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Bonus chapter! Thank you to alyanna for the donation! ^^
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Everyone has memories hidden deep in their hearts, perhaps unknown to others, that they were unwilling to lose.
Zhou Xiang crouched on the ground, holding his head. The night concealed his expression.
“Gulp—”
“Drip.”
The sound of swallowing and the sound of water dripping onto the ground simultaneously echoed in the night.
When Ning Su turned to return to the dormitory, he saw Ling Xiao leaning against the doorway.
He didn’t know when Ling Xiao had appeared.
Ning Su walked over to Ling Xiao, looking up at him in the dim light.
Ling Xiao took his hand, gradually wrapping his pale, slightly cool hand in his own. “Don’t worry.”
The laziest and most resistant to competition, little “slacker,” was throwing vocabulary books at him to study in the middle of the night.
It could only be because he was worried.
Ling Xiao lowered his eyes and looked at him, saying, “My memory is already shattered. Even if it gets worse, being further damaged and consumed doesn’t matter.”
Ning Su pressed his lips together, withdrew his hand, and silently walked into the dormitory.
Ling Xiao paused for a few seconds, looking at his own hand.
When he entered the dormitory, he saw Ning Su sitting on his bed, holding two children. Ning Su then carried the children to his own bed, taking along the book titled [Primary School English Vocabulary].
Ling Xiao: “...”
At 6:30 in the morning, everyone got up to the increasingly loud sound of the school bell.
When Ning Su woke up, he immediately looked over at Zhou Xiang.
Zhou Xiang, who had returned to the dormitory at some point during the night, woke up to the sound of the bell, sitting up in a daze and staring blankly at the blue bed cover.
“Zhou Xiang!”
Zhou Xiang lifted his head at the sound, and Ning Su followed his gaze, seeing Lu Yue smiling at him.
Lu Yue was the kind of person who could offer a clean white handkerchief with a gentle and pure smile, even in the face of a girl’s harsh attitude.
“What are you daydreaming about?” he asked Zhou Xiang with a smile.
Zhou Xiang stared at him for a few moments, then lowered his head, rubbing the back of it. “Ah, I just didn’t sleep enough. I’m too tired and still a bit groggy.”
Lu Yue said, “Don’t stay groggy; get up quickly for morning study.”
Zhou Xiang: “Yeah, I’ll get up now.”
Ning Changfeng came out of the bathroom and asked the three people who had gone to the “little black room” last night, “Did you notice anything unusual?”
Ling Xiao replied, “No.”
After speaking, he glanced at Ning Su, who was getting out of bed without looking at him.
Ji Zeming said, “It seems not.”
As a member of the Yinhua Guild, he rarely showed a positive attitude towards Ning Changfeng, but he answered seriously, “I subjectively feel that my mind isn’t as sharp, and my memory has declined, but it should be due to lack of sleep and stress.”
Zhou Xiang added, “Same here. My reactions are a bit slow.”
After speaking, he gave Ning Su a glance.
Ning Su understood that he didn’t want others to know for now, so he nodded slightly at him.
Lu Yue said, “So, going into that ‘little black room’ once is no big deal? We have exams every week, which means we’ll have to go through it eight times in two months. Perhaps something only gets triggered after a certain number of times?”
Ning Changfeng: “It’s possible. Let’s go check on the other players.”
The group quickly freshened up and went out.
Ning Su was the last to leave. He climbed onto the bed, tucked the two children into the blanket, handed them a tablet, and placed one earbud in each of their ears, letting them lie down and watch a horror movie.
This tablet was his reward for being in the top twenty of his grade.
Horror movies were a type of entertainment and an educational film that the two kids loved to watch.
Qingyi High School has a morning reading class every day. During morning self-study, teachers other than the math teacher usually come in to oversee the class. Typically, whichever teacher comes in, the students review that subject. Some teachers even treat the morning reading session as their own class.
For example, the English teacher.
Today, she used the morning reading session to check on the key phrases and sentences from the composition assignment she had given the previous day.
The other students were reading and memorizing as usual, and she randomly approached the students she planned to quiz.
The classroom was filled with the loud sound of fifty to sixty students reading aloud. No one could hear the responses of the students being quizzed unless the teacher was right next to them, and no one paid much attention.
Until the teacher suddenly slammed the lesson plan down.
The noise in the classroom gradually decreased until it fell silent.
All the students looked in that direction.
The English teacher was standing in front of a boy, sternly questioning him, “How is it possible that you didn’t memorize a single sentence? Even if you didn’t review yesterday, I gave you 20 minutes during morning self-study before I came over to quiz you. In those 20 minutes, you couldn’t memorize even one?”
All nine players in the class were watching.
The boy was a player, and with an embarrassed look on his face, he apologized to the teacher, “I’m sorry, teacher. I’ve been feeling unwell these past two days.”
“If you can stand here just fine, it means you’re not that sick. Even with me here, you didn’t bother to review. What kind of attitude is that?”
The English teacher shoved the handout into the boy’s hand, “Now, read it to me right here!”
The boy held the handout, staring at the key phrases on it, but he remained silent for a long time.
His hands started to tremble.
The other players felt a pang of unease, watching him with serious expressions.
Why wasn’t he reading?
“If you can’t memorize it, fine, but why is the handout with the keywords right in front of you, and you still won’t read it?”
They all knew that this male player was named Zhang Haitao, who scored over ninety points in English and had a solid foundation.
Zhang Haitao’s hands, holding the handout, were trembling more and more violently. The two sheets of paper rustled against each other, and his face was so pale that not a trace of blood could be seen.
The players sensed something.
The English teacher also realized it.
A smile slowly spread across her face. When she smiled, her pupils would gradually enlarge, with the blackness spreading across her entire eyeball, revealing an inhuman eeriness, making her smile look extremely creepy.
“You forgot,” she said with a cold smile, her voice chilling, “You forgot everything and lost your memory.”
The classroom fell into a dreadful silence, while the neighboring class’s reading was loud and noisy.
“N-no...” Zhang Haitao’s forehead was drenched in sweat, his voice trembling, “I didn’t... I didn’t lose my memory!”
“You forgot!!!” The English teacher’s voice overpowered his.
She immediately called for security and the drill instructors.
For some reason, Zhang Haitao was particularly panicked. He quickly tried to snatch her phone, but she slapped him away with one hand.
The players’ expressions grew even more serious.
Even though their skills and weapons were cooling down, they still retained the physical abilities honed from many instances, yet Zhang Haitao was so easily thrown aside by a mere teacher.
Clearly, these teachers were no longer within the range of normal humans.
Security and the drill instructors arrived quickly. For the native world exam takers, they used electric batons, but for the players, they held black, flexible branches.
Those branches resembled the ones from the Reflection Hall, long and looking like a noose, but they were actually very flexible.
One of the instructors whipped the black branch towards Zhang Haitao, and it coiled around his neck, tightening like a noose, dragging him out of the classroom.
Zhang Haitao desperately tried to pull the branch off his neck with both hands, his legs flailing wildly, but he couldn’t slow the dragging at all.
His face grew redder and redder, and suddenly, his eyes widened, and for some reason, he stopped struggling, being dragged away like a dead dog.
“Zzzz—zzz—”
As his feet passed the classroom door and disappeared down the hallway, the sound of his body being dragged across the floor faded further and further away, leaving only the sound of his body scraping against the ground.
