Chapter 177: Two Footprints

After finishing my opening remarks, I picked up my phone and walked deeper into the school.

"Other people stream for thirteen hours a day, and you stream for five hours in three days! You still have the nerve to run your mouth here? Don't let me find out your home address!"

"If anyone takes a cab over there to beat up the streamer, I'll reimburse their fare."

"Everyone calm down. The streamer is only human, subject to sickness and death like the rest of us. We need to be understanding."

"Understanding my ass! If he dies, what the hell are we supposed to watch?"

Teletubbies Died of Murder tipped the Super Thriller Live Broadcast Room 99 Underworld Coins: "Streamer, don't pay attention to what others say. I will always support you. I'm your loyal little fangirl!"

"Damn, there's actually a girl in such a hardcore, shameless stream?"

"I think we might have a traitor among us!"

The chat updated rapidly. I paid special attention to the IDs Daoist master Wan and Half-immortal Liu from Qingcheng Mountain, but it seemed neither of them had logged on today.

Going by the routine of my previous streams, I should have started by giving everyone a basic introduction to this place. However, the background information provided before this broadcast began didn't seem to have much connection with the location prompted by the Underworld Live Show. I really couldn't figure out why a domestic issue between a married couple would involve a medical college.

In my eyes, the only connection between the two was the very last thing the husband had said on the phone: every morning when his wife woke up, her mouth tasted faintly of formalin. And the most common place to find formalin was a medical college. Its function was simple and clear: soaking corpses to prevent decomposition.

With too few clues to figure it out, I had no choice but to enter the campus and investigate step by step.

The West Campus covered a massive area and contained four large buildings. I didn't know their specific functions, but judging solely by how dilapidated they were, they seemed even more rundown than Xinhu High School.

Trudging through waist-high bushes, I looked around. I couldn't shake the feeling that something was slowly approaching, but even after using Chasing Eye, I found nothing.

"Among the optional tasks for the Underworld Live Show, there's one to protect the living. That means I should run into other people tonight. It seems that if I want to gain a deeper understanding of the whole story, I first need to find someone alive other than myself." Surrounded by pitch-black darkness, the campus lights having long since been extinguished, I looked around and felt a bit uncertain. "What normal person would come out to a place like this in the middle of the night?"

"Thud!"

I was entirely focused on my thoughts and hadn't been paying attention to where I was walking. Stepping on empty air, half my body plunged straight down.

"A tunnel?" Gripping the edge of the hole with both hands, I peered inside. The tunnel was narrow, only wide enough for two people to walk side by side. Although the ventilation was decent, I could still smell a pungent reek of formalin.

"This passage is built underground, running straight through. What was it used for?" The fact that there was a tunnel beneath the sealed-off campus of the medical college made me a little curious. Lying flat on the ground, I stuck my head inside and looked left and right.

The deep darkness resembled the gaping maw of a monster. Taking out my phone, I shone its light inside. I didn't spot anything unusual, though when the beam swept to the left, a tiny glint seemed to reflect back.

"Aside from mirrors and metal, the only things that reflect light in the dark are animal eyes. What was that flash just now?" I put away my phone, memorized the location of this hole, and continued forward to the entrance of the first building.

This was a four-story Laboratory Building. The plaster on its exterior walls was peeling severely, and the main doors were tightly locked. However, around the back of the building, a window had been intentionally smashed.

A brick lay discarded amid the shattered glass on the ground, as if deliberately announcing to everyone that it was the culprit.

"The one who broke the window was probably a girl." A shred of butterfly lace fabric hung snagged on a glass shard on the windowsill. I carefully retrieved it and examined it up close. "The fabric is damp and carries a faint scent of formalin. It doesn't look like it was just torn off."

I climbed through the window into the building. Compared to the dilapidated exterior, the inside was surprisingly orderly. Everything was arranged neatly.

"Someone got in here one step ahead of me."

Dirt and grass seeds were scattered on the floor of the room, along with a shoe print and a bare footprint.

I carefully avoided the traces on the ground, crouched down, and observed them closely.

"Strange, why is this footprint even larger than the shoe print?" I measured it with my hand. The shoe print was only twenty-nine centimeters long, but the bare footprint was thirty-two centimeters.

"There must have been two different people who came in through here before me. One of them is likely the owner of that lace fabric. As for the other..." I looked at that thirty-two-centimeter-long footprint, a question rising in my mind. 'Why wasn't he wearing shoes?'

Picking up the Black Leather Suitcase, I gently pulled open the room's door. There was no one in the hallway outside. Still, this kind of dead silence was enough to make a person panic.

Leaving the room, I walked slowly down the corridor. As I rounded a corner, I suddenly saw a dark figure standing right in the middle of the hall.

I held my breath and pressed my back against the wall, using my phone's camera to observe it.

It didn't move an inch. I waited for a full three minutes, but the dark figure remained in its original pose.

"Something's not right." I held up the suitcase and quietly approached. If the figure made any sudden moves, I wouldn't hesitate to hurl the suitcase at it.

The human silhouette grew clearer. Only when I walked right up to it did I realize it was merely an anatomical model.

"Who moved a model into the middle of the hallway? What was the point of doing this?" Ever since my stream at Xinhu High School, I'd had an innate dread of these mannequins and models.

"You'd better just lie down on the side and rest." I laid the anatomical model flat on the hallway floor and continued forward, eventually reaching the stairwell.

"There's a basement too?" Compared to the stairs leading up, this endless, repeating flight of steps plunging underground made me far more uneasy.

Heading upstairs wouldn't be so bad. If I truly encountered an unsolvable situation, I could just jump out a window. But if something went wrong in the basement and my escape route was sealed off, I wouldn't be able to flee even if I grew wings.

Just as I was debating which direction to check first, a soft noise echoed from the basement.

The sound wasn't loud, but the building was so utterly silent that I heard it clearly.

"Sounded like metal hitting the floor." I raised my phone and started down into the basement.

The architectural structure underground was completely different from above. The hallway was wide, with both the floor and walls entirely covered in white tiles.

"Why does this feel like one of those human experimentation labs from the movies?" After creeping along the base of the wall for a dozen meters, I noticed a flash of light occasionally glinting behind the iron door at the end of the corridor.

I felt my way over to the iron door. A blast of cold air made me shiver. Peering inside, a faint, erratic light hovered between the lab tables like a will-o'-the-wisp.

I left the suitcase outside the door and tiptoed inside, holding only my phone.

Threading past a row of lab benches, I found the temperature in the room to be several degrees lower than outside. I also located the source of the light.

It was a woman with very long hair. The light was emanating from her hand, illuminating her entire face in a ghastly, deathly pale hue.

I followed her as she circled the room, finally stopping in front of a sliding door leading to an inner chamber.

The figure exerted a great deal of effort to slide the door open. Once the heavy sliding door was pulled back, a thick stench of formalin drifted through the entire room.

"What's hidden behind that door?" I furrowed my brow. I had once heard a friend studying forensics say that during his first dissection class, he had worn three layers of surgical masks and still couldn't stand the smell. Today, I finally understood exactly what he meant.

The woman pushed the door halfway open and slipped inside. I covered my nose and mouth, lingered outside for a brief moment, and then followed her in.

Behind the sliding door was a massive water tank. Aside from that, there was absolutely nothing else, nor was there any place to hide.

As a result, the moment I entered, I awkwardly bumped right into the woman. She was holding a phone in one hand for illumination and gripping a rope in the other, dragging something.

Our eyes met. The woman was startled so badly she nearly fell backward into the tank.

"Splash!" Water sprayed into the air. Although she managed to grab the end of the rope at the last second and steady herself, the phone in her palm dropped straight into the tank.

"My phone!" She stood by the edge, anxious but completely unwilling to reach into the tank to retrieve it.

Finding her reaction unusual, I lowered my head and cast a glance into the tank.

Inside the corrosion-resistant tank, soaking in twisted, haphazard postures, were several lifelike corpses with wildly varying expressions!