Su Xiaoyun glanced at me with gratitude and nodded. She took a deep breath before talking, “The girl who killed herself two years ago was Su Qiaoning, she was my older sister.”

“Your older sister?” Bai almost choked on his tea, he stared at Su Xiaoyun, shocked. “What are you saying?”

Su Xiaoyun nodded her head slightly, “The story dates back to the year when I was born. Our family is nothing special, my dad is a doctor and my mom is a nurse. Although the income wasn’t high, it was enough to raise two children and live happily. So my parents thought about having another child.”

Suddenly, I realized why I felt like the story Wen Jiubo told me about the dead girl’s background tonight in the classroom was familiar. It was because Su Xiaoyun once mentioned her parents to me.

“Then?” Bai asked.

“However, everything completely changed.” Su Xiaoyun lowered her head, whispering, “At the time my mother was pregnant with me, something strange happened in the hospital. The corpses in the morgue mysteriously went missing. Once, four or five corpses disappeared at the same time. My father was the chief director at the time, so he needed to find out what happened. But to his surprise, when he saw the CCTV footage, he found that all these missing corpses sat up from the autopsy beds and walked out of the morgue by themselves.”

I took a deep breath, stunned.

“My mother was pregnant then, so my father didn’t tell her what happened but chose to investigate alone,” said Su Xiaoyun. “Soon, he found out that all corpses that ‘came back to life’ always stood in a line and walked towards the same direction. My father searched the area and found the same grove from where we escaped. Back then, the Yan University wasn’t built yet, and the grove was just an ordinary graveyard. After a quick search, my father found all the missing corpses piled up on the ground. Some corpses had already begun to rot because of the long exposure to the ambient air. But my father was happy because he had found all the missing corpses, so he called the hospital director. They managed to carry all the corpses back to the morgue before any relatives of the dead noticed.”

“They all thought this incident was over and my father was so happy that he held a party with his friends to celebrate his success in solving that weird case. Since all the bodies were found, no one cared about how those corpses were ‘lost’. That night, my father was drunk, so he fell asleep as soon as he laid down on the bed. However, that night, he had a really scary and weird dream. He dreamed that a red skinny spirit with a huge mouth came to his bed, yelling at him, ‘how dare you steal my stuff, give them back to me!’, something like that. My father never saw something so horrible, he was terrified. He hid under the bed, shaking. He didn’t understand why the spirit kept saying he stole something from him. Then the evil spirit said, ‘those vessels are used to save the lives of my kind, but now they are trapped!'”

“How did this happen?” Her story fascinated me, and I couldn’t wait to know more about it.

“Now I’m starting to know the cause. The grove was full of negative energy, so it was easy to create a gap between the world of the living and the world of the dead. On each rainy day and during the crescent moon nights, the demons that are trapped in another world can enter this world through the gap. However, if a demon’s cultivation is not high enough to form a physical body, it can’t get through the gap unless they can find a vessel.”

“I see, that’s why the red spirit wanted to steal the corpses in the hospital morgue because it needed to get through the gap. But your father found the bodies in advance and moved them back, that’s why it was so mad at your father.”

Su Xiaoyun nodded slightly, continuing, “My father later told us that he couldn’t wake up from that dream no matter how hard he fought. He tried to strangle himself, bang his head against a wall and jump out of the window. However, each time he ended up coming back and facing the spirit. The loop went on and on and on, and eventually, my father gave up. He begged the ghost, ‘please let me go, I can give you whatever you want. I can give all the corpses to you and help you enter this world, and I’ll do anything if you let me go.’ My father thought that if he gave the corpses back, the spirit would release him. But the spirit smiled wickedly and it said, ‘Too late, I don’t want the corpses anymore. I want your unborn daughter as my new vessel.'”

Shocked, Bai and I looked at each other. The unborn daughter, wasn’t she ..

“You’re right, it’s me.” Su Xiaoyun nodded. “When my father woke up, he was terrified. Not long after that, I was born. But on the day I was born, I couldn’t breathe and didn’t cry, it took the doctors and nurses a lot of efforts to save me. It made my father realize that the spirit really targeted me. As I grew up, I began to find that everyone around me suffered misfortunes. They were either tripped and fell to the ground or lost their homework for no reason, some of them even got injured, were hit by a car or got sick..My house burned down twice, my father got hit by a car twice, and my mother got ripped-off for more than a hundred thousand yuan by a fraud. We were almost broke. However, the strange thing was that, despite the fact that so many people around me were suffering, I was fine. When I was little, my mother tried several times to abandon me by taking me to a remote forest, but I always managed to find the way home. When I was in junior high school, my father finally told me the truth. He told me that I was a child cursed by a spirit and that’s why all the people around me had to suffer. That the spirit would come to eat my soul and possess my body.”

“I was very scared and so were my parents. My mother planned to discard me and have another baby. But the weird thing was that she was pregnant twice, and both times ended up with a miscarriage. So she had to keep me. My father, on the other hand, tried to ask some Taoist priests for a method to break the curse. But he found nothing. Eventually, an old woman told him that there was a hermit with high cultivation. He knelt in front of the hermit for days and nights, asking for help. In the end, the hermit agreed.”