CH 16

Ch16 - Xiao Ming’s Daily Life

Nan Zhou seemed to have no interest in gentlemanly behavior like ‘ladies first’ and he lay down naturally on the bed.

Li Yinhang couldn’t fall asleep. After this tense day, her legs were stretched out and her eyes were closed but she felt like this day was a dream. Heads exploding, people turning into mushrooms, flamboyant and cold-eyed NPCs, supernatural missions…

Moments before being consumed by fear, uneasiness and loneliness, Li Yinhang asked the dark shadow lying on the bed, “Are you asleep?”

She didn’t dare think that ‘he will respond’ based on Nan Zhou’s indifferent temperament. The next second—

Nan Zhou replied, “No.”

Li Yinhang, “……” She hadn’t expected it so she hadn’t even planned what she wanted to say.

In the awkward, long silence, Li Yinhang saw Nan Zhou’s hand hanging down from the bed. Nanji Star ran out along his arm, jumped onto his palm with a few hops, raised his upper body and looked around.

Nan Zhou’s voice was still cold. “Tonight, go and sleep with her.”

Nanji Star chirped, a bit reluctant. Nan Zhou threw something and it fell down through the air. Li Yinhang watched as a fresh apple was thrown down and directly hit her quilt. Nanji Star’s eyes brightened. He barked like a dog and slid down. He immediately hugged Li Yinhang’s wrist that grabbed the apple and rubbed it in a fluffy manner.

Meanwhile, Li Yinhang stared at the intact apple in her hand and just wanted to know its source. Finally, she came to a conclusion. Fuck, Nan Zhou dared to grab an apple in this ghostly house. Yet such a move pulled back her spirit that had been on the edge of losing control. “Thank you.”

“It doesn’t matter. This isn’t something you should be thankful for.” Then Nan Zhou added, “Don’t crush it.”

“…Yes.” It was truly worthy of his taunting being 8 points.

Due to this episode, the nightmares Li Yinhang imagined didn’t happen. She even had a dream of swinging in the jungle with Nanji Star. By the time Li Yinhang woke up, it was bright and Nan Zhou was no longer in bed. Nanji Star was still there. He held a half-eaten apple and slept in a small nest next to her pillow.

Li Yinhang left the second bedroom and found that she had woken up late. She glanced at the clock. It was 7:40 a.m in the instance time. The door of the children’s room was tightly closed. Jiang Fang would complete the task at 8 o’clock.

The trio in the living room didn’t sleep well and all of them showed a depressed face. Then following their line of sight, Li Yinhang found that the distressed trio were looking at Nan Zhou like he was a fool.

Nan Zhou was sitting at the dining room table with a locked box that he got from an unknown place. Next to him was also a household hardware tool box that he pulled from somewhere. He was slowly poking at the box.

Since waking up, the skinny monkey had seen Nan Zhou playing with the box over there. He stared for a long time before realizing that Nan Zhou’s interest in the box was far greater than their glares. He couldn’t help asking aggressively, “What are you doing?”

Shen Jie stopped him. “This type of locked thing needs to be unlocked by a key. It is meaningless to use something to pry it open.”

Nan Zhou looked at Shen Jie and nodded. “Yes, I know.”

Then he kept poking at it.

Shen Jie, “……” It didn’t matter how good looking the newcomer was, if his brain didn’t turn then he was just a fool.

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

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Li Yinhang was washing her face when there was a knock at the door. Chen Sufeng of the duo was holding a basin of water. “The drain in the master bedroom is a bit blocked and the water can’t go down. I’m here to pour it.”

Li Yinhang made room for him. She looked at Chen Sufeng who was pouring water and wanted to say something. There was a question she had been concerned about since yesterday. She quietly asked, “That… you and Mr Yu, are you… a couple?”

Normally, teaming up with someone with limited mobility wasn’t the most cost-effective choice. The age difference between the two of them was there so they couldn’t be classmates. There were no similarities in their appearance so they were unlikely to be blood relatives. Therefore, Li Yinhang thought there was some other reason that bound them together.

“Who am I with?” Chen Sufeng wondered casually. Then he realized and suddenly blushed. One hand slipped and almost knocked off the basin in the corner. He waved his hands again and again, his face flushed and even his ears were red. “He and I, we’re not…”

A helpless chuckle was then heard behind the two of them. “I’m not with him.”

She didn’t know when but Yu Tuisi had come behind them with his wheelchair. He seemed to be talking about something as natural as eating and breathing, so natural that he didn’t need to avoid it or be coy. “It is me and his brother.”

Chen Sufeng pursed his lips. “Yes, my brother…”

Yu Tuisi added, “He has been gone for two years.”

As he spoke, he didn’t forget to tell Li Yinhang ‘the child is shy, don’t care about him’ with his eyes. He turned around the man’s ring on his left ring finger and said, “No matter what other people think, victory in this game is a very valuable thing for me.”

The house originally wasn’t big and Yu Tuisi’s voice reached the living room. The group of three looked at each other. The thin monkey whispered, “He turned out to be gay. No wonder why the energy of his body is different from normal people.”

Shen Jie curled her lips and didn’t care about it. There was little value in hearing worthless gossip.

Meanwhile, Nan Zhou raised his head from where he had been obsessed with studying the box. The ‘value’ mentioned by Yu Tuisi probably referred to the wish made at the wishing fountain of Rust City. He thought, ‘Yes, victory in the game is also very valuable to me.’

Chen Sufeng’s expression was a bit unspeakable and awkward. “Brother Yu, why are you here?”

Yu Tuisi replied, “It is because the time is coming.”

His words awakened them. Everyone shifted their gaze to the clock on the wall. Nan Zhou also put down the box and stared at the tightly closed door of the children’s room. It was 7:59 a.m. There was still no movement from the children’s room.

The atmosphere stagnated for a while. By the time the second hand moved past the top grid, Jiang Fang still hadn’t come out. The others exchanged looks and suspected that Jiang Fang’s corpse would be seen lying on the bed as soon as the door opened. Meanwhile, Nan Zhou had already stepped forward and pushed open the door without hesitation.

Jiang Fang was leaning against the bed. He faced the phone that was replaying last night’s video while re-tying his hair again. He heard the sound of the door and raised his head to meet Nan Zhou’s eyes. He said with a gentle smile, “Good morning.”

The first night was calm as if nothing happened. There was still an hour before the task of writing homework at 9 o’clock. This was enough for them to exchange information. Shen Jie heard Jiang Fang’s brief description of what happened last night and was inevitably disappointed. “Nothing really happened?”

Jiang Fang answered, “The bed was too small and I woke up once in the middle of the night. Does that count?”

Shen Jie inquired, “Did you dream?”

“No,” Jiang Fang said. “I left a pen and paper beside the bed because I planned to write it down as soon as I woke up if I had a dream.”

Unfortunately, he didn’t dream of anything.

Shen Jie turned her disappointed gaze to Li Yinhang’s phone. “So there is nothing recorded?”

“Ahh…”

Jiang Fang learned from Nan Zhou and slightly prolonged his tone. “It’s not that nothing was recorded.”

Jiang Fang moved the progress bar that was playing at double the speed to the position around two hours after the recording started. Due to the fast speed, Shen Jie only felt the screen flash past and saw nothing.

Jiang Fang apologized and turned off the double speed he had forgotten about. Then he rewound for half a minute to accurately determine the position. In the video, the mobile phone had its screen turned off and the camera was pointed at the ceiling. The starry night light moved slowly along a fixed track. The next second, the ambient light around the phone suddenly brightened.

Shen Jie instinctively shivered as she held the phone. She endured her fear and watched intently. However, nothing appeared in front of the screen except darkness. Soon, the ambient light gradually disappeared. The next moment, it lit up again. After going back and forth around three or four times, there was the sound of Jiang Fang slightly turning over and then everything stopped.

The fitness trainer frowned. “That’s it?”

Jiang Fang ignored him and asked the owner Li Yinhang, “Under what circumstances will the screen be turned on repeatedly?”

Li Yinhang seemed strangled by something and felt like she couldn’t speak. She answered with difficulty, “…Facial recognition.”

These days, the facial recognition function of mobile phones meant that as long as the camera read that a face entered a certain range, it would automatically scan and verify whether to unlock the phone or not.

Involuntarily, a scene came to her mind. At two o’clock in the middle of the night, something came to Jiang Fang’s bed. It lowered its head close to him and quietly examined Jiang Fang’s face. It asked silently with its eyes.

‘Are you asleep?’

‘Really?’

The others also inevitably made such associations. There was a repressed silence in the room.

“This…” The fitness trainer was a bit unable to speak. “This can’t determine anything… maybe when you turned over, your face automatically entered the range of the camera.” He pointed at the screen. “Look, didn’t it light up when you turned over?”

Jiang Fang replied calmly, “This is also possible.”

Li Yinhang scratched the goose bumps on her arm and felt that her fear had been relieved a lot. It wasn’t that she believed the fitness trainer’s speculation. It was that the reaction of the party concerned, Jiang Fang, was so calm. She was a bystander. It would seem extraordinarily superfluous if she screamed in fright. The result of the discussion was that there was no conclusion.

Apart from the small incident where the phone suddenly turned on, nothing really happened last night. An hour of discussion passed and it was Chen Sufeng’s turn to complete the task of doing homework.

Once the task officially started, the job function was successfully unlocked. They shifted through all of Xiao Ming’s books that could be called homework and found that it wasn’t difficult at all. It was the ordinary workbook of ‘Happy Summer Vacation’ for the third grade of primary school.

The time of the diary was stuck on July 2nd and it recorded boring facts such as ‘today I went out to play with Han Meimei. Tomorrow, I will call Li Lei. Today I helped my grandmother cross the road.’ It was the classic composition of a primary school student.

Shen Jie didn’t believe there would be no clues. She searched through all the workbooks and finally made a discovery. Xiao Ming had two math workbooks. One was issued by the school with the reference answers torn out. The other was probably bought at a bookstore and there hadn’t been time to tear off the price tag of 6.5 yuan. It was simply a normal operation for primary school students.

There were no clues so Chen Sufeng was a bit nervous. Yu Tuisi patted his head in a protective manner. “Don’t worry, I will accompany you.”

Chen Sufeng hummed and touched the place on his head that Yu Tuisi had touched. He held his pencil and felt warm in his heart. He didn’t dare to make a mistake as he wrote English words in the blank workbook one stroke at a time. Yu Tuisi was behind him, holding a children’s picture book and turning the pages one by one.

The others took advantage of this time to begin a carpet search of the 100 square meters apartment. It was literally a carpet search. Even the carpet was lifted. Li Yinhang followed the trio, working hard and not complaining as she searched through things.

Nan Zhou was very stable and continued to play with his box. Naturally, he gained a lot of looks from the trio. Jiang Fang just went to the kitchen for a bit. Then he sat down beside Nan Zhou and asked with a smile, “Aren’t you going to see?”

“There are many people. Hands are mixed and it will be more troublesome,” Nan Zhou explained. “Wait for them to finish searching and then I’ll go again.”

Jiang Fang looked at the box in his hand. “What is this?”

Nan Zhou answered bluntly, “I don’t know.”

“Do you want to open it?”

“It isn’t hard to open it. I just want to practice my skills.”

He added, “…It is thieving.”

Li Yinhang who happened to be passing by, “……”

If she didn’t understand incorrectly…

Nan Zhou was now in an instance but he was using the game’s fixed item to practice his skills. Jiang Fang didn’t show any surprise. His smile just became softer. “Jiayou.”

Nan Zhou replied leisurely without raising his head, “…Yes.”

The author has something to say:

Jiang Fang smiled: …[My wife is so cute.]