Chapter 179: The Blood of the Dead

"At first, I didn't think much of it. I figured Teacher Liu had something going on at home. But by the afternoon, I realized something was wrong. Her phone wouldn't connect no matter how many times I called. When I checked with the academic affairs office, I found out she hadn't taken a leave of absence. She didn't leave a single word or note behind."

Zhang Jiaqi recounted Liu Xuan's unusual behavior in the days surrounding her disappearance. Everything seemed to revolve around the sealed West Campus. To find out why, she had snuck into the campus late at night to investigate.

"Why didn't you bring a security guard with you?" I looked at the girl standing before me. She was in her early twenties at most, just a student.

"You can't count on those cowards. The moment they hear about the West Campus, they avoid it like the plague. Even on their regular patrols, they don't dare go near the western wall."

The security guards had to be terrified for a reason. Following her lead, I asked, "What exactly happened in the West Campus? Why was the entire area sealed off?"

"I don't know the exact details. I just heard Teacher Liu mention it in passing once." Zhang Jiaqi smiled mysteriously, her expression shifting into something strange. "Five years ago, a few corpses went missing from the West Campus. They were later found scattered across various corners of the campus, but most of them had been brutally dismembered."

"At the time, the school suspected it was a sick prank pulled by a student, so they assigned security guards to keep watch late at night. But a few nights later, the guard on duty was mysteriously murdered. Even more horrifying, lying right next to the guard's body was a fresh corpse that had just been brought into the dissection room from outside."

"According to the police investigation at the time, the only thing at the scene capable of committing the crime was that corpse." Zhang Jiaqi stepped closer to me, holding her phone up to her chest. The cold light illuminated her face as she pulled a grimace, looking exactly like a dead body freshly fished out of a pool.

"A corpse committing murder—isn't that terrifying? During the day, they are just materials quietly displayed in jars and vats, subject to the students' knives and scalpels. But at night, they turn into cold killers, returning the pain inflicted on them during the day ten or a hundred times over."

Her words gave me the creeps, but I maintained my composure on the surface. "If corpses still understand anger and revenge, then they can't be called corpses. The dead have no feelings."

I gently pushed Zhang Jiaqi away. Being too close to the girl always made my chest feel a little tight.

"Not necessarily." She gave a playful smile and used her phone to light the way. "The West Campus has four underground corpse repositories, corresponding to different majors. I've already checked this one. Let's go somewhere else."

I nodded, holding the Black Leather Suitcase in one hand. Just as I was about to follow her out, a low phone ringtone suddenly echoed from inside the laboratory behind us.

Flutes and cornets—it was a symphony filled with complex emotions.

"Your phone is ringing. Aren't you going to check it?" I turned my head, staring at the glowing light inside the corpse repository's sink. The name on the caller ID looked somewhat familiar.

"There's no need. I can't get it out anyway. Let's hurry up and head to the next place." She showed a rare moment of panic and a hint of barely perceptible fear.

I used Chasing Eye to get a clear look at the name on the caller ID. My heart jolted. I quickly coughed twice to mask my expression. "Let's go. This formalin smell is overpowering. I have no idea how you medical students stand it."

Controlling my facial muscles, my expression quickly returned to normal. I casually remarked, "Your ringtone is very unique. It sounds like a symphony."

"Mahler's Second Symphony, 'Resurrection.' Most people wouldn't understand it," Zhang Jiaqi said, sliding the door shut and walking outside.

"Resurrection?" I stared at the thick sliding door. The heavy, oppressive melody was still echoing from the other side.

Coming out of the basement, Zhang Jiaqi and I walked side by side up the steps. Her phone's light illuminated the path ahead, and we soon reached the first-floor corridor.

"Wait!" I reached out to stop Zhang Jiaqi, telling her to turn off her phone first.

"What's wrong?" She looked tense as well. She turned off her phone, hiding in the darkness.

I bent down and peered down the middle of the corridor. At the corner, a dark silhouette stood in total silence.

"Can you stop being so jumpy? That's just a model. I left it standing in the middle of the hall on purpose." Zhang Jiaqi flipped me off and prepared to stand up.

"Don't move." I grabbed her wrist to keep her from acting rashly. "When I came in, I laid that model flat by the side of the path. Now it's standing in the middle again. You didn't do it, and neither did I. That means there's someone else in the building."

"Are you sure?" Zhang Jiaqi whispered. "That's impossible. This isn't my first time here, and I've never run into anyone else."

"If you had, your fate probably would have been the same as your teacher's," I hinted, not spelling it out completely. "Did you come in through that window at the back of the Laboratory Building?"

Zhang Jiaqi didn't catch my meaning and answered honestly, "That's right."

I reached out and measured her shoe—exactly twenty-nine centimeters. "When I came in, I found a shoeprint and a barefoot print on the floor. The shoeprint must have been yours, but the barefoot print belonged to someone else."

"A barefoot print? What do you mean? They weren't wearing shoes?"

Zhang Jiaqi's casual question brought the mystery back to the forefront. I couldn't figure it out either—why wouldn't the other person be wearing shoes?

"Could you have seen it wrong?" Zhang Jiaqi tilted her head. Her face seemed to have grown even paler than before. "In this building, the only ones who don't wear shoes are the corpses."

Before she even finished speaking, the sound of a heavy object hitting the floor echoed from the far end of the corridor, like someone had thrown a sack of wheat flour down from a height.

"Who is it?" Zhang Jiaqi and I exchanged a glance. We turned on her phone's flashlight and advanced down the corridor. As we passed the anatomical model, I inspected its surface. Whoever had moved it hadn't left behind any valuable clues.

"Could it be Teacher Liu? Don't just stand there, let's go check!"

Zhang Jiaqi hurried off with the phone. I gave the model one last look and laid it flat on the ground again. "Does this model mean something?"

When I caught up to Zhang Jiaqi, I found her standing by a window. "The sound came from outside."

This was the very room I had used to enter the building for the first time. The footprint and shoeprint on the floor had already been ruined, and there was no telling who had done it.

I crouched down, trying to pick out some clues from the scattered dirt. 'I just told Zhang Jiaqi about the shoeprint and the footprint, and now the scene in this room has been destroyed. Did she do this? But what would she be trying to hide?'

All the details of that barefoot print were deeply engraved in my mind: about thirty-two centimeters long, with a very wide forefoot.

"Stop studying it and hurry up so we can check somewhere else. Teacher Liu probably made that sound."

"How can you be so sure it's her?"

"It's just a guess."

"There are still a lot of places in this building we haven't searched. I'm afraid we'll miss important clues if we leave right now."

"I've searched everywhere inside the building, even the underground corpse repositories. Where else do you think she could be hiding?" Zhang Jiaqi kept rushing me. I cast one last look at the pitch-black interior of the building before finally choosing to leave with her.

We jumped out through the window. Among the shattered glass on the ground, a thin, dark red line caught my attention. "Zhang Jiaqi, come take a look at this."

"What is it now?" She crouched beside me reluctantly.

"There's blood on this glass shard. I definitely didn't see this when I came in." I picked up the relatively large piece of glass. "Someone jumped out of the building and got cut by the glass."

I reached out and touched the coagulated blood on the shard. "The entire edge of this glass is stained with blood, over seven centimeters long. If it were a normal person, no matter what part of their body received such a large gash, they would bleed profusely. There's no way they would leave just a single, thin trail of blood."

"What are you trying to tell me?"

I kept my head down, using my peripheral vision to monitor Zhang Jiaqi's expression. "There are two possibilities for this. First, someone intentionally smeared blood evenly along the edge of the glass to mislead us. Second, this isn't the blood of a living person."

Sparked by my reminder, Zhang Jiaqi seemed to realize something. "Living people have blood pressure, so their blood would spurt out. As the time of death increases, a dead person's blood continuously coagulates. Even if their skin is sliced open, they won't bleed much."

"Exactly." I held up the glass shard in my hand. "Which means this blood was very likely left behind by a corpse."