Chapter 66.1 Dream
It rained all morning.
Lin Banxia was constantly uneasy, because the rain was usually accompanied by death. Although nothing happened throughout the morning, this unusual calm felt like waiting for the other boot to drop, almost making people miss the chaos.
After the first class in the afternoon, the rain gradually became lighter and seemed as if it was about to stop. It seemed that this time, the rain was not as ominous as before, it was just an ordinary rain.
Just when Lin Banxia was thinking this, the lights in the classroom suddenly flickered a few times, and the entire classroom fell into darkness. When the students saw this, they started to cheer loudly. It happened to be a self-study class at that moment, and the teacher was not in the classroom. Seeing this, the monitor stood up and yelled: “Stop making noise, the teacher is right next door. He will come over if he hears the noise.”
“Monitor, is it our class that has a power outage, or the entire school?” someone asked.
“I’ll go take a look.” The squad leader said, and went to the corridor. He saw that the lights of other classes were still on, and only his class was dark, so he turned around and shouted: “Our class is the only one that is dark. There must be something wrong with the electrical switch.”
At that moment, a classmate sitting in the corner suddenly stood up and walked towards the switch. His dazed look made Lin Banxia’s heart skip a beat. He stood up and shouted to his classmate: ” Don’t touch the switch!”
However, the boy didn’t seem to hear Lin Banxia’s voice. He had already opened the door of the electric board and stuck his hand inside.
“Bang!” There was a loud crack of electricity, and without even a scream the classmate collapsed to the ground softly. White smoke wisping out of his body. He seemed to be dead.
“Ah!!!!” The classmates who witnessed this scene screamed in horror. Lin Banxia rushed to the side of his classmate with quick steps. Regardless of whether it was dangerous or not, he quickly helped him up. As soon as he took his hand, he felt that something was seriously wrong. The person he lifted was completely scorched, and his pulse could no longer be detected with his hands. Lin Banxia put him down and tried hard to perform cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but unfortunately it seemed to be of no use. In front of Lin Banxia, his body gradually turned cold.
Lin Banxia didn’t know how long he had been doing it. It wasn’t until someone pulled him away that he let go in a daze. There were several policemen and doctors standing around, and someone called his name softly. Lin Banxia raised his eyes and saw Li Su who looked worried.
“Are you okay?” Li Su asked carefully.
“It’s okay.” Lin Banxia said, “I thought… no one would die today.”
Li Su sighed.
The classmate’s body was not sent to the ambulance in the end. He was pronounced dead and there was no need to resuscitate him. Lin Banxia watched helplessly as his body was carried into the funeral home’s car and stood in front of the classroom window without speaking for a long time.
Li Su seemed a little worried about him and softly called Lin Banxia’s name several times.
Lin Banxia turned around and said, “I’m fine… I’m just a little worried.”
Li Su said: “What are you worried about?”
Lin Banxia: “I’m worried that we will end up as one of them.”
Li Su was silent.
Lin Banxia said: “Go, it’s time to go to class.”
Li Su hesitated to speak. In fact, he wanted to comfort Lin Banxia, but when the words came to his lips, he found that he didn’t know what to say. He knew those words were lies, so why bother to say them? Not to mention fooling others, no one knew better than Li Su himself. His dreams had become more and more realistic as time went by. Sometimes he couldn’t distinguish between the two, so he has to leave wounds on his hands again and again as a method of judgment. However, was this method really reliable? When he experienced pain in the dream, would he be trapped in it forever? Li Su himself didn’t know the answer.
If Lin Banxia was afraid of rain before, then after witnessing death again, he began to look forward to the rain. Dreaming during the rain might be the way to solve all this.
The rain that Lin Banxia was looking forward to came three days later. He was taking a nap at the time and didn’t even realize that he was dreaming, but he soon found that the entire teaching building was empty. With the setting sun hanging by the window, everything seemed so real that no one could notice anything strange.
Lin Banxia started looking for Song Qingluo and Li Su in the dream as they had discussed last time. He searched for a while but couldn’t find them. Instead, he found a student hiding in the corner. The student looked familiar, like a student he had met several times in the same grade. When he saw Lin Banxia, he was startled and said, “Are you a human or a ghost?”
Lin Banxia said: “Of course I am a human.”
“Then where are you coming from?” The classmate pointed behind Lin Banxia.
Lin Banxia said: “There.”
The classmate looked in disbelief: “Don’t you see there’s a man-eating monster over there?”
Lin Banxia said he didn’t see anything.
The classmate looked at him, as if he didn’t believe it, and turned around to leave. Lin Banxia originally wanted to invite him to go with him, but he ruthlessly refused. He said: “No, I don’t want to be with you, who knows you are! What if you are a weird thing!!!”
Lin Banxia: “…”
He had not seen any of the monsters mentioned by his classmate. With doubts, Lin Banxia went back in the direction of the classroom. The classroom was still empty, but Lin Banxia found that the door of the office next door was half open. He clearly remembered that when he left here just now, the door of the office was closed.
After hesitating for a moment, Lin Banxia carefully opened the door of the office. The office was small and could be seen at a glance. It was empty and there was no monsters as he had imagined. Lin Banxia took a few more glances, but when he turned around to leave, he suddenly heard a soft sound coming from the cabinet behind him.
The movement in the cabinet made Lin Banxia pause, and he turned back hesitantly, wondering whether to open the cabinet door. Just when he hesitated, the cabinet door opened on its own with a creak. Lin Banxia stared at the thing in the cabinet. The thing looked like a cute girl, locked in the cabinet in a twisted posture. Logically speaking, Lin Banxia should be afraid, but when their eyes met, Lin Banxia didn’t feel any fear at all. Instead, he felt familiar, as if he had seen it before somewhere.
“Brother…” the little girl yelled and stretched out her hand towards Lin Banxia. However, as soon as she made this action, the surrounding scene quickly became distorted, and the sunny sky outside quickly became dark. It was dark, and the heavy rain poured down instantly. It was as if the world was angered by the little girl’s actions.
Lin Banxia walked up to the cabinet and patted it. He didn’t see anything strange in the cabinet anymore. Just as he was wondering, Song Qingluo’s voice came from behind him: “What are you looking at?”
Lin Banxia was stunned for a moment, turned around, and saw Song Qingluo. He was holding the boning knife in his hand, and the bright red blood on it was flowing down drop by drop, hitting the floor with a soft splash.
Lin Banxia said: “Did you kill someone again?”
“Yes.” Song Qingluo said, “I saw a student when I first came here, so I sent him back.” He entered the room and closed the door.
Lin Banxia looked wary when he saw his actions, a little afraid that Song Qingluo would stab him again. Seeing what Lin Banxia was thinking, Song Qingluo put the knife aside and made a gesture showing he was harmless: “Don’t worry, I won’t kill you this time.”
“What’s going on?” Lin Banxia asked.
Song Qingluo said: “We are dreaming.”
Lin Banxia said: “I know we are dreaming.”
“No, I mean, we have been dreaming from the beginning.” Song Qingluo said, “The school is a dream, the classmates are a dream, and the world you live in is also a dream.”
Lin Banxia’s eyes widened slightly, feeling that Song Qingluo would say something even more exciting.
“This is a contagious dream, so we have entered the same dreamland.” Song Qingluo said, “But the people in this dream will continue to dream about where we are now, which is the second place. A layer of dreams. In this layer of dreams, you can only wake up after death. If you do not die before the dream collapses but are swallowed by the second layer of dreams, then the you in the first layer of dreams will die.”
The logic was quite clear, but the more he listened to the content, the more bizarre it became. A person in a dream said to him that the reality they were in was a dream. This was simply unbelievable, so Lin Banxia did not agree, but showed suspicion in his eyes.
Song Qingluo was not surprised at all. He had long known that Lin Banxia was a smart person. If he believed him directly, he would feel uncomfortable.
“You have no proof.” Lin Banxia said, “How can I believe you?”
Song Qingluo thought for a while and said, “Do you still remember Xiaohua?”
Lin Banxia: “Xiaohua? Who is that?”
Sure enough, he didn’t remember. Xiaohua was a heretic. It seemed that the memory of her in the dream was directly filtered out. Song Qingluo pondered for a moment: “Then are your memories about your family clear?”
It was okay when Song Qingluo didn’t mention it, but when he mentioned it, Lin Banxia realised that he really didn’t remember much about the past. He tried hard to recall for a while, but he felt that the memories were blurry, as if some important content had been blurred.
“In the first level of dreams we do not have the memory of this level of dreams. You are the only exception.” Song Qingluo said, “You should have discovered that the world you are in also has all kinds of things that are not consistent with common sense. Right?”
Song Qingluo didn’t need to say this. Lin Banxia himself had already discovered that starting from Qin Xu’s mobile phone, everything around him was a little strange, but there was a logical problem in it, so Lin Banxia asked: “Indeed there are abnormal things, but you and Li Su said that you deal with abnormal events in the real real world. In other words, abnormal events also exist in the real world you spoke about. So, why are you using those strange things to prove that what I am in is a dream and what you are in is reality?”
Song Qingluo sighed, not knowing whether he should be happy or troubled by Lin Banxia’s clever little mind. He rubbed the corners of his eyes and said helplessly: “When you put it that way, I really can’t refute.”
Lin Banxia said: “We have to think of a way.”
Song Qingluo thought for a moment and said, “Don’t you think it’s strange that that Song Qingluo suddenly got close to you?”
Lin Banxia: “Huh?”
Song Qingluo said: “You two didn’t know each other, and had only met once. Why should he be so nice to you?”
Lin Banxia hesitated and said: “Maybe, maybe, you want to help your classmates?” His voice became softer and softer, and he felt that he had no confidence.
Song Qingluo said: “Let me tell you the answer.”
Lin Banxia felt something, pursed his lips, and tugged at the corner of his clothes.
“Because there was no such person as Song Qingluo in your high school.” Song Qingluo said, “He did not accompany you to high school, nor did he take you to eat the rice noodles outside the campus that you have been thinking about for a long time.”
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