Once again, Everly swore to herself—she would never be too kind again!
The next morning, after washing up, Everly walked out of the dormitory as usual and jogged around the building for her morning exercise. When she reached the corner behind the dorm, she collided head-on with Kelly, who was holding a flowerpot and wearing a strangely enigmatic smile.
Kelly was short and stocky, with narrow eyes and a face covered in large freckles—a girl who looked a little dull at first glance. When Everly saw her, Kelly was standing by the flowerbed, facing in the direction Everly was running from. Her long red hair fell across her shoulders, casting shadows over her eyes and face. Combined with the peculiar curl of her mouth and her quiet, bowed posture, she gave off an aura that was both mysterious and unsettling.
The area behind the dorm was rarely trafficked. Despite Everly suddenly appearing around the corner, Kelly showed no sign of surprise. In fact, even before Everly arrived, the girl’s slanted upward eyes were already fixed on the corner, giving the impression that she had long anticipated someone appearing there and had been waiting patiently.
Everly froze in her tracks.
From the information she currently had, Kelly was very likely connected to the cursed witch of the old school building and had borrowed the witch’s power to curse and kill the two classmates who had b*llied her. This Kelly had long since surpassed ordinary human limits—she was a walking weapon. Recklessly approaching her could easily bring disaster.
But if she turned and ran, such an obvious act of avoidance might anger Kelly, possibly marking Everly as a target.
Just as Everly hesitated, Kelly moved.
She gently caressed the black lily in her arms, walked slowly up to Everly, lifted her head, and fixed her pitch-black eyes unblinkingly on her.
“Do you love your mother too?”
“What?”
Kelly said no more.
She walked over to the flowerbed and set down the pot she was holding. Then, like a drifting ghost, she glided past Everly as if no one else existed and left the dormitory area.
Everly stood frozen, watching Kelly’s retreating figure disappear around the corner. She didn’t understand what Kelly’s sudden question meant—did it mean that Kelly loved her mother? And what did that have to do with her…?
Everly looked down at the bracelet on her wrist. The delicate silver chain still held the blue glass eye intact, showing no signs of damage.
The glass bead was a traditional Turkish amulet called the “Evil Eye,” also known as the “Blue Eye.” It had a mild protective power against curses, but it was very weak—after all, it was just a secondhand trinket that Rebecca had somehow acquired. Everly didn’t rely on it for actual protection; she mostly used it as a sort of curse alarm.
Since the Blue Eye remained intact, that meant Kelly hadn’t targeted her.
That was a relief. The rest, she decided, wasn’t worth dwelling on…
Everly forced herself to push the question out of her mind, wary of digging too deep and getting trapped. After leaving the dorm, she went to the cafeteria, ate her meal, attended classes, and carried on with her ordinary day—at least as ordinary as it could be.
But she had forgotten one thing: with Kelly around, ordinary was impossible.
Around 10:40 a.m., during English class, a piercing scream shattered the classroom’s calm.
At that moment, the English teacher, Veronica, was standing by the flowerbed, pointing to the seedlings and explaining the process of plant growth to the students. She was also quoting poetry and sharing verses related to plants, in line with the “garden education” popular in American schools. While everyone was immersed in the rich literary atmosphere, the sudden scream disrupted everything. Even the teacher turned, and all the students instinctively looked toward the source of the sound.
It was a corner of the greenhouse. In a square flowerbed raised about half a meter above the ground, several beautiful lilies were growing.
Perhaps drawn by the blooming lilies, a boy had somehow slipped away from the class and approached the flowerbed. He was now sitting on the edge of it, hands supporting him on the ground, staring in horror at a single black lily.
“P…p…person…”
He stammered, repeating words that made no sense.
The English teacher immediately sensed something was wrong. She pushed aside the students and moved to the boy’s side, following his line of sight to the black lily.
From the moment Everly saw the flower, a sense of foreboding settled over her. That morning, she had encountered Kelly behind the dormitory, holding a similar flower in her hands. Could there be a connection between the two…?
Humans are curious creatures, especially when danger is involved. Even though Everly constantly warned herself not to look—that it would surely be a horrifying sight—she couldn’t stop her feet from moving forward.
So when the teacher parted the lily stems and looked down at the black bloom, Everly, standing at the front of the crowd, saw it just as clearly as Ms. Veronica did: at the base of the black lily was not soil, but something far worse.
To be precise, it wasn’t soil at all—it was a brain, a mixture of blood and white matter.
The black lily was growing on a bare, exposed brain.
“Ugh…ugh, blech!”
Ms. Veronica immediately turned her head and vomited. Everly prided herself on her strong psychological endurance, but even she felt waves of nausea when she realized the brain was still fresh, still bleeding outward.
If that was bad for her, there was no need to describe the rest of the students behind her. Screaming, retching, running, fainting—the entire greenhouse erupted into chaos in an instant.
Thinking about it, even Everly felt a pang of sympathy for her classmates. In just two days, they had witnessed a living person being devoured by spiders into a pool of blood, and then a human brain used as soil to grow flowers. Experiencing nightmares of that magnitude at such an age… the shadow of these events would likely haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Ms. Veronica barely managed to call the police and clear the greenhouse. Though students were kept away during the subsequent investigation, rumors about the victim’s identity had already begun circulating—“It must be Eric from the class next door!” He had been missing since that morning. His homeroom teacher had searched the dorm, classrooms, and courts, asking classmates and roommates, but no one could say where he was.
The students in the neighboring class were terrified. They didn’t dare confront Kelly, whose presence had grown increasingly ominous, so they tried to confirm things with the teachers—but all the teachers were tight-lipped, unwilling to speak of it.
By the afternoon, a post suddenly appeared on the school forum, pushing the students’ panic to its peak.
The post came from a level-1 alt account, and the title was simply: [Flowers].
The name sounded innocent enough, but when the post was opened, what appeared was not any cheerful blooms—it was a horrifying photograph.
The photo showed a corpse covered in soil. Its hands were clasped behind its back, knees on the ground, head bowed in a submissive posture of guilt, kneeling inside a massive pit. The skull had been carefully removed in a circle by some sharp tool, exposing the pink brain inside. A black lily grew directly from the brain, its swollen white bulb nestled atop it. Slender roots twisted densely into the deep grooves of the brain, embedding so firmly that the tissue at the crown was shredded and smeared with red and white matter.
Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the top students in the school could easily recognize the corpse: it was Eric from seventh grade, a clever, mischievous boy always bursting with wild ideas, now killed in a gruesome and unimaginable way.
No one knew how the poster had managed to secretly photograph the scene under the heavy police lockdown. Although the forum administrators reacted quickly and deleted the post, the photo titled “Flowers” had already been saved by some quick-fingered students and, within the next few dozen minutes, spread rapidly across the entire school and even throughout the city of Micano.
Everly’s email had also, at some unknown point, received the photo forwarded by a classmate.
Expressionless, she clicked delete and then dialed Old John’s number.
The school had become too dangerous. She planned to take a leave of absence for a while, waiting for Kelly to finish exacting revenge on all her enemies before returning once things had settled.
But her plan was thwarted—soon, Everly was summoned by the police as someone related to the case.
The greenhouse where Eric died contained some rare plants. To protect school property, a surveillance camera had been installed above the greenhouse entrance. At 7:30 a.m. that morning, the footage captured Eric unlocking the door and entering the greenhouse alone. Thirty minutes later, the two school workers responsible for maintaining the greenhouse arrived. According to their testimony, the greenhouse was empty when they entered, though the black lily had already appeared in the corner.
The police therefore estimated Eric’s time of death to be between 7:30 and 8:00 a.m.
As one of the school’s prominent figures, Eric had a wide circle of friends. The only student he had ever had any “minor conflict” with was Kelly, his classmate. Everyone assumed Kelly had killed Eric. However, from 7:50 a.m. until Eric’s body was discovered, Kelly had been among the crowd, providing a solid alibi. The only unaccounted-for period was the 20 minutes between 7:30 and 7:50.
When the police asked Kelly where she had been during that time, she replied that she had stayed in the girls’ dormitory until 7:40.
If the reports were true, physically, it would have been impossible for Kelly to run from the girls’ dormitory to the greenhouse, kill Eric, and then make it to the cafeteria to eat—all within just ten minutes.
So, as the only witness who could verify that Kelly had indeed been in the dorm at the time, the police summoned Everly.
Heh… what an utterly unfair misfortune.
As a minor, Everly was supposed to have a guardian present during questioning. Old John had already driven to the school and was waiting outside. Under normal circumstances, the school should have allowed him to accompany Everly. However, when she was finally led into the interrogation room, it was the homeroom teacher from the neighboring class who walked in with her.
“Everly, you’re a smart girl. The three deceased students were all model kids, and their families are furious. They’ve sworn to see the culprit punished at all costs. So when you talk to the police… if they ask whether you saw Kelly this morning…”
Everly’s heart skipped a beat. She understood the teacher’s implication: these corrupt adults were clearly trying to get her to give false testimony.
“Understood, teacher,” Everly said obediently.
But once she was at the scene, she immediately went against that expectation and told the truth.
“Yes. Between 7:35 and 7:39 this morning, I encountered Kelly behind the girls’ dormitory… I’m certain about the time, because I’m very conscious of the time and habitually check my watch. Mistaken identity? Of course not—Kelly even greeted me at the time. I know her.”
“Are you sure, Everly?” the homeroom teacher from the neighboring class asked anxiously at her side.
Everly had learned a bit about interrogation procedures from Old John and knew that the homeroom teacher’s interference was against the rules. Strangely, everyone around seemed to ignore or tolerate this behavior. Not only that, the police in front of her kept a stern face, repeatedly asking for minute details about her morning, treating her more like a suspect than a witness.
It seemed the Micano police had already been influenced by the power of several students’ parents… How foolish—knowing full well they were dealing with nonhuman forces, yet still trying to force a “confession” using human methods?
No matter how the adults hinted or outright pressured her, Everly refused to sign any record that wasn’t hers—if they wanted to dig their own graves, fine, but they weren’t dragging her down with them.
Because Everly stood firm and clearly understood the proper interrogation procedures, she would shout for a lawyer at the slightest irregularity, making the police sweat profusely. After a tense standoff, the adults finally gave up trying to persuade this copper bean that couldn’t be boiled or steamed.