The Shadow Beneath the Desk in the Back Row

In the old classroom building of Mingde High School, the desks at the back of Class 7, Senior Year, are always swallowed by a strange shadow. No matter how strong the sunlight, it never reaches through that triangular patch of darkness, as if something had bitten a piece clean out of the room.

Ten years ago, a girl named Lin Xiaoman sat at that desk and kept saying she could hear a voice calling her name from the shadow. Then, one rainy night, she vanished from the classroom building, clutching half a bloodstained eraser. The security footage caught only a deathly pale shadow grabbing her ankle and dragging her into the darkness beneath the desk.

On her first day as a transfer student, Su Xiao is forced to sit there and discovers that the shadow moves. Like a living thing, it crawls up the legs of her desk and onto her uniform. At midnight, the copper lock on the drawer automatically springs open. Inside lies a diary, its handwriting exactly like that in Su Xiao's elementary school exercise books. On the last page is a drawing of a girl being swallowed by the shadow, with the words: “You're next.”

When Su Xiao's name starts appearing in missing-person files from ten years ago, and her classmates are gradually ensnared by the shadow and start babbling the same nonsense Lin Xiaoman did before she died, she finally understands: that shadow did not form naturally. It is waiting for the next “Lin Xiaoman,” and she has long been the prey it chose.