Chapter 518: Death Trap (2)

Chu Men glanced silently at Ye Bing. He wasn't a man of many expressions to begin with, and he didn't say much else. "What do we do next? Go into the old murder scene and take a look?"

Chu Men rattled the chain on the door, only testing it casually, but to his surprise, it fell right off with a gentle tug.

"We're already here anyway, so let's go in and take a look. I've never been to these places either." Ye Bing took the lead and pushed open the iron door. The restroom had been out of use for a long time. There was no longer any foul smell inside, and everything remained exactly as it had been years ago.

"The first body was found right here." Ye Bing pointed at a squat toilet stall. The tiles had all been dug up, leaving only a large, pitch-black hole. "I heard that the victim's head was sticking out of the hole at the time, and they had already suffocated. The police couldn't figure out how the victim was stuffed in there. They spent a lot of effort just to dig the body out."

Chu Men stared at the dark pit. It was pitch-black inside, like a tunnel leading God knows where. "A living person was stuffed inside this?"

He crouched beside the hole, entirely unaware of Ye Bing quietly approaching him from behind. A pair of slender arms slowly reached toward his back, preparing to push him down.

Watching this from where I was hiding outside the door, I had no choice but to step out.

Bang! I kicked aside the chain on the ground, pretending I had just arrived to investigate, and pushed open the door Ye Bing had sneakily shut halfway.

Hearing the noise, Ye Bing immediately stopped what she was doing. Chu Men also stood up, looking toward the door with high vigilance.

The phone screen cast a faint glow that reflected off my black-and-white mask. I walked into the room without saying a word.

"Who are you?" Chu Men froze for a moment. With the Good and Evil Asura Mask covering my face, he failed to recognize me right away.

I still didn't speak. I wasn't sure if this "Ye Bing" remembered my voice, and I didn't want to expose my identity so quickly.

Raising the Underworld Live Show Phone to my ear, I mimed making a call. This was a secret signal Chu Men and I had agreed upon before entering the dream. It was hard for anyone else to imitate; after all, I was the only one who could bring the Underworld Live Show Phone into the dream.

Seeing this gesture, Chu Men's eyes lit up as he instantly caught on. He balled his left hand into a fist and shoved it into the pocket of his lab coat.

He was left-handed, and this was his response to me.

'Good, he's one of us. He hasn't been replaced by a nightmare.'

Chu Men and I both breathed a sigh of relief, confirming each other's identities without the third party noticing a thing.

"Who are you?" Ye Bing was the one who spoke up. "Why are bizarre weirdos barging into my Dream Realm? Are you here to save me too? Why are you wearing a mask?"

"You can call me Streamer. I'm here to assist the doctor with your treatment." My voice was low and hoarse; I had purposely disguised it.

Ye Bing raised her pretty, willow-leaf eyebrows slightly. "No, you feel very familiar. Even though you're wearing a mask, I keep feeling like I've seen you somewhere before. Can you take it off?"

I wasn't sure if this "Ye Bing" was testing me or if she genuinely found me familiar. I shook my head. "What are you two doing here?"

Chu Men explained the whole sequence of events to me without leaving out a single detail. He had entered the dream earlier and quickly cleared Ye Bing's Shallow Dream Layer, finding the entrance to the Middle Dream Layer, which was where he had found Ye Bing.

"You found her that easily?" I sneered. With the mask hiding my face, I wasn't worried about Ye Bing seeing my expression. "So that means as long as we find a way out, we can wake Ye Bing up, right?"

"Yeah." Chu Men then told me the plan he and Ye Bing had discussed earlier. I didn't object. Now was not the time to turn hostile against this fake Ye Bing. The best approach was to figure out her background and see if we could coax any useful clues out of her.

"So, have you found anything?" I asked, keeping my voice disguised.

"Nothing yet. You came at just the right time. Every profession has its specialty, so I'll leave the puzzle-solving and case-breaking to you. At the end of the day, I'm just a doctor." Chu Men shoved his hands into his pockets and casually stepped aside.

"You're quite modest." I walked over to the stall and stared into the dark hole, but my mind was focused on Ye Bing's earlier actions. She had looked ready to push Chu Men into the pit.

'Where does this hole lead? A hole where a corpse was pulled out should symbolize death in a Dream Realm. Does falling into the hole mean dying?' I naturally couldn't say these things in front of Ye Bing, so I pondered silently, 'If that's the case, then Ye Bing did that to kill Chu Men. She didn't act directly, but used a trap in the dream to kill him. Could it be that even a nightmare can't kill someone directly in a dream?'

I had encountered murder in a dream during my last dive. Zichou's consciousness had collapsed, and he had ultimately died in Huang Xue's dream.

"Did you spot anything?" With an outsider present, Ye Bing had restrained herself significantly. Her plan disrupted, she now stood obediently to the side.

I shook my head, putting on a show of analyzing the scene. "Comparing it to the other stalls, you can tell that it's absolutely impossible to stuff a person into this hole without using tools. Let alone a child, even a seasoned killer wouldn't be able to do it."

"Ye Bing, didn't you say you witnessed that boy committing murder? Tell Streamer everything you know. He's a professional, and he can definitely help you solve this mystery." Chu Men stood by the door, cooperating with me seamlessly.

Ye Bing didn't speak for a long time. Finally, she muttered, "The murder I witnessed was a different case."

"A different case? The teacher who was forced to jump off the building?"

"Yeah." Knowing that staying here any longer was just a waste of time, Ye Bing decisively walked out. "I'll take you there."

I followed Ye Bing, looking at her familiar silhouette. Even the way she walked was exactly as I remembered.

'What a perfect imitation!' I sighed internally, following silently behind her.

Leaving the dormitory building, we returned to the Rehabilitation Area. Ye Bing walked at the very front, describing the situation from back then.

"The teacher who was forced to jump was named Hu. That day, he happened to call me to clean the Rehabilitation Area with him. Right after we entered a closed room on the second floor, Teacher Hu acted like a completely different person. He looked panicked and kept asking me to check if there was something crawling on his back." Ye Bing's voice was laced with confusion. "I checked several times, but there was nothing on Teacher Hu's back. His shirt wrinkles were just flattened out, making it look as if something really was clinging to him."

"I was still young back then and terrified by Teacher Hu's abnormal behavior. I hid by the bed, and then I saw him acting like he was being chased by something invisible. He bolted out of the room like a madman and sprinted up toward the roof."

"After I calmed down, I was a bit curious, so I followed him all the way to the roof of the Rehabilitation Area." Ye Bing's face slowly grew pale. It was hard to tell if she was faking it or if she had genuinely recalled something. "When I reached the roof, I happened to see Chen Jiuge coming down. He looked absolutely terrifying. I still can't forget it to this day."

Ye Bing paused for a moment before continuing. "That child had sewn himself inside a plush toy. His expression was savage, and his eyes were completely bloodshot. What was even more horrifying was that the zipper on the back of the plush toy was pulled open. As he walked past me, I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye—hidden inside the boy's doll were two bloody, severed hands! They looked like they had just been chopped off!"

"I'm sure I wasn't seeing things. I don't know where I got the courage, but I rushed straight up to the roof, thinking I would be safe once I found Teacher Hu. But what happened next was even more horrifying." Ye Bing walked ahead of us. By now, the three of us had already reached the roof. She pointed at the edge of the building. "It was right at that spot. I remember it very clearly. Teacher Hu was standing right there. He looked down, and as if he saw something specific, he reached out to grab it, and accidentally fell over."

"He saw something right before he died?" I was a bit surprised. In the Hunchbacked Boy's dream, all the killings were carried out by the Plush Bear. I actually wasn't sure about the exact murder methods. "Right at that spot?"

Holding up the Underworld Live Show Phone, I stood at the edge of the Rehabilitation Area's roof. It was a dozen meters from the ground at most, which wasn't too high. "What did Teacher Hu see before he died?"

Just as I was lost in thought, Chu Men's voice suddenly rang out from behind me. "Watch out!"