Chapter 182: The Killer Isn't a Cat

The boy's expression was terrifying, nothing like a normal person's. He bounded through the pungent liquid, his voice growing louder and louder.

"A red tongue?" I looked at his bright red tongue, then stared at the pale tip protruding from the dead cat's mouth. "Are you telling me how to tell a corpse from a living person?"

It was a bold guess, but even as I said it, it sounded ridiculous. There were countless ways to tell a corpse from a living person. Judging by the color of a tongue was something only a child could come up with.

'This kid is probably a stray, hiding out in the sealed campus for shelter.' I could already tell he was mentally impaired. He was raving mad, as if he'd experienced something so horrific it had literally scared him senseless.

The boy refused to quiet down. He continued to stick out his tongue anxiously, then reached for my face with hands dripping in formalin.

"I get what you mean." I took a step back, dodging his hands, and opened my mouth to stick out my tongue just like him.

"Red tongue, red tongue..." Seeing this, the boy finally stopped shouting. He gave me a goofy grin, picked up the dead cat from the floor, grabbed a specimen jar, and stuffed the carcass inside.

"Can you tell me what you're doing?" I kept one hand on the door. If anything came in from the outside, I would jump out the window immediately.

"Soak it." The boy held up the glass container and waved it in front of him. He made bizarre gestures, as if cutting with a Scalpel, then yelled, "Stand up!"

His words made no sense, and it took me a long time to figure out what he meant. In the boy's mind, it seemed that as long as a corpse was soaked in formalin and went through a few procedures, it could stand back up.

"A dead being has lost its soul. If the dead really could be brought back to life, that wouldn't be medicine—it would be ghost art." At first, I didn't believe him, chalking it up to childish nonsense. But on second thought, the boy seemed mentally impaired; he wouldn't deliberately make this up just to trick me. Besides, the gestures he'd just made were exactly those of a surgical operation: cutting open a chest, threading a needle, and suturing.

'If the boy is just imitating, then he must have seen a similar scene somewhere. Can the dead really be resurrected?' I narrowed my eyes, feeling I could dig up more useful information from him.

"What's your name? Why did you run into this building? Where did you come in from?"

The boy wasn't completely idiotic. Just as I had suspected, he hadn't been born this way; a massive shock had driven him mad later in life.

I asked patiently. The boy mumbled, answering in his own way. He was barely articulate, and whenever he couldn't explain something clearly, he dipped his fingers in the spilled formalin and drew on the cabinets.

He didn't remember his own name. The noun that appeared most frequently in his descriptions was "cat."

Piecing together his fragmented words and those incomprehensible drawings, I managed to guess what he was trying to express.

One evening, while playing with his friends, he suddenly heard a noise coming from the stairwell of his apartment building. None of the adults were home from work yet, and the stairwell was somewhat dim.

Driven by curiosity, he went inside, only to find a dead cat lying on the steps.

He was a kind-hearted kid and planned to bury the black cat in the courtyard flowerbed, but a woman stopped him.

The boy couldn't remember what the woman looked like. He only remembered one thing she told him: "Never show sympathy for these souls that die in the wild, or they will stick to you and follow you home."

Even the boy himself couldn't explain what he did after that.

A chunk of his memory seemed to be missing. He could only remember that later that night, his grandfather passed away. His parents received a phone call and rushed out overnight, leaving him home alone.

Too scared to turn off the lights, he lay in bed alone and finally managed to fall asleep. But when he woke up, he found that all the lights in the house had been turned off.

The room was pitch black. Terrified, he huddled under his blankets, not daring to move. Something seemed to be swaying in the dark.

Before long, he heard a faint cat's meow coming from behind him. The sound gradually grew clearer as a creeping chill climbed up his neck.

The boy's limited vocabulary couldn't possibly express how he felt at that moment. He just kept repeating the word "tongue." From what I could gather, the icy coldness he felt was as if something had stuck out its tongue and was licking his skin.

Cold, darkness, and fear. Unable to control himself any longer, he slowly turned his head.

The boy's story didn't clarify what he finally saw, but judging from his tone, one thing was certain: the thing hiding in the dark wasn't a cat.

After that, he was locked in this building. He couldn't provide any details about what happened during this period, and the pictures he drew became increasingly abstract and impossible to decipher.

Just as I was about to ask some specific questions, that strange sound of a heavy object being dragged appeared outside the door again. I listened carefully. This time, the sound was faster than before, as if someone had quickened their pace and was getting closer and closer to the door.

"That thing is coming back?" There were four buildings in the entire sealed West Campus. I had no reason to clash head-on with whatever was outside the door. Searching for clues about Liu Xuan was my top priority.

"I'll get you out of here first." I opened the window, grabbed the sill, and hopped out onto the exterior air conditioning unit.

"Hurry!" The dragging sound had already stopped at the door. I waved anxiously at the boy. "Come here! I'll carry you down."

I thought the boy was refusing to come over because he was afraid of heights, but it turned out he had no intention of leaving with me at all.

"Red tongue, red tongue!" He gave a goofy laugh, stuck out his tongue, and hugged the glass jar containing the dead cat before opening the door and running out.

"Hey!" I shouted into the pitch-black corridor, but no one answered.

'Should I go find him?' Zhang Jiaqi had gone missing in this building, and now the boy had run off too. The two people who seemed the most like living human beings were both unwilling to stay with me. 'What are they hiding from? What exactly is hidden in this building?'

My head was filled with questions as I looked at the shelves displaying the specimens in front of me. "This broadcast is much more complicated than I imagined."

While I was hesitating over whether to go after the boy, the open door of the specimen room began to move on its own. Standing on the exterior AC unit, I had to stand on my tiptoes to get a clear look.

At the bottom of the door, a withered hand was gripping the wooden panel, slowly pulling it shut.

Through my narrow field of vision, I was terrified that a rotting face would suddenly flash by. But until the door closed completely, nothing happened in the corridor.

'The doors are left slightly ajar...' It suddenly occurred to me that none of the doors in this building were locked. Just like this one, they were all left slightly open.

A cold sweat broke out on my back. Not daring to delay any longer, I quickly left and climbed down to the first floor.

"Where's my suitcase?" The Black Leather Suitcase I had left by the wall was nowhere to be seen. Holding the Underworld Live Show Phone, I stood frozen in place.

'It couldn't be Zhang Jiaqi. I've been guarding the specimen room the whole time. Does this building have another exit?' Using the phone for illumination, I looked closely. The suitcase had been dragged away, leaving obvious marks on the ground. Aside from that, a man's leather shoe print was left in the exposed dirt.

'What the hell. On the surface, there isn't a single person in this sealed West Campus, but in the shadows, it's bustling with activity.' I silently counted the possible masterminds behind the scenes: 'Zhang Jiaqi, the little boy, the barefoot person following Zhang Jiaqi, and now a man in leather shoes. Why would they gather in this campus late at night? What interests are driving them?'

I used Chasing Eye to observe the drag marks left by the suitcase, not missing a single bent blade of grass or crushed clod of dirt. I tracked it all the way to the building where the West Campus bordered the other campuses.

Perhaps due to using Chasing Eye for too long, my head spun and I felt terrible. But when I saw the people in front of me, I realized it was all worth it.

A man in a Security Guard uniform was sitting on the steps. He was taking things out of the Black Leather Suitcase one by one, examining them curiously.

Not long after, the glass door behind him was pushed open, and another Security Guard hurried out with something on his back.

"What are you doing?"

"I found some interesting things."

"Cut the crap and hurry up and help me."

The Security Guard spoke as he threw the load on his back to the ground. A hand faintly slipped out from the burlap sack.