Chapter 67
Chapter 67
Huang Yuanrui suddenly tried to leap up from the sofa, only to discover that her entire body had gone limp. She didn’t even have the strength to twitch.
Only one thought remained in her mind: It’s over.
He Qian gave her a cold glance, then strained to twist her neck. Huang Yuanrui heard the crisp crack of her joints.
Huang Yuanrui shouted, “Why can’t I move? What did you do to me?!”
He Qian rolled her eyes. “I didn’t do anything. Didn’t you walk in here yourself?”
Then she stood up stiffly and slowly walked toward the metal-framed bed.
As she walked, she said, “My husband will be back soon…”
Huang Yuanrui said, “You mean Qin Song is coming?”
He Qian ignored her and slowly climbed onto the iron bed.
She raised a finger to her lips and gave Huang Yuanrui a soft “shh.” Then she lay down gently and, with practiced ease, pulled the sheet over herself.
Huang Yuanrui stared at that sheet. It did not rise or fall at all. He Qian truly wasn’t breathing anymore.
She tried her hardest to move her fingers and toes, but it was like sleep paralysis. They no longer obeyed her at all.
Trapped in the same room with a corpse, unable to move, she screamed in despair.
“Aaaaaah-!”
Huang Yuanrui woke herself up with her own scream.
Thank goodness, thank goodness. It was a dream!
She had finally woken up in the bed in 302. It was one in the afternoon.
Huang Yuanrui swallowed with difficulty and sat up against the headboard.
Her feet were freezing cold. She felt around for the air conditioner remote and checked it, only to find the temperature had somehow been set to nineteen degrees. Maybe before her nap, she’d felt too hot and turned the AC down too low, which was why she’d had such a nightmare.
She turned off the air conditioner, climbed out of bed, and opened the window, letting the hot air from outside surge in.
Most people quickly forgot their nightmares. Huang Yuanrui was different.
She believed every dream had something in reality that corresponded to it.
Back in middle school, she had a conflict with the class monitor. The class monitor was a pretty, forceful girl, and Huang Yuanrui fought with her fiercely. They liked hanging out with the same girl, and they liked the same boy.
Huang Yuanrui hated that kind of person most of all, the sort who competed with her for both her best friend and her man. But the other girl was a class officer. No matter how viciously they fought in secret, no matter how evenly matched they were, in public, the class monitor still had authority over her.
If Huang Yuanrui was caught fidgeting in class or chatting with her deskmate, and the class monitor told her to stand as punishment, then she had to stand.
She couldn’t win against her, and she couldn’t swallow her anger, so all that resentment got bottled up and vented in her dreams.
During that period, she often had the same dream. It went like this:
On a Friday afternoon, every class in the whole school was bustling with a major cleanup.
That hateful class monitor was holding a pen and a clipboard, about to go to the administration office for a meeting with the other class monitors.
Why did everyone else have to clean, while she alone could use a meeting as an excuse to dodge work every week at this time?
Huang Yuanrui set down the broom in her hand, pulled a thick dictionary out of her desk, and quietly followed her.
When no one was paying attention, at the corner of the second floor of the teaching building, she raised the dictionary and slammed it hard into the back of the class monitor’s head, knocking her unconscious.
Seeing the class monitor collapse limply, Huang Yuanrui quickly tucked the dictionary under her arm and ran back to the classroom.
The moment she stepped through the classroom door, she froze. The room was empty.
It was too strange. When she had run out just a moment ago, the classroom had clearly been full of people-some students carrying buckets in and out, some students holding brooms and play-fighting with one another, some students earnestly wiping down the teacher’s podium with rags… Everyone had been busy with their own tasks, the place packed and lively as a New Year’s market.
Yet after sneaking out to do a little mischief and returning in just two minutes, the classroom was completely empty.
Huang Yuanrui ran to the hallway and looked out, only to find that it wasn’t just her class; the entire hallway was deserted!
She then leaned against the window to look downstairs-there was no one down there either.
This school, which had been full of students just two minutes ago, was now completely empty?
Huang Yuanrui racked her brains but couldn’t figure out what had happened in those two minutes.
Could there have been a fire somewhere, and the school had pulled the fire alarm, quickly evacuating all the students?
No, she hadn’t left the teaching building just now. If there really had been a fire alarm, she definitely would have heard it as well.
This was too bizarre. Even if something had happened and all the students had evacuated in an orderly fashion under the teachers’ guidance, it wouldn’t have been this silent, right?
Then… what about the class monitor? Was she still lying at the corner of the second floor?
Huang Yuanrui retraced her steps and went back to the second-floor corner-the class monitor who had been lying there was gone too.
Huang Yuanrui’s head was full of question marks. She pondered what was going on as she walked back to the classroom, intending to grab her backpack and go home.
Returning to the classroom, she found that someone besides her had finally appeared-Teacher Xu, the English teacher, was standing at the podium.
Huang Yuanrui: “Teacher Xu, do you know where all the classmates went?”
Teacher Xu looked at her expressionlessly. “Why do you care where others went? Have you finished your own cleaning duty?”
Huang Yuanrui: “Oh… not yet.”
Teacher Xu: “Go mop the floor.”
Huang Yuanrui cursed “damn” in her heart and went to the back of the classroom to get a mop.
Actually, this was very strange. The person who usually supervised cleaning duty was the homeroom teacher, never the English teacher.
Why was it the English teacher today? She should have gotten off work long ago at this hour.
Huang Yuanrui couldn’t be bothered to think too much and casually grabbed a mop from the cleaning corner in the classroom.
By now, the sky had darkened a bit, and she was too lazy to turn on the lights, so she made do and haphazardly mopped the floor with the mop.
Today’s mop was really heavy, and the mop handle was thick and wide. She didn’t know if it was because the mop head below was soaked with water that it seemed so clumsy, but Huang Yuanrui found it very strenuous.
As she mopped, she finally sensed something was wrong-the mop heads of other mops were thick strips of cloth, but the mop head she was holding was too thin, almost like strands.
Huang Yuanrui leaned the mop upright against a desk, crouched down, and carefully inspected the mop head.
The moment her hand touched the mop head, she suddenly let out a shriek and fell to the ground, trembling as she scrambled backward.
That was no mop head at all-it was a tangled mess of hair!
She looked more closely at the “pole” of this “mop”-it was actually the class monitor’s body.
It seemed that she hadn’t just knocked her unconscious earlier, but had killed her outright.
The class monitor’s body was already stiff. Someone had stuck her upside down at the very back of the classroom, placed together with a bunch of mops.
Huang Yuanrui had mistaken her torso for a mop and her long black hair for the mop head.
Huang Yuanrui sat on the ground and crawled back a few steps, suddenly bumping into someone’s leg.
She slowly looked up and saw Teacher Xu’s sinister smiling face.
Teacher Xu said, “Just now while others were doing their cleaning duty… where did you go off to?”
This exact dream, Huang Yuanrui had had no fewer than three times.
One thing that puzzled her was that in the dream, she had killed the class monitor, which made sense because in real life, she harbored hatred for the class monitor.
But why did Teacher Xu harbor such malice toward her in the dream?