Chapter 49 The Old Campus: "The Elephant is Gone".
Xue Chao, whose vigilance was growing, had been standing on the threshold of the stairwell. When the new balloon floated out, he quickly retreated to the corridor, knocked on the door, and tied the doorknobs together with the long fragments of the balloon, making a tight knot.
But there was no sound in the stairwell, as if it were just a prank to scare him. Instead, the sunflowers on the ceiling turned their faces in the darkness without sunlight, and the sunflower seeds made a crackling sound, like bubbles bursting.
Or perhaps it's the sound of a small balloon bursting.
Unable to stay here any longer, Xue Chao was thinking about which door to force his way through when he looked down and noticed that his black shirt had been stained with a pale yellow. He turned back and wiped it off. The wall at the far end was different from the other walls; it felt like a crayon-like material, and with a little force, he could easily scrape off a layer of grime.
Crayon? Xue Chao found the junction of the end wall and the two walls on the left and right. Upon closer inspection, he found that they were not connected, but rather like two separate boards, two vertical and one horizontal, seemingly a set. However, the left and right walls were solid cement, while the front wall, with a slight push, fell forward like a piece of cardboard, revealing a dark tunnel.
The tunnel was also made of folded paper, and a long strip of cut-out cardboard was laid out as a minecart track, but a paper boat was parked there, just big enough to accommodate Xue Chao's size.
As soon as Xue Chao settled in, the small boat glided forward, turning and twisting until it opened up into a huge art room where everything was made of folded paper. It was huge because the ceiling was even higher and everything was enlarged proportionally. He was the same height as the little tiger paper chair next to him.
A paper squirrel was nibbling on a paper flower petal when it saw someone approaching. Startled, it vanished in an instant.
Xue Chao raised his hand. He hadn't shrunk, but the size of the entire room and the objects inside made him feel that, in this world, his height was only at the level of a "child".
Directly in front is a rainbow-colored storage cabinet, storing children's origami tools and works. It's a thin piece of colored cardstock, with a picture of cartoon characters hanging from the ceiling, serving as a curtain to block half of the cabinet.
A woman stood on a paper stool behind the curtain, only her two frostbitten calves showing. She wore low heels, which made him tremble with fear, as if this "heavy" mortal body would crush the thin object that was only suitable for a paper doll.
He estimated that he only reached her waist, so she must be an "adult"?
As Xue Chao took a few steps closer, a pink paper frog, about half his height, jumped down from the long, round paper table. It didn't look like something a child would fold; its two eyes were just black crayon dots, staring at him blankly and comically: "Do you want some chocolate?"
He didn't see any clues related to chocolate, and cautiously answered according to his own preferences: "So-so."
But the paper frog seemed quite satisfied with this answer: if it didn't hate it, it could help find chocolate; if it didn't like it, it wouldn't steal its chocolate: "I want to eat chocolate."
Xue Chao almost blurted out, "What does that have to do with me?" He swallowed it back smoothly and gave the frog, who had no sense of social boundaries, a fake smile: "I don't have any. Maybe the teacher confiscated them. I'll go ask."
The paper frog blocking the way thought for a moment and seemed to be convinced: "Then I'll wait for you here."
Xue Chao nodded with a straight face. When he wasn't smiling, he had a kind of convincing and even frightening coldness, as if every promise he made would be kept and he disdained to lie. But what he was thinking was, "Just wait, he'll run away once he gets the list."
The woman had already heard someone arrive, and as he walked toward the whimsical "curtain," she said, "Here to get the list? But before we take attendance, we need to know who's absent today. You'll have to find my sunflower dice first. Good heavens, some kid must have taken them to play with."
As she spoke, the sound of turning pages filled the air, like she was organizing children's origami.
Side Quest 1 "The Lost Dice" has been triggered.
[Task Details: During yesterday's craft class, the teacher's sunflower dice went missing. Please find the dice and return them to her.]
The pink paper frog being questioned replied, "Dice? Oh, you mean that lucky cube!"
"Whether this name is good or bad is unknown," Xue Chao commented.
"But I always manage to throw out chocolates!" the lucky frog retorted.
"So you have to tell me where it is before you can eat it."
Perhaps driven by the lure of chocolate, the paper frog's enthusiasm was alarming, confidently declaring, "It'll be eaten by an elephant!"
Where is the elephant?
The paper frog looked bewildered: "The elephant is gone."
"..." Xue Chao patted its paper head, which couldn't even accommodate a brain, "Good boy, go play somewhere else."
The craft park was filled with paintings and origami works, some as big as paper frogs, about half his size, others small enough to fit in the palm of his hand. He searched through all the origami, even turning them inside out, but couldn't find an elephant anywhere.
The origami girls had already gathered together, pointing and gossiping about this impolite outsider.
The paper umbrella, with a smiley face drawn on it but no handle yet, spoke up: "I am an umbrella, not a basin. Although I do look quite like one when I'm upside down, I'm not pretending to be an elephant. I'm not pretending, that's all."
The paper rose screamed as it piled back into its folds, "My petals! He almost plucked them off!"
The paper puppy folded its ears back down: "We're already pretty good. The house has been torn down to a single 'board,' but that demon king still won't let it go. And the poor squirrels, he stuffed them into his pockets—so who is the elephant? I don't know an elephant at all!"
The paper squirrel, nestled in Xue Chao's pocket, gazed longingly at the paper rose petals: "If the petals fall, I can eat them..."
"I've had enough! I mean, who can stop that monstrous creature!" The origami crane clutched its asymmetrical wings. "He's more terrifying than those human cubs!"
Xue Chao disassembled the paper darts without turning his head: "If you're going to talk so much, go find the elephant. I think you guys think I'm not annoying enough."
He glanced at the "5.10" written in the crease; all the origami were marked with their creation date.
The origami fell silent, then asked one after another, "Where is the elephant?" and "Who saw it?" The chaos didn't lead to any conclusions, so they all quieted down again and fell into deep thought, looking at each other.
The paper rabbit whispered in the silence, "Doesn't anyone know where the elephant is? Is the elephant so invisible?"
The paper car, with its door open, looked weathered and said, "It's the smallest one in the whole park, after all."
Another despairing silence followed. Then, the paper turtle, its limbs flipped over, slowly murmured, "...Where...is...it...?"
"What?"
The paper turtle slowly opened its mouth, and under the expectant gazes of its many companions, it slowly uttered a single word: "I..."
Everyone holding their breath as they folded paper.
“…know…” the paper turtle uttered another word.
"..." the paper rabbit said numbly, "Is it going to repeat itself from the beginning again? Can it finish today? I remember it's a tortoise, not a sloth?"
Before the word "Tao" could be finished, the paper tortoise was covered by the man's shadow. Xue Chao chuckled, "Your next word will definitely be very useful, right?"
"..." The paper turtle stammered, "...a snake..."
"Oh right!" the origami crane shrieked. "It must have been a snake! When I first gained wings and started flying, I saw that brutal creature swallow something!"
This story sounded all too familiar. Considering the hints from the main quest, Xue Chao looked around the craft park, which had no snakes at all: "The snake you're talking about that swallows an elephant, could it be that painting that looks like a hat?"
"Of course not, it's just a hat." The paper rabbit looked at him as if he were blind, its crayon-drawn black bean eyes seemingly conveying emotions, clearly saying, "You don't think you have a lot of imagination, do you?" "The snake is here."
Its long paper ears pointed to a painting on the display wall. The background of the painting was black, with scattered white dots on the upper three-quarters and dense white dots on the lower third. There was nothing else.
"Unless it's a black spotted dog, where would a snake be?"
The paper rabbit looked at him like he was an idiot: "Of course it's hibernating. Didn't you see it's snowing? There's already a layer of snow—you have no imagination."
"..." These wild lines, like mud splattered onto his trousers by a car driving by on a rainy day, are snow.
And does he have imagination or not? Has no one here read The Little Prince?
Xue Chao turned around to find crayons, intending to color the whole drawing white, then draw the sun and flowers, and manually bring spring to life. But the paper puppy quickly dismissed his idea: "You want crayons? The teachers have all collected the crayons. They'll only be handed back after roll call. Otherwise, those little devils will definitely take advantage of the teacher's absence and suck those things like lollipops."
The origami around him fell silent, watching him quietly, as if expecting him to do something, preferably challenge the teacher's authority. That joyful childlike innocence was like melted crayon, forming a layer that was both shiny and disgustingly sticky.
After going through one instance, Xue Chao became quite accepting of these mentally ill individuals who were sometimes noisy and sometimes quiet as if they had been buried for years. Under the strange, expectant gazes of the origami, he slowly announced: "This is not snow."
The origami: "?"
“Those are clearly stars, hanging in the black night sky,” Xue Chao said, pointing to the white dots in the sky.
The eeriness of the paper dog vanished suddenly, as if a frozen spell had been broken, and it retorted excitedly, "You're talking nonsense! What are these on the ground? Star fragments?"
“While your assessment isn’t wrong, that’s clearly a flowerbed, with clusters of small white flowers in bloom,” Xue Chao concluded. “If the flowers are blooming, it means it’s at least March or April. Why would a snake be hibernating?”
The paper frog couldn't accept it either: "This isn't a flower at all, it doesn't even have petals! And it's so small."
"Little white flowers, little white flowers, the beauty lies in their small size and abundance. From a distance, they look like clusters of tiny white dots. Don't you know what 'objects appear larger when closer and smaller when farther away' means? I'd say your so-called 'snowflakes' don't even capture the hexagonal crystal structure," Xue Chaorui commented. "And you're such a big frog."
The paper frog pondered for a moment, then nodded solemnly to its companions: "I think he's right."
The origami: "." You changed too fast.
Xue Chao scoffed, "You guys have no imagination at all. Only adults need to explain themselves. Were you really created by children with the richest inner worlds?"
"..." This is probably a serious accusation against origami, after all, imagination and shaping ability are the key to their distinction from other colorful paper pieces. They have a soul because they are infused with children's whimsical ideas. If they don't even have a little bit of lively thinking that is not influenced by rigid adults, wouldn't that negate their life?
Everyone nodded in agreement, captivated by the more interesting explanation of "stars and white flowers" than "snow." The paper puppy, which had been shouting in protest, suddenly lost its support, as if its soul had been ripped away, and collapsed onto the paper table, becoming a real, ordinary origami.
The craft park agreed with this interpretation. The snake slowly crawled into the painting, its belly bulging high, like a camel's hump with two uneven bumps, looking exactly like the hat next to it.
"Isn't this still..." Xue Chao swallowed back what he was about to say, under the seemingly tangible gazes of all the origami. "So this is a snake that ate an elephant... Okay, I see the snake's eyes, that black spot... Is there anyone who can speak up and tell it that it's malnourished?"
The origami girls all shook their heads: "It eats everything, maybe it won't eat you. You can try to be friends with it."
Xue Chao didn't expect anything from them. He carefully observed the painting. The color of the "elephant" was very dark, with a thick layer applied. You could still see the gray of the elephant in the gaps. It seemed that the painting was originally of an elephant, but it was later covered up by the newly painted snake.
Based on the children's handwriting in the timetable, the elephant and snake were drawn by children from two different classes, and it is very likely that they were created on different days.
He scanned all the paintings hanging on the wall. None of the paintings were marked with a date. Only the top one was a picture of a little boy holding a trophy. The trophy was probably a paper trophy with little wings that the teacher had folded. Below it, stroke by stroke, was written the words "[Origami Competition 5.12]".
The paper puppy was born on May 14th. It never saw an elephant, which means the elephant had already been eaten by a snake by then. The origami crane was born on May 13th. It happened to see the snake swallow the elephant, which means the snake was also born on that day.
Many origami depicting elephants were created just a week ago.
So all they had to do was change the date of the painting to before May 13th. Xue Chao tore off the trophy from the painting, then tore off half of the glue from the bottom of the umbrella stick that hadn't been pieced back together, and stuck the trophy onto the painting. The snake slowly disappeared, and the elephant was freed from the elements.
“But we need to get the dice from its belly. You don’t have time to stick them on anymore. You can’t make the elephant disappear,” the paper rabbit reminded us.
Xue Chao asked, "The teacher said the dice are sunflower dice?"
"Yes, sunflowers were planted on all six sides."
“That’s easy.” Xue Chao tore off the butterflies from other paintings and stuck them into the painting. The butterflies immediately began to slowly fly up among the white flowers.
He tore off a paper sword and poked the elephant. The elephant raised its trunk in pain and opened its mouth. The butterfly flew into the elephant's stomach. A moment later, he took out a die with a sunflower painted on it. As soon as it left the elephant's mouth, the die fell out of the painting with a "glug" and landed in Xue Chao's palm.
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