Chapter 40 - Flowers In The River And The Moon’s Reflection In The Lake (IV)
Editor: Kitty
“Did I miss anything?” Luo Jian said to himself. There had to be a reason why the mirror fragment was missing. He must have overlooked something. Therefore, Luo Jian started searching and checking around the cla.s.sroom. He looked through the podium again and examined every piece of chalk in it. Then, he headed to the blackboard at the back of the cla.s.sroom. The blackboard, normally used to report significant news, had big words written on it in a blood-red color: The one who snitches will be killed without mercy!
Who was the one who snitched? And what secret was revealed?
Luo Jian was a little confused. There were very few clues given to him in this secret chamber. Except for the message slips, he couldn’t seem to find any clues regarding this incident. Luo Jian racked his brain, and he suddenly raised his head to look at the windows of the cla.s.sroom. The windows were all sealed by wooden boards. There were no curtains, but there were window screens. The windows were the only places that Luo Jian had yet to search.
“Gla.s.s…” Luo Jian pa.s.sed by several desks and arrived at the first window. The gla.s.s was mostly intact, and colourful paper was pasted on it. After sweeping his gaze over it several times, Luo Jian found nothing unusual. Then he went to the second window, followed by the third one. When he came to the last window, he found that one of the window panes was broken and was missing a large part of the corner, but there were no gla.s.s fragments on the ground.
“Maybe I should search through the garbage can.” According to common sense, the broken gla.s.s would have been swept up and thrown into the garbage, but there was no garbage can in the cla.s.sroom. Luo Jian walked around to look for it. There were only two brooms, a mop, a dustpan, a pile of waste paper in the corner, some leftover snack bags, and other bits and pieces of garbage.
Where exactly was the last piece of the mirror?
Luo Jian stared at the rubbish for a long time and sighed with regret before squatting down to pick up some balled-up papers and unfold them. The first one had some meaningless patterns drawn on it. The second one was a wrongly-written homework paper that had been torn into pieces, balled up, and thrown away. The third one was completely blank. There was nothing on it. The last one had a bizarre and inexplicable sentence written on it:
Watch your back.
Luo Jian shivered when he read this sentence. Suddenly, he had a strange feeling. He felt a chilly sensation on his back. It was as if there was a stream of cold air blowing on him. Before, he was searching through the wastepaper so seriously that he hadn’t noticed such a bizarre chill.
One must know that, at the moment, he was in a secret chamber with thirty-five corpses. According to the usual, illogical style of the secret chamber, it was possible for any corpses to resurrect.
As soon as he realized this, Luo Jian broke out into a cold sweat, and the icy feeling on his back became more and more prominent. This made him aware that there was clearly someone…… or some ghost standing behind Luo Jian. Maybe a skeleton was using his two hollow eye sockets to gaze at him. Luo Jian’s body stiffened. He slowly turned his head around…… and it turned out…..
It turned out that there was nothing behind him.
The cla.s.sroom was still the same. The corpses were sitting and lying in their original positions without any changes. Luo Jian took a deep breath. He felt the chill on his back disappear instantly as if it were never there. But Luo Jian’s intuition was correct. There absolutely was something behind him just now!
Luo Jian now observed each corpse carefully. The teacher was still hanging on the podium, and the students were sitting in their seats…… No!
Luo Jian suddenly noticed a serious problem. This terrible detail that he noticed was like an evil ghost’s hand, strangling him and making it so hard to breathe that in that instant, he felt like he was dying.
The corpses had moved!
Although Luo Jian could not remember the specific seats where the corpses sat or each of their poses, he had a general impression of them. He noticed that one of the corpses in this group of students had moved. Previously, it was sitting on a seat. Now, the corpse changed positions to lie on the ground.
Luo Jian forced himself to look away. He looked down at the paper ball in his hand again. The sentence that sent chills down his spine was still present: Watch your back.
In Luo Jian’s opinion, sometimes things that couldn’t be explained by common sense needed to be handled using abnormal and extreme means. Luo Jian had the advantage of being able to recognize reality, and at the same time, he was also very clear on how to break the limitations of conventional reality in order to achieve unexpected results.
Luo Jian, who was at his breaking point, now made the right decision. He took out his short blade and walked directly towards the corpse that had moved. His movements showed that he was highly vigilant and on guard against attacks from all directions. When he successfully reached the corpse, he immediately waved his knife and chopped off its skull and limbs.
“It’s just a body.” Luo Jian said to himself, “Don’t be afraid. They are already dead. All you have to do is kill them again.”
After Luo Jian pulled the knife out of the body, he stood up straight and looked around the cla.s.sroom again. This time, all the bodies had shifted. One after another, they began to move. The skeletons creaked. Some could stand up while others could only move on the ground, but their goal was obvious—they were moving towards Luo Jian, who was standing in the middle.
Luo Jian suddenly felt pain in his ankle. When he lowered his head, he saw a corpse that he hadn’t noticed before stretching out its claws and grasping at his feet. He immediately felt the hair around its grasp stand up. However, he acted reflexively in a cold-blooded way. He raised his other foot and stepped on the corpse’s head to smash it.
The flesh on the head had not completely rotted away yet and black brain matter sprayed out, splashing all over his pants, but Luo Jian had no time to worry about that. He raised his weapon and focused his attention on the corpses that were surrounding him and glaring at him as if watching their prey.
The cla.s.sroom was not big, but there were more than 30 corpses. If they surrounded him, it would be hard to escape. These corpses seemed to be easier to deal with than the ones he encountered last time on the ghost ship. Their bones were not very hard, and they weren’t very strong, either. But Luo Jian did not know whether these d.a.m.n things could be revived indefinitely and continuously. If they could, even if Luo Jian crushed all the corpses here, his actions would be meaningless.
“I’ve been dealing with corpses a lot lately.” Luo Jian said uneasily as he smiled bitterly.
The battle went on for another hour. Two-thirds of the three hours pa.s.sed, and he was left with less than an hour. Luo Jian chopped down the last body and exhaustedly leaned against the desk on the podium. The secret chamber did not let these corpses resurrect infinitely, but it was still rather difficult to deal with them because unless these terrible things were completely crushed and ground into powder, even if only a single hand was left, it would use its fingers to crawl towards him and attempt to strangle him to death.
Therefore, Luo Jian had to break the bones of every corpse to the point where they completely couldn’t move. This was so tiring that Luo Jian’s eyes sparkled with fury and he panted like a bull. It also reminded him of the poem on the blackboard—Broken pieces are scattered everywhere, and yin and yang are within your grasp.
“Broken pieces are scattered everywhere, and yin and yang are within your grasp?” Luo Jian recited the poem. He reluctantly climbed up and rummaged through a pile of the corpses’ remains. Doing this felt even more disgusting. There was a puddle of black and sticky corpse water, bone fragments all over the floor, and some pieces of skulls and other bones that had not been completely crushed into dust.
Luo Jian was injured. It should be said that he was seriously injured. The battle with the corpses was extremely dangerous for him. He had been surrounded by many corpses several times. They had clambered onto him and pinned him down with their limbs. Their rotten teeth had bitten into his body, and they laid down on him like snakes to immobilize him. Momentarily, Luo Jian had felt like giving up, but in the end he chopped them all down with his knife.
He was so determined to survive that he could not control his intense feelings. When he pulled the last mirror fragment out of a crack in a bone, he almost cried out in joy.
He took all the mirror fragments to the podium and started to piece them together. The corpse on the podium was still hanging there. For some reason, the teacher’s corpse had not moved or attacked Luo Jian. It hung there peacefully. Since it didn’t attack him, Luo Jian was too lazy to move it. Even if the corpse had been a sc.u.m while alive, he still had some respect for the teaching profession.
All the pieces of the mirror had been found. Therefore, Luo Jian naturally found it easy to piece the fragments together. The small mirror had been split by several cracks. Even if the fragments were put together, Luo Jian’s reflection still appeared fragmented. After looking at the mirror for a long period of time, Luo Jian didn’t find any abnormalities. The mirror was still fragmented, and there was no response from it.
“What’s the matter? Is there something missing?”
Luo Jian tried to think about what information he may have missed, but he could not understand what to do next. The mirror fragments had all been found and pieced together, but the next hint that would allow him to progress in the chamber did not appear.
Distressed, Luo Jian stared at the mirror and tried hard to recall all possible details. He incidentally thought of the of the poem: One side is one side, one side for one side, a left hand exchanged for a right hand, your face is my face.
Luo Jian thought about it and read it out unconsciously, but when he spoke the last phrase, he suddenly felt dizzy, as if he had momentarily lost consciousness. However, the feeling appeared fast and disappeared even faster. Thus, he only felt dizzy for a moment.
Because he still felt a bit dizzy, Luo Jian shook his head. He opened his eyes and took a look at his surroundings again. This time, what he discovered astonished him! Luo Jian was shocked to find out that without his noticing, all the corpses in the cla.s.sroom had disappeared!
“What happened?!” Luo Jian was baffled by this scene. He had looked at the mirror for a short moment. In less than a few minutes, all the corpses in the cla.s.sroom had disappeared without a trace. Even the bone fragments, rotten flesh, corpse water, and debris on the ground had vanished. If it weren’t for the traces of the battle he’d left in the cla.s.sroom, Luo Jian would have doubted what he had just seen!
When did it all disappear? Why was it that he didn’t notice any of it?
Luo Jian suddenly thought of something. He quickly took out the Nokia cellphone he had found from his pocket. The time on it was 14:11.
However, after waiting for a long time, the screen still read 11 and did not jump to 12. It was as if time had stopped in that moment. It left Luo Jian in this terrible cla.s.sroom, crying out to heaven and earth for help to no avail.
Then, at this time, the Nokia cellphone in Luo Jian’s hand suddenly rang!
T/N: I’ve moved over to Please continue to support EIC here! ^~^
For now, there would be 2x/chapter a week!
And please welcome my editor, Kitty who would be joining me in bringing all of you here amazing EIC chapters!!
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