Chapter 220 - 137: I Killed Someone

Chapter 220: Chapter 137: I Killed Someone

In August, the Keda dormitory building was empty enough to trap every echo.

In the utility room at the end of the hall, a faucet hadn’t been fully turned off.

"DRIP..."

"DRIP..."

The drops hit the sink. The sound wasn’t loud, but it carried far on the deserted floor.

Outside the window, the cicadas hadn’t fully recovered from last night’s oppressive heat, their chirping sparse and scattered.

Sunlight slipped through a gap in the poorly drawn curtains of Dorm 215, landing at an angle on the desk.

Fine dust motes floated slowly, drifting and swirling.

Chen Zhuo leaned back in his chair, one leg bent with his foot on the seat’s edge, the other stretched out lazily.

He didn’t feel like moving today.

His mind had been stuffed with too many things recently.

The derivations of Discrete Mathematics, the dimensionality reduction of matrices, the boundaries of continuous probability.

Now, all of that was over.

His thesis was submitted, his foundation in the subject was more or less set, and summer vacation was almost over. Everything was proceeding along its predetermined track.

He was wearing a T-shirt with a wrinkled, washed-out collar and a pair of baggy beach shorts.

He’d sunk into the chair with no semblance of proper posture, like a melting puddle of water.

On the desk sat a cup of soy milk he’d just bought from the cafeteria.

He held a book in his hands.

It was still the wuxia novel Wang Dayong had left behind.

He had been in a hurry when he left and forgot it. Chen Zhuo, bored this morning, had pulled it out, flipped through a couple of pages, and just kept reading.

The story in the book was simple.

A young swordsman, passing an inn besieged by mountain bandits, drew his blade. In a matter of moments, he distinguished good from evil; in a few moves, he decided life and death.

The good were saved, the wicked were punished.

Cause and effect were as clear and perfectly seamless as one plus one equaling two.

Chen Zhuo lowered his head, bit down on the straw of his soy milk, and took a sip.

Warm.

Very sweet.

The fragrance of soybeans flooded into his mouth through the plastic straw, spreading from the root of his tongue and warming him all the way to his stomach.

He squinted, turning a page. The paper made a faint rustling sound.

On a summer morning in this peaceful era, life was as simple as the sweet soy milk in his hand.

There was nothing to be on guard for, no need to ponder complex causality. Good people would be rewarded, bad people would be punished, math problems would always have a solution, and a generator would always run as long as it had fuel.

"RING—"

The telephone in the hallway rang without warning.

Chen Zhuo’s gaze didn’t move from the page.

’I really don’t feel like moving. What if it’s a salesperson? What if it’s a parent who dialed the wrong number?’

The ringing persisted stubbornly.

It ricocheted off the walls of the empty concrete hallway, creating a buzzing echo.

"RING— RING—"

Chen Zhuo sighed.

’Self-deception is useless. It must be for me. Still don’t want to move, though.’

He lowered the leg propped on the edge of the chair. He picked up his unfinished soy milk with one hand, while the other still held the wuxia novel, his index finger wedged between the pages to keep his place.

Shuffling in a pair of slides, he slowly made his way out of the dorm and reluctantly pushed open the door.

A cool cross-breeze was blowing through the hallway, whisking away some of the summer heat as it brushed against his calves.

The casing of the telephone was jarringly bright in the hallway’s shadows.

Chen Zhuo walked over. With his left hand, the one still holding the wuxia novel, he awkwardly lifted the receiver and clamped it between his neck and shoulder.

Still chewing on the straw of his soy milk, he answered with a mumble.

"Hello?"

No one spoke.

Chen Zhuo thought it was a bad connection and was about to lean closer and say hello again.

Suddenly, a burst of static erupted from the receiver.

It wasn’t the usual faint crackle of a phone call.

It sounded like two pieces of rough sandpaper being ground against each other, accompanied by sharp electromagnetic interference.

This was followed by two long seconds of silence.

Then, the static receded into the background.

In its place came the howl of a fierce wind whipping up grit and sand, along with a deep, oppressive, rhythmic mechanical roar.

Chen Zhuo frowned.

He let go of the straw.

"Hello? Who is this?"

He raised his voice slightly.

The roaring in the receiver continued, like the labored breathing of a great beast.

A few seconds passed.

"...Captain."

The voice came through the line.

Chen Zhuo froze for a moment.

He wracked his brain and quickly placed the voice.

Miao Shian.

But he subconsciously felt that something was strange.

The Miao Shian in Chen Zhuo’s memory was a sixteen-year-old boy who wore a spotless white shirt and thin, gold-rimmed glasses, who sat across from him eating with perfect posture, and whose voice remained gentle even when faced with the most difficult physics problems.

But now, the voice coming from the receiver was trembling.

It wasn’t the kind of trembling born from cold.

It was a chaotic loss of control that even affected his breathing. Every inhalation was like pulling on a worn-out bellows—short, difficult, and accompanied by the faint clicking of teeth.

"Shian?"

Chen Zhuo stood up straight, tensing his shoulder to clamp the receiver more securely.

"Is that you?"

Another two-second delay in the signal.

The roar of the machine in the background seemed to have grown louder.

"Why is it so noisy over there?"

Chen Zhuo thought he might be at a noisy summer camp, or perhaps an airport under construction.

"The signal’s terrible. Where are you?"

"Captain..."

Miao Shian’s voice crawled through the airwaves, disjointed.

"I got someone killed."

The cross-breeze in the hallway died.

Chen Zhuo’s body went rigid.