Volume One: Haunted Campus

What sets humans above animals is that they can wash the innocent blood from their hands under the guise of noble reasons.

Prologue: Rainy Night

The heavy rain had been pouring for hours. At 3 a.m., the sky was filled with rolling dark clouds, lightning, and thunder. William Carter, wearing a raincoat and holding an iron shovel, stepped out the door and headed toward the graveyard beside the apartment.

The digging began... On a typical suburban road at this hour, there wouldn’t even be cars, let alone pedestrians. Of course, in such a downpour, even if a crowd had gathered within ten meters of William Carter, they wouldn’t be able to see what he was doing—couldn’t even tell if he was human or ghost.

At this moment, William Carter was in a terrible mood. He wasn’t suddenly inspired to get rich by grave robbing after reading a few ghost stories—he was forced into this. In fact, he’d only moved into the apartment next to the graveyard three days ago. His original thought was... Of course the rent would be cheap next to a graveyard. After all, I’m a materialist. As an otaku, all I need is to stare at my computer screen. It’s not like I’m going to stand by the window and shout my life goals to the world, right? A graveyard is just a graveyard.

But on his very first night, something strange happened. While surfing the web until midnight, he kept hearing a heartbeat outside the window—thump, thump... echoing steadily. At first, William Carter thought he was hallucinating from being online too long, so he turned off the computer and tried to sleep. But as soon as he lay down, the sound became even clearer—definitely a heartbeat!

William Carter felt his throat go dry, cold sweat soaking his body. After all, outside his window was just the graveyard, nothing else. You can’t hear a heartbeat unless your ear is pressed to someone’s chest, so what was going on? As a materialist, he came up with a solution: don’t think about it, just take a sleeping pill...

The next day, William Carter woke up with a splitting headache—it was already noon. He resumed his otaku routine: go online, eat, go online again, then dinner... Before he knew it, it was midnight again. As the sound started up once more, William Carter’s psychological defenses completely collapsed. That night, he lay in bed with his eyes open, recording for a long time with his phone, his MP3 player, and an old radio. If he could prove the sound really existed, there had to be an explanation—this was the last straw for his materialist beliefs.

On the third morning, William Carter’s eyes were bloodshot. He didn’t know when the sound had stopped, or even if he’d slept at all. All he knew was that every recording device only captured his own breathing. So he turned on his phone and pressed record again.

“If I hear this recording and remember making it, that proves I’m not hallucinating or schizophrenic, and the recorder is working fine.”

He played the recording twice, let out a long sigh, and went out to buy an iron shovel...

This graveyard had been here since before the liberation, with no one managing it—some mounds didn’t even have headstones. After buying the shovel, William Carter walked to the center of the graveyard and gritted his teeth: “You bunch of old geezers, how dare you harass an otaku! You’d better be ready for your souls to be scattered! Let me tell you, an otaku, once he closes the door, is on a different plane of existence from the universe! Got it? If anyone dares to keep thumping tonight, I’ll come over and whip your corpses!”

He was fierce and menacing, spouting nonsense he thought was intimidating, and felt quite satisfied. But before he finished, a thunderclap from the sky nearly scared him to the ground. Still, he didn’t actually fall, so he straightened his clothes, put his hands behind his back, and swaggered back inside—who knows who he was putting on a show for. Across the street, the watermelon shop owner was so frightened by the sight of his new neighbor waving a shovel in the graveyard that he almost called the police.

Actually, young people like William Carter with little social experience often think they can handle everything themselves. He never thought to ask his neighbors about anything. If he’d just asked Mr. Bolton, the watermelon shop owner across the street, he could have learned a lot. For example, this small graveyard used to be the mansion of a wealthy family at the end of the Qing dynasty. Later, an unnamed fire turned it into ruins. In the 1930s, someone built a European-style villa here—the predecessor of the apartment where William Carter now lived. During the war, the building was used by the Japanese army as a temporary command post for several years, and the graveyard next to it gradually formed during that time.

If it had been some naturally gifted, kingly protagonist moving in, maybe he could have deduced a lot from this information. Unfortunately, William Carter was just an ordinary otaku—his only special skill was that his sarcasm was a bit sharper than most...