The library had two glass doors, their handles bound together with thick rope, the end of which was connected to a padlock. Xu Zhiyi tugged hard for over ten seconds, easily rubbing her palms raw in the process.
"…"
She stopped outside, grinding her teeth as she stared at the rows of books so close yet so far away, her gaze more resentful than any ghost's.
Once her mood had settled somewhat, Xu Zhiyi shifted her search to the corridor, looking for the key.
This place was far more desolate than when she'd first come. The lamp shades overhead were battered and broken, white filaments exposed to the air, electricity crackling and hissing.
The building she and Lin Yan had first lived in had the same kind of lights in its stairwell—an old, run-down neighborhood where no one in charge could be bothered to fix things.
During the day, the flickering lights were barely noticeable. But when the sky darkened and cold wind poured through the corridor, the dim yellow bulbs would blink on and off, and with a little girl crouched in the corner, the scene was so cold and eerie it could have been lent to a horror film director as a shooting location.
Xu Zhiyi had never been scared by that scene.
After all, she was that little girl crouching in the corner.
The stairwell in her memory was so similar to this teaching building's corridor. But back then, Lin Yan would open the door, bring her inside, tell her to wash her hands and eat quickly, then hang the key on a long string around her neck.
Now she had to search miserably for a key instead.
Clearly, searching for a key of unknown shape in a massive teaching building would take at least a few hours at minimum—and things could get worse. Many people, after expending enormous effort, still found it nearly impossible to locate the key.
Like the key to this first-floor library door, which was sitting in a desk drawer in some classroom on the third floor.
Solving puzzles sometimes required a bit of luck.
But if you had a small, sharp fire axe, things were a little different.
Moonlight spilled through the window glass onto the stair treads, illuminating the gleaming, blood-stained axe blade—and also illuminating Xu Zhiyi's face, full of surprise—there was a fire axe in the corridor!
She selectively ignored that little imperfection on the blade, picked up her prize, and was inwardly overjoyed.
When the mountains and rivers seem to lead nowhere.
A turn of the corner, and an axe appears.
Cutting through the thick rope with the axe was simple. Within two minutes, the padlock slid down along the loosened rope.
Before it could crash to the ground, Xu Zhiyi caught it with lightning-fast reflexes, avoiding a thunderous noise that would have echoed through the quiet corridor.
She carefully placed the lock and rope on the floor, pushed open the door, and stepped into the library.
The lights were off inside. Using the dim yellow glow from the corridor, she looked around, sweeping her gaze across the nearby walls, pretending not to see the twisted blood-red writing on them.
She couldn't find the light switch.
But on the wooden table beside the bookshelf sat a handheld kerosene lamp, the kind you'd only see in a museum, with a box of matches placed beside it.
"…"
After studying the lamp's structure for a moment at the wooden table, Xu Zhiyi struck a match and reached it through the opening at the bottom of the lamp's base.
It worked.
The flame began to burn quietly, illuminating a small area in front of her—and also revealing several tiny black fingerprints on the lamp's glass wall.
"…………"
Xu Zhiyi silently rotated the lamp a hundred and eighty degrees. Out of sight, out of mind.
She carried a lantern and clutched an axe, pacing among the bookshelves. The library's organization was chaotic—one row arranged by publisher, another by book height, seemingly on a whim, a testament to the caretaker's lack of professionalism.
Fortunately, it was a small library, and Xu Zhiyi quickly found the spine of Burning Incense. It was tucked away in the second-to-last row, buried beneath much taller books, nearly escaping her notice.
The books were packed tightly together. When she tried to pull it out, it wouldn't budge, forcing her to crouch closer to the shelf and tug harder with focused effort.
No matter what, she couldn't get it out.
Xu Zhiyi's fingers began to tremble.
This didn't feel like the usual resistance of tightly packed books.
It felt more like there was a hand on the other side of the book.
A hand gripping it just as fiercely.
Holding her breath, Xu Zhiyi set the lantern on the floor and released her grip on the book. After a few seconds of mental preparation, she pulled out the blood-stained fire axe from her side and tightened her hold on the handle.
Admittedly, in a grim and terrifying scene, a frail girl clutching an axe could appear more intimidating than an ordinary person—much like how ghost stories of midnight hitchhikers always feature children or the elderly as protagonists.
Unfortunately, that was just a romanticized version from fiction. In reality, the thing behind the bookshelf didn't give Xu Zhiyi a second thought.
It had likely been crawling on the ground for too long, harboring a uniform hatred for anything taller than fifty centimeters. Even seeing Xu Zhiyi with an axe, it lunged at her head-on.
Crash!
A row of bookshelves toppled over.
Xu Zhiyi had slammed into them.
Gasping, she scrambled up from the floor. Beside her lay the shelf she had recklessly thrown herself against. The heavy wood pinned down a humanoid creature of indeterminate gender, which hissed and writhed beneath it.
Within seconds, the sound grew fainter and fainter, until it finally fell silent.
It looked rather peaceful in sleep.
Xu Zhiyi, still clutching the axe with bated breath, dared not hesitate any longer. By the light of the kerosene lamp, she quickly snatched Burning Incense from the scattered pile of books and bolted.
Only after she had fled all the way outside the teaching building and saw nothing chasing after her did she crouch by a small flower bed, catching her breath in short, shallow gasps.
The outside had grown quite dark, but she had remembered to bring the kerosene lamp, so she could still compare the two copies of Burning Incense on the spot.
She spread the book open and devoutly appealed to every famous deity she could think of, ancient and modern, East and West—please, please let it be the answer she hoped for.
When she opened the second copy of Burning Incense, she froze.
The book she had fought so hard to retrieve was even more severely corrupted and distorted. Aside from the cover, there wasn't a single word any living person could read.
The kerosene lamp's flame flickered, on the verge of dying out.
Xu Zhiyi didn't give up.
At least the first book still had two readable pages, and they contained the character "Lin."
If she could find Lin.
She could confirm his identity.
She flipped back to the title page, silently etching the shadow's handwriting into her mind, then turned to the completely corrupted Burning Incense, trying to find characters with similar strokes in the first two pages.
Under the dim light, staring at such messy notes for a long time wasn't just a matter of sore, stinging eyes—Xu Zhiyi's mental state was also severely disrupted. A faint rustling sound kept ringing in her ears, as if countless people were walking around.
But the track field was clearly empty.
What was even more terrifying was that after she finished reading those two pages of scribbles in their entirety, she couldn't find any matching symbol in them.
What obscure characters had he written? Xu Zhiyi thought in despair.
But maybe she had simply missed something.
Xu Zhiyi rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand and flipped back to the first page.
She hadn't been this meticulous even when doing English proofreading exercises in high school. She searched carefully from beginning to end, but the more she looked, the clearer it became that she was wasting her effort.
With a sigh, she closed both books.
Xu Zhiyi's lips drooped, her eyes blinked twice, and she was shrouded in a gray, dusty filter, her vision growing blurry. Her white cotton jacket, which had gotten dirty from her earlier dive toward the bookshelf, was now streaked with black and gray stains.
When had she ever been this disheveled since her brother came home?
She closed the books, got up, patted the dust off her cotton jacket, and straightened the hem.
The face she raised was calm.
If it didn't say "Lin Yan," did that necessarily mean the shadow wasn't her brother? What if he was trying to convey some other message?
Even if he really wasn't her brother.
If she encountered a ghost that looked so much like Lin Yan and acted so kindly, then finding her brother probably wouldn't be too difficult either.
Xu Zhiyi had just managed to soothe herself and was patting off the dust when a chill ran down her back—the unmistakable feeling of some unknown creature approaching.
She turned her head stiffly, expecting to face the humanoid creature seeking revenge in the library, but the moment she saw who it was, she immediately relaxed.
The two-meter-tall shadow was looking down at her.
Looking at her covered in dust, her cotton jacket torn in several small places, her hair at her temples disheveled from running.
Even though she couldn't see the shadow's face, Xu Zhiyi instinctively sensed that the shadow was suddenly a little angry.
She froze stiffly for a second out of instinct, but she remembered her kind-human persona, and she was genuinely happy to see the shadow again—this was the perfect chance to ask him to write something simpler, something she could actually look up.
Her lips had just curved into a friendly greeting when, from the corner of her eye, she saw the shadow raise his left hand toward her and open it.
Xu Zhiyi kept her smile and obediently looked down—and nearly blacked out on the spot.
The shadow was holding two dead mice, in that same gesture of offering them to her.
Xu Zhiyi: "…"
Xu Zhiyi: "…"
This shadow was definitely not her brother!
But when you're next to a ghost, you have to bow your head. She shuddered for a moment, then decided to pretend nothing was wrong and accept these two little white mice. At least they were a gesture of goodwill, and they were much cuter than corpses.
She reached out to take them, but the shadow took a step back.
"…?"
Xu Zhiyi looked at him in confusion.
Under her puzzled gaze, the shadow extended his other hand and poked the little white mouse in his palm with his fingertip.
"Squeak—!"
The poked mouse let out a pitiful cry.
So it was playing dead?
Xu Zhiyi thought.
The shadow continued poking the second one. They were the same breed, so of course they made the same sound—small, thin, a single "squeak."
The shadow curled his fingers and, using the knuckles that hadn't touched the mice, tapped Xu Zhiyi's shoulder.
Xu Zhiyi's face lost all trace of a smile as she stood frozen in place.
When she made no sound, the dark figure resumed poking at the mice. For a moment, the only sounds on the playground were the wind and the intermittent squeaks rising and falling.
The mice were poked into utter despair.
Xu Zhiyi, who had remained motionless for so long, suddenly spoke, her voice as faint as a murmur in a dream: "…Brother?"
The barely audible words quickly dissolved into the wind, but the trapped mice gained their freedom at the same moment. The dark figure released them, its terrifying silhouette reaching a hand forward. Under the cold moonlight, there was nothing but the oppressive weight of a vengeful spirit demanding its due.
The squeaking white mice, the moment they hit the ground, fled in panic. No living creature would willingly approach such an eerie being—they would be afraid, they would run.
But his little sister hugged him.