Grade 11 Class 0

Chapter 26

"What do you mean by that?" Chen Shuai asked.

"What are you pretending to be confused about? One of you is clearly Prince Qiu but claims to be Xu An, and the other is clearly Deng Zhuofan but calls himself Chen Shuai. I want to know what you're really up to?"

Chen Shuai sighed and said, "I am indeed Deng Zhuofan. I didn't disappear back then, I just fell into a coma. After I woke up, my mother, who is Principal Chen, didn't want me to think about Class 0 of the first year of high school anymore, so she sent me abroad and changed my name to Chen Shuai."

Lin Nana looked at Chen Shuai with suspicion: "Are you telling the truth?"

"If I'm lying to you, may I be run over and killed the moment I step outside!" Chen Shuai was so angry he didn't know what to say.

Lin Nana then turned to Xu An: "And what about you?"

“I am not Prince Qiu,” Xu An said coldly.

“But you look a lot like Prince Qiu.” Lin Nana looked Xu An up and down.

“Just like him.” Xu An’s cold words left Lin Nana speechless for a moment, but Chen Shuai said readily, “Xu An and Prince Qiu are twin brothers, but they were adopted by different parents and separated. Now that Prince Qiu is dead, Xu An is here to investigate.”

"So that's how it is." Lin Nana still looked at Xu An in disbelief.

Xu An turned his head to the other side, refusing to look at Lin Nana, and said coldly, "Now it's your turn to be talked to."

"It's best not to hide it," Chen Shuai added.

"I've had enough, I don't want to hide anything anymore," Lin Nana shouted. "I fainted for no reason, and when I woke up I found myself trapped in a room. I was trapped for a whole year, and no one talked to me, no one paid any attention to me!"

Chen Shuai and Xu An exchanged glances, and Chen Shuai spoke first: "What kind of room is that? Why were you trapped in it? And how did you get out?"

"It was just an ordinary old house. I don't know why someone trapped me inside. I was able to get out because I was asleep. When I woke up, I found it was dark and I was lying on the stage of the concert hall. I was really scared, so I ran out and ran straight to find Teacher Xia. I remember Teacher Xia was terrified when she saw me!"

"Why didn't you go home? Why did you come to find Teacher Xia?" Chen Shuai then asked.

"Because...because Teacher Xia is my older sister."

Chen Shuai looked at Lin Nana in surprise, and Xu An also turned his head.

"I was adopted by Ms. Xia's parents, so Ms. Xia is my older sister," Lin Nana explained softly.

"Now that you're out, why don't you go find the police?"

“I wanted to go, but Teacher Xia said Peng Zhi’s body had appeared, and that the people in Class 0 of Grade 1 died mysteriously back then, so there must be something wrong. If I’m not dead and I appear in front of the police, I’ll definitely be suspected.” Lin Nana shook her head desperately: “I don’t want to be suspected by the police, and I don’t want to be murdered like Peng Zhi!”

"Could it be that Teacher Xia discovered Peng Zhi's body before Xiao Yuan and I?" Xu An whispered.

“She was murdered! I know she must have been murdered!” Lin Nana’s body began to tremble. “When I was trapped in that room, I heard screams. I recognized Peng Zhi’s voice. She screamed in pain, and I heard her say…” Lin Nana’s hands clenched tightly together, and her body trembled more and more.

"What did she say?" Chen Shuai pressed.

"She said...she said..." Lin Nana suddenly shouted, covering her face with her hands and weeping, "Peng Zhi shouted before she died, 'You are in Class 0 of Grade 11...you are in Class 0 of Grade 11...' From that day on, I never heard Peng Zhi's voice again." Lin Nana cried very sadly.

Chen Shuai and Xu An both fell silent, their heads bowed and saying nothing.

"I can't believe anyone, I really can't believe anyone. Peng Zhi's words must be hinting at something. I'm wondering if what she said was telling me that the murderer is a student from Class 0 of the first year of high school!"

Chen Shuai and Xu An both looked at Lin Nana.

"Xu An, what do you think?"

"I think we should go somewhere now."

"I think so too. If we look carefully, we might make some new discoveries."

Xu An and Chen Shuai looked at each other, and neither of them spoke.

Lin Nana looked at Xu An and then at Chen Shuai: "What are you talking about? Where are you going?"

“The concert hall!” Chen Shuai answered confidently.

The two pushed open the door and quickly walked out. Just as they closed the door, Lin Nana suddenly breathed a sigh of relief and leaned against the door.

Outside the door, Xu An and Chen Shuai, who had walked to the elevator, looked at each other, and Chen Shuai spoke first.

"Don't you find it strange?" Chen Shuai asked.

“Strange, very strange.” Xu An’s lips curled up slightly, revealing a barely perceptible sneer.

"It seems you sensed it too," Chen Shuai said with a smile.

The two of them simultaneously turned their gaze to Lin Nana's door.

The mystery left behind by Teacher Sixia

Inside the room, Lin Nana walked to the sofa, a gentle smile on her face. She reached out and removed the sofa cushions, pulling up the seat she was sitting on. Lying under the sofa was a person, who was also smiling at Lin Nana. Lin Nana reached out and pulled the person up.

"Biqi, they've already left." Lin Nana helped Li Biqi up and then put the sofa cushions back on.

"They've already followed our plan?" Li Biqi sighed and sat down on the sofa.

"I never thought the two of us could come up with such a great plan." Lin Nana took two bottles of orange juice from the refrigerator, sat back on the sofa, and handed one of the bottles to Li Biqi.

"Yeah, my acting was pretty good too. I managed to fool the three of them completely. How did this happen?" Lin Nana frowned.

"I've searched my sister's room countless times, but I just can't find Gao Xiaoyuan. She just disappeared right under my nose, and I don't even know what happened!" Lin Nana said with a bitter face.

“We found so much useful information with your sister, but unfortunately we don’t know how to use it. Otherwise, we would have already caught the murderer…” As she said this, Li Biqi suddenly straightened up and glared at Lin Nana: “Do you think it’s possible that the murderer kidnapped Gao Xiaoyuan?”

"The murderer?" Why did he tie up Gao Xiaoyuan? Was it for that key? Lin Nana also glared at Li Biqi: "Oh no! My sister must have used that key. Maybe it's used to open a drawer somewhere, and there must be something important hidden in that drawer!"

"What should we do?" Li Biqi exclaimed.

"Perhaps cooperating with us is your only way out." When this voice rang out, Lina and Li Biqi looked towards the door at the same time, only to see that Xu An and Chen Shuai had somehow returned to the doorway.

“You…” Lin Nana looked at the two of them in horror.

"Why are you looking at us like that? I used to be your classmate," Chen Shuai said, stepping forward.

"I don't believe you. Maybe you're the murderers." Li Biqi nervously shrank closer to Lin Nana, and the two huddled together.

“If we were the murderers, we would have killed you all long ago, instead of waiting until now. Besides, you just said that Gao Xiaoyuan is missing, and we are also looking for her, which means there must be someone else behind this, right?” Xu An said coldly.

Lin Nana and Li Biqi looked at each other, but neither of them spoke.

Chen Shuai stepped forward, bent down, and brought his face close to the two of them, saying in a dashing manner, "Have you ever played CS?"

Lin Nana and Li Biqi nodded.

“Xianzi, we are all police officers. We need to be united and cooperate with each other to catch the criminals. Otherwise, the next victim could be one of us.”

Lin Nana and Li Biqi exchanged another glance.

"Okay, we're classmates after all, and we're in a bad situation right now, so I'll trust you for now."

Chen Shuai plopped down next to Lin Nana, pushing the two girls aside: "How did you two get together?"

Li Biqi put down her orange juice, lowered her head, and tears streamed down her face uncontrollably. "I... I wasn't feeling well that day. I wanted to ask for leave from the rehearsal. If I had listened to my parents and asked for leave, maybe I would still be a normal person now, still able to go to school normally. But I didn't listen to them..." After crying softly for a while, Li Biqi continued, "That night a year ago was terrifying. I just felt everything go black, and then my head started spinning. When I woke up, I was trapped in a scary room, just like Nana. I was really scared. For the past year, I've felt like I'm living a life worse than death. I didn't know what to do. I thought I was going to die, but one day I drank some water and fainted. When I woke up, I was on the stage of a concert hall."

“You two have had the same experiences,” Xu An said.

Li Biqi nodded and continued, "When I came out, I didn't know I had been in that room for a year. I was scared, so I called my parents, but no one answered. That's when I met Nana."

Lin Nana gave a wry smile: "I had just been released at the time, and I didn't know what was going on. After seeing Biqi, the two of us came back here. We learned about the strange things that happened at school from my sister, so we decided to hide here first."

"So, do you have any contact with Li Wenbin and Fang Manting?" Chen Shuai asked.

"No. Are they still alive? Did they experience the same things as us?" Lin Nana asked anxiously.

Chen Shuai remained silent. He thought of his mother and knew that there was still no news of her. He was really worried.

"Did you find anything with Teacher Xia?" Xu An continued to ask.

“We’ve searched countless times, and all we found was that key, but we don’t know what it’s for. We were hoping to borrow your help…” Lin Nana hesitated to continue, “However, I remember my sister once said that she seemed to have found something, and that she would tell us in a while, but unexpectedly, she was murdered.” Lin Nana wanted to cry just thinking about how her sister died.

"Wang Qin..." Before Xu An could finish his question, Li Biqi and Lin Nana cried out at the same time, "No, it wasn't us! We don't know what happened or why it happened, but please believe us, we really didn't kill her!"

Xu An remained silent; he could tell that the two girls didn't seem to be the murderers.

“Oh right, Nana, didn’t we also find a videotape?” Li Biqi suddenly remembered and blurted it out.

“But it was just an ordinary videotape. We’ve watched it dozens of times and haven’t found anything unusual,” Lin Nana said.

Chen Shuai looked at the two of them and asked, "Where is the videotape?"

After flickering a few times, the television screen finally displayed an image, though it was blurry, as if captured by a camera. The background of the image was the school's broadcasting room, and the time displayed in the lower right corner was exactly the afternoon of the year before the incident in Class 0 of the first year of high school.

Chen Shuai, Lin Nana, and Li Biqi squeezed onto the sofa and watched the video intently, while Xu An stood in the corner of the sofa, staring coldly at the TV screen.

In the video, the layout of the broadcasting room was no different from reality, except that it was empty. After a short while, a woman walked in, looking down at some documents before sitting down in front of the microphone. When she looked up, Xu An and Chen Shuai saw Teacher Xia's face. She spoke kindly into the microphone, but there was no sound on the videotape. Just then, Teacher Xia on the screen suddenly lowered her head, took out her phone from her pocket, and answered it. Suddenly, her expression changed drastically. She stood up abruptly, first turning her back to the camera, then turning back again. The camera could just see her lips move a few times. She hurriedly closed the phone, said something into the microphone, and then rushed out of the broadcasting room.

Lin Nana pressed the remote control to turn off the videotape, then looked at Chen Shuai and Xu An and said, "That's all. We can't hear any sound, and we don't know why my sister had that expression back then."

Xu An suddenly snatched the remote control from Lin Nana's hand, restarted the videotape, watched it again, and then looked confidently at Chen Shuai.

Chen Shuai suddenly realized: "I understand now. Teacher Xia originally planned to rehearse at seven o'clock, but she changed the time to eight o'clock because of that phone call!"

Xu An nodded and looked at the videotape again: "The problem is who made that call, why Teacher Xia looked so flustered and scared, and why she postponed the rehearsal by an hour. Where did she go in the meantime?"

Xu An continued rewinding the videotape, repeatedly slowing down the footage of Teacher Xia answering the phone, carefully observing her lip movements.

“My sister was saying… how did you find out? How could this happen? I’m going right now…” Lin Nana sighed. “I know my sister best, so I already knew what she was saying. But what good does knowing do? I still don’t understand what she meant.”

“Investigation…” Chen Shuai muttered softly, while Xu An frowned, pondering the words. Suddenly, the two looked at each other at the same time and shouted, “Teacher Xia must be investigating something!”

Lin Nana and Li Biqi stared at the two of them in astonishment.

“There must be more clues!” Chen Shuai said confidently. After saying this, Chen Shuai stood up, went through the hidden door, and re-entered Teacher Xia's house. Xu An glanced at Chen Shuai and followed him in. Lin Nana and Li Biqi exchanged a look and decided to follow them in to take a look.

Teacher Xia's room was still the same, with nothing suspicious about it.

In the living room, Chen Shuai, Xu An, Lin Nana, and Li Biqi searched high and low for a long time but found nothing.

Chen Shuai seemed a little anxious. He looked at Lin Nana and asked, "Has anyone else touched your sister's room?"

“No, I’ve been carefully keeping an eye on things from next door…” Lin Nana suddenly remembered Gao Xiaoyuan’s mysterious disappearance: “Maybe someone came by, but I didn’t see anything.”

In the bedroom, Xu An lifted the covers under the bed to look, but found nothing suspicious. As he stood up, his gaze fell on the electronic calendar on the bedside table. The dates on that calendar were strange; they didn't look like dates at all. The numbers were arranged haphazardly, seemingly misaligned, yet somehow not quite.

Xu An stared intently at the electronic calendar, lost in thought, when suddenly his eyes lit up: "Chen Shuai—"

Hearing the shouts, Chen Shuai, Lin Nana, and Li Biqi rushed into the room, only to see Xu An pick up the calendar from the bedside table.

"Have you made a new discovery?" Chen Shuai immediately asked.

Xu An held up the electronic calendar to Chen Shuai.

Chen Shuai stared blankly at the calendar, while Lin Nana and Li Biqi curiously gathered around.