Chapter 45
Chapter 45
Wei Sen glanced at the time on her phone. Today was June 9, 2102. Last night had been her wedding night, and the day her husband died.
She had clearly spent three days in the Eerie World, yet in the real world, she had only slept for one night.
Was this God’s doing too?
When she went to the Eerie World, had it been her body that entered, or her soul?
Thinking this, Wei Sen opened the app on her phone and checked last night’s surveillance footage.
In the footage, she had been asleep the entire night. Nothing unusual had happened at all.
So… those three days at Zhihui Primary School had been experienced by her soul!
But her five senses had felt so real!
And that so-called “God” had said that dead meant dead.
So even if only her soul died in the Eerie World, her body in reality would die all the same.
The injuries her soul suffered in the Eerie World would also appear on her physical body!
So humans really did have souls?
Wei Sen still remained doubtful about everything she had learned. At the very least, before she had absolute proof, she would not believe every illusion or one-sided claim.
She wondered how the others were doing…
She thought of the teammates she had met in the Instance World. After they left through the school’s third gate, what had they gone through?
Most likely, they had encountered that “God” too and each become an Order Keeper. They would probably enter another Instance World again as well.
But when would the next Instance begin? And would they meet again?
The trigger for entering the Zhihui Primary School Instance had been sleep. Would entering the next Instance be the same?
That guy who called himself “God” had explained nothing properly.
But Wei Sen was in no hurry to verify it now. Once night fell, there would be plenty of time to sleep anyway.
Right now, she had something more important to do.
With great difficulty, she dragged the corpse out of the freezer. It was a man one meter eighty-three tall. His entire face had been scalded beyond recognition, then frozen into a lumpy, uneven mess.
This person was none other than Li Chang. A year ago, when she woke up, he had still been her boyfriend. But as of yesterday in the real world, he had become her lawful husband.
A year ago, she had been hit by a car that ran a red light and sent to the hospital. After waking up, she had forgotten everything that had happened in the past.
It was Li Chang who told her, one by one, about everything from before. Under his meticulous care, her body soon recovered.
Because of her car accident, their wedding date had also been postponed from October 12, 2101, to June 8, 2102.
After being discharged from the hospital, Wei Sen had originally accepted everything Li Chang told her. She started working and dating as she had before, trying to accept an ordinary life the way Li Chang claimed her former self had.
But she discovered that she was becoming stranger and stranger. This world was becoming stranger and stranger too. Even Li Chang, through their day-to-day interactions, seemed to grow more unfamiliar instead.
She often asked herself: Was she, who had lost her memories, still the same person she used to be?
Why was it that no matter how Li Chang treated her, she could not feel the slightest stir of emotion?
Why had this world become so unfamiliar?
Why was it that no matter where she went, she always felt as if a pair of eyes was watching her?
Until finally, she became certain that everything truly was wrong, and it was not merely her imagination!
So she conducted experiment after experiment…
The first time, Wei Sen closed the doors and windows of her bedroom, lit a basin of charcoal, and went to sleep.
When she woke up, Li Chang was already sitting by the bed.
He said he had happened to come by her home to look for her and saw that her doors and windows were shut tight while charcoal was burning. He blamed her for being careless and nearly causing an accident, but more than that, he was distressed for her.
After that incident, he wanted to move in with her. But she still felt that the person before her was far too unfamiliar, so she decisively refused his suggestion.
The second time, Wei Sen threw away all her electronic devices and walked into the mountains on foot.
She lost contact with the outside world for a full twenty-four hours. When she was too hungry to keep going and was hiding in a cave, Li Chang found her with a group of police officers.
He said she was the most important person to him in this world. If anything happened to her, he absolutely would not go on living alone.
But even after hearing those words, Wei Sen still was not moved in the slightest. Instead, she felt the person in front of her had grown even more unfamiliar.
The final time was five days ago.
While Li Chang was away on a business trip, Wei Sen wrote a suicide note one day in advance. Then, early the next morning, she went out, preparing to head to the rooftop mentioned in the note.
As expected, before she could reach the rooftop, she ran into Li Chang at the entrance of the building.
Li Chang said he had ended his business trip early and wanted to come back sooner to prepare for the wedding.
And this morning, he had just happened to be bringing a client to the building. He hadn’t expected to run into her by chance.
Wei Sen had not exposed his lie back then, but in her heart, she already had her answer.
She had written her suicide note at 10:00 p.m.
At the time, Li Chang had been out of town. If he wanted to return to Jingdu, it would take him an hour just to get to the airport. And because he was on a business trip in a small county town with no direct flights, he would have to make a connection.
The earliest flight out of that county town was at 11:00 p.m. After that, he would have to wait five hours at the transfer airport, which meant the earliest flight he could take back to Jingdu was at four in the morning.
From Jingdu Airport to the building where Wei Sen intended to kill herself, the taxi ride would take another hour and a half. That meant he would arrive at the building at 5:30 a.m.
And Wei Sen had arrived at the building at 5:38.
If the first time Li Chang saved her had been a coincidence, and the second time had been with the police’s help, then what about the third time?
She had calculated every detail of the timing. Only if Li Chang had known, the very moment she wrote her suicide note, that she would go to the rooftop in the morning to kill herself, could he have immediately set off and made the 11:00 p.m. flight out of the county town. Only then could he have caught the earliest four-a.m. flight back to Jingdu!
Otherwise, there was no way he would have made it in time!
If he had learned even a moment later than when she put pen to paper and wrote that suicide note, by the time he rushed back, all he would have found was her corpse.
So… how had he known?
The place Wei Sen had chosen to write her suicide note was an open stretch of grass, exposed on all sides, somewhere there absolutely could not have been any surveillance cameras.
She desperately wanted to know what all of this was really about.
It was not until last night, after the wedding, when Li Chang had drunk a great deal with the guests who had come to attend the ceremony.
He said that being able to marry Wei Sen was the happiest thing in his life.
After they returned to their new home, Wei Sen filled the stockpot in the kitchen with water, set it on the stove, and turned on the heat.
Slightly tipsy, Li Chang walked in and asked why she was boiling water in the middle of the night.
She did not answer. She was only thinking: if boiling water were poured onto a person, how would an ordinary person react?
And how would Li Chang react?
“Ah Sen, can you not ask me?”
Li Chang saw that she did not answer, yet he said something very strange. Perhaps it was the alcohol, but his eyes looked hazy and tinged with sorrow.
“You know what I’m going to ask you?” Wei Sen stared at the water already boiling in the pot.
Li Chang wrapped his arms around her waist from behind. “I can’t lose you. Can’t we just go on like this forever?”
“I want to know the truth.”
“Do you have to know? No matter the cost? Even if that cost is a life?”
“Yes.”
It had clearly happened only last night, yet at this moment, Wei Sen felt a little dazed.
Had she pushed Li Chang’s head into the scalding water, or had he buried it in there himself?
In any case, he was dead now.
But before he died, he had taken a book from the study and given it to her. It was John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.
What did this book have to do with the truth she had been pursuing all along?
For the time being, Wei Sen could not arrive at a definite answer.
After Li Chang died last night, she had contacted a seller on a secondhand platform and had an old-fashioned freezer delivered.
Street vendors often used things like that, so it would not draw much suspicion. It could also temporarily preserve Li Chang’s body.
If men really did come from Mars and women from Venus, just as the book title said, then men and women were not the same species. Was that why Li Chang had always known her every move, no matter when or where? Was that a Martian superpower?
Wei Sen found that hypothesis far too ridiculous.
Starting in 2013, technology had begun to explode, and the world changed with each passing day.
But in 2025, technological development showed clear signs of decline. From then until the present year of 2102, seventy-seven years had passed without any major technological breakthroughs.
Compared with 2025, the only real changes in the world were that phone screens had grown thinner and larger, and foldable phones could be folded more times than before.
Although many countries had also begun space exploration programs one after another, they had still failed to overcome the problems of energy and the key technical barriers.
So saying Li Chang was a lizard man was more convincing than saying he was a Martian.
However…
Li Chang’s behavior had been far too abnormal. And those words he said before he died had also seemed like a roundabout admission of something.
So Wei Sen decided to dissect his corpse and take a look.
What if men and women really were not the same species?
She even began to suspect that the entire world she lived in was fake…