Chapter 55

Chapter 55

Huang Yuanrui drove Qin Song’s car to the area around Xinda Primary School.

She parked by the roadside, then took a narrow path on foot to the school’s side gate.

This was the northwest corner of the school. A row of single-story houses stood there, originally used as dormitories for the faculty and staff, with a large iron gate beside them.

Those little houses were only suited to living conditions from twenty years ago. Later, none of the teachers or staff wanted to live in such cramped quarters anymore, so the area gradually fell into disuse. The iron gate was locked as well, and on ordinary days the faculty and students could only enter through the school’s main gate.

But Huang Yuanrui knew that near this iron gate, there was a section of fence where two of the steel bars had been bent by someone at some point, leaving a gap just big enough for her to squeeze through. Last time, she had slipped in through this gap and, while Zhang Qiong’s daughter Qiqi was in gym class, put a dead rat in Qiqi’s schoolbag.

She had poisoned that rat with her own hands.

After loitering around the school for several days, she had accidentally discovered that the school cafeteria was often plagued by rats-and that the school was actually so stingy it refused to put out even a few glue traps.

So she bought a large amount of rat poison, mixed it with food, and left it in the corners. Within a few days, she had harvested an entire nest’s worth of dead rats.

Wearing gloves, she moved the nest of dead rats to a patch of wasteland overgrown with weeds and left them there for a few days. The summer heat quickly rendered them unrecognizable.

In the end, she put on swimming nose plugs and a pair of goggles, divided the things into two portions, placed one in Qiqi’s schoolbag, and tied the other with string outside Zhang Qiong’s window.

Throughout the process, she had retched countless times and been left panting with exhaustion just as many times. But whenever she thought of Zhang Qiong getting out of Qin Song’s car, of Qin Song reaching out to pat her on the butt, and of all the countless nights when, unbeknownst to her, the two of them might have been whispering sweet nothings with their heads together, her strength would come flooding back.

Originally, she had only wanted to give Qiqi a scare, then have Qiqi bring that information home and scare Zhang Qiong as well. She had assumed Qiqi would throw the entire schoolbag away at school that very day.

Unexpectedly, the timing had been too perfect. Qiqi had a cold and a stuffy nose that day, so she hadn’t smelled the stench in her schoolbag at all. She had brought the dead rat home completely intact.

The rat family had left the school, then miraculously reunited in Zhang Qiong’s home.

A phrase suddenly came to her mind: Mickey’s Misfortune House.

She couldn’t help wanting to burst out laughing again.

Diagonally above the school’s side gate was an ancient-looking security camera. It looked like a mere decoration, and who knew if it was even still powered.

Huang Yuanrui sneered at the camera and flipped it off.

She casually tucked her skirt between her legs, getting ready to step through the gap between the steel bars.

She had just lifted one leg over, her arms braced with effort and her other leg still dangling in midair, when someone suddenly patted her shoulder from behind-not too hard, not too light.

She shrieked and toppled down headfirst.

Today, she was wearing a skirt with bare legs. Fortunately, she landed on her butt. Otherwise, both her knees would have been scraped bloody.

Huang Yuanrui scrambled up from the ground in one swift motion. Before she could even brush the dust off her backside, she looked sharply at the person who had patted her shoulder.

It wasn’t one person. It was two. Two men.

They stood there without moving, like a pair of mannequins.

Both men were tall, a full 185 centimeters. They wore simple black business-casual outfits and casual shoes.

One of them was very thin, while the other was extremely burly. Huang Yuanrui thought the burly man looked a lot like a Korean actor named Ma Dong-seok.

Huang Yuanrui had been vigilant about her surroundings the entire way here. She was certain there hadn’t been a single person on this road.

Then where had these two men popped out from?