The Girl in My Bed，Died a Year Ago

In anatomy class, I watched as my girlfriend's body was wheeled in front of me.

Just last night, she was curled up in my arms, her warm fingertips tracing across my collarbone as we made love.

But the metal tag on the corpse's ankle coldly displayed a line of text: Olivia Smith, Female, 22 years old, Death by fall from height, Time in morgue: 365 days.

She had been dead for a whole year.

What exactly was the girlfriend who had been moaning beneath me every night and living with me for half a year?

Chapter 1

My name is Michael Johnson, a second-year graduate student at medical school and a teaching assistant for this semester's anatomy lab course.

Right now, I was standing in front of the main dissection table, gripping a cold scalpel, while dozens of freshman eyes stared at me from below.

On the dissection table, the outline of a body wrapped in white cloth glowed pale blue under the lights.

The sharp smell of formalin stung my nose painfully—a smell I'd been breathing for five years and had long grown used to.

But today, mixed into that smell was a faint, sweet scent of gardenias.

That was Olivia's scent.

I pushed down the inexplicable flutter in my chest, cleared my throat, and addressed the freshmen below, "Today we'll be doing a regional dissection lab."

After speaking, I bent down to look at the metal nameplate hanging at the head of the dissection table.

The moment my fingertips touched the nameplate, a bone-chilling cold shot through my entire body from my fingertips, like an icy snake crawling through my veins.

The words on the nameplate stabbed into my eyes one by one:

Name: Olivia Smith

Age: 22

Cause of death: Multiple organ rupture from high fall

Time in morgue: 1 year

Olivia.

This name was like a red-hot branding iron, searing itself onto my retinas.

She was my girlfriend of half a year, the Olivia I saw every day and held in my arms every night.

My breathing stopped instantly. My blood felt frozen in my veins. Every hair on my body stood on end, and even the hand gripping the scalpel began to shake uncontrollably.

The freshmen below noticed something was wrong and started whispering, but I couldn't hear anything anymore. All I could hear was my own heartbeat pounding like drums in my ears.

Impossible.

Absolutely impossible.

Olivia and I had only met half a year ago on the ginkgo path at school. She was carrying a stack of books and accidentally bumped into me. Books scattered everywhere, and she apologized with a red face. The light brown beauty mark below her eyebrow looked impossibly gentle in the sunlight.

Just last night, she was lying in my rental apartment, curled up in my arms acting cute, saying she wanted to eat pastries from the shop at the school gate tomorrow.

How could she have been dead for a year?

How could she have become a cadaver on the dissection table?

I forced down the choking feeling in my throat. My fingertips were shaking badly as I reached out, grabbed a corner of the white cloth, and yanked it off.

The moment the cloth slid away, the shadowless lamp's light fell directly on that face.

The light brown beauty mark below her eyebrow, the delicate nose, the pressed lips, even the tiny mole behind her ear that only I knew about—everything was exactly the same as the Olivia I saw every day, down to the smallest detail.

There couldn't be a second person in the world with these exact same marks.

But this face was deathly pale and rigid, without a trace of color. Her lips had the blue-gray tinge characteristic of corpses, and the blood vessels under her skin showed a disturbing blue-black color from the formalin preservation.

Her eyes were closed, her long eyelashes completely still. She lay there cold, without a hint of life.

She really was a corpse.

A corpse that had been lying in the morgue for a whole year.

A terrifyingly extreme thought coiled around my heart like a venomous snake, tightening and tightening until I could barely breathe:

My girlfriend of half a year wasn't human at all.

The instant this thought exploded in my mind, Olivia on the dissection table suddenly opened her eyes.

Those weren't human eyes.

Her entire eye sockets were filled with thick blood-red, without any whites, like two wells filled with fresh blood, staring straight at me.

Her mouth opened slightly, and there was actually a coin in her mouth.

Her stiff arm suddenly lifted up, blue-black fingernails reaching straight for my neck. Cold corpse energy rushed at my face, carrying the heavy smell of formalin and decay.

"Michael, I've been with you all along."

Her voice was cold and stiff, like two pieces of rusty metal scraping together, drilling straight into my eardrums.

The shadowless lamp in the dissection room suddenly flickered wildly, electrical currents crackling. The freshmen below instantly vanished without a trace. In the entire dissection room, only I remained, along with the corpse on the dissection table lunging toward me.

The instant her fingertips barely touched the skin of my neck, all the images receded like a tide. My good friend Daniel Wilson's voice exploded in my ears as he slapped my shoulder hard, his voice so loud it made my ears ring, "Michael! What's wrong with you? Why are you spacing out? The students are waiting! Why is your face so pale?"

I snapped back to reality, gasping for breath. Cold sweat ran down my forehead along my cheeks, dripping onto the dissection table and spreading into small wet spots.

I was still gripping that cold scalpel. In front of me on the dissection table, the white cloth was still properly covering the body. The shadowless lamp shone steadily. Below, dozens of freshman eyes looked at me with confusion.

I quickly looked down at the metal nameplate at the head of the bed.

It bore a completely unfamiliar name. The age and cause of death were all information I'd never heard before, with no connection to Olivia whatsoever.

My fingertips still retained the bone-chilling cold of Olivia's skin. On my neck, I could still feel the chill of her fingernails scraping across it.

But everything before my eyes told me that the horrifying scene just now was nothing but my hallucination.

Could it really be that I'd been under too much pressure lately from grad school exams and teaching, causing such a vivid hallucination?

I pinched the nameplate, my knuckles turning white, but the doubt and fear in my heart grew like wild vines, instantly covering my entire heart.

I forced down the surging feeling in my chest and pushed through the rest of the anatomy class with a trembling voice.

The entire time, I didn't dare let my gaze fall on the dissection table. My mind kept flashing back to Olivia's pale face in the hallucination, her hollow blood-red eyes, and that cold phrase: "I've been with you all along."

The moment the bell rang, I practically fled from the dissection room, not even bothering to put away the teaching materials.