Chapter 30: The Woman in White on the Playground

After finishing my business, I stood by the window and peered outside. If she didn't show up soon, I wasn't sure how much longer I could hold out.

Wait...

As I turned back toward my bed, my eyes swept across the playground and suddenly locked onto a blurry figure. I quickly called out to Chen Yuming; having an extra pair of eyes would be safer.

"Shouldn't we wake the others?" Chen Yuming whispered.

"No, having too many people around will only make things worse!"

In the end, Chen Yuming and I snuck out and headed for the stairs. The lights in the corridor were all off, and we crept down with extreme caution, not making a single sound. After exiting the dormitory, we skirted the basketball court and reached the playground, where we hid behind a cedar tree and kept watch.

At first, there was nothing.

"Hey, did you get it wrong?" Chen Yuming whispered.

"Shh..." I signaled for silence. He shut his mouth and stared at the field.

Before long, a hazy figure began to move from the far side of the playground. No, she wasn't moving—she was drifting. It was a woman. The night was so dark that her features were indistinguishable, but it was clear enough that she was female. She drifted toward us with her head bowed, reached the corner, and then turned away. She repeated this cycle as if it would never end.

"Th-there really is... a ghost!" Chen Yuming’s eyes and mouth were wide open.

Could the dorm leader have been taken by this woman? I squinted, trying to make out her face, but it was obscured by her hair. After drifting back and forth for an hour or two, she finally changed direction. She brushed past the tree where we were hiding and drifted slowly toward the boys' dormitory. We turned and tracked her movements.

She stopped at the basketball court, pressed herself against the dormitory wall, and began to climb, reaching out with her hands to pull herself up. When she reached our floor, she nimbly slipped through the bathroom window. Seeing that, I was terrified—had she climbed in while I was in there just moments ago, I would have been scared out of my wits!

"Come on, let's go up!"

We abandoned our hiding spot and sprinted toward the dorm. We were halfway there when Chen Yuming stopped and tugged at my sleeve. "Look, what’s that on the roof?"

I looked up. Two silhouettes stood on the rooftop—a man and a woman. They hesitated for a long time as if they were arguing. Finally, they held hands as if to jump together, but at the last second, the man pulled his hand away and pushed the girl. She plummeted to the ground, and the man vanished. I rushed to the spot where she had fallen, but found nothing.

"What is going on?" Chen Yuming asked.

"It must be a magnetic field. In specific conditions, certain scenes can be recorded by the surrounding environment, like a video recording. If similar conditions occur again, the scene replays." I had read about this in a science journal; it was rare, but it meant that someone else must have stood here once, watching that exact same tragedy.

"Oh no! The female ghost!" I suddenly remembered the entity that had entered our room.

I took off running. That was a real ghost, and if the dorm leader had been taken by her, he wouldn't stand a chance. I reached our room in under thirty seconds.

I pushed the door open just as a classmate—the boy in bed five, right below me—was walking out. I took a closer look and realized his eyes were closed; he was sleepwalking. I didn't dare pull him, fearing that waking him suddenly might cause a fatal shock. I stepped aside to let him pass, then walked in and saw her.

Long white robes, long black hair—just like a ghost from a horror film. She stood by the bathroom door, manipulating our classmate. I realized what was happening and lunged forward, grabbing him just as he began to climb the railing. After pulling him down, I covered his eyes so he wouldn't see what was outside. He began to struggle violently, so to prevent any further harm, I struck him with a hand-chop to knock him unconscious. I left him in the corridor and rushed back into the room.

As I walked, I bit my middle finger to draw blood, dabbed it onto my forehead, and pulled out the copper coins I had prepared. But the moment the ghost saw me, she leaped out the window, showing no sign of attacking me at all!

I was stunned. Was my righteous energy so overwhelming that demons and spirits fled at the sight of me? I knew I was dreaming, but I chased after her anyway, calling for Chen Yuming to drag our classmate back to his bed.

She drifted; I ran. Naturally, I was much slower. By the time I reached the playground, she had vanished. If I didn't find her now, I might never find her again, leaving us completely vulnerable.

I stood on the playground, searching for a long time without success. I ran to the school’s waste dump and rummaged through the trash for ten minutes until I found a phone casing, which made me smile knowingly. Using other scraps from the pile, I fashioned a simple Kongming lantern. My grandfather had once told me that these lanterns could track lost souls; if you placed something the ghost had touched inside, the lantern would lead you to them.

I found a lighter under a stone slab in the landscaping, likely left by students who snuck out to smoke during gym class. I lit the lantern, and it rose slowly, drifting toward the center of the green belt before hovering in place.

"So, this is where you are!" I brandished my copper coins and marched toward the spot.

But when I arrived, there was nothing there. I looked up; the lantern was definitely hanging right above this spot. Was she underground? I found a wooden stake and began to dig. The soil was loose, and within ten minutes, I had cleared a large pit. As I jammed the stake down once more, it hit something soft. I pulled it out and saw it was stained with dark, clotted blood.

Something was wrong. There was someone down there!

I worked more carefully, prying away the dirt until a brown garment appeared—the same one the dorm leader had been wearing when he disappeared. My heart sank. The person I had just struck was likely him.

Chen Yuming walked over and went pale when he saw the clothes in the pit. "Is that the dorm leader?" he asked, trembling.

"I don't know yet." The body was face down; we couldn't see his face.

I asked Chen Yuming to help me flip him over—I didn't have the courage to do it alone. The body was stiff, like a log. We turned him, and my fears were confirmed. It was indeed the dorm leader. His expression was horrific; he had been scared to death.

I checked his body, but aside from the hole I had accidentally poked, there were no obvious wounds. The Kongming lantern had burned out and drifted down to snag on a nearby tree. I looked back into the pit and saw another layer of clothing beneath him.

Was someone else buried here? I pried at the dirt again, and before long, another corpse appeared. It wasn't recent—it was a skeleton that had clearly been there for years. I thought that was all, but beneath the skeleton, we found two more.

Four bodies, laid out neatly. The first had terrified me, the second less so, and by the third, I felt numb. We didn't know what to do. If we called the police, how could we explain why we were digging here in the middle of the night? But we couldn't just leave them.

We chose to call the police. After a long wait, the cruisers arrived without sirens to avoid disturbing the neighborhood. Four officers, the school security guard, the principal, and the two of us stood around the pit. It wasn't uncommon for construction in this school to unearth remains, as it was built on an old graveyard, but those were always ancient bones—not a fresh corpse.

The lead officer glanced at the pit, then turned his gaze toward us.

"How did you know there were bodies here?" His tone wasn't an inquiry; it was an interrogation.

"We saw a woman in white and followed her here, and that's when we found them," Chen Yuming said.

The police didn't believe a word about a woman in white. The officer’s face darkened, and he snapped, "I asked how you knew these bodies were buried here!"

I detested people like him, who used cold, accusatory language just to get the job done. Chen Yuming looked at me, equally curious. I pointed to the lantern snagged on the tree above us.

"That lantern led me here," I said. There was no point in lying.

These people claimed to be non-believers, but deep down, they were terrified of the supernatural. I had even seen the principal consulting a blind fortune-teller on the pedestrian bridge before. The officers looked at the lantern, then back at me, their faces hardening.

"You expect us to believe that?" the officer growled.

"Believe it or not, that's the truth!"

Their mindset was clear: they intended to drag us in, even if we were innocent, just to make their own lives easier.

"It's true! We really saw a woman in white!" Chen Yuming cried out, sensing the danger we were in.