ghost wall?”

He propped himself on his knees, then looked up at the other four, suddenly noticing an even more unsettling issue—

“You… the four of you… how come you’re not even a little out of breath?”

Lu Yang’s voice was filled with disbelief. “I’m an athlete, for crying out loud, and I’m panting like this after running down seven or eight floors! How come you guys… you guys aren’t even breathing heavily?”

Qin Xuan’s breathing was only slightly labored, his physical exertion far less than Lu Yang’s.

But Hua Liang, Su Mian, and Xue Li showed no change at all.

Lu Yang’s question, however, made the already eerie atmosphere even more stagnant.

After asking, he too realized something, his face instantly turning even whiter, as he fearfully looked at his companions beside him.

Could it be… they…

Just then, a clear, unhurried sound of footsteps came from the stairwell below.

“Tap-tap-tap-tap.”

The footsteps were eerily distinct in the deadly silence, approaching their floor.

Everyone instantly held their breath. Lu Yang even forgot to pant, looking in terror at the dimly lit, choking corner below the stairs.

Su Mian’s heart pounded wildly, and her hand subconsciously tightened around the pendant of her necklace.

Finally, two figures emerged from the shadows below the stairs, stepping onto the “fifth floor” platform where they stood.

The girl walking in front had a neat ponytail and a cold, delicate face. It was Su Baixue.

Following behind her was Ling Chen, his lips tucked into his pockets, a playful smile playing at his mouth.

Su Mian clearly saw who it was and blurted out, “Baixue? What are you doing here?”

Su Baixue clearly hadn’t expected to encounter them here, especially Su Mian. A flicker of subtle surprise crossed her cold eyes, but it was quickly replaced by deeper detachment and vigilance.

Her gaze swiftly swept over Su Mian, Lu Yang, and Qin Xuan, finally lingering for a moment on Hua Liang and Xue Li.

“Don’t call me Baixue.” Su Baixue’s voice was colder than the air in the corridor. “We’re not that close.”

Her gaze refocused on Su Mian’s face, her tone one of formal inquiry:

“Also, what are you doing here? At this hour, in a place like this?”