Mitternachts-Handbuch für paranormale Phänomene

Kapitel 9

You scumbags!

His hand gripping the dry cloth clenched into a tight fist. Oh no, he was about to lose his mind... He almost yelled those words out loud. The boy in the front seat was pounding his heart.

No! Absolutely not! Think about the consequences...

You coward, you can't afford this!

"Aa ...

Suddenly—

Suddenly, an unexpected "sound" swept down rapidly from the corner of everyone's eye.

For a mere fraction of a second, the extremely illogical "high-sweeping" direction of the sound caused everyone in the corridor—whether sweeping, walking, or chatting—to instinctively look towards the sink.

Thump.

A dull, strange sound.

"..." Gan Ze looked out from the sink.

"..." Xu Guoxian looked out from the sink.

“…” Wang Naiqiang looked out from the sink.

"?" The boy wiping the glass looked out from the sink.

This is the fourth floor.

The washbasin is against the wall, downstairs there are flower beds and drainage ditches, and behind that is a huge playground.

Looking from the washbasin area, you can see another parallel teaching building, and the students in that four-story building are also looking in this direction.

Everyone instinctively moved closer to the wall, peering out to search for where the shadowy figure had gone after swooping down.

Several hundred people screamed at the same time.

The screams grew louder and louder, and a few seconds later it was practically a hysterical chorus of a thousand people.

That dark figure was a person.

A mass of gore that even the word "bloody mess" cannot accurately describe—an extreme mass of gore and blood.

Strangely, the mangled mass of flesh was located in the very center of the playground, with no buildings around to provide the physical conditions for someone to fall from such a height. So it must be…

Looking up at the sky.

No planes passed by, nor did they leave faint white streaks as they cut through the clouds.

So from which height did this person fall at high speed?

A higher sky?

What place is higher up in the sky...?

The "falling object" seemed to be screaming as it fell, even though it was only for a moment, but many people must have heard it, right? That agonizing scream came from above in the past progressive tense, which many people could attest to.

Speaking of falling.

The force of the fall was astonishing.

The PU floor was badly dented. The corpse looked like a mosquito that had just sucked its fill of blood, bursting open as if it had been struck hard by two palms. Eighty-seven students were playing basketball on the playground at the time. Every single one of them was covered in bits and pieces of the corpse's flesh; none were spared.

Irregularly shaped splatters of blood writhed across the green basketball court. The blood droplets splattered as far as the eye could see, landing on the faces of Xu Guoxian and Gan Ze, who had been watching the spectacle from the fourth-floor sink. The blood was still warm and sticky.

Right, that sound.

It's said that the strange, deafening sound of the impact on the Earth's surface caused tinnitus in every student playing basketball at the time for three days. Just how high could it have fallen to produce such a terrifying sound? Before that, no one knew what the sound of a "human" impacting the Earth's surface could sound like. Even after questioning the students with tinnitus, none could aptly describe the sound using a metaphor, or what it resembled.

Everyone was talking about it.

The word "sudden" is insufficient to describe the bizarre and abrupt nature of this "accident." There were too many witnesses; everyone participated in this tragic and unbelievable scene, creating a very lively atmosphere.

Human nature is terrifying. Although the atmosphere was horrifying at first, many people actually laughed after the screams. Many people quickly took pictures of the terrifying scene with their phones, and many more described it with words like "Oh my god! I can't believe I've ever seen something like this in my life! It's truly a classic!" Almost everyone picked up their phones to call their friends and family, excitedly sharing the strange event.

The playground was packed with onlookers, noisy and bustling, with the constant clicking of camera shutters from mobile phones.

Fang Lin was unexpectedly rescued.

Having finally found something even more interesting than sexual harassment, Gan Ze and the other two rushed down immediately.

"Excuse me! Excuse me!" Gan Ze laughed loudly, "That's so cool! It's a paranormal phenomenon!"

Xu Guoxian kept looking up at the sky: "Where did it fall from?"

Squeezing through the crowd, Wang Naiqiang only dared to open one eye halfway: "Could it be from a UFO?"

The three people squeezed closer and closer until they reached the core area where the body had been directly hit on the playground. The onlookers chattered amongst themselves, and a flood of unfounded and wild speculations arose.

"Wow, that's our school uniform!"

"Is it really someone from our school? Which class are they in?"

"That's terrifying! More terrifying than a train crash!"

"Who did he offend? Was he executed by the underworld? I've read about it in novels. It's called 'throwing execution'."

"How could the underworld possibly go to such lengths? And... where would they even throw it from?"

"Why haven't the police arrived yet? Has no one called the police?"

"I feel like throwing up... The smell of blood is so strong. Excuse me, excuse me, I need to throw up... Ugh..."

"Could it be... dropped by a helicopter? Did anyone hear a helicopter just now?"

"Is that white stuff brain matter? It looks like tofu pudding..."

After a great deal of effort, the three of them finally reached the body.

"Completely rotten... So cool! You're amazing to die so spectacularly!" Gan Ze exclaimed in amazement. "How many people can die like a superstar? You're so cool!"

"You can't talk nonsense. Disrespecting the dead will have consequences." Being so close, Wang Naiqiang felt a chill run down his spine, and his legs went weak.

"How dare you be so disrespectful! Quickly take a picture of me with it, hurry, hurry, hurry!" Gan Ze handed his phone to Xu Guoxian, quickly squatted down next to the corpse, and made a victory sign: "Hurry up! Otherwise everyone will copy me!"

Xu Guoxian held his phone and pressed the shutter button with trembling hands.

Could this be the reason why some ghostly photos were taken? Xu Guoxian felt a shiver run down his lower abdomen.

"Your hand is shaking so obviously, let's do it again!" Gan Ze yelled, lingering next to the corpse and continuing to make a V-sign.

Click.

The unnecessary ambulance arrived.

The police, who had no choice but to come, also arrived.

The reporter who most wanted to come, of course, did come.

"Unidentified fallen object"... or perhaps "deceased person"? Their identity was quickly determined.

Although the face was smashed into a mangled mess, the deceased was wearing the school's uniform, and the brown student ID and name were clearly visible on the uniform.

Gan Ze, Class 6, Grade 2.

6

It's been three days.

DNA testing takes seven days, but...

Fingerprint matching only takes ten minutes if all the fingers to be matched are present.

The fingerprints of the body that fell from a height onto the playground were not shattered by the impact. Upon comparison, they matched Gan Ze's perfectly. Not just the thumb, but all the fingerprints of the fingers that could be found at the scene matched, and the blood type was also the same, AB.

The next step that current technology can take is to compare the DNA sequences of the two entities.

In four more days, we will know whether the body wearing Gan Ze's uniform and bearing all of Gan Ze's fingerprints is actually Gan Ze himself—this suspicion and hypothesis are extremely contradictory.

It's Chinese class again.

The essay topics are "My Views on School Bullying" and "On Loneliness," and students must choose one.

The composition book on the table was completely blank. Gan Ze sat blankly at the back of the classroom, his eyes empty like a dead man.

The dark circles under the eyes are very deep, and the contours of the forehead are much more prominent than usual.

"Don't overthink it! You're sitting right here, perfectly fine. You don't have time to die, right?"

Xu Guoxian patted Gan Ze's shoulder forcefully, but Xu Guoxian's eyes were also full of strangeness.

For the past three days, his best friend Wang Naiqiang dared not approach Gan Ze at all, and would quickly walk away whenever he saw him from afar. The other classmates did the same, avoiding Gan Ze, who "should not logically exist in this world," and only daring to comment on this focus of attention in the whole school from a distance.

Not just in our class, but in the next class, and the class after that… everyone in the school was talking about the corpse and Gan Ze, who was cursed by it. Reporters flocked to the scene, and both electronic media and newspapers and magazines wrote seven or eight versions of the supernatural legend about the corpse that fell from the sky. Of course, they also interviewed Gan Ze, who was treated like a superstar.

No, not as a superstar.

—It was treated as a corpse that still retained the ability to speak for the time being.

No one was more terrified than the protagonist, Ganze.

When Gan Ze was taken to the police station to give a statement, he came into contact with detailed evidence that other students couldn't access. The blood-stained uniform embroidered with Gan Ze's student ID and name had another chilling detail.

The tailor shop that embroidered Gan Ze's name on his uniform, being used to embroidering three-character names, didn't divide the horizontal space on the student ID number into two equal parts. Instead, they embroidered Gan Ze's name at the beginning, leaving an empty space behind it, making the overall proportions look unbalanced. Gan Ze was quite unhappy about this and used it as a reason to overcharge the tailor by twenty yuan.

And the name on the uniform worn on the exploded corpse was embroidered in that same uneven way.

When Gan Ze noticed this small detail, he almost peed himself on the spot.

"Go home first, and we'll find out what kind of prank this is."

When the police made this assurance to Gan Ze, their expression and tone were full of undisguised perfunctoriness.

In the past three days, Gan Ze hasn't slept for a single second.

He was terrified that if he fell asleep, he would become that corpse falling from the sky, and every time he felt sleepy, he seemed to have the hallucination that his feet were dangling in the air. It sounds silly and irrational, but for the person in question, it was an incredibly profound and immense pressure.

He conspicuously fell to his death in full view of the public, and then posed for a smug photo with his own corpse...

Even the most skilled magician couldn't do that, right?

Does Gan Ze know magic?

No. So it's definitely a curse.

Gan Ze visited five large temples and collected seven incense bags containing offerings of two Mazu statues, three Guanyin statues, one Guan Gong statue, and one Ji Gong statue, all gathered around his neck. He was frightened twice and obediently drank talisman water for two days. Even though he's not religious, he's learned to make the sign of the cross on his chest from time to time. Yesterday alone, he went to the school counseling office for psychological counseling twice.

Gan Ze's mental state is nearing its limit.