"Hey, you there! Yes, you—what are you standing around for? Sit down!" The middle-aged man glared at Chen Ge, but Chen Ge didn't react. The man coughed twice, and only then did Chen Ge come back to himself and quickly sit back down.
"Buddy, what are you trying to do?" Round-faced Chubby Boy whispered to Chen Ge, but Chen Ge didn't say a word. His eyes stayed fixed on Zhang Ya at the podium.
"West City Private Academy was shut down six years ago, and Zhang Ya died a year before that. If things had gone differently, she'd be twenty-five now, and this was probably what she'd look like."
With Chen Ge staring at her, the woman at the podium smiled at him, then turned to look at the other students.
He took a deep breath and forced himself to calm down. Then he hid his backpack beneath the desk and secretly checked what was inside.
Everything else was unchanged. Only Zhang Ya's Bedtime Storybook had "escaped" from its compartment again, now lying on top of all the other items.
The middle-aged man left, and Zhang Ya began her first class. Chen Ge, sitting by the wall, quietly opened Zhang Ya's Storybook.
Behind its blood-red cover were page after page of blank paper. All the gruesome, terrifying stories were gone, and the words written in blood seemed never to have existed.
"When I entered Fang Yu's World Behind the Door, the words in the Storybook seemed to disappear too. What's this book really for? Why do all the bloody words vanish every time I enter a World Behind the Door? Where do they go?"
"When I first pushed the Door open, it felt like I'd fallen into a Sea of Blood. I nearly suffocated, but a pair of hands grabbed