Eldritch Horror Theatre

Theoretically speaking, the person who had just walked past was merely a student with a jacket wrapped around his head. Out of all the possibilities, that remained the most likely scenario.

Assuming they had a reasonable motive for doing so.

After all, returning to an empty school on a weekend was already bizarre behavior. Doing so with a jacket bundled haphazardly around one's head, as if too ashamed to be seen, was even stranger.

That mental state alone was sufficiently surreal.

Fu Qian's response was simple. To find out whether this figure was a man or a ghost—and if a man, why he would do such a thing—they just had to wait and see how things developed.

The mysterious shadow chasing from behind was clearly rushing toward a mutual encounter.

Of course, theoretically speaking, since the path forward was now clear, the most rational course of action for Eva would be to flee the area immediately, rather than stick around to watch the show.

Returning the pen to her, Fu Qian went straight back to the corner of the room to continue examining the peculiar corpse.

[Should we hide a little longer?]

This was despite the fact that the words written on the white jacket were now extremely difficult to make out.

[Sure.]

Fu Qian merely nodded. His attention remained fixed on the seated corpse as his hands carefully felt their way from the neck and shoulders up to the head.

For a corpse, the person's sitting posture could be considered quite dashing—far superior to the sprawled-out pose they had found him in earlier.

Moreover, without the massive amount of fake blood to obscure the details, the inspection was much cleaner.

This time, running his fingers through the curly hair, Fu Qian finally felt an unnatural indentation at the back of the skull.

It felt as if the head had been struck by something, though no blood had leaked out.

Therefore, rather than this being the cause of death, it was significantly more likely that the corpse had been battered post-mortem.

In that regard, this aligned much better with the situation back at the party.

But why someone would batter the corpse became a thought-provoking question.

...

It was obvious that although she had grown somewhat numb to the constant barrage of stimuli, Fu Qian's makeshift autopsy still managed to deliver a significant shock to Eva.

Coupled with the fact that the lighting had deteriorated beyond repair, her stiff hands finally gave up on written communication.

Yet, even though she looked chilled to the bone, she showed no intention of opening the door to leave, nor did she even prepare to step slightly further away from the corpse.

Fortunately, after Fu Qian finished feeling the head, he showed no inclination to inspect the rest of the body. Instead, he turned his attention to checking the clothes' pockets, eventually taking the jacket completely off.

He found nothing.

Every pocket was completely empty.

It sounded like the situation outside was the same.

Calculating the time, the person who had walked past with their head wrapped up should have bumped into their stalker by now. Yet, no sound had echoed out at all.

No matter how one looked at it, this didn't bode well. Not only were the two figures not killing each other, but it almost felt like they had successfully rendezvoused.

[There's no sound.]

Clearly, Fu Qian wasn't the only one with this concern; Eva had also noticed it. Since the words were now impossible to read in the dark, she simply pointed repeatedly in the direction the figures had come from.

[I know.]

Fu Qian nodded. The next second, he stood straight up, giving Eva a start.

[Are there any taboos about going up from here?]

Walking all the way to the door, Fu Qian took the pen and immediately wrote down that sentence, gesturing above his head.

Huh?

Barely managing to read the words by the faint light seeping through the door crack, Eva, who had subconsciously followed him, was visibly shocked. She couldn't understand what Fu Qian was planning to do.

[No.]

It wasn't until Fu Qian gestured to prompt her that she finally shook her head rapidly.

"But it's dangerous outside."

Then, noticing the shoes Fu Qian had picked up again, she seemed to realize something. Eva completely abandoned written communication, dropping her voice to a barely audible whisper to urgently warn him.

"So you can stay here."

Unfortunately, after replying in a similarly low voice, Fu Qian simply pulled the door open.

...

The figures were nowhere to be seen outside, and Eva ultimately chose not to follow him out.

Gently closing the door behind him, Fu Qian stood in the rapidly darkening gloom. After a brief sigh of admiration for Eva's strong will to survive, he continued forward in the direction he had initially intended.

This time, no new footsteps echoed from the stairwell.

But that didn't matter. Fu Qian slipped on the shoes he had been carrying, scanned his surroundings, and began to ascend the stairs.

Clang!

According to Eva, there were no special taboos about walking up here.

Of course, she had also warned him that the nearby railing was ancient; accidentally bumping into it would produce a significant amount of noise, making it incredibly easy to expose oneself in such absolute silence.

Fortunately, Fu Qian hadn't bumped into it accidentally.

After taking a few steps up, he used the faint light to lock onto a particularly rickety section of the railing. A second later, his foot slipped, and he threw his entire body weight against it.

The massive noise was piercingly loud in the darkness, accompanied by a teeth-grinding screech of friction.

Having caused such a racket, Fu Qian didn't pause for even a moment. He continued upward, suddenly accelerating his pace to perfectly mimic a desperate sprint for survival.

Not only that, but he even imitated the figure he had just seen, casually wrapping Joshua's jacket round and round his own head.

...

Doing this in an environment that seemed fraught with hidden dangers was undoubtedly an unwise choice. Anyone with a normal brain wouldn't pull such a stunt.

But thinking about it in reverse, if someone actually did this, it meant they either had no brains, or they had an abnormal motive.

Although he had managed to draw some vague conclusions from the previous two scenarios, it was still far from enough to untangle the overall logic of his mission.

In Fu Qian's judgment, if he successfully escaped in such a muddled fashion, the probability of the mission immediately being deemed a failure the moment he stepped out of this building would be extremely high.

From dusk until nightfall, the situation in this place had become increasingly complicated and bewildering. It was time to muddy the waters a bit.

And given how dead quiet every area was, making a ruckus was undoubtedly a highly efficient strategy.

Of course, since his grasp of the situation wasn't complete, he couldn't rule out the possibility that he was currently navigating through a horde of monsters with a Mortal Body.

Therefore, after muddying the waters, the best outcome would be to escape entirely unscathed.

After sprinting up a floor, Fu Qian casually flicked on the stairwell lights for this section, allowing his bizarre getup to be briefly exposed in the illumination.

Then, he immediately turned the lights back off, casually unraveled the jacket from his head, tossed it aside, and took off his shoes to carry them in his hands again.

Walking in utter silence, he left the stairwell and entered the corridor section on the floor above, casually opening a door and ducking inside.

This entire sequence of actions took less than half a minute from start to finish, yet it had undoubtedly shattered the tranquility of the night.

And as Fu Qian sat down behind the door and listened quietly, another set of hurried footsteps suddenly rang out—truly inheriting his will.

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