Carrying My Senior's Coffin (GL) - Chapter 6

The icy aura spread quickly, instantly enveloping the three people in the hallway.

Youlan paused, tightened her grip on Manman’s hand, and quickly turned to run down the stairs. The sound of their frantic, haphazard running echoed through the stairwell, as if they were fleeing for their lives.

Fang Yiyi rubbed the goosebumps on her arms and remained motionless. She clearly felt a damp, sticky sensation cling to her back, accompanied by a faint, musty odor, like that of an underground parking garage.

She glanced at 404, not far away. Sure enough, the door was slightly ajar.

Perhaps because the curtains were closed, it was pitch black inside.

Fang Yiyi tightly pursed her lips, involuntarily holding her breath. After a two-second pause, she walked in.

Things had reached this point; there was no avoiding it.

The spring on the inside of the door was still working well. Fang Yiyi opened the door halfway and felt resistance. She stopped, watching her shadow cast on the floor framed by the light. The lines of her two legs were stretched to a bizarre length, and everything above her waist merged with the darkness. Fang Yiyi closed the door, and the small patch of light instantly vanished.

She regulated her breathing, her palms slick with a thin layer of sweat. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but the cold, sticky feeling on her back disappeared the moment she entered the room. It was like a piece of ice melting in the air, the coldness lingering in wisps around her.

“Can I open the curtains?” Fang Yiyi asked tentatively, her voice small, carrying obvious anxiety and fear.

No one answered.

Fang Yiyi thought for a moment, then quickly walked to the bed. With a whoosh, the heavy, ponderous curtains were yanked open. The long-lost sunlight instantly poured in, illuminating the long-silent little dorm room.

Dust churned up. Fang Yiyi instinctively closed her eyes, and her long eyelashes caught some dust, looking fuzzy in the sunlight.

Suddenly, a soft laugh sounded in her ear.

Fang Yiyi was startled. Her grip slackened abruptly, and the curtain thumped shut. The room returned to its customary darkness.

“You… you adapt quite well.” The voice was hoarse and ethereal, strangely articulated and toneless, like an ill-maintained tape recorder, swaying from her left ear to her right, making her deeply uncomfortable.

Fang Yiyi was speechless. A slight pain came from her right ear, and she felt something wrapped around her neck; her breathing was a little constricted.

“…Look over there,” the voice said again.

Look where? Fang Yiyi paused, but her gaze was somehow guided toward the direction of the small, dark compartment. A cold sweat immediately broke out!

The small room was still pitch black, but at the entrance, a shattered full-length mirror had been placed at some point. Shards were scattered on the floor, with only a few pieces still attached to the frame. Those few fragments acted like countless tiny eyes, clearly reflecting Fang Yiyi.

Fang Yiyi stood there, thin and frail. A black and white shadow, as if from a CT scan, was clinging tightly to her. The pale white bones of its arm were faintly visible, wrapped around her neck. Resting on her shoulder at a bizarre angle was an intact skull. The skull’s chin rested on her shoulder blade, and its teeth were biting the cartilage of her earlobe. From the back of the skull, a mass of tangled lines resembling hair draped down, covering the area from the skull to the tailbone, indicating the gender of this thing—it was vaguely female.

The arm holding her tightened, and Fang Yiyi groaned faintly.

“Are you going to kill me?” Fang Yiyi suddenly asked.

The ghostly shadow in the mirror paused. A hand caressed Fang Yiyi’s face, the bones of the arm twisting at an incredible angle, like a parasitic dodder plant. “Since you dared to return, haven’t you prepared yourself?”

Fang Yiyi closed her eyes, clenched her hands into fists, and tried hard to steady her breathing so her voice wouldn’t tremble. With a desperate air, she shouted: “I don’t want to die!… I don’t want to die,” her voice gradually shrank, as if she was speaking only to herself. Covering her face, she slowly crouched down, sobbing brokenly: “I don’t want to die… I haven’t gotten my diploma yet. I haven’t let my parents see me graduate… I don’t want to die… I just want to graduate quietly. Why, why are you forcing me? I have repeatedly backed down. Why can’t I even live…”

The small shadow huddled into a ball in the darkness, shaking and helpless.

After crying for a while, Fang Yiyi’s chin was grasped and forcibly lifted. Before her were two hollow, dark eye sockets—no eyeballs.

“Truly useless,” she heard the hoarse, grating voice say. Then, her neck hurt. She was lifted and her body was uncontrollably pushed backward, where she fell onto the bed she had just made.

Fang Yiyi’s vision was blurred with stars from being choked. The sudden lack of oxygen made her gasp for a long time before she realized she was pinned down again.

Her clothes were ripped open. A bone-deep coldness adhered to her skin, chilling her through and through. Unlike the first time’s haziness, she was now completely clear-headed. Her brain recorded every sensation vividly: it was both cold and painful.

Her cheek was patted. In the darkness, the thing whispered in her ear, telling her: “Remember this well.”

Fang Yiyi looked blankly at the outline, opening her mouth to let out a series of short, quick breaths.

…

“Buzz—Buzz—” In the dark dorm room, an old-fashioned phone buzzed the time. The small screen emitted a greenish glow.

Fang Yiyi picked it up, checked it, and pressed the button to silence it.

“It’s two o’clock,” Fang Yiyi said softly from the bed.

A shadow sat on the edge of the bed. Compared to its previous ethereal state, it was now deeper, showing hints of white flesh. The shadow was bent over, tidying its hair.

“I have class to attend,” Fang Yiyi shifted uneasily, trying to figure out how to get past the ghost to put on her shoes.

“…”

No one spoke. Fang Yiyi thought for a moment, then rolled off the bed.

The floor was dirty; she hadn’t had time to clean it. She bent down and carefully tried to step into her shoes. As her toes touched the shoe surface, an arm swept across, hooking her waist and pulling her back onto the bed.

Two pale arms braced on either side of her head. Wet hair clung to her face. In the shadow, two blood-red lips were exceptionally conspicuous.

“You want to leave? How can there be such a good thing? You’re not going anywhere today.”

As the saying goes, “First time a stranger, second time familiar.” The ghost’s energy seemed endless. Fang Yiyi simply emptied her mind and stopped resisting. Gradually, she began to feel an odd sense of pleasure beyond the pain. Eventually, she didn’t even know when she fell asleep, only waking up the next day with a rumbling stomach, terribly hungry.

Fang Yiyi sat up dazedly in bed, scratched her messy, sticking-up hair, and retrieved her crumpled school uniform from a gap in the bed. She spread it out and stared blankly at it.

How am I supposed to wear this?

“Dazed and confused. Reliving the memory?”

The memories of last night instantly flooded her mind. Fang Yiyi subconsciously shook her head obediently and looked toward the source of the voice.

A woman in a long red dress was sitting on the desk, her bare feet resting on the back of the chair, revealing her ankles. Her skin was so pale it looked transparent. Her long, half-dry hair spread out around her. Her face was delicate, her features petite, with slightly upturned eyes, carrying the lazy fatigue of being well-fed.

She was the perfect image of a female ghost who consumed human vitality.

As the one whose vitality was consumed, Fang Yiyi felt terrible. Just sitting on the bed, her entire body felt like it was falling apart. Her back ached intensely, as if she had been disassembled and reassembled. Every cell screamed with exhaustion.

She thought that if there was a mirror, she would likely see heavy dark circles under her eyes.

She also wondered if her life span would be shortened, and if so, how and by how much.

The good thing was that she was no longer as afraid as she had been last night. After two nights with the ghost, she could tell that this ghost wouldn’t kill her, at least not yet.

“What is your name?” Fang Yiyi asked.

The ghost toyed with her fingernails, giving her a half-smile and replying: “Li Ting.”

Li Ting?

Fang Yiyi’s eyes widened. “Ten years ago, there was a national top-scorer in the college entrance examination in Ning’an City, with 749 points, just one point shy of a perfect score. Then there was no news, and no one knew which university she attended. Was that you? Did you come to Zhengling Women’s University?”

Li Ting hummed in response, confirming it.

Although she didn’t know why a national top-scorer had become the female ghost of dorm 404, Fang Yiyi sincerely exclaimed: “You are so amazing…”

“That’s ancient history, why bring it up?” Li Ting scoffed, thinking of something, and her expression turned gloomy.

“Why aren’t you getting up yet? Didn’t you eat enough yesterday?”

Fang Yiyi was stunned, then quickly and efficiently put on her clothes.

What do you mean, didn’t eat enough? She hadn’t eaten a single thing since yesterday, and she was starving. If she didn’t eat soon, she felt like she might literally starve to death.

When she stood up, her legs gave out, and she didn’t manage to keep her balance. Her foot landed on the floor, and her clean sock was immediately covered with a thick layer of dust. Fang Yiyi’s pale face crumpled into a look of misery.

Li Ting was also disgusted. “So dirty.”

“…” Fang Yiyi didn’t know what to say. She had tried to clean several times but was stopped. She had assumed the ghost naturally preferred this dusty environment.

“I’ll go ask the dorm manager for some cleaning tools later.”

Li Ting tossed her a string of Buddhist beads threaded on a red cord. “Wear this. I’ll go with you.”

Fang Yiyi picked it up and examined it. The red cord was a common type sold on the market, but the beads looked like they were taken from somewhere else, intricately carved with dense, barely discernible scriptures. The two elements combined were somewhat mismatched.

By the time Fang Yiyi was dressed and ready to go out, it was half an hour later. Li Ting transformed into a wisp of smoke and concealed herself within the beads.

Walking downstairs, Fang Yiyi saw an ambulance parked at the entrance of the dorm building. She paid no mind to the commotion. She avoided the crowd and headed straight for the cafeteria.

Breakfast was self-serve: fried dough sticks, steamed buns, and various small pickled vegetables, accompanied by three types of porridge. Fang Yiyi was starving. She immediately grabbed two bowls, filled both with millet porridge, four fried dough sticks, one steamed bun, and a full plate of pickled vegetables. She found a corner and ate with gusto.

Some classmates passed by and sat down at the table next to hers.

“Is Nancy really insane? When I saw her being loaded into the ambulance, she was shouting ‘There’s a ghost! There’s a ghost!'”

“She sees everyone as a ghost. When I walked out of the dorm door today, she saw me and insisted I was a ghost. Her reaction scared me to death.”

“I think she broke her leg…”