Chapter 24 Tide Proverbs (VI) Flying Fish Emerge from the Sea.
When I returned, the pool had already been cleaned, and I met the students on duty.
The three of them tacitly avoided a focused discussion because they all looked somewhat tired. Xia Zhu lay on the bed, her left eyelid twitching incessantly.
The world quickly plunged into darkness, but she couldn't sleep. She could only stare at the red algae on the ceiling above her head, swaying left and right in the night wind, vaguely revealing the triangular symbols hidden within.
I don't know when it started, but the things that used to be drawn on the ground with water were moved to the ceiling, right above Xia Zhu's head, facing her every night.
The fifth day of entering the dream is almost over, and Po Liang still has no clue.
Dreams are formed because of obsessions or desires.
What is the obsession or desire behind this dream?
Is it repetitive classes and a stifling campus life?
Xia Zhu didn't think so. She had a feeling that these courses were specially arranged by the dream master, and that it might even enjoy them. The repetition represented numb discipline, as if it were cultivating a group of people who, like itself, loved this content or something else.
Including the staring ritual on the third night, what exactly were they looking at?
The sea or the moon.
Perhaps they are not watching, but waiting.
Thoughts materialized and moved through my brain, slowly splitting from a string of words into numbers, and then into countless triangular patterns, flashing incessantly like a program error. Meanwhile, the deathly silence outside began to fill with sounds like dripping water, as if the ceiling above were leaking.
Drop by drop, they gather in the chest cavity, forming a small pool of imagined water.
Xia Zhu was caught in a vortex of thought.
Until a piercing scream shattered this balance.
"What happened?!"
Screams came from one of the rooms, waking up some people, including the three of them.
"It looks like the second floor," someone said, pointing downstairs.
Xia Zhu and Feng Feng exchanged a glance and followed the others downstairs.
A group of people had already gathered outside a room on the second floor. The door was open, and Feng Mian was among them. He was standing at the door, and after seemingly seeing the scene inside, he turned to the two of them with an ambiguous expression.
He was the boy who was punished by having his teeth pulled in biology class.
He lay naked on his back on the floor of the room, the moonlight shining through the window and onto his smiling face, revealing a set of sharp teeth.
No one stepped forward; everyone stood expressionless on the perimeter. His chest, without a single rise and fall, suggested he was most likely dead. The fine teeth, not human but resembling those of some kind of fish, indicated that things were not so simple. Not only his teeth, but his body also showed varying degrees of change.
The three of them pushed through the crowd, and Xia Zhu squatted down and placed her finger under the person's nose. Sure enough, there was no breath.
"Dead."
Xia Zhu turned around and told Feng Feng, who was standing at the door and unwilling to come closer.
There was a layer of viscous substance piled up under the corpse, and the lower abdomen was thickly covered with viscous substance. His posture could be described as very upright, with his hands pressed tightly against his sides, in a stiff state. Xia Zhu hesitated for a second, then grabbed the corpse's wrist and tried to lift his arm.
As the arms moved away from the sides, a thin membrane was pulled out, revealing four raised tumors hidden beneath the skin.
The corpse looks exactly like a six-winged angel from a biology textbook, with the tumors being the wings that haven't yet grown.
The peaceful and contented smile on his face was as if he had completed his once-in-a-lifetime flight.
The others acted as if it were none of their business, and no one wanted to ask about the situation, until a chuckle came from the doorway.
"This is... the consequence of disrespect..." The teacher appeared out of nowhere, always carrying that ghostly aura.
"Alright...everyone...go back to your rooms...everything here has nothing to do with you anymore..." He waved his hand to shoo away the students blocking the doorway.
"And...you guys...don't miss tomorrow's class...missing class...will naturally...be punished..."
Feng Feng shuddered after hearing this. She glanced at Xia Zhu, then turned and walked towards the door.
Although the room was dark, the moonlight was enough for her to see that there was something shiny on Xiaofeng's heels, which looked like the slime on a corpse, but she didn't seem to have been close to it.
As Xia Zhu passed by the man, she heard him muttering rapidly and in a low voice.
"Someone has already... been inspired..."
The voice sounded like it was talking to itself, or perhaps it was deliberately meant for Xia Zhu to hear.
When I got back to my room, it started raining again outside.
Feng Feng closed the door first, before Xia Zhu could call out to her.
The danger level of dreams has increased; in addition to the punishment of tooth extraction, they can now also trigger death.
She had just examined the body carefully and found no other external injuries. The mouth and nose were relatively normal, and there were no signs of poisoning. However, since even a human has mutated, there was no need to dwell on what caused the death.
The question we should be considering is whether there was a perpetrator in this accident, and if so, who that perpetrator might be.
And what is the "calling" the man mentioned? Does "the one who is called" refer to the deceased or the murderer?
A sense of crisis welled up in her throat, and her stomach felt empty, making her want to vomit. The rain outside the window was getting heavier and heavier, the sound of the rain becoming more frequent. As if possessed, Xia Zhu leaned out the window and looked downstairs.
A black figure in a raincoat stumbled through the rain, his steps labored, and he seemed to be carrying something on his shoulder, wrapped in a black tarpaulin.
The thing seemed very heavy. Step by step, it was put down and dragged. During the process, a pale hand fell out from the oilcloth.
Finally reaching the edge of the pool, the man rested for a moment, supporting his back, and then threw the black tarpaulin and everything inside into the pool in one go.
After doing all this, he stood by the water for a few seconds, staring at the water without moving. Suddenly, as if sensing something, he turned his head sharply to look at Xia Zhu by the window.
She quickly dodged and hid, sitting on the bed with her back against the wall.
The face beneath the raincoat hood belongs to the teacher.
Now she finally understood what the pool in the yard, and the tarpaulin in the warehouse, were for.
"Thump—thump—"
The sound of knocking on the door in the darkness was extremely alarming.
Xia Zhu got out of bed, her heart pounding. There was nothing of any practical use in the room except her backpack, which was still quite heavy. She had no choice but to carry the backpack in her hand. Although it was not very useful, it could still catch someone off guard.
"A-Zhu, there's something I'd like to discuss with you."
The person outside the door was none other than Feng Mian.
He didn't intend to come in, and seemed hesitant to speak. Moonlight shone from the side, illuminating the ends of his hair with a touch of white. In addition to the dampness of the rain, there was also a faint smell of soap in the air.
"I feel like something's off with Xiaofeng."
"Let's go inside and talk."
"Right here!" His tone became impatient.
“Xiao Feng is acting strangely. I bet you saw it too. She’s been standing at the door, but her heels are covered in the slime from the corpse. What does that mean? It means that she might have been in the victim’s room before us. It means that she might have killed that person… Liang has her eye on her. She can’t be in danger… she can’t… and not only that…” Feng Mian’s eyes darted around. He only stared at the top of his feet and never made eye contact with Xia Zhu.
“Not only that… I’ve also become a bit strange…” He seemed lost in memories.
“My room also has a window like this,” he said, pointing to the other side of Xia Zhu’s room. “There are some barnacles climbing on the outer wall below the windowsill. Those barnacles must have been here for a long time, clinging tightly to the wall, and they can’t be easily removed. Their shells are also very hard, of course…”
“But these past few mornings, I’ve noticed that many of the barnacles have rotted, as if they’ve been forcibly chiseled open. Every night, the number of barnacles that have been opened increases. When I first noticed it, I thought it was birds on the island catching them, but then I found my fingers full of barnacle shell fragments, and around my mouth too.”
"Did I crush these? But why don't I remember anything? Do I have the strength to pry these things open with just my hands?"
“Ah Zhu, but I know it’s me.”
"No matter how much I clean it, new marks will appear the next morning."
“I did all of this, I know it.”
He slowly raised his head and held his hands out in front of Xia Zhu, with some fragments still between his fingers.
No wonder Xia Zhu always smelled soap on Feng Mian. He probably couldn't believe that he was unconscious, taking advantage of the cover of night to frantically lean against the window, sticking his body out, just to pry open the barnacles on the wall and stuff all the tender flesh inside into his mouth. That kind of hunger was like an animalistic instinct that couldn't be suppressed. He could only wash the fragments over and over again to wash away the fishy smell.
Xia Zhu stepped forward, but Feng Mian subconsciously stepped back.
But it doesn't matter anymore, she can see his eyes clearly.
Beneath eyelashes longer than two girls combined, pupils were a syrup color similar to Feng Feng's, seemingly no different from before. However, after blinking, a membrane appeared between the eyeball and eyelid, quickly obscuring the pupil and hiding it deep within the eyeball.
His eyelashes trembled slightly, like a butterfly that had just emerged from its chrysalis, and a fear that Xia Zhu had never seen before rose from the depths of his eyes.
“This dream is different from Azhu’s. The demon has not shown any trace so far, there are no startling scenes, no monsters baring their fangs and claws… I vaguely felt the difference when I woke up on the first day. As is the usual style of the demon’s dream, something seems to be missing here. Now I finally understand. The reason why there are no monsters is because I seem to be that monster.”
She couldn't wait any longer. Xia Zhu made up her mind. Even though she was no match for these special-powered monsters in terms of fighting strength with her bare hands, she still believed that she had to take the lead. The way the brother and sister looked at her made her heart ache. She had to do something.
The rain lessened, the sky changed slightly, and for the first time in a long time, the sun stingily shone a sliver of golden light on the horizon. She told Fengmian to go back to her room and rest for a while. The clock would probably ring soon, and a new day would begin in this dream world. Tonight, she would leave the school and climb the cliff.
The fleeting shadow that once appeared might have been a turning point when things were stagnant. Since she wasn't allowed to move around freely on campus, she had to go outside to take a look, which probably wasn't against the rules.
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