The rotten flesh was the missing student.
Though they had entered less than three hours ago, Xue Rong felt it had been longer than a century. She wished she could forget everything that had happened during this time, yet she remembered each incident clearly.
They had expected the building to be cluttered with debris and trash, but upon entering, they found it surprisingly tidy, with furnishings neatly arranged. This didn’t quite match their image of a haunted building.
The group gathered before the architectural floor plan on the first floor, using flashlights to examine the layout of the Anatomy Building.
Feng Xiaojuan stood at the back, her face deathly pale.
Xue Rong comforted her, “She’s just a female hooligan. Don’t take her words to heart.”
“Yeah, Xiaojuan, what ‘Evil Qi’? It’s not as scary as she made it sound.”
“But that girl was really strange. Why would she be sitting in a tree in the middle of the night? Have any of you seen her on campus?”
“She definitely isn’t from our school. If there were a girl that pretty, even if we didn’t remember her, Wu Liang would. He’s like a cat smelling fish whenever he spots a beautiful girl.”
Wu Liang promptly kicked the speaker. “Screw you! Don’t talk nonsense with Rongrong here. Wasn’t I just trying to find a suitable lead actress for the drama club by chatting up pretty girls? I’m a proper man of the new century—always respectful toward women, never crossing any lines, and as for feelings, I don’t even entertain them.”
With this banter and laughter, the atmosphere lightened, and everyone began discussing where to explore first.
“Let’s go to the fourth floor. Since nothing here has been moved, maybe we can still see the corpses from twenty years ago in the pool up there.”
“Don’t scare people! How could there still be something like that? That’s disgusting.”
“…”
“Xiaojuan?” Xue Rong nudged Feng Xiaojuan, who seemed lost in thought. “Are you still thinking about what happened earlier?”
“No.” Feng Xiaojuan shook her head blankly, her expression vacant. “I just… I feel a bit…”
She opened her mouth, but her throat seemed clogged, as if phlegm were stuck, leaving her hoarse and unable to speak for a long while.
He Wenjian suggested, “How about I take her back first? You all go ahead and explore. If you find anything, just take pictures and show us tomorrow. It’ll be the same.”
Seeing how genuinely frightened she was, Wu Liang didn’t press the matter. He Wenjian left with Feng Xiaojuan, and the remaining group agreed to explore floor by floor, starting from the first. They had come all this way and weren’t about to give up easily.
At first, everything went smoothly. Xue Rong couldn’t recall exactly when things took a turn.
She only remembered that Wu Liang was the first to notice something amiss. He glanced back and asked, “Where’s Wang Peng?”
Excluding Feng Xiaojuan and He Wenjian, there were four boys and two girls left. Wang Peng, who loved photography, had been walking and snapping pictures along the way, gradually falling behind without anyone noticing.
“He was just behind us. Maybe he went into one of the rooms to take photos again. There’s a human skeleton specimen in that classroom on the second floor. He said he wanted to take it back to the dorm—he must have gone there,” one boy said. “You guys go ahead. I’ll go back to find him, and we’ll meet up at the staircase later.”
“Disappearing suddenly in a place like this—he might not be scared, but we are. What’s with the human skeleton specimen? It’s creepy,” Ding Jie complained.
The boy chuckled nervously. “In a place like this, you shouldn’t say ‘ghost,’ and you shouldn’t be afraid of ghosts either. The more scared you are, the more they’ll come out to frighten you. Who knows, one might appear behind you and blow on your neck.”
Ding Jie felt a chill run down the back of her neck and angrily cursed, “You damn ghost!”
The boy, after being punched a few times by her, ran off laughing to find someone else.
After the boy left, Wu Liang led the group forward, but after that incident, the remaining four lost interest, each lost in their own thoughts, no longer speaking.
They soon reached the stairwell. Wu Liang wanted to light a cigarette, but his lighter was broken and wouldn’t catch fire.
Bored, he asked Xue Rong, “You didn’t finish your story earlier. What exactly happened here back then?”
Xue Rong’s aunt had only heard it from others, and the story that reached her niece’s ears wasn’t very detailed.
“I was just scaring Xiao Juan. How would I know the real story? There are all sorts of rumors, mostly about corpses coming to life and killing students who stayed late to study in the building. But as for seeing it, no one has actually witnessed it.”
“If no one has seen it, how did the rumors start?”
Xue Rong said, “Because a student went missing in the Anatomy Building. The security office had no record of him entering or leaving the school, so the parents were convinced their child had met with trouble at the school. They carried an empty coffin and parked it outside the principal’s office for three days, demanding either the school find their child’s body or compensate them with three hundred thousand yuan.”
“Three hundred thousand in 2000 wasn’t like it is now,” Wu Liang asked. “What happened next?”
“The police and the school checked all the surveillance footage but found no clues. They practically turned the Anatomy Building upside down but found no trace of him. Eventually, the school had no choice but to hire a Taoist priest. My aunt was a student council member back then and often went in and out of the teachers’ offices. When she went in to submit some materials, she overheard the teachers talking about that priest.”
Ding Jie quickly asked, “What did they say?”
Xue Rong replied, “The priest said the missing student’s body was in the Anatomy Building, but ordinary people couldn’t see it because the student was no longer human.”
Ding Jie shuddered but couldn’t help asking, “And then?”
“The priest set up an altar outside the building at night and went in alone. At dawn, he came out carrying a bag of rotting flesh, saying the rotten meat was the missing student.”
Ding Jie felt her scalp prickle with fear.
Wu Liang was also spooked and quickly ended the topic, “It was just a charlatan trying to scam money by bringing in some maggot-infested rotten pork. You can’t believe that.”
His reassurance made Ding Jie feel a bit better. She took out her phone to check the time, but the screen was black.
She asked Xue Rong, “What time is it?”
Xue Rong’s phone screen was also black. She checked her watch and found the hands had stopped at the moment they entered the building, not moving at all. She quickly reached for Wu Liang’s phone, but it was also black. The remaining boy saw this and checked his own phone, his face instantly paling.
If one person’s phone broke, it could be a coincidence, but so many people’s phones breaking at once couldn’t be an accident—especially after just discussing such a topic. Fear grew wildly.
Even though the building was sealed, Xue Rong felt a cold draft blowing from the corner, raising goosebumps on her legs.
She suddenly remembered what the girl had said.
—If you don’t want bad luck, don’t go in.
Only now did she realize it might not have been a warning but a reminder. That girl must have known something about this building.
“How could this happen!” Ding Jie trembled. “There’s a ghost! Is there a ghost here?”
Wu Liang: “Calm down, you’re a college student. Can you stop being so childish? There are no ghosts in this world.”
But Ding Jie couldn’t calm down at all: “Then how do you explain it? My phone was fully charged before we left, there’s no way it would shut down so quickly. Something must not want us using our phones—it’s afraid we’ll contact the outside world. I want to go back, right now!”
Xue Rong didn’t dare act brave anymore and suggested, “Ding Jie is right. Some things are better to believe in. This place really is a bit eerie. Let’s call it a night and go explore a haunted house another day. How about we go down to the second floor to find Wang Peng and the others, then leave together?”
The two boys didn’t object, and the four of them headed downstairs. The entire building was silent, with no sound of people to be heard.
When they reached the stairwell on the second floor, Wu Liang called out the names of the two boys down the hallway, but no one answered.
“They might be busy dismantling specimens and didn’t hear. I’ll go check.” Just as Wu Liang was about to go look for them, Xue Rong grabbed his wrist.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, only then noticing that Xue Rong’s face was deathly pale, her eyes fixed straight ahead as she gestured for him to look.
They had descended one floor from the third floor, so this should have been the second floor. But the red paint on the wall above them clearly read “Third Floor” in large characters.
Wu Liang gasped sharply, realizing the hallway’s layout was exactly the same as the third floor where they had stopped to rest earlier.
Ding Jie nearly lost her mind.
“Don’t jump to conclusions,” Wu Liang said habitually, reaching for a cigarette before remembering his lighter wouldn’t work. “We all remembered wrong. The floor we were on earlier was the fourth floor. We need to go down one more floor to reach the second floor. No wonder Wang Peng didn’t hear me calling—we were on the wrong floor.”
His smile brought no comfort. Everyone was on the verge of a mental breakdown, especially Ding Jie, who absolutely refused to go any further.
What happened next was bizarre and chaotic.
They descended another floor, but the wall still displayed “Third Floor,” and the hallway’s layout remained unchanged.
Finally abandoning their self-reassurance, they realized this building might truly be haunted, as science couldn’t explain this situation at all.
Too afraid to enter the hallway, the group sat at the stairwell, sweating nervously as they tried to think of a solution.
There were many folk methods to break a “ghost wall.” Some said urinating in a corner would disperse it, others suggested tying a red string to the left foot and letting the person wearing it lead the way to naturally escape. Still others claimed ghosts feared aggressive people—if you cursed and shouted while walking, the ghost would be too scared to bother you…
They spent an hour trying every method they could think of, but nothing worked.
The two dark characters for “Third Floor” now felt like the most terrifying nightmare in the world, lingering before their eyes and refusing to fade. During this time, Ding Jie fainted twice, only to wake up crying each time.
In the end, it was Wu Liang who suggested they couldn’t just sit and wait to die. If there really was a ghost here, it likely wasn’t trapping them for fun. Although He Wenjian and Feng Xiaojuan had left earlier and would surely send help once they realized they were missing, considering what Xue Rong had said about the events twenty years ago, it might already be too late by then.
—Before that, they had to save themselves.
The two boys discussed it and decided to smash the third-floor window, use the ivy vines as a rope, and climb down to seek help outside.
They entered a classroom on the third floor and found that both the inside and outside of the windowpanes were sealed with thick wooden boards. The boards were secured at both ends with sturdy rivets. The desks and chairs in the room were all made of wood, already moldy and softened. While it was easy to shatter the glass, breaking the thick wooden boards on the windows was far more difficult.
Wu Liang planned to search other classrooms for suitable tools, but Ding Jie, who had retreated to a corner as soon as they entered the room, refused to follow him no matter what. He had no choice but to leave Xue Rong behind to keep her company.
Before leaving, he checked the room for anything unusual and instructed Xue Rong to lock the door. No matter what happened, she was not to open it unless he returned.
With that, Wu Liang and the other boy left the room.
At this point, it should have been no later than two o’clock.
Afterward, Xue Rong stayed in the room, comforting Ding Jie while keeping her ears pricked for any sounds outside.
A long time passed, and she began to sense something was wrong. The Anatomy Building wasn’t particularly large, with at most ten classrooms per floor. Even if they searched each one systematically, half an hour should have been more than enough. Xue Rong was sensitive to time, and she felt that at least forty minutes had passed since Wu Liang and the other boy left, yet there was no sign of their return.
Wu Liang wasn’t the type to leave her in a dangerous place for so long under such circumstances. Even if he couldn’t find any tools, he would have hurried back to stay with her.
Ding Jie whispered, “Could they have gone to another floor?”
“Impossible. If we could go to another floor, we wouldn’t be trapped here in the first place.”
“But…” Ding Jie said softly, “We only tried going downstairs earlier and never attempted to go upstairs. What if the fourth floor is accessible?”
Xue Rong froze, remembering the map she had seen at the entrance.
The fourth floor was the morgue, rumored to contain a large formaldehyde pool once used specifically for preserving corpses.
“That can’t be…” Xue Rong hesitated. “Even if it’s a ghost wall, it wouldn’t block only one direction. Let’s not overthink it. We’ll wait a little longer—they might be back any moment.”
As soon as she finished speaking, a soft knocking sound came from the door. Just as Ding Jie was about to ask who it was, Xue Rong covered her mouth.
“Wu Liang and I agreed that if he returned, he would knock three times, pause, and then knock twice. If the pattern doesn’t match, we can’t open the door,” Xue Rong whispered into her ear.
Knock, knock, knock—knock, knock—
The knocking was perfectly rhythmic, and Ding Jie’s anxious heart settled slightly.
Just as Xue Rong was about to open the door, Wu Liang’s voice sounded from outside: “Xue Rong, it’s me. Open the door.”
Xue Rong stopped in her tracks, her face paling with fear.
“What’s wrong? Hurry up and open the door!”
“We can’t,” Xue Rong pressed her hand down.
“Why? Are you going to lock Wu Liang out?”
“When we were together, we agreed that unless he wanted to break up, he would only call me Rongrong. For two years, he has never once called me by my full name…”
“…The person outside isn’t Wu Liang,” Xue Rong stammered, her lips trembling. “No, maybe it… it isn’t even human.”