The Fifth Pockmark

Wang Qin's last words had led them to Fang Chuchua, the girl who had gone missing over a decade ago. In the history department, Zhai Jia and Hui Nan listened as Jia Shi recounted what he now knew about Fang Chuchua. The two women showed no great panic — perhaps because too many alarming things had already happened.

Zhai Jia just sighed. "I've had a vague feeling all along that this school is hiding something dark. I've asked Master Liu to perform rites for Gu Qing's soul several times, but they haven't stopped whatever's been acting against us. So all along it was this Fang Chuchua who disappeared fifteen years ago — she's the real cause."

Hui Nan cut in: "This Fang Chuchua — the disappearance probably wasn't as simple as an accident. Let me go ask the principal more about the girl and Wang Qin."

Hui Nan stood up to leave.

"Wait." Jia Shi called her back. "There's something I can't figure out. The police have confirmed the text was sent by Wang Qin herself — but why would she send it to me? What does it have to do with me?"

Hui Nan pulled out her own phone, opened messages, and showed it to Jia Shi. The most recent message at the top was the group text Jia Shi had sent out announcing his new number. Only then did Jia Shi realize that his new phone had a feature — when a number changed, it automatically sent a group notification to everyone in the contact list.

"Wang Qin wasn't deliberately sending it to you," Hui Nan said. "She must have been under extreme time pressure — no time to choose a recipient. She just hit reply to the most recent message she'd received. That's probably why there are no punctuation marks either."

Jia Shi pressed further. "But the send time was 3:20 a.m. Wu Xian told me the time of death was around 1 a.m. How do you explain the gap?"

"Maybe she used a scheduled send?"

"You think she had time to set up a scheduled send under that kind of time pressure?"

"There wasn't any time pressure," said Zhai Jia, picking up the thread. "The send time was 3:20 a.m. — meaning she was already in another world when she sent it. This message, like the terrifying nursery rhyme, is a signal from somewhere beyond."

Zhai Jia's words silenced the room. Hui Nan didn't accept the strange interpretation, but she couldn't find anything to refute it, and finally left the history department for the principal's office to learn more about Fang Chuchua. But Principal Chen Daipeng had no time for her. The consecutive deaths were a devastating blow to a school already struggling with limited staff — and three of the four dead teachers had been homeroom teachers of fourth-year exam-prep classes. The only homeroom teacher not yet targeted, Zhu Hua, still had her name boxed on the death list. Chen Daipeng was frantically conducting back-to-back interviews with new candidates, hoping to replace the vacancies as quickly as possible.

Hui Nan arrived at the principal's door just as two young interviewees were walking out. She learned one was there for biology, the other for geography. A pang went through her. A biology hire was to replace Huang Lu — but why were they hiring a geography teacher? Had Chen Daipeng already written Zhai Jia off as dead? He had probably also interviewed a geometry teacher, ready for when she herself was gone. Having seen the death list, Chen Daipeng hadn't tried to stop the killer. He had simply used it as a staffing guide, hiring replacements for the teachers who were going to die.

Hui Nan walked away from the principal's office in silence. She didn't think Chen Daipeng was wrong, as a principal, to handle things this way. But she now understood clearly: the principal was not the person who would save their lives.

Back in the mathematics office, Hui Nan scanned the death list and opened a group chat on her computer. She added every boxed name still living, uploaded a photo of the list, and explained its origin. The teachers who were boxed and still alive were: Suo Xin, Zhu Hua, Jia Shi, Zhai Jia, Zhang Yao, and Hui Nan herself. No one in the group spoke. They stared at their own names inside boxes and recalled the events of this week:

Monday: language arts teacher Ma Dahua, hanged in the classroom of Class 4, Grade 4.

Tuesday: biology teacher Huang Lu, stabbed through the eye by glass in her apartment building stairwell.

Wednesday: physics teacher Xiao Jin, drowned in the school bathroom.

Thursday: chemistry teacher Wang Qin, burned to death with acid at Kangping Hospital.

Today was Friday.

Tonight — who would be the fifth pockmark?