“The person I prayed for is a classmate. We’re in the same class. You might not remember her, but she’s the class representative for our subject. A few weeks ago, she suddenly came down with some strange illness and hasn’t returned to school since.”
An Ping looked thoughtful as he recalled the events. “Her illness was really strange. She’s always been in good health, and I’ve never heard that she had any underlying medical conditions…”
“Not bad. You know quite a bit.” Mu Geshen sat on the doorstep, breaking up the instant noodle cake and dropping the pieces into his enamel mug. “Is she your secret crush?”
“No! Don’t make things up!” An Ping’s entire face turned red. “The point is, she’s been on leave for a long time. This is No. 1 High School! The school never approves leave for that long!”
“What’s so difficult about that?” Mu Geshen said calmly, holding a plastic fork between his teeth. “The number of times I’ve taken leave is probably the class representative’s number of absences raised to the power of n.”
An Ping genuinely didn’t know what to say. Should he agree that Mu Geshen had a point? Or should he mock this legendary school bully, who’d repeated so many grades that he’d become a legend, for actually knowing what an nth power was?
The events of that afternoon had been like something out of magical realism. First, he discovered that a classmate actually lived in a City God Temple. Then he’d been coaxed into burning incense and having his fortune told. After that, he’d been sent off to buy instant noodles as an offering…
Most unbelievable of all, the notorious school bully of No. 1 High School was actually a spiritual charlatan—and one who looked and acted like a retired government official, no less.
An Ping studied Mu Geshen and felt that he was completely different from the rumors. Not only was he surprisingly easy to get along with, he was also quite approachable. Although just a few words from him could leave someone so flustered they couldn’t find their way out of an argument, the effect was oddly endearing. As the saying went, opposites met at the extremes; beneath his eccentricity was a strangely familiar, down-to-earth warmth.
Perhaps it was precisely this half-serious, half-nonsense manner that made people relax around him so quickly.
An Ping had kept this matter bottled up for a long time and genuinely had no one to talk to about it. Now, he told Mu Geshen everything from beginning to end.
“Normally, if someone came down with such a serious illness, the whole grade would be talking about it. But this time, not only has no one said anything, even the teachers avoid discussing it. Take the homework delivery, for example. I originally wanted to bring both your homework and hers, but our homeroom teacher stopped me and absolutely refused to let me go.”
“Interesting.” Mu Geshen slurped up a forkful of noodles. “I added too much water…”
He paused, then asked, “Did the class representative fall ill in the classroom? What exactly happened?”
An Ping thought for a moment. “It was during the long break between classes. She was sitting at her desk, eating a bowl of noodles, when she suddenly slumped forward onto the desk. No matter how much we called her, she wouldn’t wake up. In the end, the teacher called an ambulance, and she was carried out on a stretcher.”
“Sitting at her desk, eating a bowl of noodles…” Mu Geshen mused. “You remember the details so clearly. Are you sure she’s not your secret crush?”
An Ping: Please, I’m begging you, big brother. Can we talk about the actual problem?
After teasing him mercilessly, Mu Geshen finally said something useful.
“Do you remember what kind of noodles she was eating?”
“Not very clearly.” An Ping thought for a moment, then glanced at the enamel mug in Mu Geshen’s hands. “I think her mother brought them to her. They smelled really good, and there was pickled cabbage in them, too.”
“What a coincidence.” Mu Geshen grinned at that. He stood up with the enamel mug in hand. “No time like the present. Let’s go, An Ping’er.”
He casually gave An Ping a new nickname. The playful -er at the end of the name carried a faint upward lilt, as light and airy as drifting willow catkins.
An Ping froze for a moment before realizing he was being addressed.
“Huh? Where are we going?”
“Back to school. No. 1 High School.”
Regardless of the city, any school called No. 1 High School was bound to be a key school of some importance. No. 1 High School was the best school in the old town. Nestled between mountains and water, with several reasonably impressive historical sites nearby, its campus was said to benefit from the very best of nature’s blessings.
The school had been established nearly a century ago and had a reputation for producing outstanding people. Every year, competition for admission was fierce, with applicants practically breaking their heads trying to get in.
Someone like Mu Geshen, who’d repeated so many grades that he was practically on the verge of becoming a turtle, was probably a first in the school’s hundred-year history.
No. 1 High School operated a day-school system. Since the school was on holiday for the next two days, there were very few people on campus.
An Ping followed behind Mu Geshen, watching as the latter threw a loose school jacket over his pajamas. He tousled his hair into some semblance of a style and strolled boldly through the school gates, carrying his enamel mug.
“Wait, why don’t the security guards stop you when you’re dressed like that?” An Ping asked. “Did the school rules and regulations get eaten by you or something?”
Mu Geshen’s skin was very pale, and there were faint dark circles beneath his eyes, making him look somewhat sickly. Yet not a single thing about his words or actions suggested the bearing of someone frail and ill.
By now, An Ping’s impression of him had changed completely. Either the man was a spiritual charlatan who’d found a second career after being laid off, or he was one hell of a con artist.
“I’ve been calling the gatekeeper Uncle for six years. We’re practically relatives. Why would we stand on ceremony?” Mu Geshen said shamelessly. “Oh, by the way, my uncle likes smoking Hongtashan cigarettes. If you want to leave campus, give him a few packs. He’ll definitely let you through.”
An Ping’s mouth twitched as he listened. “Then where are we going now?”
“Back to our classroom. Our class, specifically.” Mu Geshen waved a hand like a retired official conducting an inspection. “An Ping’er, you lead the way.”
“Isn’t it just our classroom?” An Ping asked, bewildered. “Why do you need me to lead the way?”
“Though I left home young, I return old,” Mu Geshen said with complete justification. “I’ve taken too much leave. I can’t remember where it is anymore.”
An Ping: “…”
The teaching building at No. 1 High School was called the Octagonal Building. It had a rather unusual design: every classroom had eight corners, forming an irregular octagon. An Ping’s class was on the second floor, with windows facing the street. By the time the two of them entered the classroom, it was nearly dark, and the streetlights outside were already visible.
An Ping turned on the lights and walked over to a desk. “This is the class representative’s seat.”
The desk was beside the window and looked every bit like the seat of a model student, piled high with textbooks and exercise books. Mu Geshen pulled out the chair and rummaged through everything before declaring, “Something’s missing.”
An Ping hurriedly asked, “What’s missing?”
“She’s the class representative, isn’t she? How come she doesn’t even have the answer key for the Wu San exam-prep books?” Mu Geshen searched through the desk drawers. “I know the answer keys are supposed to be collected, but why are teachers so stingy these days? They can’t even leave a copy for the class representative?”
An Ping had honestly lost count of how many times Mu Geshen had left him speechless.
“…No, I’m begging you, big brother. Can you please stop going off on tangents? Once we’ve dealt with this, I’ll even lend you my homework to copy.”
“Now that’s an offer I can’t refuse.” Mu Geshen readily agreed, picked up his enamel mug, and began eating his noodles. “Let’s get to work. An Ping’er, go adjust the clock.”
He pointed at the clock above the blackboard. “Do you remember what time the class representative fell ill? Set the clock to that time.”
Looking at the instant noodles in Mu Geshen’s mug, An Ping began to understand. “You want to recreate what happened back then?”
“Exactly. The long break between classes, the seat by the window, eating noodles.” Mu Geshen slurped his noodles. “Come on, young master, hurry up. At this rate, I’ll have finished eating before you’re done.”
An Ping turned to adjust the clock. The sound of Mu Geshen slurping noodles echoed throughout the classroom.
“Not to criticize you, but slow down a little. If something really happens, we’ll need time to react…”
An Ping was tall, so he reached up and took the clock down without difficulty. He set it to six thirty in the evening.
Once he had put the clock back in its original place, he turned around—and froze in shock.
The seat where Mu Geshen had been sitting was now completely empty. All that remained was an enamel mug.
Yet the sound of someone slurping noodles continued to echo through the classroom.
An Ping had received nine years of compulsory education. He had been born in New China and raised under the red flag, and he had never encountered anything supernatural in his life. His scalp instantly prickled with terror. His first reaction was to snatch up a copy of Ideological and Political Studies: Compulsory Volume Two from the teacher’s desk and start loudly reciting Marxist materialism.
His voice boomed through the classroom. He managed to turn the textbook’s principles and methodologies into something that sounded positively capable of exorcising evil spirits.
The key concepts and difficult points in a textbook probably had the same effect on every high school student: they could make the living wish they were dead, yet somehow cure all ills. They could bring the dead back to life, leaving everyone caught between ecstasy and agony, unable to escape either. An Ping was probably experiencing the latter. After rattling off a whole string of exam points, he felt considerably more clearheaded. He suppressed the urge to turn and run, forcing himself to calm down.
A perfectly living person had just vanished right before his eyes. At the very least, he had to figure out what had happened.
The sound of someone slurping noodles still echoed through the classroom. After steadying himself, An Ping realized the noise wasn’t appearing out of nowhere. It was coming from the classroom’s broadcast speakers.
The sound was repetitive and mechanical, without the slightest pause.
Just how big was this person’s mouth? How could they keep eating for so long without stopping? Weren’t they afraid of choking?
An Ping listened for a while, but the sound gave him goosebumps, and he couldn’t make anything of it. He carefully thought back over everything that had happened and made a decision.
He would repeat exactly what Mu Geshen had done.
He adjusted the clock to six thirty again, walked over to the class representative’s seat, and sat down. Then he picked up the enamel mug and lowered his head to take a mouthful of noodles.
The slurping sound from the speakers suddenly stopped.
An Ping raised his head and discovered that the classroom was now packed with people.
You could get used to anything after encountering it twice—or so the saying went. This time, An Ping was a little calmer.
Not even slightly.
First, he let out a shriek like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. Then he hurriedly clapped a hand over his mouth and began trembling like a malfunctioning sieve.
He had absolutely no idea where all these people in the classroom had come from. They seemed to have materialized out of thin air in an instant, and no matter how he looked at them, they seemed deeply ill-intentioned.
An Ping glanced around. Every single person was wearing a school uniform, their backs rigidly straight. But the strangest thing was that he couldn’t see any of their faces.
Based on his experience passing cheat sheets around during class, no matter where you sat in a classroom, there were always some people whose faces you could see directly. It was impossible for every single person to be completely out of sight.
Yet now, some people had their faces hidden behind the collars of their school uniforms, while others had their features half-obscured by long hair. The longer An Ping looked, the more horrified he became.
Could this be a classroom full of dead people?
He couldn’t take it anymore. He abruptly stood up, and the desk beneath him scraped loudly against the floor.
The figure sitting in front of him moved at the sound and turned around stiffly.
It was a paper effigy!
Its neck twisted a full 180 degrees. Its face was made of white paper, with facial features drawn on using some unknown substance. Its lips were a horrifying shade of red.
Most terrifying of all, everything about this thing looked fake—except for its long hair, which looked frighteningly real, as though someone had pasted an actual human scalp onto its paper face.
The paper effigy stretched its lips into something that was almost a smile and let out a series of “kekeke” sounds, like fingernails scraping against a door.
And just when things couldn’t get any worse, that one smile caused every “person” in the classroom to turn their heads.
One after another, white paper faces stared at An Ping. Their expressions were all different: happiness, anger, sorrow, joy, greed, rage, delusion, resentment. Some looked wretched, others bizarrely lively, comical, or utterly absurd.
The little rationality An Ping had left was blown to smithereens, turning to a useless lump of mush.
Mystery solved. This wasn’t a classroom full of dead people.
It was a classroom full of paper effigies!
An Ping was so terrified that he even forgot how to scream. He yanked open the window beside him and jumped out without a second thought.
Since ancient times, the second floor had been home to many heroes, people who would jump out of windows at the drop of a hat.
The window wasn’t very high above the ground, and there were shrubs beneath it. Whenever someone did badly on an exam, their classmates would gather around and jump out of the window together for a bit of fun. An Ping was quite familiar with the maneuver.
He had intended to leap out and escape, but the moment he opened the window, a hysterical chorus of bird cries assaulted his face. The harsh, discordant screeching sounded like a child wailing in the dead of night, nearly knocking him backward into the classroom.
This side of the classroom faced the street. No. 1 High School was located in the old town, where the streets were lined with ancient plane trees. In summer, everything was lush and green; in winter, the trees were covered in bird nests.
From late October until the beginning of the following year, the birds called endlessly, day and night. One or two birds singing could sound melodious enough, but thousands upon thousands of them shrieking together became a funeral wail so deafening it felt as though the sky itself were collapsing. The entire street seemed to have a ceiling built out of noise.
An Ping landed on the ground in a thoroughly undignified heap. Before he could even regain his balance, little white specks began pelting down from the sky, covering him from head to toe.
Wherever there are birds, there’s bound to be bird droppings. And when thousands of birds gather in one place, it becomes a veritable rain of shit from the sky!
When a person was down on their luck, even drinking cold water could make them choke. An Ping had first been scared out of his wits by the paper effigies, then fallen flat on his back downstairs, and finally been bombarded from head to toe with bird droppings. He’d gone white-haired in an instant, so to speak.
An Ping was on the verge of a complete breakdown. His belly was full of furious terror and pent-up frustration, and he desperately wanted to roar at the sky. What the hell is going on?!
Unfortunately, even screaming twice wasn’t an option—unless he wanted bird droppings to land in his mouth.
Just as he was feeling utterly overwhelmed, a school uniform dropped over his head.
“What are you standing there for? Why aren’t you finding somewhere to hide? Planning to stand here and take a shower?”
It was Mu Geshen.
Before An Ping could grab him and demand to know where he’d disappeared to, Mu Geshen seized him by the collar and dragged him into a full-on sprint. When they finally stopped, An Ping yanked the school uniform off his head.
“What kind of place is this?!”
They seemed to be hiding in a storage closet somewhere along the corridor. Brooms and garbage bins were piled all around them.
Mu Geshen answered a completely different question. “Did you see all those birds in the trees?”
No kidding. Was he blind?
“Most of the old town is planted with plane trees, so it’s normal for birds to gather in large flocks during winter. The area around No. 1 High School is no exception,” Mu Geshen explained. “But in recent years, the city’s been cleaning up its appearance. All that bird noise isn’t good for the learning environment, so the school drove the birds away in several large-scale efforts. Over the past two years, the flocks have gradually dwindled, with most of them migrating to the eastern part of the city.”
An Ping suddenly understood what Mu Geshen meant. He was right. The number of birds around the school really had been decreasing over the past few years. When they’d entered the school gates earlier, they’d barely seen any.
He’d been so shaken just now that his mind had automatically reverted to how things had been a couple of years ago, when noisy flocks of birds were still commonplace.
So where had all these birds that suddenly appeared come from?
Mu Geshen glanced at him and immediately said, “You’ve figured something out.”
An Ping steadied himself, still unable to believe it. “Could it be that we’re at No. 1 High School from several years ago?”
“Exactly.” Mu Geshen nodded. “We’re at No. 1 High School, but not the same No. 1 High School we were just in. The school hasn’t had flocks of birds this large around it for at least two years.”
“How is that possible?” An Ping tried to defend his already crumbling worldview. “Did we somehow slip into a different point in space-time?”
“Maybe read fewer comics in your spare time. You must have heard some of those old campus ghost stories, right? Like the dormitory where someone died, or the restroom that’s haunted. Rumors like that are common at schools.”
Mu Geshen looked completely unruffled. He even had the leisure to continue chatting.
“Some of those stories are actually true. For example, some schools are built on land that used to be a cemetery. One reason is that the land is cheap; another is that young people are full of yang energy, which can suppress yin spirits and evil influences.”
“Please don’t tell me we’re in a cemetery right now…”
“More or less the same idea.” Seeing An Ping’s face turn an unhealthy shade of pale, Mu Geshen shrugged. “The old town has a history of over a hundred years, and there are lots of ancient buildings around No. 1 High School. This whole area was already densely populated during the Republican era. Naturally, it was also one of the places where the most people died during the wars. Some wronged souls can linger for decades without dissipating. So while this place isn’t technically a cemetery, its yin energy and baleful aura are no weaker than one’s.”
An Ping was so frightened he nearly rolled his eyes back. His voice was barely a whisper. “So what does that mean?”
“Although the yin energy here is strong, there’s also a great deal of human activity. The two forces clash, making it easy to tear open a rift between yin and yang. We’ve probably stumbled into one of those places where the boundaries between the two have become blurred.”
“These rifts are also known as the Three Paths Interstice. They exist between Heaven above, the human world, and the Three Paths below. They’re basically a godforsaken, ghost-abandoned no-man’s-land, full of things that are neither fully alive nor fully dead—neither human nor ghost.”
“Three Paths Interstices are pretty common. They drift all over the place within the cracks between yin and yang, but ordinary people rarely manage to enter them.” Mu Geshen clicked his tongue. “Did you see those paper effigies with crooked noses and slanted eyes?”
An Ping immediately felt his breath catch again. “I saw them. What are they?”
“They’re called nightmare puppets, a type of dream demon. Technically, there shouldn’t be anything like them in a Three Paths Interstice, so the class representative must have brought them in.” Mu Geshen pushed the storage-room door open a crack. “She probably has some deep-seated emotional knot that she’s never been able to resolve. That’s what drew the Three Paths Interstice to her.”
“An emotional knot can become a prison, trapping both the person and those around them. You said she’s never woken up. Looks like her soul was left behind here. We’ll have to find it and take it back.”