Chapter 8

Did Black Glasses believe in things like chumaxian? No.

As he spoke with the sorceress’s daughter, he looked at her eyes and was almost certain that she was messing with him. But he could tell that there was something wrong with her.

When Black Glasses was leaving the school, he met a little girl who looked to be in the second grade. She appeared to be standing in the hallway as some kind of punishment.

He thought about what the chumaxian had said just now. It seemed to be implying that there was something out there that wasn’t a ghost. And in order for that thing to go back to a certain place, it needed that ritual to act as a bridge.

“Ghost” wasn’t a strong term. In fact, ghost could refer to the consciousness after death, or any consciousness from an unknown origin. But the fact that the chumaxian had emphasized that it wasn’t a ghost was rather odd. The daughter of this sorceress was lying, but what purpose did she have in telling this story?

Black Glasses was different from me. Unless I had a very strong hunch, I usually felt as if I had made a mistake most of the time, and there was a fifty-fifty chance that the other party didn’t lie to me.

I also felt that I would rather have that thing be a ghost. I was the type who believed that my friends and relatives received my thoughts every year during the Qingming Festival. But people like Black Glasses, who were sure that the other party was lying to them, could hardly make mistakes. When he taught me, he also talked about these kinds of skills. As long as people lived to a certain age, they would see through lies.

Black Glasses left the school and went to a restaurant nearby. But as he was eating, he suddenly heard someone cry out. When he went out to look, he saw that a huge black cloud of smoke was coming from the school. He rushed back to the school, only to find that the whole building was on fire. He thought of the little girl who had been standing in the hallway as punishment. Worried that there were still students in detention, he rushed in and carried the remaining children out on his back one by one. But by the time he got to the last child—that little girl who had been standing in the hallway as punishment—her throat had become disabled.

When he came out with the little girl on his back, the sky was overcast and it began to rain heavily. It was very rare for it to suddenly rain so heavily in the Northeast during that season. The little girl tried desperately to cover her ears as she tried to shout something.

Black Glasses felt that the little girl had heard something from the thunder at that time, but she couldn’t speak.

Later, a burnt corpse was found on top of the laboratory building. It was the sorceress’s daughter. She was the one who had started the fire. At that time, the school had a surveillance system that captured the sorceress’s daughter walking to the rooftop. After a huge disturbance, the girl turned into a burnt corpse and the whole laboratory building started to burn everywhere.

Black Glasses began to suspect that all of those people on the roof were killed by lightning. But as he watched the surveillance video, he found that there wasn’t a huge streak of lightning falling from the sky.

“There’s a religion that believes the body will be annihilated after being struck by lightning, but the consciousness will enter the sky,” Bai Haotian said. “Little Master Three, is it possible that the chumaxian wanted to overcome the calamity and gain special abilities? Don’t they say that they can have someone else overcome the calamity for them so that they don’t have to suffer themselves?” (1)

“Read less novels.” Fatty touched Little Bai’s head, but she smacked his hand away.

“The cameras were very clear,” Xiao Hua continued. Black Glasses always felt that this case was man-made. Although he didn’t know why it felt like a feng shui array, there had to be a conspiracy behind it. And this conspiracy didn’t have anything to do with ghosts or gods.

But the surveillance cameras were so clear that there was no reasonable explanation for how someone on the rooftop suddenly burned like that. Moreover, the high temperature was instantaneous. The person was carbonized within a quarter of a second, which was something that only lightning could do.

And based on the camera angle, when the sorceress’s daughter went up to the rooftop, her mouth kept moving as if she were talking to something. Her expression even seemed a little confused and panicked. From the camera screen, it almost looked like the chumaxian made her go to the roof. Black Glasses still thought that the sorceress’s daughter was lying, but she ended up dying just like that. For a brief moment, he had a faint doubt that he had misjudged things.

Black Glasses carefully looked at the recording of the sorceress’s daughter on the rooftop. Based on the movements of her mouth, the Northeastern dialect was quite clear. He looked at her lips very carefully and found that one of the sentences she was saying was: “If what you say is true, will going to that place really alleviate all regrets?”

<Chapter 7><Table of Contents><Chapter 9>

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TN Notes:

(1) Per Tiffany: When it comes to “overcoming calamity”, people have to suffer in order to gain special abilities and become immortals, so gaining special abilities is their main goal. It’s like how you need to defeat monsters before you can level up in a video game.