Chapter 50: Nightly Ghost Stories (2/2)
Bai Yan choked up from Luo Xing’s words, almost suffocating in the process.
He initially wanted to call out this brat saying, ‘Don’t speak up. Just go do your practice exams,’ but discovered that Luo Xing, who was hardly ever without his practice tests, was flipping over the archive with a concentrated expression on his face.
He suddenly became even more depressed.
“Okay, you guys quiet down. I want to listen to something.”
Ye Shangyu typed in a few commands on her keyboard, and the other two adjusted their heads to get a view of the screen, discovering an unfamiliar girl on it with a police officer questioning her.
“This is…?”
“En, Mo Kaka. She’s being questioned by the police for their records.”
“Big shot, can you cover for me? Have you teamed up with other players?” Bai Yan cheekily asked while grinning.
Ye Shangyu shot a glance at Bai Yan and indifferently said, “This matter is outside the game. Let’s listen to this first.”
The three’s attentions were completely on the screen. Ye Shangyu adjusted the laptop’s volume so that everyone could hear Mo Kaka’s testimony.
“…”
“…I didn’t find out anything in particular. Really, I was in deep sleep last night. I didn’t hear any suspicious movements nor did I sense anybody entering and escaping my dorm room.”
“Hidden under the bed? I don’t think this is plausible. The bottoms of our beds are narrow, even extending our arms there would already be difficult, so it couldn’t have been able to fit a person.”
“The bathroom is also impossible. Before we went to bed last night, we went to the bathroom several times, so how could someone be there.”
“None. I didn’t hear anything.”
“What did we do yesterday? Yesterday afternoon, Lanlan and I were together in our dorm room, playing on our phones. We were both looking at the school forum’s gossip section. When night fell, she went to get her quilt and came back. We then ate some yellow braised chicken and used our phones after. When it was lights out, we went to sleep at the same time…”
“Enemies? Lanlan didn’t have any enemies. She’s like me, an otaku. She also didn’t have a boyfriend. Normally, if we had the chance to not go out, we wouldn’t. Lanlan’s temper was also good, and she wouldn’t offend anyone.”
“Was there anything abnormal?… Oh right! Lalan read a scary post in the forum’s section called ‘Nightly Ghost Stories.’ She said it had something to do with a quilt, which made her scared… Uncle police officer, chopping up someone and only leaving a head can’t possibly be done without any noise. Do you think that Lanlan could have been killed by a ghost?”
“…”
When Mo Kaka’s statement had concluded, Ye Shangyu typed on her keyboard while asking, “What do you guys think? Let’s share our thoughts first.”
“The forum. Clearly the forum was the problem.” Bai Yan answered, “Ye Zi, can you find that post?”
“Wait a second, what did you call me?”
“Ye Zi ah. Luo Xing’s and my name are both only two characters long, so when one says it, it reads smoothly. Saying a three character name requires too much effort.”
“As you will.” Ye Shangyu deeply gazed at Bai Yan, then bowing her head and continuing to fiddle with something on her computer.
Not a moment too soon, she suddenly pursed her brows and frowned, saying to the two, “You guys give it a try. See if you could access the forum through your phones.”
“I got in.” Bai Yan said, “But before I do anything, explain to me what I have to do in advance. I don’t want to click open that post to see what would happen. Sun Yulan opened this post and died, so I reckon that once you see this story, you would automatically be in a ghost story, and I’m still not prepared for that.”
“No need to click on it, and you can’t also click on it because the post is gone!” Ye Shangyu brows strung tighter, “I took a look at the browsing history in Sun Yulan’s phone. It showed that she was looking at the gossip section inside the school forum for half of the day, but basically didn’t click on the ‘Nightly Ghost Stories’ section.”
“The post disappeared? I suppose it’s because we didn’t trigger certain conditions.” Bai Yan muttered to himself, “Is it possible that it’s only visible during a certain time? Or, if there’s a person that activated the ghost story, the post would disappear?”
“Those are all possible.” Luo Xing looked at the phone and said, “But, there’s also another possibility. The old post disappearing doesn’t mean that new ones won’t come out. We’d better not randomly click on things in the forum, just in case someone would accidentally click on the ghost story’s post and be the next protagonist of the ghost story.”
Obviously, they’ve found an important clue, but their investigation was still stuck in a rut.
Everyone wouldn’t dare act blindly without thinking, and all looked at the ‘Nightly Ghost Stories’ with bitterness and resentment.
In truth, they were not without a solution. It’s just that the method was too cruel, so no one proposed it.
Ye Shangyu and Luo Xing both kept their silence, so it was clear that they were intending to rely on time.
Seeing that Ye Shangyu was repeatedly looking over here, with a look that said ‘You’re the type of person that does this thing, just give it to me straight’ kind of expression, Bai Yan rolled his eyes and said, “Should we hire someone and ask him to help us?”
“Okay, the responsibility of finding someone to hire should be yours.” Ye Shangyu immediately added, “You mentioned it, so you go do it.”
Bai Yan looked Luo Xing in the eye, inwardly saying that if Luo Xing even dared pass up on taking this task, the next one who would be in that forum would be this kid(2).
High school students still carried a naive view of this world. Not accepting this kind of work would mean that he was lacking in a moral sense. Furthermore, there was also another option for them, but this method would have been a bit too troublesome.
“Forget it! You just help me research the ‘Nightly Ghost Stories’ poster. The site traffic for this section is only a small amount. A day’s worth of traffic only adds up to a handful of people. All these posts have tags that indicate the number of clicks they have. Each post shows that there are people clicking them open. We should find these people and ask them one by one so that we can always fill out the contents of the posts from this.”
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T/N: I know the previous chapter said that Sun Yulan clicked on the Nightly Ghost Stories Section, but I double checked the raws.
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