At present, according to the compilation by the news club, three of the four deceased were connected to the sorority.
However, the remaining one, Abby, had no ties to the organization.
With her rare beauty and a good family background, Abby would have been qualified to join the sorority. But she was proud, independent, and a highly intelligent girl with her own unique views on everything.
When she first entered university as a freshman, Abby had received an invitation from the sorority. However, she believed that joining such an outdated organization was aningless, so she rejected their offer on the spot.
[…Yes, without a doubt, Abby and the sorority were like two parallel lines, never ant to intersect. She didn’t even know the first two victims. However, very fortunately, our ticulous mber Roy happened to discover that Abby, as a mber of the drama club, would occasionally purchase so unique accessories from Mia…]
Mia was a handicraft enthusiast. She wasn’t short of money, but she enjoyed the feeling of having her creations praised and loved, so she often shared handmade lace headbands and similar accessories online.
As an important actress in the drama club, Abby had a high demand for classical-style accessories. After accidentally discovering that there was a talented craftswoman among the freshman students at their school, she privately approached Mia and began commissioning her to make custom accessories.
Thus, the social circles of the four victims ended up linking together, one after another, in a way Everly had never expected.
The information gathered and organized by the news club didn’t stop there.
They were like a rich mineral deposit—the more you dug, the more treasures you uncovered. It even made Everly suspect that one of the news club mbers might be the protagonist of this thriller.
Back to the main point.
Flipping to the end of the compiled information, Everly also saw so photos collected by the news club.
They were several candid shots.
The background of the photos was an old, tiworn building with a simple, archaic design. The subjects were several young students. Among them, the person running at the very front, shown in profile, was unmistakably Bianca. Behind her were four figures—two boys and two girls—chasing after her with angry expressions. Because they were running so fast, motion blur appeared in the photos.
The first photo showed the four chasing from behind, with Bianca fleeing ahead.
In the second photo, Bianca pushed open a door and ran inside, with the four following not far behind.
In the third photo, the photographer, perhaps out of curiosity, had followed a bit further and took the picture from the doorway. The room had only a small window on the wall, so the lighting was poor. Combined with the fact that the room was filled with all kinds of stacked boards, the environnt was very dim.
In the photo, one could vaguely make out a figure believed to be Bianca running toward the far corner of the room, with only half of her clothing visible outside the turn, while the four pursuers were in the middle of the room.
In the next photo, all five people—the group of four including Bianca—had disappeared around the corner.
In the fifth photo, the photographer had run back to the original spot where the candid shots were taken and hid there, likely worried about being discovered.
In a corner of this photo, the b*llying group could be seen striding out of the doorway arrogantly. Behind them, in the dim room, most of Bianca’s body was concealed in shadow. Her head was slightly lowered, the whites of her eyes rolled upward, as she stared at their backs with a sinister gaze.
…
These five photos were all that the news club managed to capture.
Attached behind the photos was a note explaining their source, along with so of the photographer’s thoughts.
As ntioned earlier, after internal analysis, the mbers of the news club generally believed that the four girls had died from so kind of infectious disease.
Considering that the source of the disease was Bethany, and that the first three victims all had so connection to the sorority, the news club sent out several of their photographers. They arranged shifts for them to stake out near the student activity center, hoping to capture so of the sorority’s activities.
Unexpectedly, after several days of surveillance, they didn’t manage to photograph any of the sorority’s secrets. Instead, the photographer on duty at noon yesterday accidentally captured a scene of the drama club group of four b*llying Bianca!
Even more coincidentally, not long after that, Bianca died.
With that, the photos taken suddenly went from being about the cliché topic of “campus b*llying” to becoming directly related to a death case.
[All of them are girls, all of them suddenly collapsed and died in public. Moreover, after I investigated Bianca’s social dia, I found that her recent posts are completely inconsistent with her past behavior… I suspect that Bianca may also have contracted that terrible infectious disease. Therefore, I developed these photos and placed them into the case file of the four girls’ deaths, hoping that capable mbers can collaborate in the investigation and verify my hypothesis.]
The photographer wrote this in the note.
Clearly, given a bit more ti, the news club would have discovered the unusual nature of Bianca’s case and rged it with the previous ones.
Unfortunately, their line of investigation was off. The five girls had not died from an infectious disease, but from so kind of unimaginable, supernatural force that completely defied the laws of science.
After reviewing the materials secretly obtained by the news club mbers, Everly opened her browser and searched social dia using the keyword “Mouster College Student Activity Center.”
Many users of Chatter are college students who enjoy sharing their daily lives. Everly compared the photos she found online with the five candid shots and quickly confird that the building captured in those photos was near the back entrance of Mouster College’s Student Activity Center.
So when Sara and the others chased Bianca, it wasn’t as they had told the police—that they only pursued her outside the building. In reality, they had followed Bianca all the way into a room near the back entrance of the student activity center.
But what exactly was that room used for?
Everly took a partial screenshot of the fourth candid photo and sent it to Doreen.
The other side first replied with a “?”, then honestly asked why Everly had sent her a photo of the drama club’s storage room.
Everly: [That’s the drama club’s storage room?]
Doreen: [It should be. A friend once took inside to look around.]
Everly: [What’s inside that storage room?]
Doreen: [Well, set panels, costus—basically all kinds of stage props.]
“… ”
Considering that Doreen wasn’t part of the drama club and likely had only limited knowledge of the storage room, Everly decided to gather more information from elsewhere.
This “elsewhere,” naturally, referred to the ever-useful tool person, Orff.
For Orff, hacking into a school’s internal network and retrieving information from the campus forum was as easy as reaching into a bag to take sothing out.
About fifteen minutes later, he filtered out all information related to the drama club’s storage room from the campus forum—including discussion threads and various photos—and sent everything to Everly in one go.
By this ti, it was already close to noon. When Everly saw that Orff had sent over a compressed file of several gigabytes, she felt dizzy, her vision going dark.
Sure enough, she wasn’t cut out to be an investigator. She had been sitting at her desk reading materials all morning since waking up, and it felt like her brain was about to give out.
Compared to that, fighting and killing suited her much better.
Everly decided to change her mood.
She ordered room service, filled her stomach first, then did a few stretching exercises under the sunlight to relax her mind. Only after that did she return to the desk and, sowhat miserably, continue researching the drama club’s storage room.
Before shedding her old identity, Bianca M had gone so far as to break character just to lure the group of four b*llies into the drama club’s storage room—she most likely had so special purpose.
Was there sothing unusual stored inside? Or perhaps so kind of trap hidden there? If she thoroughly investigated the storage room and found that “special” thing, could she then follow the trail and uncover the secret of the creature M…?
Pushing aside her distracting thoughts, Everly began going through discussion threads related to the drama club’s storage room one by one.
As is well known, theatrical performances require a large number of stage props. The drama club at Mouster College had a history of nearly a hundred years, with its props passed down from generation to generation. With each new cohort, so old props would deteriorate or be damaged beyond repair, while new ones were periodically added to the inventory.
Over ti, the club simply ran out of space to store everything.
In the past, the drama club had its own dedicated warehouse. However, eight years ago, when Mouster College planned and constructed a new teaching building, the original warehouse site was taken over.
Although the school tried to make up for it by assigning an empty room in the student activity center as a fixed activity room for the drama club, there were simply too many items. No matter how large the room was, it still wasn’t enough to hold all the props.
Next door to the drama club’s activity room was the sorority’s activity room.
The sorority and fraternity at Mouster College had an even longer history than the drama club and held significant influence within the school. As a result, both organizations had their own dedicated rooms in the student activity center—and more than just one.
However, the sorority had strict admission requirents, so its mbership was relatively small. The school allocated them three rooms—only one large classroom was used regularly. Of the other two, one small activity room was only used occasionally, while the last room, being on the shaded side and long and narrow with poor lighting, was basically left unused by the sorority and allowed to gather dust.
The drama club, on the other hand, didn’t mind this at all. What they needed was simply a place to store things; whether it had good lighting wasn’t a concern.
As it happened, so sorority mbers held key positions in the drama club at the ti, and the relationship between the two organizations was very close. Thus, after an internal vote, the sorority agreed to lease the unused room to the drama club as a storage space. In return, the drama club would pay a small annual rent to help fund the sorority’s activities.
This was the key information Everly extracted from a pile of posts on the student forum.
At this point in the investigation, the various clues converged in an unexpected way—every lead ultimately pointed to the sorority at Mouster College!
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