Guo Yujie held up her hands and let out a distraught cry. She rushed out of the room and into the bathroom, repeatedly washing the blood from her hands. But it didn't seem to help. Her hands were bright red, as if stained with blood, or perhaps from scrubbing too hard. Guo Yujie took it to be the former. She kept scrubbing, making no sound of tears, only letting out a constant stream of muffled, fearful cries.
At last, she seemed to remember something and picked up the hand soap beside the sink. Foam covered her hands, then washed away, but her hands were still bright red. So she repeated the process.
I returned to Guo Yujie's room and looked down at the letter on the floor.
On closer inspection, the traces of blood hadn't been written onto the paper. They had seeped through from the other side. The red blood had soaked into the paper and emerged on the reverse. But the marks had undergone a strange change: they weren't reversed. The border pattern and the signature inside it were identical to the writing on the front of the paper.
A noise came from the bathroom.
I got up and walked over. Wang Mingli's face wore a strange smile—neither quite crying nor quite laughing. Her expression was twisted, and so were her emotions.
Guo Yujie was still washing her hands, but it didn't look like she was using hand soap. Her hands were slippery, as if she'd put something on them.
I looked down at the bathroom floor. There was a bottle on the tile—a cleaning product... glass cleaner.
I whipped my gaze toward Guo Yujie.
She had rinsed the slime off her hands, but her skin seemed even redder.
Guo Yujie gave a loud yell and braced both