The Three Pure Ones' Secret: Expressing Spirit

We walked down the corridor, and there were two more rooms on either side. Wang Xiaoshuai and I followed Zhou Xing, who came to one of the rooms. This room was clearly different from the classrooms we had just passed. The door was in good condition and painted green, but it must have been many years old, with peeling paint in many places. There was an iron latch on the door, with an old, worn-out three-pronged iron padlock hanging on it. Judging from the patina around the latch, this room must have been an office or something similar in the past.

The fact that the room was locked proves that it's definitely not empty; there must be something inside!

Wang Xiaoshuai asked Zhou Xing, "Are we going in or not?"

Zhou Xing turned to look at Wang Xiaoshuai: "Nonsense! Why would we sneak over to this old classroom at the back if we weren't going in!"

Before Wang Xiaoshuai and I could react, Zhou Xing, like a bandit, kicked the padlock latch. However, the latch wasn't broken, but the door opened from one side of the hinge, and the broken green door was hanging from the door frame by the latch.

Wang Xiaoshuai and I stared at Zhou Xing in shock. He scratched the back of his head and laughed awkwardly, saying, "Don't be afraid. It's late at night and raining. How could anyone hear anything here?"

Wang Xiaoshuai and I were naturally not as brave as Zhou Xing, and I secretly worried that someone might come to arrest us later. Then the three of us looked into the room by candlelight and found that the room was indeed different. It was very messy, probably because it hadn't been opened for a long time, and it gave off a strong musty smell and the smell of rotting wood.

The three of them went inside together. There were several writing desks and several filing cabinets, all made of very old wood. Some of them had broken off from the corners due to the weight of the wood, scattering books and papers all over the floor.

The three of us took out books from the filing cabinet to look at. The books were textbooks published a long time ago, and we weren't interested in them, so we tossed them onto the writing desk next to us. The writing desk was already covered in dust and was almost turning into clumps of mud.

We rummaged through the filing cabinet for a while, but it was all the same books; nothing different. Perhaps Zhou Xing was tired of carrying the candles; he placed them on the writing desk, then moved to the other side of the desk. We didn't know what he was doing, so Wang Xiaoshuai asked him, "What are you looking for?"

As Zhou Xing looked around, he walked inside and explained to us, "I'm seeing if there are any drawers or anything in this writing desk, to see if I can find anything."

He walked over and suddenly exclaimed, "Hey, there really is!"

We saw him fiddling with something, and when we asked him what he was doing, he ignored us and just kept fiddling with it. We went over to take a look, and no wonder he ignored us—the drawer was locked. He tried to open it for a long time but couldn't, so we went over to help him. Although the lock and the metal plate were rusty, they were still very secure. Finally, having run out of options, we found a piece of fallen tile in the room, and Zhou Xing knocked it against the lock.

The old lock was rusted shut, and although the knocking didn't open it, it broke the metal plate. Zhou Xing then pulled open the drawer, which was filled with paper, pens, ink, and chalk in a jumble. He took things out one by one until he reached the bottom, where he found several photos that were completely unrecognizable.

I was stunned to see these people. What were these photos? I couldn't make out anything. They flipped through them and found some writing on the back. I looked closely and saw that it read: "Graduation photo of Class 3, Grade 9, 1998."

I was a little confused, so I said to them, "Hey, this photo says 'Grade 9, Class 3.' This used to be junior high, how come it's high school now?"

The two men shook their heads, indicating they didn't know either. Finding nothing unusual, the three then looked at the other drawers of the writing desk. After opening all the drawers, they naturally found nothing unusual either; they only found fountain pens used by teachers to correct homework and Hongyan ink that had been sealed away for many years.

Seeing that there was nothing particularly interesting in the room, the group prepared to move on to the next place. We went outside, intending to go to the room across the corridor, but just as we stepped out, we were drawn by a strange sound—a sound coming from the bushes where we had just been.

The pattering sound grew louder and louder, and the rain around us stopped sometime ago. A hazy moon appeared in the previously pitch-black sky, its dim light illuminating the bushes and allowing us to make out the shape of the classroom we had come from.

The classroom we came from was like a courtyard house. The surrounding area was dimly lit by the moonlight. It was clear that the classroom buildings were indeed like an enclosed temple. There was even a pavilion in the middle of the enclosed bushes, but there were too many thorns and weeds around it to get through.

The gurgling sound piqued our curiosity. Wang Xiaoshuai said, "What's that sound? This place looks like a temple. Should we try to go inside and take a look?"

Zhou Xing looked around and then said, "Don't rush, let's head towards the big chimney. This place is bigger than we thought!"

This guy didn't want to leave the group late at night, so he followed Zhou Xing to the room across the corridor. It was an empty room, but there was a painting on the wall. The painting was huge, two or three meters high, depicting a beautiful woman in a white dress holding a bamboo stick in her hands.

We were a bit baffled as to why there was a portrait of a woman painted on the wall of this room. She looked ethereal and otherworldly, unlike a modern person. Moreover, the painting didn't seem to have been painted in the last few decades. Some of the paint on the wall had already peeled off, and the corners were even more outrageous, with many blue bricks exposed and a large crack running through them.

Zhou Xing raised the candle, and we saw several large traditional Chinese characters next to the woman, which read "Statue of Chang Qingqing, the Immortal of the Chang Family." The three of them stared at each other, exclaiming, "Holy crap! This is actually an immortal! But I've never heard of such a person among immortals before!"

It's understandable that we didn't know at the time, because Chang Qingqing wasn't a fairy at all. As for why she was called a fairy and why her image was painted on this wall, it's because the old classrooms behind the school we visited used to be a Taoist temple. However, the temple was converted into a school during the Republic of China era, and many things related to Taoism were renovated.

As for the story of the fairy Chang Qingqing, I only gradually learned about it later.

The group watched for a long time, but none of them knew who this fairy was. Perhaps at that time, all they knew was that the white dragon horse's hooves were facing west.

Zhou Xing glanced at his watch and saw that it was almost ten o'clock, so he said to us, "Hey, stop looking at it, let's hurry up and go back."

When Wang Xiaoshuai heard him say he wanted to go back, he said sarcastically, "Oh, scared?"

Zhou Xing rolled his eyes at him: "I'm not afraid of you, you old man. Look at the time! Are you even going to class tomorrow?"

Zhou Xing then urged us to go to the next place. We walked into the corridor and went deeper for about ten meters before coming out of the corridor and arriving at an open space outside. The open space was about two or three hundred square meters. We didn't know if the ground was cement or something else, but nothing was growing there. We were a little surprised because the middle of the old classroom was full of weeds, but there wasn't a single blade of grass here. Through the moonlight, we could vaguely see a building opposite the open space, and on top of the building was a very large chimney.

When we saw that it was the chimney that the others had mentioned, we felt a surge of excitement, but even more so, fear. I was probably the one who was afraid; I don't know if those two scoundrels were scared.

However, when he thought of the story Wang Xiaoshuai had told him at the beginning, that the school used to be an execution ground and that people were burned to death in the buildings under the chimney, he felt a strange sense of unease.

Zhou Xing, perhaps a little intimidated, said to Wang Xiaoshuai, "Let's go. Didn't you say this chimney is dangerous and could kill people? Are you chickening out?"

Wang Xiaoshuai retorted defiantly, "What am I afraid of? You'll be scared to death later!"

Neither of them would give in to the other, but I didn't care and just followed behind them.

The three of us slowly walked toward the large chimney. I felt increasingly strange because as we got closer and saw more clearly, the building in front of us didn't seem to be the room where people were burned to death that Wang Xiaoshuai had described. As we got clearer, we realized that this was not a chimney at all, but clearly a large ingot-shaped incense burner for burning paper money.

The group was stunned. This school was quite speechless. The rest of the temple had been renovated, but the ingot furnace was the only thing that hadn't been demolished, which proved that it really was a temple before.

Wang Xiaoshuai glanced at Zhou Xing beside him, who was grinning smugly: "How about it, bro! Still want to argue?"

Zhou Xing looked at the smug Wang Xiaoshuai and scoffed, "Tch!"

This furnace doesn't necessarily prove that this is a temple. What if it is a landmark building, something the school built for art purposes?

Although Zhou Xing's excuses were somewhat far-fetched, Wang Xiaoshuai didn't take it to heart. Instead, he gathered around the ingot furnace to look at it, because the furnace was indeed astonishing. The carvings on it were so impressive that they were practically lifelike.

After everyone had looked around, we were surprised to find a downward stone staircase behind the ingot furnace. Some of us were a little surprised; there was another way to go, and the old classrooms behind the teaching building actually occupied such a large area, even though they didn't look very big inside.

After thinking about it, Wang Xiaoshuai realized that the main road next to them also led to the back, and the auditorium was right behind them. So he urged Zhou Xing to go downstairs and see if there was another way back, as he didn't want to climb back up to the window again.

We then went down the stairs, and after a while we came to a corner, and then continued down the stairs.

The three people were stunned. The auditorium was down here? They didn't remember there being such a staircase behind the auditorium.

But the group didn't want to go back the way they came, so they went down the stairs again. After a while, they arrived at a small square made of rammed earth. Once they saw it, they realized what was going on, and I wasn't so scared anymore.

The three of us went to the back of the auditorium. We had come here to clean before, and the reason we hadn't noticed the stairs when we did a thorough cleaning was because they were behind a restroom. Plus, I was being lazy and just skipped the cleanup, so I had no idea there was a staircase behind the restroom that led upstairs.

We looked around and confirmed that this was the place we had been before. We looked at the toilet in the back and another room next to it. Wang Xiaoshuai said to Mo and Zhou Xing, "Hey, when did they build another room? We didn't see it when we came here last semester."

Zhou Xing simply said, "It was fixed during the holiday, what's so strange about that?"

After looking at it, I felt something was off because the building was built strangely; it wasn't in the school's architectural style. Seeing that the two didn't seem to care, I said to them, "Hey, wait a minute, this building's style is so weird, don't you think it looks like a temple?"

The two looked at each other, and Wang Xiaoshuai exclaimed in surprise, "Huh! It really does seem to be true!"

The three of us looked completely bewildered. Zhou Xing glanced at us nonchalantly and said, "Who cares? Let's go see what they're doing repairing this room!"

We then had no choice but to follow him. As we got closer, we felt increasingly strange, because the house didn't look newly built at all. Instead, it gave off a sense of weathering and vicissitudes that had lasted for hundreds of years.

Zhou Xing walked to the door and found it was still two large wooden doors, with two large round windows on either side, separated by wooden lattice bars. Zhou Xing held a candle and tried to shine it inside, but the faint candlelight couldn't reach inside at all. He couldn't see anything inside. Zhou Xing was skilled and daring, unafraid of being blown up by cannons, so he kicked the door. There was a loud bang, the door didn't open, and he was thrown to the ground.

Wang Xiaoshuai and I looked at it, then said to him somewhat speechlessly, "Brother, there's a bolt here, just pull it open!"

Zhou Xing smiled a little sheepishly: "I wasn't paying attention, I messed up the act, hehe!"

We opened the door, and the unique scent of candles and incense from the temple wafted out. But there were no candles or incense inside, cobwebs everywhere, and it was very dark inside.

Seeing this, our minds were completely blank. The more we thought about it, the more we felt like idiots. Nothing was right. This place hadn't been here before; it suddenly appeared in just half a semester. But the place didn't look like a building that had only been completed a few months ago. The cobwebs inside looked at least ten or twenty years old.

We were puzzled, but we were also genuinely curious, so we walked around looking at things. But after only a few steps, the three of us were stunned by what appeared and froze on the spot!

The room was filled with statues of gods, or more accurately, statues of gods, each with a different pose, some joyful, some sorrowful, some standing, some sitting, and some even lying on animals. The three of them were stunned by the statues on both sides and remained silent for a long time.