Since Li Menghan specifically mentioned the equipment room, there had to be a reason—some hidden trigger within the instance.
“Let’s check around. Be careful,” Dong Zi reminded her in advance.
He used a stick to probe the room first, making sure there weren’t any traps. Only after confirming it was safe did he step inside.
Dust blanketed the floor, half an inch thick. The moment he entered, he started coughing from the choking air.
Abandoned machines were piled haphazardly across the room. One wrong step and you could trip.
Suddenly, Dong Zi noticed something. He crouched down and ran his hand over the floor, his expression darkening slightly.
“There was a fight here. And old bloodstains… This place is definitely tied to a ghost story,” Dong Zi said, straightening up and scanning the room. “But we don’t have any clues yet. No way to figure out what actually happened here.”
Lulu nodded. “Let’s search around for now. Later, we can head back to the classroom building and ask some of the NPCs. Someone’s bound to know something.”
The two of them turned the equipment room upside down. In the cracks between the clutter, they finally discovered a torn-up diary—only a few pages remained.
There were no other useful findings.
As they stepped out of the room, Dong Zi carefully flipped open the diary and began to read aloud:
“March 11th, sunny. No one talked to me again today. I feel so alone at school.”
“March 26th, rainy. The teacher called on me in class and I answered correctly. The teacher praised me, but I heard them laughing behind my back.”
“April 19th. I’m in so much pain.”
“April 21st, overcast. They put a toad in my desk. I tried to get an apology, but they just kicked me. It hurt. It hurt so bad.”
“April 29th, rain. They cornered me. There were a lot of them. They beat me so hard I hurt all over. I didn’t dare come to school for three days. I hate myself so much.”
The rest of the content was smudged by water damage or torn out entirely.
The handwriting was neat and delicate, the tone clearly that of a girl—venting about her daily life and the pain of being relentlessly bullied by her classmates.
But something about it made Dong Zi uneasy. A strange feeling he couldn’t quite place, like something wasn’t adding up.
Lulu didn’t seem to notice anything off. She quickly caught on and analyzed, “This is school bullying. I didn’t expect your high school to be hiding so many skeletons—first a scumbag, now a bunch of bullies. What if all the ghost stories are like this?”
Then she realized how harsh that sounded and quickly added, “Just speculating! We still need to ask around and confirm.”
“Yeah.”
Back at the classroom building, it was still class time, so they couldn’t pull any students out for questioning.
Dong Zi thought it over and decided to target the teachers instead.
This kind of bullying was clearly a group effort. Ask the students, and they’d probably just cover for each other.
But Dong Zi wasn’t great with people. He could stay organized and efficient when it came to work, but when it came to social interaction—he was blunt, direct, no finesse.
Lulu, who was only marginally better but still the stronger of the two, took over the job of asking questions.
She picked an office with only a few teachers present and approached the one who looked the kindest and most approachable. Knocking on the door, she said, “Excuse me.”
The teacher looked up right away. “Come in.”
She had a warm expression, so Lulu entered and handed her a few of the torn diary pages. “We found this in the equipment room.”
As she finished speaking, she shot Dong Zi a look. He followed up, “Yeah. There was blood on the floor too.”
“Do you think something happened there, teacher? Should we call the police?” Lulu asked cautiously.
When the woman saw the diary pages, her expression flickered—almost imperceptibly—but if you looked closely, it seemed… normal. She nodded. “You’re both very observant, but you don’t need to worry about this. This… this happened a long time ago. But thank you for finding the diary pages.”
With that, she tucked the torn pages into her drawer and waved them away. “Were you two cutting class? That won’t do. Hurry back to your classroom.”
They were both stunned—completely unprepared for how fruitless the whole exchange had been. Not only did they get no answers, they lost several pages of the diary. It just didn’t feel like a good trade.
Dong Zi looked like he wanted to say something, but the teacher was clearly trying to usher them out.
They had no choice but to leave the office, exchanging awkward glances in the hallway.
“She definitely knows something.”
Lulu changed the subject. “My guess is she’s seen that diary before.”
Dong Zi agreed. “Could be. And she said it happened a long time ago—that means the bullied student either died or transferred out. Either way, they’re not here anymore.”
Just then, the bell rang for the end of class. Students poured out of their classrooms, racing for lunch.
Among the tide of running NPCs, Dong Zi grabbed one at random and asked, “Have you ever heard of anything happening in the equipment room?”
“You went to the equipment room?” The student NPC froze like he’d just heard a trigger word. “That place is haunted. No one’s used it in years.”
Dong Zi hadn’t expected a random NPC to be so useful. He quickly pressed for more. “Anything else?”
The student NPC said, “Just that it’s haunted. People have been scared there. Now nobody dares go near it.”
He tried asking for more detail, but the NPC had nothing left to say—just empty, repetitive lines.
So he let the kid go eat.
Lulu said, “It’s fine. At least we’ve confirmed that it’s connected to a bullying case.”
The two of them headed back toward the equipment room, hoping to trigger some kind of haunting event.
But just as they stepped onto the sports field, Dong Zi suddenly said, “Someone’s following us.”
Lulu focused—and immediately sensed it too. There was a gaze flitting across their bodies, watching them. She tensed, exchanged a look with Dong Zi, and the two of them split up.
The stalker hesitated when they separated, unsure who to follow. In that moment of indecision, a figure darted behind them. Dong Zi lunged, grabbing the person from behind in a chokehold and spinning them around—
It was the female teacher they’d spoken to earlier.
She’d been following them this whole time.
Dong Zi released her immediately. Even though she was an NPC, she wasn’t like the standard script-following ones. She felt more like the key characters from previous instances—like Yun Qing or Wang Fan. She had her own thoughts, her own presence.
Just as he’d suspected—this was a crucial character.
“You were following us?” Lulu looked at the teacher, confused. “Was that your diary? Or… did it belong to someone you knew?”
The teacher didn’t get angry at the barrage of questions. Instead, like a real person, she looked a little sad.
“I did know them,” she said softly.
“You—”
“But first, you have to tell me: why are you investigating this? Are you really trying to find out the truth? Do you have the ability to right this injustice?” the teacher asked.
Lulu was caught off-guard by the sudden barrage of questions. “Right the injustice?”
Wait—was the victim of this school bullying still around? Still being tormented?
“I believe you. I can do it,” Dong Zi said without hesitation.
The female teacher looked like she’d just grabbed hold of a lifeline. Leaning against the wall, she finally revealed the secret she’d kept buried for years.
The diary’s author wasn’t a girl, as they had assumed—but a quiet, delicate-looking boy.
His name was Cheng En. He had been one of her students the year she first started teaching, fresh out of university. He was exceptionally bright, kept to himself, gentle and reserved—everything a teacher could hope for. She had praised him many times in class.
But over time, she began to notice something was wrong. Cheng En was deeply unpopular in the class. Whenever she complimented him, snickers and sneers would ripple through the room.
She couldn’t understand it—until one day, she overheard a few students talking.
To them, Cheng En was an “oddball.”
He didn’t fit in. He was too clean, too well-mannered, too quiet. His handwriting was beautiful, his demeanor soft-spoken. Things that should have been praised were instead mocked. They called him a niangpao—a slur for someone “too feminine.”
Those who bullied him were jealous of his grades, yet also convinced someone like him had no right to be among the top students in class.
Their harassment escalated. Each time worse than the last. Until one day, they dragged him into the equipment room.
There were too many instruments in there. Someone grabbed a bat—no one knew who—and swung it at Cheng En’s head.
He collapsed instantly, blood pooling from the back of his skull.
The students panicked. They hadn’t expected things to go that far. They fled in a frenzy.
And Cheng En… because no one got help in time, died there—alone.
“So after that… to keep them from hurting anyone else, I started pretending the place was haunted. I made it as scary as possible to drive them away,” the teacher said, voice growing more pained. “It was the only thing I could think of. But Cheng En’s life… it was already gone.”
To be rejected simply for being different…
Dong Zi instantly thought of Liao Xing, from the hospital instance.
The boy in this instance was just like Liao Xing—only here, the pressure didn’t come from family, but from school… from classmates.
This was school bullying that had escalated into outright physical violence.
And it was in the past.
They were too late to save him. He’d already lost his life in the darkness of that torment.
The teacher’s voice trembled as she continued, “I… I thought if they didn’t get a reaction from him, they’d lose interest. That if he just endured, he’d be safe…”
She never imagined it would get so bad—that a child would die in the equipment room.
Worse, one of the bullies had powerful family backing. None of them were ever punished. Only Cheng En’s parents had screamed and wept in heartbreak.
It didn’t change a thing.
Lulu sighed. “Scum like that don’t stop just because their victim doesn’t fight back.”
The teacher lowered her head. A single tear splashed onto the ground. Her voice broke. “I taught him to study hard, to be diligent, to be polite… But I never taught him how to protect himself… I failed him.”
She thought if a good student stayed quiet and respectful, the bad ones would lose interest.
But she forgot—there’s a word in this world: relentless. A mindset of: If I’m miserable, then so are you. There are people—garbage—who don’t stop just because they’ve gone too far.
Garbage doesn’t “learn their lesson.”
