Chapter 113

Chapter 113

The handwriting on the note was rushed. It had clearly been written in a hurry.

But the strokes on the second line seemed as if the writer had forced himself to calm down. Even so, the tip of the pen had trembled slightly, like he didn’t want to face it but had made himself do it anyway.

The note was obviously meant for Ning Shuo. And just now, right in front of the NPC, Ning Shuo had said he was taking leave and asked him to tell the homeroom teacher if he couldn’t make it to morning self-study tomorrow.

Ning Wang had written it. Ning Wang had remembered some things from the Internal Upheaval in the System a few years ago.

Rao Lin imagined what it would be like if Teacher Song had died once a few years ago, but he had forgotten it, only to remember it now…

He didn’t really want to keep imagining. He glanced out the window at the heavy darkness of the night.

No wonder Ning Shuo had been in such a hurry to ask for leave.

He was going back to coax his little kid.

—

Ning Shuo had actually had some guesses about the possibility that he might have died before.

Judging by the fact that he might be Ning Wang’s copy, his birth should have come from that mirror.

If a Water Moon Mirror Fragment could complete an NPC’s consciousness, then it seemed reasonable that the complete mirror could fully copy a person’s consciousness.

As for his death, Ning Shuo had already suspected it back during Spirit Tracing.

After all, it had been from a first-person perspective. That meant he must have died before.

Not to mention, the mirror that had “given birth” to him had shattered too, further confirming his guess that he had “died.”

But from what Ning Wang had said, it seemed he had witnessed Ning Shuo’s death with his own eyes.

Not the Water Moon Mirror’s death.

Ning Shuo’s.

The death of Ning Shuo’s entire human form.

Ning Shuo wasn’t rushing back to investigate the truth of his own death.

Ningning had written so frantically, and it was such a terrible memory.

He should go back and give him a hug.

—

A bus after ten at night was honestly creepy as hell.

In the modern world, it was one person’s loneliness. In the Script, it was one person’s helpless isolation and the carnival of countless shadows.

Though Ning Shuo simply pretended not to see their carnival.

When he took off his glasses to wipe the lenses, a long, thin shadow rod shot toward his face with a whoosh, stopping only a hair’s breadth from his eyeball.

Expressionless, Ning Shuo put his glasses back on and muttered under his breath.

The Ghost/Monster entities leaned closer to listen, only to discover he was reciting physics formulas.

Ghost/Monster: “…”

After finally waiting until his stop arrived, Ning Shuo continued pretending he couldn’t see them. He got off the bus without looking sideways, leaving those clawing, snarling shadows behind him.

The excuse he had used at school, that he was worried the family property would be seized, wouldn’t work at home for the time being. The Wen Clan and Jiang Clan had not reached that point yet either.

So Ning Shuo climbed through the window.

In the night, a security guard seemed to see a dark figure. He nudged the coworker beside him. “Did you just see someone?”

The coworker, who was scrolling through videos, waved him off. “The gates are closed. Where would a shadow come from?”

“I’m serious. Just now, it was like-whoosh…”

“Whoosh? What are you thinking, that someone flew past?”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess so.”

The lights were off in Ning Wang’s room. He sat at the head of the bed, one leg bent, one hand resting on his knee, the other holding his phone. The phone’s glow was the only light in the dark room.

A faint rustling suddenly came from the window. Ning Wang’s slightly furrowed brows relaxed, and he instinctively looked over.

A hand reached over the windowsill and waved in a show of weakness. “Ningning, I’ve come to elope with you.”

Ning Wang tossed his phone aside and ran over to pull Ning Shuo in. “Ge.”

Ning Shuo shushed him. “I snuck in. Don’t let the people here find out.”

Ning Wang asked, fully aware of the answer, “Why did Ge come?”

Ning Shuo glanced at him, his fingertip tracing from Ning Wang’s brows and eyes down to his jaw. “Didn’t Ningning write such a pitiful little note because he still wanted to see his ge tonight?”
Ning Wang did indeed have that intention, but the thought of “wanting to meet” had never been his alone.

He didn’t call Ning Shuo out on his stubborn denial. Instead, he scooped him up sideways and set him on his own bed. “Brother, don’t worry. None of them are here tonight, and the Servant staff won’t come in without permission either.”

Why did that sound so much like they were sneaking around?

Ning Shuo leaned lazily against him and let Ning Wang place him on the bed. “Wen Nuan, Jiang Shixian, and that Madame Sang are all gone? Where did they go?”

“Wen Nuan has started a new round of love-hate entanglement with that stepbrother from the Wen Clan. Jiang Shixian’s company was never as big as the Wen Clan to begin with, and after that stepbrother made his move, it’s teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. He’s still busy at the office. As for Madame Sang, she saw the situation turning bad and went to look for her next backer.”

A very concise summary.

Ning Shuo was clearly the one being pinned down, yet he lifted a hand to pinch Ning Wang’s chin. Behind his lenses, his expression was languid and refined. “In that case, Ningning, your family is going bankrupt. Why don’t you come with me instead?”

“Brother, don’t say that like it isn’t your family too.”

Ning Shuo’s expression shifted at once, becoming deliberately affected. “Knight, you’ve seen through me. Then this King can only sell his beauty to survive. Sob.”

Ning Wang burst out laughing. After they bantered for a while, he finally said, “Brother, it’s getting late. Go to sleep.”

Ning Shuo pinched his cheek. “Aren’t you going to tell me what you saw?”

—

Ning Wang had suddenly remembered it during a meeting.

The plan had been made on the fly, and when it was still nothing more than an unformed idea, Ning Wang hadn’t felt any particular sense of familiarity with it.

Not until the plan was carried out step by step, and many things were exposed to the public exactly as expected.

Perhaps because there were slight overlaps with his forgotten memories, many images appeared before Ning Wang’s eyes during the meeting.

Most of them were fragmented, but they all had one person in common.

In those images, that person had the same face as Ning Wang. His hair changed from short to long.

There was him smiling, him getting angry, him plotting trouble, and him helplessly coaxing him.

In the end, amid a thunderous explosion, that person shattered into pieces.

And vanished.

The scattered images weren’t connected, and almost all of them quickly became difficult to recall. Only that final explosion remained impossible to forget even now.

Ning Shuo used the tone one would use to coax a child. “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared. I’m here.”

Ning Wang was no child, but since Ning Shuo was happy to coax him like this, he was happy to be coaxed.

Only after the breathing by his ear evened out did Ning Shuo begin thinking about the question that had been troubling him all along.

He had been in the System for so long, yet without relying on the Water Moon Mirror, he had only remembered fragmented memories twice. Why had Ning Wang been able to remember so many times?

Was it because the Water Moon Mirror had shattered?

But judging from the logic that the shard’s consciousness had still existed after leaving Mingzhi, his memories and consciousness shouldn’t have had much to do with the Water Moon Mirror anymore.

Or rather, the Water Moon Mirror should only have helped his memories recover. It shouldn’t have hindered them.

And in the Spirit Tracing, the action of that version of himself throwing the shard to Mingzhi had clearly been deliberate.

One of his purposes must have been to ensure that, one day, he could take the shard back and recover those memories.

But Ning Shuo kept feeling that this couldn’t be the only purpose.

He sank into sleep amid the tangled mass of clues, unaware that the person holding him had moved.

The arms around him tightened, then loosened, as if afraid of losing the person in his embrace, yet also afraid that if he held on too tightly, the person in his arms would scatter like shards.