Chapter 177: Red Maple Boarding School (14) “He seems to have forgotten something”

In the latter half of the night, Zhang Yiyu woke up hungry.

She hadn’t eaten anything for a long time; as a ghoul, she didn’t need to consume human food, and she wouldn’t starve to death even if she ate nothing.

But after dinner, she felt an unusual hunger, as if a hidden desire buried deep in her heart had been provoked, and she could no longer suppress it.

After finishing everything on her plate, she still wanted more. Seeing the expression of the player next to her who couldn’t stomach the food, she genuinely felt it was a waste of God’s gifts.

She knew her feelings were abnormal, so she didn’t dare to appear too eager, only managing to finish half of the female player from the Tingfeng Guild’s food under the guise of helping to share the burden.

The hunger was greatly relieved at the time. She finally managed to endure until lights out and tried her best to fall asleep.

She had thought she could wait peacefully until breakfast the next day, but in her hazy dream, the hunger, no longer suppressed by willpower, grew more rampant, gradually overwhelming her reason.

So hungry… I want to eat something… Zhang Yiyu muttered silently in her heart, rising from the bed like a ghost and walking out the door step by step.

She seemed to instinctively know where to find food, descending the stairs step by step as if guided by an unseen force, wandering through the corridor on the first floor.

The scent of food grew closer. Zhang Yiyu swallowed her saliva, tiptoeing past the office and heading towards the adjacent archive room.

The food she anticipated was inside. The archive room door was wide open, as if an elaborate feast had been laid out, inviting her in.

Although there was no lighting, Zhang Yiyu could clearly see the most attractive thing in the scene.

It was a young man lying in a pool of blood. His thin limbs wouldn’t yield much flesh, and half of the back of his head had been sheared off, still gushing brain matter and fresh blood.

The person was visibly dead, yet he constantly emitted an alluring scent, much like a plate of half-cooked foie gras that no one had yet touched.

Zhang Yiyu was startled by her own thoughts. Her reason briefly resurfaced, stirring up the fear inherent in being human.

She had gone out at night, come to the first floor, and encountered a dead person… What was going on?

And why did she feel an appetite for a corpse?

Was it because she was a False Human? Why hadn’t Ning Xu told her about this characteristic?

She couldn’t be like this; she wanted to be human, not degenerate into a true ghost… However, instinct quickly gained the upper hand again, and Zhang Yiyu’s eyes became hazy.

Anyway, as a ghoul, she couldn’t livestream. What did it matter if she did things that were not allowed by public morals?

The rich smell of blood gave off an attractive fragrance. Zhang Yiyu’s consciousness sank into ignorance inch by inch, and only one thought remained in her mind—

It looks so delicious, just one bite, one bite shouldn’t hurt… When Qi Si returned to the dormitory, Chen Lidong had not yet come back.

The deserted, lightless environment had completely become the domain of ghosts.

A thin figure lay on the empty bed. The child-shaped ghoul looked at him with sad eyes, revealing expressions of reproach and pain, seemingly questioning why he was still alive and well in this world.

Qi Si flicked the switch of his lighter. The faint orange-red flame briefly illuminated a small space, and the ghost’s shadow vanished instantly, as if it had never existed.

“Is it a hallucination caused by the ‘insomnia syndrome’?” Qi Si had a faint suspicion and looked down at his Pocket Watch of Fate.

The watch’s hands moved diligently, the second hand ticking one step per second, subtly engaging the minute hand via the gears for an almost imperceptible turn. At first glance, nothing seemed amiss.

Upon seeing the description of “Group Hallucination” in the records, Qi Si immediately thought of the scenario in the Hopeless Sea: everyone was trapped in a giant dream, and they needed to find the key to the dream to truly wake up.

He vaguely remembered that in the dream of the Hopeless Sea, the hands of the Pocket Watch of Fate were stagnant because the flow of time in the dream depended on subjectivity and could not be observed by objective objects.

But here, the Pocket Watch of Fate had been running steadily the whole time, and its speed was consistent with the flow of time, basically ruling out the possibility of the players being in a dream.

“Is it because hallucinations and dreams are different in nature? Or… is the space I am in right now real?” Qi Si looked at the description of “marking objective time” on the item’s details and fell into contemplation.

Time is undoubtedly very important in this instance.

In the records about insomnia syndrome, the timeline from the children’s infection to their death was very clear. Players needed to figure out their current time node to make rational decisions based on the records.

So, what exactly does “objective time” refer to?

The time flow in the instance and reality are completely different; “objective” is inherently a relative concept.

Qi Si was inclined to believe that time in the instance was similar to a “progress bar.”

The Grand Performance instance gave Qi Si inspiration: every instance has a potential timeline, and specific events occur at specific time nodes.

Just like the unwavering three-day cycle in the Rose Manor; or the wedding banquet on the second day and the Night Parade of a Hundred Ghosts on the third day in the Shuangxi Town instance… The speed of the Pocket Watch of Fate’s hands is undoubtedly consistent with the scroll speed of this timeline. If so, is it possible to establish a world of hallucination with the same time flow on the foundation of the real world?

Qi Si took out a blank sheet of paper from his backpack and looked at the line he had recently transcribed: “The children’s Group Hallucination constructs a new school above the original school.”

The direction was too explicit, practically slapping the standard answer onto the players’ faces, making him momentarily suspicious that this might just be misleading information without practical significance.

The new school… time… the two Ms. Medinas… Qi Si sat on the edge of the bed, trying to follow the vines of thought to deduce the answer. Thousands of thoughts swam wildly in his mind, and various irrelevant information and meaningless images flashed before his eyes, preventing him from extracting definitive information.

He couldn’t help but feel a bad premonition—that insomnia syndrome would not only affect his sleep but also his thinking.

Qi Si cherished and was superstitious about his intellectual ability, almost worshipping it like a deity, because, in his view, it was the only thing he could rely on, and the sole endowment that defined who he was.

Any slight decline in his thinking ability was enough to make him uneasy and nervous, and if the decline was irreversible, he would be in extreme agony.

He had once thought that if he ever found himself becoming an idiot, he must immediately slit his own throat to end his miserable existence… After thinking so chaotically, Qi Si realized he had zoned out.

Perhaps due to mental fatigue from a sleepless night, he was now easily distracted by sudden, bubble-like thoughts, unable to focus his attention on useful areas.

The time displayed on the Pocket Watch of Fate was exactly 2:30 AM, still early before the second bed check at four o’clock.

Qi Si picked up his pen and, using the faint light of the lighter, wrote down lines of information on the paper, from known clues and inferences about the instance to his own identity.

—He clearly remembered that when a patient’s insomnia syndrome became terminal, they would forget who they were.

Recording information proved effective in aiding thought. Although various tangled, vine-like ideas still spread through Qi Si’s mind, he was ultimately able to sort out a relatively clear thread.

The hand reached 3:00 AM. Estimating the time, Chen Lidong would be back soon.

Qi Si folded the written paper and tucked it into a compartment of his backpack.

The compartment seemed to already be stuffed with items, causing resistance when the new paper was inserted.

His fingertip touched another piece of paper, folded squarely and pressed flat. Qi Si pinched it out with two fingers and unfolded it before his eyes.

On it, written clearly in his own handwriting, were the words:

【There is a calendar hanging in the corner to the left of the school’s main entrance. Today’s date is June 1, 1869.】

Yet Qi Si had absolutely no recollection of writing it… On the second floor of the school, Chen Lidong and Zhou Datong each held a torch, walking one after the other toward the end corner of the hallway.

After leaving the dormitory, Chen Lidong used the ring’s communication function to call Zhou Datong, and the two went down to the first floor together.

He had intended to search the office but didn’t expect that some people had already gathered inside before him.

He had no intention of joining the crowd, and with the mindset of “since I’m already out,” he turned around and led Zhou Datong up to the second floor.

Zhou Datong had mentioned that two rooms on the second floor couldn’t be opened, so no one had gone inside yet. Predictably, there must be many good things inside.

Chen Lidong happened to have a weapon-type item suitable for violent entry. If not now, when?

Before long, Chen Lidong and Zhou Datong stood between the two rooms sealed with cement.

These two rooms were located on opposing walls, directly facing each other, possessing a kind of axial symmetry aesthetic. A thick layer of gray cement sealed the doors, closing off almost every corner. If one didn’t look carefully, they wouldn’t even realize a door existed here.

Chen Lidong took White Blade from his item panel and held it. The silver-white dagger flashed faintly in the dim light. Without hesitation, he plunged the tip of the blade into the solid wall and scraped down hard, actually carving open a crack.

“As expected of Boss’s item, it cuts through metal like mud,” Chen Lidong exclaimed, looking at Zhou Datong, who was stunned beside him. “Xiao Zhou, don’t just stand there. Grab any useful tools you have and lend a hand.”

Zhou Datong snapped out of his daze and hastily pulled a crowbar from his backpack, starting to chip away at the cement on the door in a similar fashion.

After chipping off a few more chunks of cement, he saw something, scratched his head, and pointed at a line of worm-like, serpentine writing on the ground. “Brother Chen, what is this? It looks a bit like writing…”

Chen Lidong stopped his movements and looked in the direction he was pointing.

On that small patch of cement floor, hair-thin strokes etched a series of dense symbols that did not belong to any language he recognized in the world, resembling the spells of a witch in a fantasy setting.

The cement acting as the writing surface was clearly applied later, likely from the same period as the cement sealing the door, as it had overflowed from the door crack and was simply smeared onto the floor by the construction worker to save trouble.

Chen Lidong squatted down, brushing the dust off the characters, lowering the torch to the ground, and leaning in to illuminate the line of writing.

He saw faint fingerprints distributed around the characters, likely pressed into the cement with fingers while it was still wet.

But why would someone lie on the floor and press fingerprints into the cement?

“Brother Chen, what do you think they used to carve these words? How are they so delicate?” Zhou Datong asked with a simple smile.

Delicate… Chen Lidong felt a flash of lightning in his mind and blurted out instantly: “Fingernails.”

“…They were carved with fingernails, probably by a child lying there playing around before the cement dried.”

Chen Lidong spoke in a nonchalant tone, but his triangular eyes were fixed on the writing on the ground.

He instinctively felt it was a crucial clue, but no corresponding translation appeared on his system interface, no matter how long he stared at the words.

Was it because the content of the text was unimportant, or for some other reason?