Chapter 20: Chapter 20
Ugh... my head hurts. What time is it now?
Liushu awoke with a splitting headache, got up from bed, and turned on his phone to check the time.
Until what time did they drink last night?
What did they even talk about?
Damn, it's all gone. Total blackout.
Guess that's what you call drinking to oblivion.
Never mind, better go get some breakfast first.
Liushu got out of bed, got dressed, and put his hand on the doorknob.
The door was kicked open from outside by Wei, the door slamming Liushu straight onto the wall.
"Are you trying to pose as a living wall art?" said Wei.
"What kind of weird thing is that?"
Liushu pushed himself off the wall.
"Did you find Shuang Yun?" The source of this content ɪs NoveIꜰire.net
"Then why are you coming to my room?"
"I came to look for you."
"You've been missing for a whole day, and you're asking me why I came to find you?!"
Wei picked Liushu up with one hand.
Liushu picked up his phone again.
Holy crap, he had actually slept for almost thirty hours straight.
So he had directly missed Mo Ying and Xiya's match today?
"I'm docking some of your salary this month."
"Have mercy, seriously, if you dock more I'll be eating dirt by the end of the month."
At the mention of a docked salary, Liushu looked utterly reluctant.
"Didn't you used to survive eating dirt anyway? I have faith in your tenacious vitality."
Wei smiled as she left the room.
Leaving behind a forlorn Liushu standing alone in the room.
He'd literally drunk away a month's salary—Liushu was half numb from life.
"By the way, about Shuang Yun, I have some guesses,"
Wei suddenly stopped in the corridor.
Liushu regained his serious expression.
"She once touched the Forbidden Book of time. Yesterday I went to ask Principal Alitos, and she said previous people who touched that book also had similar incidents."
"This sudden disappearance kind of situation?"
"Yes. That book has been touched by a few people before; Shuang Yun isn't the first. Some of them also suddenly disappeared, but they all came back within minutes or hours."
"But Shuang Yun has already been gone for several days."
"Right. My guess is, after she came in contact with the Forbidden Book of time, her very existence became highly unstable, and she jumped to another timeline—could be the past, or the future."
Liushu's eyes widened.
Right, that's possible.
Shuang Yun could very well be experiencing a time jump right now.
"But I've also been through the Corridor of Time. Why am I fine?"
"Not sure, maybe because the person who opened the entrance was Shuang Yun, so you weren't affected. That's just a guess. Maybe, in the future, you'll go through a time jump too."
"You've become too much of a busybody. You used to be a cold person."
Wei stared directly at Liushu.
"Indeed, maybe I was too much of a busybody. Perhaps I shouldn't have cared about whether Shuang Yun lived or died,"
Liushu replied blandly.
Just as Wei said, he was actually just like her—both were rather cold types.
"No matter what, it's because of your meddling that I'm now in a heap of trouble."
Wei produced a stack of documents.
"I'll be blunt. Shuang Yun may not come back."
"Time jumping is something neither you nor I can comprehend. She might not come back, or, even if she does, this world may have already passed by hundreds of years."
"And that's still the lighter scenario. Worse is..."
"She might travel back into the past, and if she brings current technology with her, this could cause the present timeline to collapse."
"... No, maybe I'm overthinking it."
Wei suddenly took back her previous words.
"If she interferes with our timeline, she'll be dealt with before that happens."
Wei was right; if Shuang Yun really time-jumped into the past, before she could affect the future, a god or a divine agent would take care of her.
That was the worst-case scenario.
"Whoa, what a gloomy face to see first thing in the morning, Mr. Liushu,"
Mo Ying commented when she saw Liushu looking dejected in the breakfast hall.
"Teacher, were you drained by a vampire or sucked dry by a succubus? What's with that look?"
Mo Ying twirled noodles in her bowl with a fork.
"Vampires and succubi only exist in books, not in the real world,"
Liushu retorted, cracking open an egg.
"Wait, I think not long ago someone actually found a vampire, so I guess vampires are a rare species—at least they do exist. As for succubi, no one's found one yet, so probably they aren't real."
Liushu peeled the egg.
"Teacher, where were you yesterday?"
"That's confidential."
Of course Liushu couldn't admit he drank himself to a blackout.
"Haven't seen Shuang Yun today either,"
Mo Ying look around at the other students in the hall, still failing to spot Shuang Yun.
"She took a leave of absence with me after her match today, said she had something and had to go back, but she'll return for later matches,"
Liushu casually replied.
He himself had no idea when Shuang Yun would come back.
Or rather, whether she could even come back was a question.
Time was not something anyone could understand.
"Oh, really? And she didn't even tell us,"
Mo Ying believed Liushu's words.
Xiya looked at Liushu.
Liushu winked at her, signaling her to keep quiet.
Xiya said nothing and went on eating.
"By the way, teacher Liushu, since you weren't here yesterday, there's something you might not know,"
Mo Ying suddenly said.
Liushu asked, holding his coffee.
"In yesterday's match, a few students suddenly acted extremely abnormally and were forcibly removed from the match by other teachers and sent to the infirmary,"
"Xiya, you stole my line. That was supposed to be me telling him."
Mo Ying shook Xiya's hand.
"You'd have kept him guessing forever, so I just said it myself,"
"They were acting abnormally? How so?"
Liushu's interest was piqued.
"They didn't wait for the referee to signal the start before suddenly attacking, and even after the opponent's Prism was broken, they kept attacking like they'd gone crazy,"
"Looks like more trouble is brewing,"
Liushu muttered as he picked up his tray and left.
"Teacher Liushu, you're eating so little?"
Mo Ying called after him from her seat.
"I left my cigarettes in my room, I'll be back in a bit,"
Liushu waved at her as he left the hall.
Liushu closed the door to the infirmary.
A man who treated his cigarettes as life itself—there was no way he'd leave them in his room.
"Good morning," greeted Yiguan Huamo, the infirmary's physician, sitting on a chair next to some medicine jars.
Just as Mo Ying had said, Huamo was a very beautiful woman. In her white coat, she exuded a unique kind of elegance.
"So, what's the situation?"
Liushu cut straight to the point.
"The situation—you mean them?"
Huamo gestured at four students lying on beds, all in evident pain.
"This was collected from them."
Huamo produced a sealed jar containing some powder—hardly noticeable unless you looked closely.
"This is pollen from the plants in the hunting grounds. It can heavily disrupt the mind, make people irritable, trigger hallucinations, cause madness. If left unchecked, it can even parasitize the host, make flowers bloom all over their body, and keep spreading more pollen."
Huamo smiled while saying things that sent chills down the spine.
"I am actually quite interested in this human garden phenomenon."
"I don't have such twisted tastes. These students are all freshmen; they've never been into the hunting grounds."
"Yeah, I know. I just don't get why this pollen showed up. Because of this, the principal had all students screened yesterday."
"What was the result?"
"Quite a few students were affected, including Mo Ying and Xiya. Not one of them realized it themselves."
"But don't worry—the principal has already extracted the pollen from them. Now they're fine. Thank goodness it was caught early—otherwise... quite a few would have died..."
Huamo's last words came out in a low tone.
"This stuff can float through the air. Maybe it just drifted in from somewhere."
"As for where it came from, you'll have to investigate. You're more sensitive to this kind of thing, aren't you?"
Huamo said with a smile.
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