Chapter 284: Incineration Trench

The last Buddha statue absolutely could not fall into Lu Xing's hands again. I called Secretary Zhang late at night, telling him to urgently notify Huang Boyuan.

At first, Secretary Zhang hesitated to take a call from a wanted criminal like me. He only agreed to pass on the message after I warned him that Huang Xue's life might be in danger.

I hung up and headed straight for Xinhu High School. As for the situation at Jingying Sanatorium, I could only do all I could and leave the rest to fate.

It was already 3:00 AM by the time I reached Xinhu High School. The road conditions were terrible, and with the torrential rain, I hadn't dared to drive too fast.

"Get out!" I casually abandoned the million-dollar Lamborghini by the side of the road. Throwing on a raincoat, I shoved the limping Jiang Chen forward and headed toward Xinhu High School.

It was a vast expanse of wasteland. Dark and bitterly cold under the torrential downpour, it had dissolved into a sprawling mud pit.

One careless step and you could sink up to your knee. The muddy water rushed in, making it an exhausting struggle just to pull a leg back out.

Hampered by Jiang Chen's leg injury, our pace was painfully slow. I was burning with anxiety, but there was no better option.

The police cruisers tailing me parked along the highway. Their high beams cut through the sheet of rain, illuminating my figure and leaving me nowhere to hide out on the wasteland.

"That was fast." Looking back, I locked eyes with Chen Jianguo through the heavy rain and flashed him a grin. Xinhu High School was nothing like Century New Garden. It had no electricity, no light, and no life; it was a natural hazard node.

In a place like this, the Fate Ghost's power would be magnified a hundredfold. If he pushed me too far, I wouldn't hesitate to kill to stop the killing.

"Captain, do we pursue?" several squad leaders asked, approaching Chen Jianguo to await his orders.

Chen Jianguo's response left them puzzled. "Teams One and Two, go in—just don't lose sight of him. The rest of you, form a perimeter and surround the area. Try to avoid getting close to the center of the wasteland."

The police cruisers mobilized to carry out his plan. By scattering his forces, it almost seemed like he was deliberately letting me off the hook.

"A sudden change of heart? Highly unlikely. He probably knows what once happened at Xinhu High School and is afraid of his entire team being wiped out, which is why he resorted to this cautious approach." I cast a cold glance at the trailing officers but didn't attack them, simply trudging step by step toward the center of the wasteland.

The area had truly been abandoned for far too long. Over these five years, the people of Jiangcheng had completely forgotten about Xinhu High School.

Seeing the dilapidated, gloomy complex looming ahead, Jiang Chen rubbed his eyes. He couldn't believe such a massive cluster of abandoned buildings existed deep in this wasteland. "A ghost building?"

"It used to be a school. Now, it's an Amusement Park for the lonely." Just as I was preparing to vault over the guardrail, I glanced down and spotted a warning sign half-submerged in the muddy water. "Why is this thing always buried in the dirt?"

I hung it back in place. Then, I tossed Jiang Chen over the fence before vaulting over after him.

The heavy rain reduced visibility and made escaping harder, but it had its perks. For instance, soaked shoes would leave a clear trail of the criminals' footprints across any dry floor.

A covered portico stretched for over three meters between the main gates of Xinhu High School and the actual campus interior. Thanks to its vaulted roof, the ground beneath hadn't been completely soaked by the downpour.

"Three distinct sets of footprints?"

I examined them patiently. Judging by the direction of the toes, the shoe sizes, and the tread patterns, a total of three people had entered during the time I was away.

Two were wearing straw sandals, and one was wearing ordinary sneakers.

All three had walked with very light steps. The mud prints were shallow—they had to be trained martial artists.

"Three people?" Even counting Lu Xing and Qiu Ren, that was only two. Where did the third person come from?

"Get in!" Shoving the limp Jiang Chen, whose calf was now swollen, I forced him onto the campus. My mind drifted back to the nightmare fabricated by the Primal Destiny Divine Fiends.

"The Dream Realm is a reconstruction of memories. The Buddha statue wouldn't just materialize out of thin air; the Primal Destiny Divine Fiends must have seen it in real life." In the nightmare, his homeroom teacher had maintained a sordid affair with the principal. Perhaps the Primal Destiny Divine Fiends had secretly witnessed that scene, or perhaps the homeroom teacher had intentionally flaunted it in front of him, torturing his still-immature mind.

It was precisely because the memory was so deeply ingrained that the Dream Realm had recreated it flawlessly, down to the last realistic detail.

We entered the Laboratory Building and searched floor by floor. Slowly, the nightmare and reality began to align. When I kicked open the door to the fourth-floor faculty office, the scene from the dream materialized right before my eyes.

It was completely identical. The desks, the podium... even the chair where the principal had been tied up in the dream was sitting in its exact original spot.

"How long has it been since anyone came in here?" The room smelled heavily of mildew, everything coated in a thick layer of dust.

I strode straight into the room. There, pasted onto the wall near a desk, was a map.

Peeling back the yellowed tape revealed a ten-centimeter shallow pit hidden behind the map. Nestled perfectly upright inside it was a Double-Faced Buddha Statue.

"Intact! I've finally seized the upper hand!" Reaching out, I felt around the statue. I felt absolutely zero psychological pressure committing such a deeply disrespectful act at a time like this. My fingers slid past the Buddha's head, and right as they landed on the double-faced Buddha's chest, I faintly felt something catch beneath my touch.

Bending my fingertips, I pried hard, digging a blood-red crystal out of the statue's heart.

It resembled a Buddhist sarira, but I had never heard of a sarira radiating a bloody glow.

"The Eight Consciousnesses of Buddhism... could this be the mind-consciousness?" I wasn't sure if it was just my imagination, but after digging out the mind-consciousness, the Buddha statue seemed to lose a hint of its spiritual aura, turning into something entirely mundane.

"The mind-consciousness is still here. The Buddha statue hasn't been touched, and this room shows no sign of anyone entering early. So what was the deal with those three sets of footprints?"

"Besides Lu Xing, did someone else brave the midnight downpour to enter Xinhu High School?"

A scream echoed from downstairs. It came from the armed police tailing me—they hadn't been attacked, just startled out of their wits by swaying ghostly shadows.

"A place for the dead, yet so many living people had to barge in. After tonight, I'm afraid Xinhu High School is going to get far more lively."

Having obtained the mind-consciousness, I now held the initiative. The question was whether I should stay here and wait for Lu Xing to find me, or relocate to a more advantageous spot for an ambush.

I cast a glance at the armed police creeping around the corner below and decisively abandoned the idea of an ambush. With those "capable officers" around—men incapable of success, but more than capable of failure—I would absolutely be discovered.

"The Laboratory Building isn't safe. I'll leave here first." Between my second midnight broadcast and the encounters in the nightmare, this building had left a deep impression on me. I had experienced too many supernatural horrors within its walls.

Leaving the Laboratory Building, I began to ponder another problem: 'Three sets of footprints represent three different people. When I went to Anxin Hotel, the Mother-Child Gu Mother Bug was pointing in the opposite direction, meaning Lu Xing and Qiu Ren must have split up. If even one of those three sets of prints belongs to them, why didn't they immediately retrieve the Double-Faced Buddha Mind-Consciousness? What did they run into at Xinhu High School?'

After waiting bitterly for five years, what could possibly be more important than the Two-Faced Buddha's plan?

My eyes gradually lit up. "They must have run into an unexpected situation, and right here on campus at that!"

I looked left and right but couldn't detect anything amiss. Suddenly, Bai Qi barked at me twice before breaking into a run through the pouring rain.

"Where are you going?"

Following behind Bai Qi, Jiang Chen and I cut straight across Xinhu High School, arriving at the Incineration Trench at the very back of the campus.

The dilapidated single-story building remained just as it was before. The torrential rain had washed away the Original Destiny Soul Hanging Talisman on the window frame, leaving the entire structure looking utterly ruined.

The moment Bai Qi approached this building, his behavior grew highly abnormal. He clearly wanted to go inside, yet he didn't dare get too close, merely pacing in circles at the door.

"What's in this room? Yuan Chen already died in the Dream Realm. There should be nothing left in there but charred corpses." I was somewhat bewildered; even when heavy fog was sealing the mountain and Bai Qi faced a wolf pack, he hadn't been this unsettled. Gripping my gun, I used Jiang Chen as a shield.

"You go in first!"

Unwillingly, he led the way. The moment he stepped through the door, Jiang Chen swept his gaze into the inner room. Just one glance was all it took for him to freeze in his tracks as if petrified. Even with my gun pressed hard against his head, he didn't dare take a single step further.

Following his gaze, I peered inside. The inner room's door was unlocked, and the doorframe was still plastered with densely packed Talisman Paper, looking much the same as the first time I had entered.

But when I looked deeper into the inner room, my hands began to tremble uncontrollably.

Those students who had once been cursed by the Primal Destiny Divine Fiends—the ones who had hanged themselves, jumped off buildings, and died in all sorts of bizarre ways—were all standing up right at this very moment.

I had been inside that room before. I had personally dragged Yuan Chen's corpse out from among them. I was certain they had already died five years ago.

"Resurrected? Or could it be..."

One drooping face after another, their incomplete corpses stood entirely expressionless in the pitch-black room. Their hands were cupped in front of their chests, as though they were waiting for something.