It’s Him – Ch13

The Incident That Drove a Student to Death

Li Xun was unaware of the situation at home. She had told Teacher Zhao that she didn’t care whether he was the murderer or not.

However, in reality, through her observations, Li Xun was certain that Teacher Zhao had blood on his hands. She was highly sensitive to such matters.

Her mother would handle the serial murder case, so she would first investigate how the student had died.

Once she solved both cases and found concrete evidence, she could figure out a way to get her mother out of this mess.

At this point, she still didn’t know that her mother was part of a group committing crimes. Aunt Zhang next door, along with the elderly neighbor who treated her as a granddaughter, had also joined in the plot involving intentional harm and imprisonment. They, too, needed to be saved.

Teacher Zhao was a good starting point.

When Zhao Jingzheng received the text message, he was somewhat surprised.

“Did any of the students my father taught get into trouble?”

He had lived in the school’s teacher dormitory with his father since he was little, so he was well aware of what happened at the school.

“The school has had several incidents, mostly suicides, with a few accidents, but none of them involved my father’s students. There were no issues related to my father, and we’ve never had a student’s family come to cause trouble.”

He wasn’t lying. Occasionally, students’ parents would come to see his father, but they were usually bringing gifts, and his father never accepted anything expensive, only leaving with some local specialties.

Li Xun had also searched for student death cases at Pingcheng High School online. For incidents involving the deaths of minors at schools, there would usually be only one report, with limited details.

The online records listed thirteen student deaths.

Seven were suicides, five were non-suicidal deaths—one from a fatal accident while bathing, one from severe allergies, and three students who drowned in a nearby lake while swimming together.

But the internet only started gaining traction in the last ten years, and for cases before that, she would have to wait for the entrepreneur to provide more details.

The person had not stopped investigating the killer. Over time, the connections accumulated during this process would surely be useful.

Li Xun was good at utilizing others’ resources.

Sure enough, when school finished that afternoon, she received a detailed collection of student non-natural death incidents at Pingcheng High School from 2000 onwards.

This teammate was reliable. Despite the claim that it was her teacher, the other party hadn’t overlooked anything, possibly compiling all such incidents together.

Li Xun suspected that there were a few people on the other side also studying the matter.

Looking at the information on her phone made her eyes ache.

Li Xun took the documents home and printed them all out.

Thankfully, she had a printer, though the number of pages was quite large—220 pages, and that was after she had reduced the font size.

She didn’t know where they had gotten the information from, but the data included basic information about the students who died unnaturally, such as their classes, teachers, and other details.

Li Xun directly searched for the cases from 2007 to 2008.

The data was messy and not arranged by date, and she had to search through it for a while before she found two cases.

One involved a male student who jumped from a building.

The other was a female student who died from a severe food allergy.

The former was due to immense pressure from schoolwork and an inability to integrate into school life, and the data denied any involvement of school violence.

The latter was confirmed to be a result of school violence. The girl had a strawberry allergy, and others had mocked her for being overly sensitive. No one believed that anyone could be allergic to strawberries. She was forced to eat a bowl of strawberries, and her reaction was so severe that the students who had bullied her ran away in fear.

The two students were in the same class, but Teacher Zhao was not listed among their instructors.

Li Xun furrowed her brows. Had she made a mistake? Was there something that happened during those two years that caused this psychopath to stop?

Although she hadn’t explicitly stated it, she believed that Teacher Zhao was the serial killer from back then.

Li Xun could only start over and look through the cases. The pressure on students, especially in prestigious schools like this one, was immense. Students worked from morning until night. The intense mental labor, coupled with unavoidable social interactions with classmates and family members, certainly pushed many students to the brink.

As she reviewed the information, Li Xun felt heartbroken. Due to time constraints, she focused on the subject teachers.

After an hour of reading, she noticed a pattern—

Most of these students came from rural areas, with girls being the majority. She felt inexplicably uncomfortable. Pingcheng High School had a very high university entrance rate. Once you were admitted, you could at least get into a decent university.

Why did they choose to give up? Why did they fall just before dawn?

Another issue—none of the students involved were taught by Teacher Zhao.

This was odd.

In twenty-five years, he hadn’t taught a single student who had a mental breakdown?

Was it really that coincidental?

To verify this, Li Xun created a table of all the teachers at Pingcheng High School who had taught for over fifteen years and began to gather data on the situations they had encountered.

Teachers with over fifteen years of experience, combined with the school’s requirement that each teacher must handle three classes, had likely encountered more than one case of non-natural student death.

Li Xun’s attention was drawn to the two teachers who had only encountered two such cases—Teacher Sun. She had been the homeroom teacher of both the boy who jumped and the girl who died from an allergic reaction.

Her teaching years happened to coincide with the period when the serial killer stopped.

Li Xun marked her out as the focus.

Suddenly, it dawned on her—there was an underlying logic between the student deaths and the serial killings.

Teacher Zhao had managed to remain unconnected to the incidents, making it impossible to link him to the murders.

But how had he done it?

Teacher Zhao was a very cunning person, and as time went on, it became harder to spot any flaws. The breakthrough should still lie in the earlier stages of the events.

Li Xun didn’t trust Zhao Jingzheng. Many things had likely happened during his childhood. To children, everything that happened seemed natural and wouldn’t attract attention.

Li Xun suggested that Zhao Jingzheng should ask his mother, and she, on the other hand, would go to question Teacher Sun.

Li Xun wasn’t sure whether her intuition was right, but she instinctively grasped the most important information.

—

Teacher Sun Ning had been teaching for twenty years at the school. Pingcheng High School was the best in Pingcheng, and to teach there, one had to be a doctoral student from a good university.

Back in her day, the requirements were more relaxed. She wasn’t even a teacher’s college graduate; she went to a normal university for her graduate studies and started teaching at 27. She joined Pingcheng High in 2007 and was now fifty years old.

Her entry to Pingcheng High School was particularly noteworthy. It was the peak period of the Red Balloon serial murder case.

She had followed the case back then, but she couldn’t bring herself to believe that her colleague, Teacher Zhao, could be the killer.

However, after going home, she would search for evidence that Zhao might be the murderer, and every time she looked, her heart would race with fear.

Logically, Teacher Zhao was well-regarded, and when she was a new teacher, she thought the same. But then something happened that led her to deliberately distance herself from him and make sure that the teachers in her class had no contact with Zhao.

This event occurred during her early years as a teacher.

Like some teachers who unintentionally ended up in the profession of teaching and educating, Sun Ning had done some tutoring during her university years. Back then, she found she enjoyed teaching, and since her major was English, she thought becoming an English teacher would be a good choice.

What set Sun Ning apart was her strong sense of responsibility. She had a particular view of the teaching profession and believed that being called “teacher” meant she had a responsibility to guide students along the right path, even if they didn’t understand or appreciate it at the moment.

Thus, conflicts began to arise with the students. They didn’t understand why she was so strict, and they suspected that she was just trying to please the school. They even whispered behind her back that she didn’t deserve to teach at this school, claiming that she was overly strict at her previous school and forced students to cheat to boost her grades, which eventually got her the position at this school.

In most cases, the conflict between teachers and students is not resolved by the students suddenly understanding, but by the teacher having an epiphany. The teacher eventually realizes that they can only save those who are meant to be saved.

But Sun Ning hadn’t reached that point yet. She still believed she was a savior and understood these children.

The students at Pingcheng High School were all top students from various junior high schools, many of whom came from rural schools. More than half of them were left-behind children, meaning they lacked access to better educational resources and parental support. Yet, they managed to outcompete city kids and win their place at this school.

These students were mostly boarders at Pingcheng High, and many of them found themselves at a crossroads, struggling with self-doubt. The boys became addicted to video games, sneaking out at night to play.

Sun Ning would go out at night to catch these students, only to be secretly called a crazy woman by them.

At the time, she felt that teaching was absolutely the most unsuitable job for her.

Fortunately, Zhao Teacher extended a helping hand at that time. Zhao helped her manage those troublesome students. Sun Ning’s temper was volatile back then, while Zhao was very gentle, always trying to mediate between the students and her.

Later, one of the students in her class jumped off a building. The student’s parents came to the school demanding compensation, because the student had left a suicide note blaming Sun Ning for forcing them.

Almost everyone said that she had pushed the student to their death.

Sun Ning collapsed and took two months off work. After that, she was no longer allowed to be a homeroom teacher.

After that incident, she slowly overcame her own issues. She stopped being overly demanding and accepted that as long as her students could get through these three years safely, that would be enough.

It was also around this time that she slowly realized how frightening Zhao Teacher really was.

It started when, one day, in the classroom office, another new teacher was throwing a fit because a student had copied someone else’s homework. The teacher was just scolding the student at first.

But Zhao Teacher suddenly said, “It’s no big deal, forget about it, it’s just homework, not a fight.”

Upon hearing this, the new teacher instantly lost control, beating the student and cursing about the fight.

Sun Ning, being very sensitive, felt something was off. She started recalling how she had been influenced, and thinking back to the student who had jumped off the building, she began to suspect that Zhao Teacher had somehow guided all of this.

However, she also thought that perhaps it was just the result of her overwhelming stress and guilt, and that she was projecting her own feelings onto Zhao Teacher.

So, she never told anyone. Instead, she instinctively avoided Zhao Teacher, and slowly, as she became a more experienced teacher, she found herself more adept at handling student issues.

Whenever new colleagues arrived at the school in a hurry, she would quickly help them through the initial chaos, trying to keep them away from Zhao Teacher.

In her heart, she also felt that perhaps it was her own unwillingness to take responsibility that made her view Zhao Teacher so negatively.

Now, as she was nearing fifty, it had been a long time since anyone brought up the death of a student in front of her. That incident had happened so long ago.

Until one day, she received a text message from an unknown person:

“Hello, Teacher Sun, I would like to confirm something. Li Hao was killed by Zhao Teacher, wasn’t he?”