Yinhuai Middle School: Thirteen Curses

Yinhuai Middle School has been open for eighty years. Its college admission rate has ranked near the bottom every year, but its dropout rate has never been made public.

At the center of the campus stands an old Chinese scholar tree, a hundred and twenty years old. Its canopy blocks out the sky, and not a single leaf ever falls, in any season.

A rule passed down among the older students says: never count the tree's branches in the dead of night. When you reach the thirteenth, it will count you.

Su Jinwan was admitted to Yinhuai Middle School with the highest score in the city. But instead of an acceptance letter, she received a black card bearing just one line:

"Your mother owes us. You will repay her debt."

In Dormitory 404, she met four others who had been "chosen" just like her: Lu Huaishen, a taciturn transfer student who always wore a glove on his left hand; Xu Anran, who could communicate with spirits and wore a dark red jade pendant around her neck; Jiang Yu, an orphan missing a finger; and Lu Zhixing, a repeat student who had lived at the school for three years, his wrist wrapped in red knots.

On the first day of school, a name that didn't exist appeared on the attendance sheet.

The first curse descended.

Roll call, shadows, exam papers, test subjects, betrayal, sacrifices, the teacher's way, gazes, stairs, traitors, coffins... all the way to the end.

Thirteen curses. Thirteen rounds of deathly trials.

When Su Jinwan opened her mother's old diary, and Lu Huaishen entered the forbidden zone on the third basement level, they discovered the truth:

This school was never built to educate students.

It is a cage. An altar. A feeding ground.

And the thing sleeping inside the old scholar tree has awakened.