Chapter 183: Red Maple Boarding School (20) “I Will Be Resurrected in Two Hundred Years”

Graves dotted the cemetery, burying the remains of indigenous children.

After the outsiders landed on the nascent territory, they used fire to destroy the remnants of the original tribes. Iron artifacts inscribed with sacrificial texts were melted into liquid gold, and along with them, the history of the indigenous people, recorded by generations of prophets, was also destroyed.

The outsiders who won the war occupied the indigenous land, plundered gold and silver, and issued harsh decrees prohibiting the indigenous people from worshipping their own gods or using their own script.

The children were locked in boarding schools, forced to learn the language of the invading foreign race, and everyone lost their names, left only with a cold numerical designation—

47 was one of them.

Under the daily torture, he forgot many things, but he alone remembered his mother holding his hand when he was young, using a stick to write lines of wriggling, serpentine characters in the sand.

In the dead of night, he repeatedly traced the strokes of those characters in his mind, and secretly wrote the forbidden symbols on collected scraps of paper behind the teachers’ backs.

The deity his tribe once worshipped was condemned as an “Evil God,” and even mentioning Him was taboo. Yet, he quietly used a red pen to outline crimson eyes on paper, praying for His gaze for a long time.

His parents, who died in the war, had taught him how to draw Him countless times, and he had drawn Him countless times; closing his eyes, he could see the outline of that eye in the darkness.

That was the eye of the Evil God, and the totem of his tribe.

After all beliefs were banned and people abandoned their deity out of fear, he became the Evil God’s only follower in the world.

He devoutly performed rituals, praying for the Evil God’s attention and blessing.

The teachers quickly discovered his secret actions, angrily accused him of attempting to bring disaster and death, and maliciously announced to all the children: “47 is the incarnation of the wicked devil on earth, and he deserves to rot in the dirt forever, keeping company with foul corpses.”

Their tone carried a sense of malicious pleasure, as if they had finally caught a prime example to frighten the other children, which they could use to warn and threaten others not to follow suit.

Naturally, 47 was punished.

The teachers tried various methods, including beating, electric shock, and Prefrontal Lobotomy; every means conceivable at the time for correcting a Bad Kid was applied to the only Bad Kid.

But no matter what they did, 47 would always resume carving characters and totems in every place he could reach after recovering.

This behavior did not seem like an innocent hobby, but rather a deliberate act of resistance and provocation. The teachers felt their authority was being challenged, and their methods became increasingly severe.

They tied 47 to an iron frame and moved the frame into a pitch-black iron room. But whether they used hemp ropes or iron chains, 47 would miraculously escape every time, and as always, expressionless, calmly and intently write characters in the room where he was confined.

Initially, he used charcoal pencils hidden somewhere unknown. After the teachers searched him clean, he dipped his fingers in sludge and smeared it on the walls. When the sludge was removed, he used his fingernails to scratch through the hard wall, deeply engraving characters the teachers could not understand.

This was already beyond the scope of human capability, seeming more like he was driven by some force incomprehensible to the world. Described using the knowledge within the teachers’ cognitive realm, it could be called “demonic possession.”

The teachers unanimously agreed that 47 should be nailed to a cross, just as true devils were handled in the Middle Ages.

In fact, they did this, but often, the day after they had pierced 47’s limbs with iron nails and erected the cross on the back hill, 47 would reappear in the school the next morning as if nothing had happened, like a vengeful ghost seeking lives in an ancient horror story.

The ghost’s limbs were covered with bloody holes left by the nails; some had scabbed over, while others were still weeping blood.

Sometimes he would use rainwater to clean his filthy wounds. Bright red blood droplets would fall onto the ground, creating shallow little pits, and after the rain, a small flower resembling an eye would bloom from them.

A teacher once witnessed the entire process of 47 descending from the cross late at night.

The boy leaned relaxed against the wooden frame covered in sharp splinters, his expression showing an ignorant and unconscious serenity, reminiscent of a statue of a god enshrined in a church. He tilted his head slightly, looked up at the high sky, and his lips trembled as he muttered something incomprehensible.

The nails holding him were pulled out by an invisible pair of hands and tossed into the pool of blood. He stepped onto stairs made of empty air, landing steadily on the damp earth.

The bizarre scene spread throughout the school, and the teachers gradually realized that this might be a form of witchcraft they could not understand; or perhaps—this child numbered “47” was truly blessed by a deity.

They tried to ignore 47, letting this strange child draw and write everywhere they could see, while constantly preparing to smooth over the carvings on the walls with cement.

But the carvings always grew faster than the cement repairs. When dense characters and blood-colored eyes crawled like moss onto their desks and beds, they still felt a sense of fear, as if the ghost representing the indigenous race was hovering above each and every one of them.

They had considered ignoring the writings, but Mr. Thorson insisted on the philosophy that “to exterminate a nation, one must first destroy its history and language,” demanding that they must completely eradicate the backward culture of the indigenous people.

They could only report the various strange circumstances concerning 47 to Mr. Thorson. The old gentleman, who firmly believed in science, scolded them severely: “Since you can’t kill him, then go kill his companions! I refuse to believe every single one of them knows that damned witchcraft!”

The teachers were inspired. Whenever 47 made a bizarre move that defied their understanding, they would punish a child using the cruelest methods and tell the child that it was all 47’s fault.

“As heretics who once worshipped the Evil God, you were born with filthy, wicked blood, destined never to be bathed in the gaze of the divine. And 47 is the worst child among you, attempting to summon the terrifying Evil God and obstruct your process of atonement.”

That’s what the teachers said.

The children also began to hate 47, as if he were the source of all misfortune, suffering, and pain. One by one, they spat at 47 and threw stones at him, thereby demonstrating to the teachers their resolve to sever ties with the Evil God.

47 never made a sound, silently enduring all the malice with lowered eyelids, like a clay statue. Yet, the children and teachers who spoke ill of him would always, inadvertently, suffer injuries in incredible ways.

One teacher incited a child to stab 47 in the heart with a knife. The next day, that child was found brutally murdered in the dormitory, pinned to the wall with a knife through his chest.

Fear and loathing spread among the students, but 47 seemed completely unaware of what had happened, still squatting in the corner, neither eating nor sleeping, tirelessly drawing eyes all over the walls.

The teachers realized that 47’s fanaticism for the Evil God had surpassed his love for his own people, and none of them had a way to deal with him… On June 1, 1869, Mr. Thorson announced that a baptism would be held for the “Good Kids” at the church.

He read out a series of numbers. What initially surprised the teachers but soon became an unspoken understanding was that “47” was also on the list.

Mr. Thorson never believed in witchcraft that science couldn’t solve, while Mr. Barron racked his brains trying to decipher the secrets of the witchcraft. The two had reached a consensus on certain matters.

The children boarded the truck, but instead of going to the church, they were taken to a windowless iron house.

They were herded into a public shower room, the door was locked from the outside, and a knockout drug was blown into the room through the exhaust pipe. They lost consciousness within seconds.

What followed was a series of blood extractions and injections not permitted by public morals… In the cemetery, a towering cross stained with brown blood stood tall, and tiny graves were piled up close together beneath it. Slanted stone markers bore numerical designations almost erased by time, chaotic and irregular.

Qi Si lowered his head and counted the numbers, always feeling that something was missing from the scene.

Eyes… the entire school should be covered in drawings of eyes… As he thought this, he felt puzzled by his own idea: why would he think there should be eye patterns in the school?

After walking among the graves for a while, Qi Si felt dizzy. He raised his hand to touch his forehead and confirmed it was burning hot.

He had a fever.

The effects of the insomnia syndrome were still manifesting and worsening with time. In a few days, he estimated he would struggle even to walk, let alone explore for the main quest.

He had to leave here quickly and go to another space to continue his plan.

Qi Si remembered something and took out a piece of white paper from his backpack.

The back of the white paper was already covered in writing.

Part of it was legible, recording the story of a child named “47”; the other part consisted of strange characters, with bizarre strokes crawling everywhere, like incomprehensible scribbles.

Qi Si guessed that he had seen the indigenous script at some point, deemed it an important clue, and copied it down.

But he had no memory of doing so.

The memory loss was severe, and he couldn’t currently find a pattern to the missing memories.

Qi Si took out all the written papers and reviewed them from beginning to end.

He inadvertently lowered his head and caught sight of something in his peripheral vision: the dark mud ground was covered with strange symbols, identical to those copied on the white paper.

He then realized that those scribbles on the white paper had been transcribed from the ground beneath his feet.

“Do these characters have any meaning? Or… are they hinting at something?”

The characters on the ground were arrayed in a grand display, practically leaping into Qi Si’s eyes. Even without recognizing the meaning of a single character, one could feel a pure shock derived from their sheer quantity.

Qi Si felt his head swimming from the visual noise, so he decisively shifted his gaze and continued studying the numbers on the gravestones.

He searched along the way until he found the gravestone numbered “47,” and crouched down, leaning on the cold stone slab.

There was no mound behind the gravestone, only an empty coffin lying in the pit. Engraved on the bottom of the coffin was a line of text belonging to no known language in the world, yet Qi Si strangely understood it—

【I Will Be Resurrected in Two Hundred Years】

So the coffin said.

“Such an obvious hint? Should I lie inside now and wait two hundred years to rise from the dead?” Qi Si made a joke, driven by a sense of humor only he could understand.

A warm wind rising from the ground carried whiffs of blood, and drops of bright red blood dripped from the cross, blooming into eye-shaped flowers the moment they hit the earth.

The scene before him instantly matched his imagination. Qi Si felt like he had gained some knowledge, yet he couldn’t recall anything.

Indecipherable songs rose and fell in his ears, and colorful figures moved back and forth before his eyes, quickly blurring into shapeless color blocks, diluting his brain’s ability to process information.

He reached out and poked the bottom of the coffin, finding it surprisingly clean; he felt no dust.

The safest way might be to let a pawn lie inside first to test it, but undeniably, he currently had very few people he could deploy—to be precise, only Zhang Yiyu.

And Zhang Yiyu was still needed for important tasks… As for the coffin, it wasn’t his first time lying in one; the first time is strange, the second time is familiar.

Qi Si tilted his head and pondered for a moment, then took the Sea-God Scepter out of his inventory and forcefully thrust the trident tip at the coffin lid.

The collision between metal and wood produced a sharp ‘zheng’ sound, yet not a single new scratch appeared on the dark wooden lid.

“Quite sturdy. It can effectively prevent corpses from rising,” Qi Si chuckled to himself, stepped into the coffin, and slowly lay down.

The cramped space reminded him of the staff dormitory in the black factory he had lived in years ago. However, the situation was slightly better now; at least there was no nauseating fishy smell.

Hmm, lying in the coffin, creating an alibi while remotely issuing instructions to Zhang Yiyu, and throwing out some false clues… Perfect!

Qi Si calculated happily, while laboriously lifting the lid leaning against the side of the coffin and pulling it over the coffin box.

Once inside, he tentatively pushed the lid and found that with his strength, he could still push it open easily.

Safe and reassuring.

In the silence, the Soul Leaf in his inventory suddenly began to tremble wildly.

Qi Si reached out to touch the tip of the leaf and heard Zhang Yiyu’s anxious voice: “Boss, Jiang Junjue seems to have figured out I was lying and is telling me to confess and be spared punishment… What should I do?”

Qi Si leaned back, feeling a bit drowsy, his voice tinged with a nasal tone: “Tell him you are the Witch, and your side quest is to kill the Philanthropist, but that you don’t know who the Philanthropist is.”

“Ah? Won’t I be in trouble if I expose myself so quickly?… Also, what’s the deal with the Philanthropist?”

“I promised to let you leave alive, and even if it’s just to avoid being sanctioned by the rules, I will do my best to fulfill the Contract. Since you chose to trust me, then follow all my arrangements.”

“Uh, but why?”

Qi Si continued speaking to himself: “If I don’t appear in the classroom before ten o’clock, find a chance to come to the cemetery in the east as soon as possible and open the coffin behind gravestone number 47.”

He pulled the coffin lid over, closing it inch by inch. As he finished his last word, the final sliver of light was obscured.

He indulged in the silence, drifting into a state of half-sleep.

Time in the darkness became immeasurable. In his daze, he heard the sounds of a man and a woman talking, and the sounds of shovels filling earth, which started and stopped, indicating a live burial was taking place.

The similar scene triggered a memory. Qi Si’s thoughts drifted back to the pit in the ground when he was sixteen, the cold dirt poured onto his face, the persistent smell of mud… He should have died then, but he surprisingly crawled out of hell—his vitality had been astonishingly tenacious since childhood.

Thinking about it now, perhaps he was already a lone ghost wandering the human world back then, destined to be a scourge for a thousand years… After an unknown period, new voices gradually emerged in the distance.

First, a low male voice: “I once learned a Soul Summoning technique from the Vice President. I wonder if I can summon the ghosts of those indigenous people and have them recite something for us.”

The other voice was very cold: “Mhm, you can try.”

“Hey, Brother Chang, don’t be skeptical. It’s better to believe in this technique than not to…”

“Oh.”

The two voices rang out one after the other, one of them sounding very familiar.

Qi Si listened for a while, then raised his hand to cover his face, smiling silently.