Escape the Infinite Chambers

Chapter 39 - Flowers In The River And The Moon’s Reflection In The Lake (III)

“But one body is missing.” Luo Jian repeatedly counted the number of corpses in the classroom, and with the addition of the teacher’s corpse, the total number was only 35. However, there were 35 student desks, so where is the corpse of the last student?

Did it disappear?

Luo Jian looked around the classroom and paid attention to the corpse of the teacher in front of him again. From the appearance, the teacher died miserably. The teacher’s head was pierced by an iron teacher’s pointer. It went through from the corpse’s left temple and protruded out from the right ear, causing a large crack in that area of the corpse’s skull. As a weapon, the pointer is not completely sharp, but the ends of it were of a smooth curvature. But seeing the way this teacher died, it is likely that the pointer was thrust into the teacher by someone. The pain the teacher felt could only be imagined.

After the teacher died, the corpse was hung on the ceiling with a rope. Luo Jian lifted the corpse’s clothes and noticed that there were many cracks on the bones of the hands and feet of the teacher. He gauged that the teacher probably suffered from inhuman torture when the teacher was dying.

“To be able to cause that many injuries, it can be seen that it was not only the work of a single person, most likely...” Luo Jian took a glance at the rows of students’ corpses sitting below and then reverted his gaze back to the poor teacher’s corpse. He sighed with pity. He didn’t know what the teacher had done before the teacher’s death, which caused everyone to torture the teacher to death.

It seemed that the culprits are obviously this group of students, but perhaps, it may only involve a part of this group of students too. However, regardless, if one can watch their teacher being tortured to death and watch the culprits hang the corpse onto the classroom’s podium, whether this group of students were involved or not in this crime, it is evident that they were at least the accomplice.

Towards the national education system, Luo Jian knew that studying is mandatory, but this kind of education is really flawed. He felt that it’s even possible to produce some abnormal murderers. He thought of the news reports of many classmates and roommates killing each other in the past few years, which only fully proved that there is nothing that human beings can’t do in this world.

Luo Jian searched the teacher’s corpse’s pocket and he found a wallet, a bunch of keys, a piece of mirror fragment.

“What’s the use of this mirror?” Luo Jian stroke the mirror fragment. The fragment was relatively small, and its edges were sharp. Luo Jian took out the fragment which he found from the female corpse moments before. The two fragments could not be put together, so he sighed again and placed them all in his pocket.

In addition to the mirror fragments, other things seem to be of little value. The ID card in the wallet read Wang Teng and there were several hundred yuan of Grandpa Mao stuffed in the wallet. It is a pity that when you are born, you don’t bring anything with you and with your death, you can’t bring anything with you either. When you leave this secret chamber, you cannot bring them out except for what you brought in at the beginning.

So, Luo Jian threw the wallet aside and placed his concentration on the set of keys. Although the secret chamber would not make it so easy for him to find the key to open the door, with so many keys here he could not help but want to try to use these keys to do it.

Luo Jian insisted on not letting go of any chances. Therefore, he immediately snatched the keys and made various comparisons on the lock of the redwood door, but he could not find any that could match the lock. Luo Jian was disappointed and threw the key on the desk, but later, he seemed to think of something, and kept the set of keys. He placed it into his pockets.

After checking the body of the teacher, Luo Jian then focused on the blackboard behind the corpse. On the blackboard, there was a poem written with white chalk. The chalk words were askew and twisted. At first glance, they were like words written by a primary school student. But the content of the poem really made Luo Jian confused:

Under the dark eaves, white written words were seen in the black backdrop, broken pieces are scattered everywhere, and yin and yang are within your grasp.

One side is one side, one side is also one side, a left hand exchanged for a right hand, your face is my face.

Luo Jian was inexplicably incited by this poem. He felt his hair stand due to the chill. Luo Jian could understand these two phrases- “Under the dark eaves, white written words were seen in the black backdrop”. The ceiling of this classroom was originally white, but because of this place appeared to be from an era long ago. Perhaps due to the water leakage, there is a layer of dark mould on the ceiling. The light did not illuminate over the ceiling much. Thus, the ceiling appeared to be in a shade of black.

‘White written words were seen in the black backdrop’- it obviously meant the blackboard. But what do the ‘broken pieces are scattered everywhere’ mean?

Luo Jian stepped forward and approached the blackboard, but as soon as he reached the front of the blackboard, he felt something under his feet. It sounded with a creak. Luo Jian glanced down. To his surprise, there is another mirror fragment under his feet.

In some horror movies, the presence of a mirror always hints to the existence of something unknown. For example, a black shadow flashing in the mirror, a blood face reflected in the mirror, or because of a prank, someone would use blood to write words on a mirror. Such an object drenched in blood is rather creepy.

There are also cases with broken mirrors, which usually indicates that the protagonist will be broken into pieces, akin to how the mirror is like.

“I can understand the phrase ‘broken pieces are scattered everywhere’, but what does the phrase of ‘yin and yang are within your grasp’ mean?” Luo Jian picked up the mirror. Now he has got three pieces of mirror. It felt like he was doing a collecting items quest. He fixed his eyes on these mirror fragments. The broken pieces can only reflect a part of Luo Jian’s face. Looking at it, it appeared as if Luo Jian’s face is split into four or five fragments.

‘One side is one side, one side is also one side’-Luo Jian completely could not comprehend the second half of this poem phrase. He could only guess that this may also be related to the mirror. After all, what reflects in the mirror is the opposite of reality. The left hand’s reflection would show the right hand.

What is more, the background of the secret chamber involves the use of the word ‘mirror’, which made Luo Jian thought of many different assumptions. But what is the use of a mirror? Could it be that one could escape if one could find all the mirror fragments?

Moments later, Luo Jian decided not to get tangled up in the thoughts of the mirror. He searched around the podium and found nothing special. So, he searched the students’ desks and chairs below and searched through each and every corpse. It was a disgusting and exhausting task. Some of the corpses had rotted to the extent where there were only bones left were not so disgusting. However, if there were rotten flesh left hanging on the corpse or maggots crawling on it, those were the corpses that were utterly disgusting. When walked up to every corpse, he had to summon up 120% of his courage. Besides this, he still had 30 over corpses waiting for him to search through them.

It took Luo Jian an hour to search through every corpse. One-third of the three hours passed. During the process of searching, Luo Jian was very careful to keep the completeness and the position of every corpse as much as possible. Most of the corpses were sitting on their chairs. There were a few of them that were lying on their desks. One of the female corpses died more miserably compared to the teacher hanging on the podium. Although Luo Jian was not a professional forensic scientist, he still saw how the female died-the female corpse’s cause of death was rape.

The corpse’s cervical vertebrae were broken, the legs were twisted in an extreme angle and it appeared that her legs had been pried open, the clothes on the corpse were full of holes and dirty, the leg bones were broken, the entire corpse laid back on the chair, and the head was drooping. After gazing at the corpse for quite a moment, Luo Jian finally cannot help but sigh. He tore down the curtains in the classroom and used it to cover on the female corpse.

The one who died miserably seemed to be the key figure. He also got two pieces of mirror fragments from this female corpse. After searching through all the corpses, he got seven pieces of mirror fragments. He immediately jumped onto the podium and began to piece the mirror fragments on the teacher’s desk. The mirror was the size of four palms, in a rectangular-like shape. It was the kind of small mirror that little girls usually took out from their bags to take a glimpse when they needed to. However, it did not matter how Luo Jian tries to piece it together, because the pieced mirror is missing a fragment. The mirror seemed to be missing a fragment in the middle.

In addition to the mirror, Luo Jian did not get anything of key importance from other corpses. What was found were just books, pens and test papers commonly owned by students. There were also some old-fashioned martial fantasy novels, expired snacks, and garbage bags. He also found a small game console. It was the old-fashioned kind of game console. However, it seemed to be broken.

Other than these, the most important things found should be the little pieces of message slips that Luo Jian has collected.

A message slip is a kind of paper torn from a book in class and in it, one can write what wants to say to the receiver. It can be folded into a square or rectangular-like shape or simply crushed into a ball so that the students next to you can pass the message to the other till it reaches the person you want to convey the message to.

Luo Jian found five pieces of such message slips in total. When the slips were unfolded, one could see that there were different written words in different handwritings, some were gossiping or having boring conversations. However, Luo Jian noticed that the contents of these notes all mentioned something about a certain someone, and when talking about this person, they all used a kind of way to refer to this person, for example, one of the slips are written as follows:

[After committing such an act, how can this person continue to stay in this class]

[It’s Slut Wang who opened the back door for her]

[How shameful, she had already been XX!]

[Last time I saw her go to the hotel with a man]

[Since she likes to be fucked by others so much, it would be better if she is killed]

At the end of the conversation, Luo Jian could glean a lot of information from it. For example, the corpse that had been raped to death may be the “she” in the message slip and the so-called “Slut Wang” is the teacher Wang Teng hanging on the podium.

There is an unusual relationship between the teacher and the female student. Moreover, the female student is isolated by most of her classmates and they deemed her behaviour as improper. But there are still some points of doubt......

Luo Jian frowned. Even if the girl really behaved badly or had all kinds of unusual relationships with people out of school, the most common thing was to that she would be gossiped about by other students and she would be hailed by the school’s headmaster or other higher-ups. Then, this matter would be settled by expelling her out of school. It would not be that serious where she would end up being murdered.

Exactly what was the reason that caused this group of students to be so crazy? They killed their teacher and raped their female classmate. In the end, all of them even collectively died in this classroom.

Luo Jian looked at the message slips over again, and he found that he could not find more valuable information. Issues that had passed long ago no longer had any value, and these people had already died. Luo Jian also did not want to explore the various reasons that caused this to happen. What he troubled over is that he missed at least one mirror fragment and after searching through every corner of the classroom, he could not find more fragments.