Chapter 14 Chapter 14 The Boy Under the Moonlight
The weather is not very clear tonight, and scattered dark clouds have blocked most of the moon.
Yuyin looked up at Building A, Year 3, in the hazy moonlight. She had gone out for dinner earlier and had waited until the time when the rumored strange event would occur before coming to Building A, Year 3.
In the stillness of the night, strange, thumping noises emanated from the silently towering building. However, not a single ray of light emanated from the tightly closed doors and windows. The entire building was pitch black, clearly devoid of activity. This contrast made the building seem even more eerie and terrifying, instilling a sense of dread.
Yuyin finally understood why the students who had experienced the strange stories in Building A for three years were so secretive when talking about it.
The so-called Building A for the third grade is a building outside the originally planned land of Hyotei Academy. It was donated to the school by Keigo Atobe and is usually used as an activity venue for the third grade and the tennis club.
Yuyin had been to Building A several times in the past three years for class activities and was quite familiar with the building's structure. However, the biggest problem at the moment was how to get in.
Before Hyotei closes at night, a dedicated administrator will check that the lights are turned off and the doors and windows are closed. The same applies to the entrance of Building A, Grade 3.
Yuyin wandered around several windows on the first floor for a while, and after confirming that they were locked, she simply stopped thinking about it, stepped onto the windowsill, used the force to jump up, and repeated the same process on the windowsill on the second floor. In just a few breaths, she reached the open window on the corridor on the third floor, turned over and jumped in.
She took out her cell phone, turned on the flashlight, and followed the direction of the thudding sound.
The sound was not as dull as the sound of a basketball hitting the ground. Yuyin guessed that the object that touched the building surface must be very small. She had some memory of this sound, but she was not familiar with ball sports and could not be sure for a moment.
The only thing that was certain was that the sound was not caused by a monster or a cursed spirit, because at such a close distance, even a big monster or a special-grade cursed spirit could not completely conceal its breath and not leak any demonic energy or cursed power for her to detect.
It's useless to overthink; seeing is believing. Yuyin walked down the long corridor. In the dim light, she saw that the door of the room in front of her, where the noise came from, was half open. She turned off the flashlight and quietly approached the room. There was no light on, and the knocking sound became clearer and clearer. Standing at the side of the door, she glanced inside and saw -
Narcissus in the moonlight.
The moon just happened to emerge completely from the dark clouds, and the bright light shone into the room through the large transparent glass, reflecting on the boy's short purple-gray hair, covering him with a hazy halo, which seemed to be glowing at first glance.
It's Atobe Keigo.
Yuyin suddenly understood.
As the donor of Building A, a member of the school board, and the student council president, Keigo Atobe is the only person besides the school administrator who holds a key to the building. After ruling out the possibility of ghosts, the most likely person to have entered the building and caused all this commotion is undoubtedly Keigo Atobe.
Even someone like Yuyin who doesn't know anything about tennis could tell that Atobe was obviously practicing hitting the ball. The thuds were all made by him swinging his racket and hitting the ball against the wall.
He looked even more excited than he had been playing soccer that afternoon. Facing the high-speed balls fired at him by the machine, he swung his racket so swiftly that his shadow was invisible. With Yuyin's keen eyesight, she could tell he was hitting several tennis balls simultaneously, sometimes as many as a dozen.
Until the machine had used up all the stored balls, Tebe's round of practice slowly came to a halt. He reached out and wiped the sweat produced by the intense exercise with a towel, then turned back to the sidelines to get a water bottle.
His sharp perception allowed him to almost instantly identify the shadows at the door.
In the dead of night, a mysterious black shadow appeared in a dark building with only one person in it... It really had the atmosphere of a supernatural horror movie. However, although Atobe was not an atheist, his self-confidence and self-reliance were so strong that he was not afraid of any tricks.
Atobe shouted, "Who? Come out!"
*
Yuyin hesitated for three seconds between going out and running away.
Then he pushed the door open decisively and walked in.
If I turn around and run, it would seem like I'm in the wrong, but no matter how you look at it, isn't it Atobe who is more responsible for practicing in the dark and scaring students from the same school?
"It's me." She said frankly.
Atobe narrowed his narrow eyes. There was a shadow, so it was most likely a living person. Then he heard a familiar voice and saw the face of the person opposite him clearly in the moonlight, "Saionji?"
Just as he breathed a sigh of relief, he thought of something else and asked suspiciously, "No, why are you here?"
Not to mention the time and place, it was very suspicious that he appeared alone in Building A, Grade 3 at this time. Moreover, after entering the building, he locked the door from the inside to prevent the administrator from noticing anything wrong during inspection.
"Well," Yuyin scratched her head, thinking of an excuse, and took out a notebook from her pocket and said, "Actually, I'm collecting material for a supernatural novel."
"Collecting folk songs, gathering materials?" Atobe raised an eyebrow, sizing up Saionji Tamon. Suddenly, he folded his arms and snorted, "You're quite brave, coming to a place like this alone late at night."
He should have thought of it earlier. Saionji is not the kind of nerd that ordinary people think she is. On the contrary, she has a good personal mood and is very lively under her aloof appearance.
The last time he, as student council president, inquired about the women's archery club, he'd heard the current club member, Goto Rika, unintentionally pour out a stream of bitterness, the target of which, of course, was Saionji Tamon. From that moment on, it became clear to Atobe that his neighbor was something of a two-faced person.
"Of course I am skilled and bold." Yuyin didn't care about Jibu's ridicule at all. The young master seemed to do whatever he wanted and didn't care about what others thought, but in fact he was very sensible and careful not to cross the bottom line.
She looked at the last unannotated line in her notebook and suddenly smiled. "Congratulations, Atobe-san! I'd like to ask you about your feelings about becoming one of the ten most surprising people in Hyotei's new school."
"Ah?" Atobe looked puzzled.
*
“Nonsense!”
After listening to Saionji's explanation of the strange noises at night in Building A, Year 3, Atobe Keigo immediately understood what kind of weird thing others had misinterpreted as his random act. He scoffed, "This kind of unglamorous strange story is completely unworthy of me."
"Yeah, you have a point, Atobe-kun."
Yuyin held the black tea and ate French dessert, nodding her head in agreement with him. After all, one should be grateful for what one has received.
The lights were bright at this moment, and the two were having an evening tea party in the lounge connected to the training room.
"But I never expected that. I've been to Building A several times in the past three years, but I never realized that in addition to the various activity rooms and meeting rooms, this building also has tennis courts, training rooms, and a dedicated lounge."
Yuyin's eyes swept across the magnificent decorations in the lounge. Not to mention the obviously valuable ornaments and furniture, the table and chairs she was sitting on were all made of high-grade mahogany. The lounge also had refrigerators, bathrooms and other supporting facilities. The food they were using now was just taken out of the refrigerator. According to Jibe, the stock was updated and replenished every day.
Atobe took a sip of steaming hot black tea to neutralize the sweet taste in his mouth. He actually didn't like overly sweet French desserts, he just prepared it this way to quickly replenish energy, but when he saw the girl opposite him with her eyes curved with joy when she ate macarons, he knew how much this was to her liking.
He said modestly, "What's the big deal? I've only built an indoor tennis court, a dedicated training ground, and a lounge in this building." This is because the building's primary function is not tennis. "If you go to my castle in the UK, you'll see that it's a true tennis city."
The look in his eyes when he mentioned tennis was very different from usual. His tone was extremely proud, and he really wanted to pull out the tennis castle for people to see.
Yuyin smiled and said, "Then I would like to thank Atobe-kun for the invitation. If I have time to visit England next time, I will definitely come to visit you."
Thinking about it carefully, she hasn't traveled to distant places for a long time since her soul traveled to other worlds in the fifth grade. This is because every time she was unconscious and traveled through time, it was during summer vacation, which happened to be the longest vacation and the most suitable time for traveling. In the other world, she was restricted by her work and identity and could not get away. It turned out that she really didn't go out to play well.
Atobe waved his hand generously: "No need to wait for free time. I will suggest that the school change the destination of the next school trip to England."
Yuyin's eyes lit up. School trips are usually scheduled from September to October, and there are subtle differences among schools in different regions. Simply put, students go out to play under the order of the emperor. Since Tetsuya entered school, the school board has always been very generous in allocating funds. Since Tetsuya said so, this matter is almost certain.
Thinking about the ghosts rampant on the island now, if she really went to a place with a long history and classical heritage, she would not know what she would encounter, which would give her a headache. Traveling abroad is undoubtedly a better choice.
"Ahem," Atobe coughed lightly, "but I'm not without conditions."
He paused for a moment before saying, "When you're collecting materials...don't include Building A from Year 3, right?"
Atobe Keigo didn't know where Saionji was writing the article, and whether any Hyotei student would recognize the prototype, but he had to be prepared for the worst. What if, what if someone guessed that the so-called tennis racket hitting sound in the building late at night was caused by him, how could he, the young master Atobe, put his face aside?
Yuyin suppressed a laugh. "Of course that's no problem. Even if I were to use this theme, I wouldn't write about tennis. Atobe-kun, which do you think is better: the sound of balls bouncing in the basketball hall in the middle of the night or the sound of the piano in the music classroom?"
Atobe said without hesitation: "The piano, the music at midnight has a more mysterious atmosphere."
Just kidding, basketball and tennis are both ball sports, so it is easier to connect them together. Naturally, he wanted to nip this possibility in the bud.
"It's fine for me to write it for piano. I don't plan to tell anyone about it anyway."
Yuyin pondered for a while, she said that the source material was not completely false to deceive Jibu, it was time to conceive the plot of the next book of "The Book of Contracts of a Hundred Demons". Now that she knew that the worlds had merged, and Brother Dechang was also in this world, she naturally could not completely copy her past experiences, and needed to invent more content. Then, it seemed that it would be okay to write about the strange phenomena caused by a musician who did not want to be reborn after his death in the next unit?
"But if you continue to practice at night, if some adventurous students run into you one day, they won't be as easy to talk to as I am."
Junior high school students are at the age of adventurousness in their second year of high school. Yuyin even suspected that someone had come to explore earlier, but Atobe locked the door, and others could not get in because they were not like her who could climb walls and climb roofs. If a third-grade student took advantage of the activity class to pretend that the first-floor windows were locked, he might be able to enter the building.
Atobe hadn't expected that the visual stripping training he'd done to deal with Rikkai University would cause so much trouble, so he could only helplessly say, "Just wait until August."
In August, the national competition will be over, and he will no longer need to maintain special training to compete against Haida.
The author has something to say:
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You actually said I was short? My last chapter was 2987 words long, which is pretty long for a spin-off!
Note: The setting for Building A in Year 3 comes from the official Prince of Tennis Hyotei design collection (which I don't own, but found a translation by a Hyotei fan online; feel free to search for it if you're interested). It was donated by Atobe and built for the 3rd Year A building outside the school grounds. The official setting says the Hyotei tennis club regularly holds secret tea parties here as a special treat to their supporters (? It's confirmed he's a host, Atobe, you and one of Ouran's sons must have a lot in common~)
The official setting didn't mention there were tennis courts and fitness equipment in the building, but considering Atobe's past style, he liked to build tennis courts everywhere, so there are some in the private setting~
The British castle here refers to the one in the movie~
*
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