Chapter 90 - Eighty-Nine:

Chapter 90: Chapter Eighty-Nine: "What Are You Looking At?Li Xin, who was packing his bag, nodded, seemingly unwilling to talk.

Su Ming’an glanced at Wang Ran’s seat, which was even covered with dust, as if it hadn’t been occupied for a long time, then he put his homework into his bag, shouldered it, and headed straight for the classroom.

"Su Jian, Su Jian, please help me with tonight’s homework!" Zhang Jinfei’s voice came from behind: "I haven’t finished the series on my phone, I must watch it today..."

Su Ming’an ignored him; in his mind, he could still see Zhang Jinfei reduced to nothing but a skeletal frame that night.

After Wang Ran was killed, he disappeared mysteriously, as if he had never existed.

Lost in thought, Su Ming’an walked downstairs and looked up to see the figure of a young man with a mantis on his shoulder, whom students were walking around, waiting there.

"This is bread and milk tea bought from the Main God store, it’s very safe, want some?" Lv Shu, guessing he couldn’t go to the cafeteria, had prepared the food beforehand, holding exactly two pieces of bread and two milk teas in his hands.

"No milk tea early in the morning," Su Ming’an glanced at the bread. "I don’t eat bread either."

"It’s not poisoned..."

"No, really, I won’t eat it."

Lv Shu looked somewhat dejected as he put the items back into his bag and started to nibble on his own share.

"Hey hey! Good morning, you two!" An energetic voice came from the stream of students heading for school, and sure enough, it was Wang Xingkong, bouncing along with his backpack.

"Did you rest well? To be honest, it’s been so long since I’ve had such a good sleep... the past two worlds either kept me up scared or were too filthy to rest... Oh, Ming An’an, you look really pale," Wang Xingkong squinted at him for a second. "Did you stay up late doing homework and didn’t sleep well?"

Su Ming’an hadn’t paid it any mind, but seeing Wang Xingkong’s inquisitive look, he still pulled up the system interface mirror to see—his eyes were full of bloodshot veins, dark circles quite evident, and his complexion wasn’t looking great.

...Maybe it was influenced by the phrase from the Clone Skill, "Warning, this skill comes with an extremely high risk of death upon collapse!" Indeed, having used the cloning ability frequently, his spirit was not in great shape.

"You really don’t look so good," Lv Shu commented. "Did you encounter an enemy last night?"

"It’s nothing," Su Ming’an replied curtly, but then he seemed to remember something, his lips curled into a forced, yet mild smile, as he looked at Lv Shu and Wang Xingkong, "...Thanks for your concern."

Lv Shu’s hand tightened, while Wang Xingkong cheerfully responded: "Hey hey, Ming An’an is thanking me! No need to thank me, it’s just that I’m too happy today, slept so well..."

Wang Xingkong always had this carefree demeanor, and the two of them paid him no mind.

After walking some distance, Su Ming’an looked up to see the teaching building finally emerge from the white expanse in front of him.

Climbing the stairs with the flow of students, he could hear Lv Shu’s low voice amidst the bustle:

"...Are you okay?"

"...You don’t need to pretend like that." Lv Shu suggested quietly, "Find a chance to release that recording."

Then he followed the crowd to his class.

"Ming An’an, I have to tell you, last night’s homework really was killer, but luckily I still remembered some knowledge from high school, otherwise it would have been game over..." Wang Xingkong chattered endlessly. When Su Ming’an entered the classroom, the first thing he noticed was Shen Xue sitting next to his seat.

She had her hair in twin ponytails today, her luscious black hair soft and smooth, and a pair of bright, shining, glass-bead-like eyes were looking at him.

Shen Yue was also sitting not far away. The moment he entered the classroom, her clear and gentle eyes also turned to look at him, as if suddenly pressing a piece of broken dawn light gently with an iron.

When two similarly stunning girls in school uniforms turned their gaze towards him, their lethal charm was unrivaled.

Su Ming’an handed in his homework, had Wang Xingkong step aside, and sat down to open the English book required for morning reading.

The barrage was also quite excited today:

"Su Jian." A soft voice came from beside him, and Su Ming’an looked up to meet Shen Xue’s clear eyes that were reflecting his own image: "Did you go somewhere last night?"

Her tone was solemn, and she pronounced her words unusually slowly.

Su Ming’an was taken aback as he realized the scent of roses on his clothes.

The fragrance seemed to stick, and strangely enough, it was still there after a whole night had passed.

"Oh," he said. "Wang Han had some problems he couldn’t solve, so I went to his dorm to explain it to him. Maybe I went to that place, why do you ask?"

He was paying close attention to Shen Xue’s expression.

Her brows moved slightly, and then she turned her head away: "...I see."

She acted as if she didn’t care about it anymore and didn’t pursue the question further.

"Ding Ling Ling—!"

The bell rang.

Morning reading began.

The morning classes went by relatively normally, with two English and two math classes. The English and math teachers seemed quite normal and didn’t ask many questions. However, just before the start of the fourth period, the homeroom teacher showed up at the door.

"Wu Hai, Chen Weiwei, Sun Haiyao, Lu Yu, Wang Han..." He recited a list of six names, his face so crumpled it looked like it could kill flies: "Your homework from yesterday, not acceptable! Tonight after school, come to my office on the second floor!"

Wang Xingkong’s heart skipped a beat, and as soon as the class was dismissed for lunch, he immediately cast a pleading look in Su Ming’an’s direction.

"Ming’an, Ming An’an, you must save me!" Wang Xingkong grabbed his hand and shook it wildly: "I’m done for, I’m done for, that office is definitely not a good place..."

"You want me to accompany you?"

"Wow! That would be fantastic!" Wang Xingkong smiled happily, his mood instantly relaxed: "If you’re there with me, Ming An’an, it won’t be so scary. If that old guy tries something on me, you must save me!"

"Okay." After nibbling on a chocolate to replenish his Physical Strength, Su Ming’an lay back down on the table.

"Well, I’m off to eat, see you later Ming An’an!" Wang Xingkong’s always energetic voice faded away.

Su Ming’an yawned; lying on the table, he felt his vision blur and the surroundings grow indistinct. After squinting his eyes for a moment, he sat up.

It was now nap time, and the students in the classroom had gradually left, either to the cafeteria for lunch or back to their dorms for a nap.

Su Ming’an noticed the classroom was empty and, with his head down, pulled out the red leather diary he had found in the office building the night before from his backpack and flipped it open.

He had thought there would be some clues, but after flipping through the pages, he found only blank sheets of paper.

After a moment of thought, he took out the water bottle from the side of his backpack, unscrewed the cap, and poured water over the diary.

Amidst the glistening water, movement began to appear on the pages of the book.

Text gradually emerged.

He turned to the page where the text was appearing, and since water had glued some of the pages together, it was a bit tricky to carefully tear them apart. After gently separating them by pinching the corner of the pages, he was abruptly met with a line of blood-red characters:

[We need to create a real world

— A world without death is not beautiful, nor is it poetic.]

The water had made the handwriting look blood-soaked, as if the page was drenched in blood, giving the characters a somewhat ferocious appearance.

"...Another lunatic." Su Ming’an closed the book.

"...What are you looking at?"

Suddenly, a ghostly question floated over from beside his ear, and his hand holding the book trembled slightly as he turned his head slightly to look, meeting a pair of frightening, glassy eyes.

...She had arrived without a sound, not even the noise of footsteps.

As if she had sprouted from thin air.

The bullet screen comments seemed even more frightened than Su Ming’an.

"Reading a diary." Su Ming’an slipped the diary into his backpack as if nothing had happened.

"...I see." Shen Xue leaned in very close; her falling strands of hair drifted onto Su Ming’an’s cheek with the afternoon breeze, carrying an almost decaying rose scent. Her eyes seemed even more lustrous, making the afternoon light appear milky white and glossy.

"I see you haven’t had lunch yet." She held up a sealed plastic bag in her hand, "Want to try some red bean bread? Your favorite."

"...No, thanks." Su Ming’an always declined food offered by suspicious women.

"Alright then..." After asking this question, Shen Xue turned and left.

It was as if she had come just to see what he was doing.

Students started trickling in, yawning, as the afternoon classes began.

The afternoon was filled with physical chemistry and mathematics, and as the physics teacher came in and started drawing ball movements on the board, his voice, amplified by the microphone, crackled and buzzed, lulling like a sleepy bug summoning the soul. Su Ming’an felt truly fatigued and, despite the cool gaze of Shen Xue to his right, he couldn’t help but lay his head down on the desk and fall asleep.

In his dream, he kept sensing a faint rose scent at the tip of his nose, a fragrance that soothed him, and without realizing it, he slept through several classes.

What he didn’t see was the corner of the page pressed under his arm, revealing a portion of the folded front page.

There, written all over it, was the name "Shen Xue."

Next to him, Shen Xue turned her head, a trace of a deep smile on her face.

This sleep was very deep, the deepest Su Ming’an had experienced in a long time.

The rose scent lingered, his thoughts were muddled like they were coated in sludge, and for a moment, those blurry thoughts cleared in an instant, rising tumultuously like fire meeting oil.

He gained a sliver of lucidity, struggling to focus on the weight of his heavy eyelids, trying to break through that line blocking the light—

In a blink, his view expanded greatly.

The world seemed to regain its color; upon opening his eyes again, he was bathed in vast, splendid sunlight.

He rubbed his eyes, sat up from the desk, yawned, and saw not a single student in the classroom.

...How long had he slept?

He immediately became alert and looked up at the clock on the classroom wall, seeing the hands pointed at twelve.

...Noon, twelve o’clock?

Outside the window, there was a broad expanse of brilliant sunshine, making the windowsill all bright and shiny; it was obviously daytime.

Before he fell asleep, it was the afternoon’s first class... Going by that timeline, could it be that he slept here straight into the next day?

But if he had overslept, not to mention Wang Xingkong, at least Lv Shu would have come to wake him, yet when he looked at the system panel’s private messages, his chat with Lv Shu was still on the topic of copying homework.

He glanced at the live stream’s chat, and the chat today was also quite lively, as if they didn’t mind that he had slept for so long:

This bunch in the live stream chat had their daily routine like this, because they couldn’t get a response from him, so they learned to talk to themselves, usually chatting about some trivial matters, making the live stream room like a world chat.

As he was organizing his backpack, he had a thought to step outside and take a look, but he suddenly noticed something wasn’t right.

...After he finished reading that red-covered diary yesterday, he clearly put it inside his backpack,

Why is it not to be seen in the backpack now?

He immediately clicked open the system’s inventory column, and caught sight of the red leather diary lying quietly in the backpack space.

A faint cold sweat streaked across his forehead, and some unpleasant emotions began to emerge in his heart.

He opened the diary.

— Inside was an expanse of emptiness.

Apart from there being no bloody writing, there wasn’t even a trace of water damage; it was a clean diary.

It seemed he thought of something, then a wave of uncontrollable sense of crisis started to spread up his spine, like a floodgate opening, becoming unstoppable.

"— What are you looking at?"

A gentle female’s voice, soft and tender, came from behind his neck, exhaling a breath carrying the scent of roses.

Su Ming’an turned his head somewhat stiffly and met Shen Xue’s eyes, which were bright and shiny like glass orbs.

His fingertips trembled slightly as he sent a private message to Lv Shu.

"Ding dong!"

A reply came quickly from the other side.

"Ding dong!"