Yun Xueqing said in surprise, “The Homeroom Teacher died?”
Who had done it?
Fu Wuxuan shook his head. “Unclear. I just sensed residual Oracle Spiritual Energy on the body.”
The Homeroom Teacher was a high-level Weird. Something capable of casually killing a high-level Weird could only be a high-level Oracle.
Yun Xueqing asked, “Someone from the Divine Temple?”
He still said, “Unclear.”
Among the Divine Temple, only a handful of people could casually kill a high-level Weird.
They were all old acquaintances, and he really didn’t want to run into them.
Fu Wuxuan touched his pocket. He suddenly craved a cigarette, but he had quit smoking for half a year, and his Storage Space had no stock left long ago.
His thoughts wandered irrelevantly: if Su Bai were here, he could shamelessly bum one off him.
Yun Xueqing watched him and suddenly changed his mind. “Let’s go check Yin Shixing’s dorm room for any other clues.”
If they could find that Denunciation Letter in his possession, the doubts weighing on their minds should resolve themselves.
They went to the dorm supervisor’s office and checked the registry to find the dorm rooms for Yin Yan and Yin Shixing.
Though they were brothers, they were in separate dorms—Yin Shixing’s on the fourth floor, Yin Yan’s on the third. They headed to Yin Yan’s room first.
The two had died this semester. No new students had moved into the dorm yet, and with no family to clear out their belongings, everything remained as it was.
Yin Yan had very few possessions—barely anything, just clothes and toiletries. Even those toiletries had been used up by his morally deficient roommates, leaving only empty bottles sitting there forlornly. Beyond that, just textbooks, which held nothing worth seeing.
The two rummaged around and found a tube of bruise ointment in a drawer.
Yun Xueqing suddenly recalled the student handbook’s description: Yin Yan was someone who loved to fight.
Compared to Yin Shixing, Yun Xueqing found Yin Yan the more mysterious of the two. Clues about him were too scarce; only special methods revealed even minor details.
He knew a spell called the Retrospection Technique. By holding an item, it allowed him to glimpse fragments of the owner’s past memories tied to that item. However, it had major limitations—it only showed relevant segments and consumed a great deal of Spiritual Power.
He gripped the bruise ointment, pursed his lips, and slowly channeled his Spiritual Power.
A water-blue light fell upon the ointment, and scenes gradually emerged before Yun Xueqing’s eyes.
The rumored brawler Yin Yan had a notably frail build. He sat alone on his dorm bed, covered in wounds, tears streaming as he applied the bruise ointment to his injuries.
The scene froze there. Yun Xueqing frowned and urged more Spiritual Power forward, pushing the vision ahead.
Bruise ointment required three applications a day. Sometimes Yin Yan couldn’t apply it in time and would slip the small tube into his pocket to tend his injured arm in class.
The ointment had little smell, but his deskmate pinched his nose in disgust. “Can’t you stop rubbing that stuff in class? It stinks!”
Yin Yan hung his head, his overgrown bangs obscuring his eyes, hiding his expression. He didn’t retort. Silently, he screwed the cap back on the opened tube and slipped it into his pocket without a word.
Yin Shixing, seated in the front row, heard the commotion and glanced back at him before silently turning away to continue chatting and laughing with his deskmate.
At noon dismissal, Yin Yan skipped the Dining Hall. Instead, several classmates of varying heights, builds, and weights cornered him in the hallway.
The leader, a tall and burly boy, grinned maliciously. “Bombed the test again, got chewed out by the homeroom teacher. Feeling the pressure—good thing I’ve got you, sandbag, to help me unwind.”
The others laughed too. One said nothing and simply punched Yin Yan in the face. Seeing him hit the ground brought a satisfied sigh. “Feels so good.”
The punch reopened Yin Yan’s old bruises, now layered with fresh blood. His face looked like a painter’s palette, mottled in every color.
A scrawny bespectacled boy trailing the bullies stepped forward, squatted by the fallen Yin Yan, and twisted his arm hard. In a flat tone, he said, “Such pale skin—turns red with just a pinch.”
Their insults and fists rained down like a storm.
Yin Yan let them hit and pinch without a peep from start to finish. He didn’t fight back, just kept his head down, hands shielding his face to mask his hatred and pain.
Plenty of people passed by after school, but not one intervened.
Someone occasionally hesitated, wondering if they should tell a teacher, only for bystanders to dissuade them. “Those bullies are top students. Don’t stick your neck out.”
In this grades-obsessed school, “excellent students” acted with impunity. A clique of them was untouchable.
Yin Shixing packed up and left the classroom, spotting Yin Yan getting beaten on the ground.
A companion hesitated. “Shixing, isn’t that your little brother getting beat? Should we…?”
Yin Shixing, as if accustomed to it, replied indifferently, “Can’t help him. He needs to learn to stand up on his own.”
Another companion chuckled. “Someone as outstanding as you, stuck with such a loser brother. Might as well die early—total embarrassment to you.”
Yin Shixing didn’t respond or refute, merely saying flatly, “Let’s go eat.”
The companions: “Yeah, let’s eat.”
Their footsteps faded. The teaching building emptied, leaving Yin Yan to endure his agony alone.
Finally, the burly leader sighed in relief, kicking Yin Yan several meters away in satisfaction. The bruise ointment and a letter tumbled out of his bag together.
The vision cut off there.
Yun Xueqing finished watching the school bullying scene, his face unconsciously darkening.
Fu Wuxuan noticed the mood shift. “What’s wrong?”
Yun Xueqing relayed the vision to Fu Wuxuan, who pondered thoughtfully. “Yin Yan wrote a letter, and Yin Shixing had one too. Did they each write their own, or was it the same one?”
He looked up, speculating casually, “If it’s the same letter, its contents might have nothing to do with the Orphanage.”
As he thought, he added another guess. “If it’s a Denunciation Letter, maybe it denounced this bullying?”
He shot down his own idea. “A grades-first school like this wouldn’t care about campus violence. Even if Yin Yan was too naive to realize it, he didn’t need to write a letter—showing up covered in wounds to the principal would’ve been proof enough.”
Yun Xueqing refrained from jumping to conclusions. “We’ll know once we check Yin Shixing’s room.”
They went up to the fourth floor. Yin Yan already had few belongings; Yin Shixing’s personal items were even scarcer—practically nonexistent, as if deliberately cleared out.
Fu Wuxuan frowned. “Someone searched through his stuff ahead of time.”
Yun Xueqing nodded. “Only a few textbooks left.”
He flipped open one casually. It was covered in dense notes, marked in different colored pens—clear signs of repeated review, with fresh insights each time.
Fu Wuxuan said wryly, “Study god. No wonder—the scariest aren’t geniuses, but hardworking geniuses.”
Yun Xueqing paused, stopping his flipping.
Fu Wuxuan noticed. “What’s up?”
“The handwriting.”
“What?”
Before Fu Wuxuan could grasp it, Yun Xueqing looked up, his clear black-and-white eyes holding an inscrutable emotion. “Yin Shixing’s handwriting in the textbook doesn’t match the diary we got from the Orphanage—the one supposedly his.”
The textbook notes were in flowing, elegant running script, practiced deliberately. The diary’s handwriting was crooked regular script—two different people’s.
Yun Xueqing said no more. He tore out a page of Yin Shixing’s notes, dashed back to Yin Yan’s third-floor dorm, and checked his textbooks.
Yin Yan was a poor student with sparse notes, but Yun Xueqing spotted it at a glance: Yin Yan’s crooked regular script matched the diary exactly!
He tore out a page from that too, took the two samples back to the first-floor dorm supervisor’s office, and replayed the surveillance footage, freezing on Yin Shixing holding the Denunciation Letter.
He zoomed in repeatedly. The image quality was poor and blurry, but Yun Xueqing barely made out the envelope’s handwriting: crooked regular script!
After triple-checking the comparisons, he confirmed: the so-called Yin Shixing diary was actually Yin Yan’s. And the Denunciation Letter Yin Shixing held was written by Yin Yan too.
Fu Wuxuan, piecing the clues together, understood. “So Yin Yan knew the Orphanage’s secrets. His Denunciation Letter likely exposed them. But for some reason, it ended up in Yin Shixing’s hands.”
Yun Xueqing nodded in agreement. “So we just need to find the letter.”
Ye Xuechun woke from his nap to the two big shots analyzing away while he silently played background.
Hearing this, he scratched his head in confusion. “So where’s the envelope? We checked both their dorms—nothing. Not at the Orphanage either… Someone else must’ve taken it.”
The clue hit a dead end.
His words brought a moment of silence.
Yun Xueqing, deep in thought, suddenly said, “Yin Shixing was a smart guy.”
Ye Xuechun: ?
What did that mean?
Fu Wuxuan smiled. “If the letter was in Yin Yan’s hands, it might’ve been taken. But it was in Yin Shixing’s. Holding such a bombshell secret, he’d have hidden it well.”
Ye Xuechun half-grasped it. “So the letter hasn’t been taken by anyone else? Just hidden somewhere super secret by him.”
Dragoncry Middle School had closed-campus management—no easy way out. With the school so big, where could he hide it?
Ye Xuechun rubbed his chin. “They say the most dangerous place is the safest… Classroom? Principal’s office? Teacher’s office? All possible.”
Fu Wuxuan added, “Could be the teacher’s office.”
Maybe the overwhelming Weird aura wasn’t just from that strange portrait—perhaps the dangerous letter was hidden there too.
With the biggest mystery on the verge of cracking, Ye Xuechun couldn’t wait to escape this Weird Domain. His earlier fear of the office vanished; he was eager to try. “Let’s go check the office or classrooms now.”
Fu Wuxuan shook his head again. “Those spots are too obvious. Something wrong there.”
Would the key to unraveling everything be that easy to find?
Ye Xuechun sighed. “School’s not that big. Gotta be office or classroom. Not like the library or sports field—right? Let’s search anyway.”
Burying it in the sports field, school flowerbeds, or tucked in a book would be like needling a haystack.
Not just them—even ten more people might not find it.
Fu Wuxuan didn’t move, instead looking to Yun Xueqing, who sat on the sofa still pondering.
The usual blank expression on his face was gone, replaced by rare cold solemnity. His normally vacant gaze, treating all things as nothing, now focused sharply—calm and intent.
Fu Wuxuan was about to speak, suggesting they check the office together and see if they could find the letter, when Yun Xueqing abruptly said:
“There’s one most dangerous place we subconsciously overlooked—a spot students never go. The letter’s there.”