“Quiet!”
The sudden shout snapped Vester back to her senses.
Before she knew it, she had returned to a place she once knew all too well.
“Class, the higher-ups have suddenly assigned an essay writing activity, so we’ll have an extra homework assignment today.”
“The requirement is to use ‘Childhood Dreams’ as the theme, with a word count of over 800 words, and the writing style… don’t write any messy stuff, just uniformly write an argumentative essay, and try to finish it before the end of the evening self-study.”
“Teacher.”
The student sitting at the front of the podium leaned forward and whispered something to the teacher.
“The math teacher still needs to go over the test papers during the third evening self-study class, right? Then you can put the Chinese homework aside for now, and hand in the other assignments as usual. If you really can’t finish it tonight, hand it in by the end of tomorrow’s lunch break at the latest, you hear me.”
As the voice fell, the class bell rang right on cue.
The teacher glanced at the phone screen, nodded a few times to the duty teacher, and turned to walk out of the classroom.
“…”
The blonde girl scanned her surroundings, and the familiar layout before her gradually overlapped with the scenes in her Remembrance.
“Have I returned to the time when I was still in high school?”
She reached her hand out toward the person closest to her, and then, her hand passed right through the other person’s body.
“So, am I just dreaming right now?”
Having reached this conclusion, Vester let out a sigh of relief in her heart.
It’s easy to just talk big on the internet, but in reality, who wouldn’t want to become a young lady in Europe, then abandon their identity, return to high school to frantically prepare for the college entrance examination, score a few more points in the exam room, and wipe out thousands of competitors?
“Speaking of which, my grades back then were pretty good, right?”
Thinking of this, she smiled playfully, and then walked over to her own seat in her Remembrance.
“What major did I fill out back then… Never mind, it doesn’t matter anyway.”
Perhaps because it was too far in the past, Vester could no longer even see her own appearance back then clearly.
The person sitting in that seat didn’t look any different from everyone else in this classroom.
“***, what was your childhood dream?”
“…”
Hearing this, that person moved their lips slightly, seeming to want to say something.
However, it was just like when someone wants to write something down, but in the end fails to write even a single word.
In the end, he said nothing at all.
The blonde girl lying in bed abruptly opened her eyes.
“Dreams, huh.”
As time passed, Remembrance donned an ambiguous coat.
People always seem to feel that as long as they embrace it, they can return to the past…
When you instinctively reach your hand out to the side, you only grab empty air.
When you hear a familiar voice, what you see when you turn back is not that familiar person.
After that, you experienced many things.
Whenever you remembered the past because of similar scenes, the lingering emotion left behind by those days would transform into something even heavier.
‘If, back then…’
Countless times returning to the past in dreams, and countless times witnessing that beautiful ending shatter like a bubble after waking up from the dream, the original emotions had long lost their original appearance, transforming instead into an obsessive fixation like carving a boat to find a lost sword.
“That really is a topic one doesn’t want to recall.”
Therefore, no matter who it is, they probably have one or two things they find hard to let go of.
◇ ◇ ◇
The sun plummeted into the valley, and the last touch of twilight glow had not yet drowned in the horizon.
On that mysterious island nation across from the Celestial Empire, this period of alternating day and night was endowed with special significance.
During the rotation of day and night, due to the blurring of the boundary between Yin and Yang, humans might see some things that they usually couldn’t see in the realm of the living—this is what the Eastern Land calls the “Hour of Meeting Demons”.
To trace the root of it, this is not entirely groundless either.
After all, although this is a folk custom developed by Japan itself, its roots cannot be separated from the Yin-Yang and Five Elements of the Celestial Empire.
Including the Celestial Empire, many regions also have similar sayings.
At dawn, the night curtain still hangs high in the sky; at dusk, night is about to come.
The so-called “boundary of Yin and Yang” focuses on “Yin” rather than “Yang”.
Compared to pure darkness, special time periods where light is either close at hand or has not yet receded are even more likely to stimulate unease in one’s heart.
Precisely because of this, people unanimously impart such an ominous imagery to the alternation of day and night.
Why not put it another way.
If there were no longer any daylight in the world, replaced by endless night, would sayings similar to the “Hour of Meeting Demons” still exist in this world?
The existence of light instead exacerbates people’s fear of darkness…
“I could have endured the darkness, if I had never seen the light.”
“What are you muttering about?”
…Hearing Otto’s murmur, Vester patted the other person’s shoulder.
“No, it’s nothing.”
Startled by Vester’s sudden appearance, Otto was stunned for a split second before shaking his head.
“I always feel like you’re hiding something from me.”
Hearing this, the blonde girl couldn’t help frowning.
“Vester, people don’t peek at the other person when they’re wiping away tears, do they?”
“Ah, I was just joking.”
“Is that so? Vester has really loved making similar jokes lately.”
In order to get close to Otto, didn’t she have to pull some little tricks.
“Fine then, I won’t do it like this in the future.”
Called out like this by Otto, the blonde girl turned her head away, awkwardly scratched her face, and muttered softly.
Pulling little tricks and such was also quite cute—Seeing this, Otto thought to himself.
Seeing that the conversation was getting a bit hard to carry on, Vester simply changed the subject:
“Ahem, Otto, I really feel like something has been a bit off lately.”
This was not groundless.
Although she hadn’t found any concrete evidence, within this Apocalypse clan territory, she truly felt an indescribable sense of incongruity.
Paying attention to Otto had already become a habit.
Vester would instinctively associate everything with him, and this time was no exception.
“I can’t quite put into words what the specific situation is, but anyway, Otto, you need to be a bit careful lately.”
“…” After falling silent for nearly ten seconds, Otto smiled at the blonde girl from the bottom of his heart, “Mhm, I know.”
If one were to compare the human heart to a container, just how much emotion could it carry?
Otto wasn’t sure.
He only knew that whenever he began to doubt whether his heart could hold any more love, the girl before him could give him the answer with just a single sentence, a single action, or even a single look:
Look, it can hold even more.
“Vester, I’m so glad you can care about me like this.”
“Mhm?”
Such a nag Otto is, good thing he’s just my bro, otherwise it would be such a loss of face.
According to research, certain subconscious behaviors of humans cannot be changed no matter how much time passes.
The so-called subconscious involves many aspects, including but not limited to the inertia of thinking, the cognition of things, and the attitude towards dealing with people and matters.
Obviously, Vester now still hadn’t shaken off the influence of her past life’s subconscious.
Naturally, she could not realize what her actions truly meant to a member of the opposite sex.
“Vester, no need to worry, nothing will happen.”
However, one must admit that Vester’s intuition was indeed quite good.
Otto looked away, a trace of an inexplicable emotion flashing through his gaze.
‘She actually noticed…
Looks like I’ll have to speed things up.’