Chapter 181: Red Tongue

"Why did your teacher have this kind of medicine in her drawer? Does she have lung cancer?" The situation was aligning more closely with the Underworld Live Show's exam prompt. I held the bottle, staring at the white pills inside. It was a cure that could save lives, but also a lethal poison.

"I don't think so. Teacher Liu was perfectly healthy and didn't have any bad habits. Besides, even though she was usually quiet, we actually talked a lot. If she had cancer, she wouldn't have hidden it from me." Zhang Jiaqi's response left me slightly puzzled.

"Then who was this medicine for?"

The whole time Zhang Jiaqi and I were in the room, she had been flipping through dusty documents. She showed no intention of searching for her teacher. I had reminded her, but she brushed me off, claiming she was looking for answers in the files.

As for the files she was skimming, most were written in English, which I couldn't read at all. A small portion consisted of experimental data on bodily reconstruction—including clearing blood clots in cryogenically frozen blood vessels, brain cell proliferation and regeneration, and even some philosophical definitions of the soul.

Seeing all this left me with genuine admiration for Teacher Liu. Spanning medicine, psychology, and philosophy, the female professor was practically an all-around genius.

"Every broadcast is tied to the Eight Characters Divine Fiends. If Liu Xuan is the key to this one, her situation perfectly matches the Heavenly Doctor Divine Fiends."

The Heavenly Physician was the star deity governing illness and disease. In traditional astrology, if one's Four Pillars encountered the Heavenly Physician while their destiny was weak and lacked the support of auspicious spirits, they would either be perpetually sick or physically frail. However, if their destiny was strong and aided by noble spirits, not only would they enjoy robust health, but they would also be exceptionally suited to practice medicine.

About half an hour later, a strange noise came from the corridor outside. I waved at Zhang Jiaqi, gesturing for her to turn off her phone, and stood by the door to observe the situation.

My eyes had already adjusted to the darkness. Out in the empty corridor, it sounded like a heavy object was being dragged forward.

A blurry shadow in my field of vision gradually grew clearer. It looked like a person—a soaking wet person with a mutilated lower half.

Pressed flat against the floor, he used both hands to drag himself forward, crawling inch by inch toward the room Zhang Jiaqi and I were in.

"A corpse?" I muttered. It was too dark outside to tell if the monster was being dragged forward by some unseen thread, or if it was crawling on its own.

Regardless of the answer, neither scenario was a good sign. The calm before the storm was over. This was a signal—the truly terrifying live broadcast had begun.

I shot Zhang Jiaqi a silencing gesture and started scanning the room for a handy weapon. But to my shock, the moment I turned around, a bright light flashed inside the room!

Zhang Jiaqi had turned on her phone. As if she had gone mad, she snatched up a few files, shoved the door open, and sprinted out into the hall!

The sudden turn of events caught me off guard. By the time I chased her to the doorway, I suddenly realized something was wrong.

A grip tightened around my ankle. Something had grabbed me.

I looked down to see a face, bloated from soaking in formalin, rolling its eyes upward to look at me.

"Fuck!" I kicked it away. The corpse rolled across the floor, its muscles still twitching slightly. It didn't seem at all like a long-dead specimen.

I stared at the corpse that had stopped moving in the corner, then glanced at Zhang Jiaqi, who had already fled to the end of the corridor. Compared to the bizarre cadaver, catching Zhang Jiaqi and getting some answers was far more important.

I sprinted after the light of her phone. But the moment I rounded the corner and reached the stairs of the Laboratory Building, I froze in shock.

"The light is gone!"

The pitch-black stairwell was unbearably quiet. It felt like a dying man holding in his final breath—uncomfortable, stifling, and dripping with a scalp-numbing terror.

The flights of stairs stretched into the unknown, and Zhang Jiaqi was nowhere to be seen.

'The classrooms on both sides of the corridor are all unlocked with their doors left ajar. I saw them earlier; they're full of motionless silhouettes. Could Zhang Jiaqi be hiding inside one?' Pushing open one of the doors, the feeling of trying to pick out a living person from the numerous cadaver specimens and anatomical mannequins in the dead of night was enough to drive a person insane.

I found myself caught in a contradiction, hoping the shadow in front of me would move so I could catch Zhang Jiaqi, while also fearing they would suddenly make a noise and plunge me into a more terrifying situation.

Standing in the doorways of the pitch-black classrooms, staring at the blurry silhouettes and remembering the crawling corpse from just moments ago, I scrapped the idea of searching inside.

I was afraid this was a trap. Once I entered, if someone locked the classroom door from the outside, I would likely be driven into a dead end.

'She probably wouldn't hide in here. When we first passed through the corridor, Zhang Jiaqi revealed a look of terror. She tried her best to hide it, but that fear had already taken root deep in her heart. That must also be why she walked through the corridor so quickly.'

I quickly calmed down. 'Zhang Jiaqi has already found what she needs. She's definitely going to escape, and the exit is on the second floor!'

I rushed downstairs and waited in the room filled with partial dissection specimens and infant specimens. Pressing my back against a shelf lined with bottles and jars, I couldn't tell if it was an illusion, but I kept feeling as if over a dozen pairs of eyes were staring at me from different angles in the dark.

Unlike rotting corpses, their general shapes were practically indistinguishable from living people. That was the most terrifying part.

'I can't stay in this room for long.' A deep sense of foreboding rose in my heart. If the things standing in the classroom weren't mannequins, but something else, I would never be able to handle their numbers once they all came running out.

I glanced at the open window. Physical instinct drove me toward the sill; seeking safety and avoiding danger was human nature. But before I could reach the window, the door to the specimen room was pushed open.

'Zhang Jiaqi?' Not daring to make a sound, I crouched on the floor and peered toward the doorway through the gaps in the shelves.

The person who walked in wasn't Zhang Jiaqi, but an unfamiliar little boy.

He looked to be only six or seven years old, and he was clutching a dead cat in his hand.

'How could a kid get inside the sealed campus? Is he a family member of a teacher living on campus?'

Covered in grime, the boy looked like a little beggar. His clothes were also strange. Ragged and torn, his shirt covered his thighs, fitting him very poorly.

'Could he have sneaked in from the outside to steal things?'

The boy's next actions took me somewhat by surprise. He casually took down two glass jars containing human organs from the shelf, opened the lids, fished out the specimens, and stuffed them both into one jar. Then, he placed the dead cat from his hand into the emptied glass jar.

Closing the lid, the boy cradled the glass jar and admired it with a beaming smile, acting as if he had just accomplished something extraordinary.

I quietly sneaked over to the doorway and shut the door while he wasn't looking. The boy didn't even hear the sound of the door closing; he seemed completely immersed in immense joy.

I slowly approached. The boy was wearing a pair of worn-out soccer shoes, and there were no red strings, tags, or anything of the sort on his exposed skin.

'He should be a living person...' According to my previous observations, most of the cadaver specimens wore a circular tag on their wrists or ankles, which detailed the corpse's name, the date the specimen was prepared, their cause of death, and so on. After searching for a long time, I hadn't found anything similar on the boy, so I breathed a sigh of relief.

"Hey, what's your name?" I asked, keeping my voice as gentle as possible so I wouldn't scare him.

Crash!

Even though I had controlled my tone, the sudden voice still made the boy violently flinch. His hands slipped, and the freshly packed glass jar crashed to the floor.

The glass shattered, sending formalin spilling everywhere. The pungent smell was nauseating.

The loud crash scared me just as badly. I stood frozen in place for a long time, not daring to move a muscle, pressing my ear tightly against the door to listen for any movement outside.

'I can't stay here long. I keep feeling like something is coming.'

The boy stiffly turned around and looked at me standing in the doorway. The muscles in his face spasmed, his crying expression remarkably ugly.

Listening to his intermittent sobs and watching his face become deformed from the constant twitching, I was just as terrified as he was.

'Where on earth did this child come from? No, his crying is too loud; it will definitely attract something.' Forcing down the fear in my heart, I slowly walked over to the petrified boy, gently hugged him, and patted his back. "Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid."

Perhaps feeling my body heat, the boy gradually stopped crying. He crouched on the floor, staring at the dead cat among the shards of broken glass.

"Is this your pet? Where did you come in from?" The sudden appearance of this boy brought me too many questions. Just as I was about to ask them one by one, the boy suddenly pried the cat's mouth open and grabbed the dead cat's tongue.

The cat had already been dead for a long time. Its tongue had turned white.

"What are you doing?" I was slightly taken aback. I was just about to stop him from abusing the corpse like this when he suddenly turned his head to stare at me. He opened his mouth, stuck his own tongue out as far as it would go, and mumbled, "Red tongue, red tongue, red tongue!"