Tian Mingyuan came back.
But no amount of bandages could hide the weakness in his eyes.
He started avoiding Song Xiaoyang—subtly, but deliberately.
He stopped calling on him in class.
Stopped looking at him altogether.
And Song Xiaoyang... he remained silent. But something in his gaze had changed.
He no longer lowered his head.
He no longer trembled.
He would sit there, staring straight at Tian Mingyuan during lessons, with a faint, unreadable smile tugging at the corners of his lips.
Cold sweat began to gather on Tian Mingyuan's forehead.
He knew something had slipped—
Out of control.
One afternoon after school, Song Xiaoyang stood alone in the empty classroom. He pulled a notebook from his bag.
It was Tian Mingyuan's lesson plan journal.
Taken during the chaos at the abandoned lab building, when Tian had looked away for just a moment.
He flipped through the neat handwriting until he reached the final page.
There—tucked between the pages—was a photograph.
A young girl.
Smiling, radiant.
Su Xiaowei.
Song Xiaoyang stared at the picture, his eyes icy.
Bai Ye's voice slithered into his ear:
"He knew your mother was dead. That's why he tormented you."
His fingers brushed across the girl's face in the photo.
"So... what if she dies too?"
He pulled out a lighter.
A flame flared to life, hungrily devouring the image. Ash drifted to the ground.
Song Xiaoyang watched it burn, his voice barely audible:
"We're not done yet, Teacher Tian."
⸻
Tian Mingyuan's car was vandalized.
Not just scratched—gouged.
Deep, violent slashes across the metal, carved in with terrifying precision.
"Murderer. Thief."
Six words, scorched into the door like a curse, a sentence passed.
He stood there in the parking lot, face pale as death.
He knew who had done it.
He knew... Song Xiaoyang was watching him.
And he knew...
The game had only just begun.
This time, he wasn't the hunter.
He was the prey.
⸻
Song Xiaoyang stood on the rooftop of the abandoned school building, night wind slicing through his uniform.
Bai Ye sat on the rusted railing, her decaying dress fluttering like wilted silk.
Her mouth stretched unnaturally wide, splitting to her ears as she grinned, baring bone-white teeth.
"You did it."
Her voice crawled out of some deep abyss, thick with twisted satisfaction.
Tian Mingyuan wouldn't be coming back.
His car brakes had failed.
On a dark mountain road.
He'd gone over the cliff.
The police called it an accident.
He'd been acting strange lately.
Some even said they'd seen him wandering the abandoned building at night—like he was haunted.
Song Xiaoyang looked down at his hands.
They still smelled faintly of motor oil.
"He's dead," he whispered.
As if stating the weather.
Bai Ye giggled.
It sounded like glass shattering.
"You're finally free."
Song Xiaoyang didn't look at her. His eyes were fixed on the distant city lights—cold and countless, like a sea of indifferent eyes.
"Are you me?" he asked suddenly, his voice so hoarse it barely sounded like his own. "Are you the resentment I buried?"
Tian Mingyuan's car had already plunged into the ravine, reduced to a burning heap of twisted metal. The thought should have brought him satisfaction, but instead, a hollow chill had settled in his chest.
Bai Ye stopped swinging her legs. Her eyeballs rolled halfway in their sockets before locking onto Song Xiaoyang's face. Moonlight passed through her translucent body, casting a faint, shifting shadow on the rooftop floor.
"Yes… and no," she answered softly. Her voice suddenly took on a gentle tone, like a mother's whisper soothing a child to sleep. "I'm the part of you you refuse to admit—the rage you suppress, the revenge you crave… but I'm something else too."
"Then where did you come from?" Song Xiaoyang stepped forward, the rust from the railing brushing onto his sleeve.
Bai Ye let out another quiet giggle. It reminded him of fish swimming beneath a frozen lake—beautiful and eerie. She leapt down from the railing lightly, her bare feet touching the concrete without a sound.
"Do you really want to know, Xiaoyang?" she tilted her head, black hair falling across half her face. "I'm pure malice."
⸻
That night, Song Xiaoyang waited on the rooftop.
She came.
Pale, but strangely calm.
"You have one too, don't you?" he asked.
Lin Xiaoyu was silent for a moment. Then she nodded.
"She's called 'Hongyu,'" she said softly.
"She appeared after Zhang Mengmeng transferred in."
He stared at her.
And suddenly, he understood.
Why she'd known about Bai Ye.
Why she wasn't afraid.
She had been touched by the darkness too.
"When Zhang Mengmeng bullied you... Hongyu taught you how to strike back, didn't she?"
Lin Xiaoyu's lips curled into a slight smile.
One that felt both unfamiliar—and familiar.
"I just made sure she... 'accidentally' fell down the stairs."
She said it quietly.
"Just like Teacher Tian's brakes 'accidentally' stopped working."
They looked at each other.
A strange understanding passed between them—dark, unspoken, complete.
⸻
But Song Xiaoyang didn't feel free.
Tian Mingyuan was dead.
Yet Bai Ye hadn't vanished.
She still sat by his bed at night, stroking his face with rotting fingers, whispering in his ear:
"You and I... we'll never be apart."
And Lin Xiaoyu?
Her Hongyu still lingered in the shadows—watching her.
Reminding her:
The darkness never leaves.
They had become each other's only solace—
But also each other's abyss.
⸻
One day after school, they stood by the river, watching the murky water churn.
"Do you think we can ever go back?" Lin Xiaoyu asked.
Song Xiaoyang didn't answer.
He already knew.
They couldn't.
Hand in hand, they stood at the edge of the dark—
No longer victims,
No longer villains.
Just two souls, swallowed by the night.
Behind them, Bai Ye and Hongyu smiled.
"Welcome to our world."
When Song Xiaoyang pushed open the front door, the rusted iron hinges groaned like a dying animal. The sour stench of cheap liquor wafted through the air, like poison distilled from some rotting fruit. His father, Song Jianguo, slumped on the faded couch, the flickering blue light of the TV casting ghostly shadows across the crevices of his weathered face.
"You still know how to come home?" his father spat, his voice slurred and soaked in alcohol. "The school called. Said you—"
Song Xiaoyang's fingers twitched by the seam of his pants. He stared at the purple-red birthmark on the back of his father's neck—shaped like a crooked dagger. His mother once called it an angel's kiss, back when tenderness still existed in their home. Now, it pulsed with every gulp of liquor his father swallowed, like a parasite drunk on blood.
"Was it you who did that to Wang Lei's leg?" his father suddenly shouted, hurling the bottle at the floor. Glass exploded into jagged shards, as broken as the life they lived.
"Say something!"
Flashes of blood and torn flesh still lingered on Xiaoyang's retinas—Wang Lei's thigh spurting crimson as the rusted spoke pierced muscle, that sickening, muffled crunch like a watermelon being split open. Bai Ye crouched on his father's shoulder, her rotting fingers twirling the neck of the shattered bottle, grinning with pride.
"You knew," Xiaoyang said, his nails digging into his palm until blood seeped out, tracing dark red rivers along his lifeline. "You knew what Tian Mingyuan did to me. And all you said was 'it takes two to tango'?"
His father suddenly crumpled, like someone had pulled the spine from his body. He collapsed back onto the couch, oblivious to the glass cutting into his leg. On the TV, the evening news droned on in a hollow voice: "…New developments in the car accident involving former teacher Tian Mingyuan. Investigators suspect tampering with the brake fluid…"
Bai Ye's body began to melt, thick black sludge dripping onto the top of his father's head. She leaned in, whispering against Xiaoyang's ear:
"Now… kill him."
The knife Xiaoyang pulled from his pocket gleamed coldly in the moonlight. He imagined the blade sliding into his father's throat, the warm gush of arterial blood splattering across the faded wallpaper—a painting more vivid than anything he had ever created.