Mysterious Revival

Chapter 561: Chapter 558: The Person in the Painting

“Ah!”

Yang Jian kicked open the door to a dormitory, and immediately a shrill scream from a female resonated from inside.

There were two students who had lingered on this floor and hadn’t left. At this moment, they looked terrified as if they had seen a ghost, huddling together and shivering in the furthest bed.

“Is anyone there?”

He was slightly stunned, it appeared that Wang Quan hadn’t miscalculated; there were indeed students who hadn’t managed to leave the building in time.

However, judging by the expressions of the two girls, they were clearly aware of the events transpiring in the dormitory building.

This was good, as it meant Yang Jian wouldn’t need to waste time explaining.

“There’s a haunting on this floor right now, and I’m dealing with it. Stay here and don’t wander around,” Yang Jian said, before turning and leaving the room to check the next one.

“Wait, wait, take us with you,” one of the girls hesitated before hurriedly pleading with a tearful voice: “I don’t want to stay here.”

She didn’t care who Yang Jian was anymore, as long as she could leave this place.

“The ghost might very well be on this floor; are you sure you want to follow me?”

Yang Jian said with a stern face, “You might die even quicker with me, of course, I won’t object if you really want to come along, but don’t expect me to save you if we encounter danger. I believe you’ve already encountered some situations before and have some understanding of what’s happening.”

The girl was immediately frightened into hesitating.

“Bang!”

After all, ghosts that killed indiscriminately were relatively rare.

Yang Jian continued searching for the dormitory where Miao Xiaoshan had previously been.

He was certain that the dormitory on the fifth floor must have been hidden by a ghostly painting. Now that his ghost eye was useless, he couldn’t invade the Ghost Domain within the ghost painting. He could only search using the most straightforward methods. If he was careful enough and didn’t miss anything, he should be able to find it.

Wang Quan and two colleagues were also rapidly searching each dormitory.

“Captain Wang, there’s a student who has been left behind,” a colleague reported immediately upon entering a room.

“Note down the number of people and the room number, leave her there, and tell her not to wander off. It’s dangerous outside,” Wang Quan immediately said. “The way back has disappeared. It’s riskier to have them with us. We’ll deal with them once Yang Jian has resolved the situation here. Remember, our current task is to locate the ghost painting; don’t get distracted.”

“Yes, Captain Wang, I understand.”

The colleague quickly began to reassure the girl, telling her not to move around and to stay there and wait for them to come back and rescue her.

“Have you found anything?” Wang Quan asked.

Another colleague, who had finished searching a room cautiously, replied, “No discoveries yet.”

Wang Quan furrowed his brows. They had almost finished their search and aside from finding a few students who hadn’t left on time, there had been no anomalies detected. It looked like the issue must be on Yang Jian’s side, and he hoped Yang Jian had found the root of the problem.

“Just two more rooms left. Report back as soon as you’ve finished searching them.”

They reached the end of the hallway, the last two dormitories were almost searched.

Just as one officer had comforted a girl and stepped out of the dormitory to continue the search, he suddenly caught sight of a woman in red who had appeared in the corridor at some point.

He paused briefly, thinking she was a student who had run out of a room, and was about to shout, “This student, it’s dangerous outsi…”

Before he finished speaking, his body trembled and then became rigid; his pupils dilated suddenly.

Because he saw the woman’s appearance clearly.

Her features were blurred, you could only vaguely discern them, giving a hazy impression; but as much as you tried to see clearly, you never could because her face was meant to look that way. The red clothes she wore were an outdated European style, which clashed with the modern attire of female students.

What was particularly noticeable were her hands—devoid of any blood color, pale as porcelain, glimmering with a subtle white halo.

uickly placed his hand firmly over his mouth.

“Calm down, don’t shout,” Wang Quan pressed down his voice harshly, his face making a grimace and tensing his entire body to prevent the colleague from losing control.

As ordinary people, they must remain calm; any action that drew the attention of ghosts meant a dead end, even if a top-tier spirit controller was also present on this floor.

The ghost, though it appeared in the corridor, did not linger for long.

The red figure seemed to ignore Wang Quan and his companion, heading straight for one of the dorm rooms instead.

That dorm room had already been checked earlier, confirming the presence of a female student inside.

Clearly, the ghost’s appearance was not without purpose.

It must have been that someone inside had triggered the ghost’s murderous rules, thus becoming its target.

However, Wang Quan could only watch helplessly as the ghost silently entered the room, not daring to make any move.

Because any attempt would be futile.

“Breathe deeply, stay calm; have you forgotten your usual training?” Wang Quan whispered, steadying his teammate’s emotions.

It took the teammate more than ten seconds to collect himself, then he nodded.

Only then did Wang Quan carefully release his mouth.

“Captain, did you see that?”

There was a taut emotion in the teammate’s voice, as strained as his current state of mind, finding it hard to speak.

When he continued to feel along the wall and touched the doorframe of the next dormitory, he suddenly stopped in his tracks.

There was something off about the doorframe of this dormitory.

Then Yang Jian saw the door of the dormitory transform suddenly, as if a layer of falsehood was suppressed and made to vanish by the Ghost Hand.

The wooden grain, with its old embossing, and the dark red paint, which looked like coagulated blood, were all flaking off, revealing a sense of antiquity.

It was just like the frame of an oil painting.

“Found it,” Yang Jian’s eyes sharpened.

Indeed, his guess was correct; the flaw of the haunted painting was that it couldn’t easily move.

At least, not until it had fully revived.

As Yang Jian grasped the frame, he formed a suppression.

Now that his Ghost Eye didn’t need to suppress, it was as if a slot for a ghost had been freed up, allowing the unrestrained suppression of a ghost’s movements.

The original dormitory door immediately altered its appearance.

The doorframe turned into a picture frame, and the door itself became an oil painting.

Depicted on the oil painting was the interior of a dorm room: a bed, books, a desk, which could be recognized from the layout and some details as Miao Xiaoshan’s previous dormitory.

Because Yang Jian even saw a former female roommate he had met before in the painting.

She was depicted on the tile floor of the painting, only the upper half of her body visible, missing her legs, lying motionless. From the side profile drawn in the painting, it was apparent that this female student was dead, her pupils unfocused, her facial expressions stiff with rigor mortis, her body twisted and frozen in place.

“No, there’s something missing from this painting…” Yang Jian scrutinized the oil painting and frowned.

Although he had never seen the haunted painting clearly, even in the previous incident at the residential complex where he had only looked from far away from the tenth floor, the center of the painting conspicuously showed a blank space.

There was no paint on that patch, just the blank outline of a person.

One could imagine that this area should depict a person.

No, more precisely, it should depict a ghost.

But the ghost in the painting had vanished, leaving behind only an empty space.

“The ghost, did it step out of the painting?” Yang Jian quickly speculated.

Considering Sun Yujia’s previous incident where she was so frightened that she jumped off the building, if there was a ghost involved, she must have encountered one that had stepped out of the haunted painting.

Wang Quan stood in the distance, silent, gesturing towards a nearby dormitory as if to say, the ghost was inside there.