Nana Toki drifted farther in, and the air thickened around them like damp velvet, the mood turning stranger with every step. By the end, blood-letters smeared the second-floor walls in clotted swaths, the words drowned like ink in rain.

“How long do we have to stay here?” Xuduo’s voice shook beside Lu Ming, fear pooling in her chest like cold water before she dared to speak. She wasn’t like Nana and Lu—one wraith, one man—both steady as iron nails. This kind of chill, this kind of warped silence, gnawed at her nerves like moths at silk.

“Emmm, at least till we find the staff office,” Nana said without looking back, her figure floating ahead like a lantern on a misted river. “You saw the first floor. Classrooms held no answers; the Red Robed Wraith didn’t show. The only place where anything useful might linger is where teachers work.”

“What if we can’t find it?” Xuduo edged closer to Lu, heat rising to her cheeks like a hidden ember.

“Can’t find it? Then we go back to the New Campus and wait for them to come to us,” Lu said, the words falling like pebbles into a well.

“Come to us?” Xuduo’s whisper was a leaf rattling in a draft.

“It means go home, wash your neck, and wait to die,” Nana cut in, short and clean, like a blade across frost.

Ever since she decided to return to the Soul Carriage to seek that boy, they’d been naked in the Ghost School master’s gaze, exposed like fish in a clear pond. One careless move, and the few remaining days of this exchange trip could turn fatal.

Xuduo fell silent, her breath a tiny thread.

They—two humans and one wraith—stopped and started along the second-floor corridor, like swimmers testing black water. Maybe it was Lu Ming’s nerves, but the passage felt like a throat narrowing, the hush so deep he could count their footsteps like beads.

He noticed something else. “Isn’t this corridor too long?” The thought rose unbidden, a pale moth in his mind. From outside, this hallway was shorter than the New Campus by half, but they’d been walking nearly three minutes, and the end was a receding moon.

The walls leaned in, slow as vines tightening around a tree. Unease spread in Lu’s gut like oil. He broke first, voice pitched toward the floating figure ahead. “Ling Jiang, haven’t you noticed the walls drawing toward the center?”

“I have,” Nana said, calm as winter water.

“Then why keep going? Ahead is unknown, a mouth of fog. We could drop to the next floor, regroup, plan, then move.” Even an exorcist hardened in deep mountains—bones knit by wind and night—could sour at a stinking dark that kept closing like a trap.

“Can you swear the way back is the way we came?” Nana halted, holding the air like a held breath. “You’ve seen it. This corridor stretches like a bad dream—what should take seconds has turned to minutes. It stinks of tricks.”

“Imagine we turn the moment we spot the tell. What if the walls keep shrinking?” Her voice was a bell in fog. “We’d walk forever in a tunnel with no dawn, crushed between ribs of stone, or jump early to escape the slow grind of despair.”

“The best path is straight through. If the Old Campus’s Red Robed Wraith is truly tied to the boy on the Soul Carriage, it won’t watch us die. With ghosts, you conquer fear—you don’t bow to it.”

She turned and glided on, pale as ash. Lu chewed the inside of his cheek, thought hard, found no better answer, and followed, jaw clenched like a locked door.

At the same time, in the New Campus, a phone trembled on the bedside table in Dorm Seven, the vibration a trapped insect under glass.

“Bzz—”

“Bzz—”

Half-asleep, Xiaoxiao Ji fumbled through the dark like a blind cat, fingers finally finding her phone. Who was texting at this hour, stirring the pond?

She tilted her head and blinked at the message, a ripple of surprise touching her face. Lu Ming?

He’d gone to explore the Old Campus with the ghost-sister. Why text now?

“You there?”

The message was bare as bone. Xiaoxiao stared, the meaning thin as smoke.

“Bzz—”

“Bzz—”

Another text slid in, the same two words.

“You there?”

Sleep tugged at her like heavy snow. She wanted to toss the phone aside and drift, but worry pricked her skin like needles. After a beat, she typed with the hand hiding under the quilt. “I’m here. Lu, do you need something?”

“We were attacked by the Red Robed Wraith in the Old Campus. Xuduo’s badly hurt. Can you come help me get her back to her dorm?”

His replies crawled, slow as cold syrup. Without that last thread of will, Xiaoxiao would’ve sunk back into dreams.

Attacked, in the Old Campus? Sister Ling Jiang said the Wraith was tied to the boy on the Soul Carriage. Why strike without reason? The thought was a thorn.

She wanted to call, let her voice cut through fog, then remembered the night pressed in and her roommates slept like stones. She typed instead, the question tight as a knot. “Where’s Sister Ling Jiang?”

“......”

No answer. On her side, Xiaoxiao’s left eye twitched, a sparrow’s wing beating once. Sleep fled like mist.

Something was wrong.

“Hey? Lu, you still there?”

She sent the text, breath hitching.

After a long pause, his reply came, a dull bell in the dark. “Just hurry over. I can’t drag her into the boys’ dorm.”

“Okay. Wait for me. I’m coming now.”

Xiaoxiao trusted Lu not to lay dirty hands on Xuduo, but gossip was a weed that grew overnight. If Xuduo woke in the boys’ dorm, the school would buzz like hornets.

These two, she thought, and her heart felt like a wrung cloth.

She slipped from bed and pulled on the jacket Nana Toki had plastered with yellow Talismans, their edges crisp as dry leaves. She straightened herself and ghosted out, phone a small moon in her hand.

“Bzz—”

“Bzz—”

Before she’d gone down a few flights, her phone shivered again. Another text from Lu.

“You there?”

“I’m heading downstairs. Where are you?”

She reached the first floor of Dorm Seven and stared at the main door, locked tight by the dorm supervisor, iron cold as winter bark. She typed, breath fogging in her chest. “The front door’s shut. I can’t get out.”

“There’s a key in the stone crack at the lower right of your iron gate. Hurry. We’re under the big tree to the left of the teaching building.”

His reply made her eyelid jump, a flicker of warning like a fish flashing in dark water. How did he know their door key?

Lu looked mild, a scholar on the surface, not the kind to raid girls’ dorms like a beast in clothes. Then where did that key come from?

Fine. She’d ask him later and nail it down.

She crouched and felt along the stone seam, fingers finding the cold bite of the key. Heart held tight, she turned the lock and slipped out of Dorm Seven. The teaching building should be this way, she remembered, the path a pale ribbon.

Night at Longvine Academy was hushed, a lake sealed under ice. Xiaoxiao walked the dorm-road and felt the chill creep like ivy up her spine.

She flicked on the phone’s flashlight, a thin blade of white. Her unease didn’t thin; it pooled, dark and steady.

“Bzz—”

“Bzz—”

Her phone bucked suddenly, and she startled, breath scattering like beads. It took a moment for her pulse to settle.

“You here yet?”

He sounded urgent—at least, the words felt pushed, like footsteps quickening.

From the start, Lu’s side had felt off, a cold draft under the door. Maybe it was a prank—she shook her head, spat the thought. Lu had decent character; he wouldn’t toy with her at midnight.

“Almost there. Hold on.”

She touched the yellow Talismans on her jacket, paper crisp under her fingers, and shivered as if a shadow had breathed on her neck. Better get Xuduo back fast. How was the ghost-sister now?

Xiaoxiao jogged, breath like mist, and reached the big tree to the left of the teaching building. The shade lay black as ink.

But no one stood there. The silence was a closed fist.

“I’m here. Where are you?”

She sent the text and scanned the building’s face. Her sleeves tightened around her hands; the air felt wrong, like a stage after the actors had fled.

“Ah... so you’re here...”

A voice rose behind her, familiar and strange, a mirror fogged over. Before she could turn, the world blurred; something smothered her nose and mouth, and a crushing dizziness flooded her skull like deep water.

At the same moment in the Old Campus, as Lu Ming followed Nana Toki down the black throat of the hallway, his phone jolted once, a small tremor. He pulled it out and glanced at the new mail. From Xiaoxiao Ji. Two bare words:

“You there?”