The Old Pagoda Tree Outside the Window

[Campus Forbidden Secrets]

On the first night of the new school year, an older student warned her: If you pass the old locust tree at midnight, don’t look back, no matter what you hear.

Lin Nian looked back. The next day, her roommate drowned in the lotus pond, though the water was only knee-deep. A ring of purplish handprints circled her ankle.

After that, someone cried beside her bed every night. Every sob carried the same message: You’re next.

She began investigating the tree’s secrets, only to discover that over the past sixty years, more than a hundred girls had died beneath it. Some drowned, some fell from buildings, and some supposedly “took their own lives.” Every one of them had the same handprints on her ankles.

Worse still, those girls had never left.

They were waiting for her. Waiting for her to look back, to come down, to say a single word.

But when Lin Nian finally saw them, she discovered that the living were more terrifying than ghosts, and the truth more terrifying than any horror.

You think there’s only one tree outside your window. But the tree is covered with countless eyes.