"Xiaoqing, wake up, Xiaoqing..."
When he opened his eyes again, what he saw was the ceiling of the hospital in the real world. Lin Qing's mother was sitting beside the bed, looking at him with a worried expression.
Lin Qing only felt that the palms of her hands were tight and her fingers were numb. She raised her arms and looked, holding a sharp bone and a few pages of withered diary in her hands.
"You were holding these things in the ambulance, and the doctor couldn't break them open."
"Mom, these are Pang Xiaolong's things."
Lin Qing's mother seemed a little surprised when she heard this name:
"Who is Pang Xiaolong?"
After hearing this, Lin Qing looked at her mother in confusion. At this moment, Lin Qing realized that there seemed to be something wrong with her memory.
"Mom, why did I come to the hospital?"
"I heard from the doctor that you ruptured an artery in the dormitory and made the call yourself. Son, if you have anything you can't think of, you can talk to your mother."
"What are you thinking about? How could I commit suicide? I just remember walking to the lake with the newcomer, and I can't remember what happened after that."
"Are they the two little girls who sent you here? They are quite beautiful."
With that, Li Huixi and Chen Chichi walked into the ward. After a brief greeting, Li Huixi suddenly asked:
"Have you found the owner of the diary?"
This sentence made Lin Qing's body instinctively start to fear. After experiencing such a terrifying scene, his body had already remembered the experience at that time.
All the memories in the lake were blurred, and the memory about Pang Xiaolong was like a dream. If you don't pay attention, you will completely forget it in a certain moment.
Lin Qing looked at the pages of the diary in his hand, then looked at Li Huixi with sharp eyes, and shook his head slightly.
The only memories of Li Huixi include inviting her to Zhongxin Lake and showing her the contents of Pang Xiaolong's diary.
The two of them looked at Lin Qing who looked like he couldn't remember anything, breathed a sigh of relief and left.
"You two classmates are not bad. I only left after seeing that you were fine."
"See I'm okay? Why do I think they are here to confirm that I have indeed lost my memory..."
Lin Qing wanted to say something, but she still kept it in her heart.
Lin Qing couldn't figure out why he would cut the artery. He had a very clear understanding of himself. It was absolutely impossible for him to commit suicide if he was timid and afraid of death. There must be other motives for cutting the artery.
And he had to connect all this with Pang Xiaolong's relics in his hand.
Rereading the diary again, Lin Qing extracted the chilling contents:
"Exactly the same self, similar world, take a sip of lake water..."
Without the relationship between Hu Zhong and Li Huixi and those horrific memories, Lin Qing's mind could think more clearly.
Lin Qing took out a pen and wrote in the blank space of the diary:
"I don't know why I lost my memory, but what is certain is that some unexplainable phenomenon must have happened to me, which is also the reason for my excessive blood loss and amnesia. Not only that, but something like a substitute will appear in my body. I am not familiar with the two people just now, so why did they appear in my dormitory? All this must have something to do with them. "
"Regarding amnesia, no one around me remembers Pang Xiaolong except me, and the bone in my hand is like a piece of his body. I can vaguely remember his tragic death. The background is our dormitory, and outside the scope of the dormitory, Will I have amnesia? Is it school-wide?"
"There is also a problem with the school's lake water. We cannot rule out the possibility of hallucinations after drinking the lake water, but if it is a hallucination, the items that actually exist in the hand cannot be explained."
Lin Qing's thoughts ended here. His mother had been watching over him for an unknown amount of time, and she had fallen asleep on her side.
The whole hospital was so quiet that it felt strange. Lin Qing carefully pulled open the quilt, pulled out the needle, and tiptoed out of the door. Lin Qing breathed a sigh of relief at the busy scene in the corridor.
However, the inexplicably familiar face at the end of the corridor made Lin Qing shudder. There was no need to think about it. That face was Lin Qing's own.
Lin Qing in the lake also noticed the main body at this time, proudly showed him a meaningful smile, turned around and disappeared into the stairwell.
Just as Lin Qing was about to chase after him, the walls in the hospital corridor began to peel off, the lights flickered on and off, and the moving crowd suddenly stopped at a certain moment, like game characters caught in an infinite loop. Even the sky outside the window slowly turned red.
Lin Qing felt dizzy for a while, and his limbs could not use their full strength. Something was eating away at his consciousness.
Now Lin Qing's only thought was to run out of this corridor. However, this corridor seemed to have no end, and his physical condition was getting worse and worse.
As if a certain critical value had been passed, everything about the world in the lake began to flash in Lin Qing's mind, and the relevant memories returned to Lin Qing's mind bit by bit, about Li Huixi, Chen Chichi and those bizarre things. experience.
In contrast, Lin Qing's body could no longer withstand the ravages of reality. His body was so light that he risked not waking up every time he blinked.
With the support of the memory in the lake, Lin Qing gritted his teeth again and tore his newly sutured leg wound open.
A smelly, rotten black-red liquid flowed out of Lin Qing's body. He was very familiar with it. It was the same kind of putrid black blood that Pang Xiaolong had in the dormitory.
The flow rate was too slow. Lin Qing was sweating all over and simply tore open all the sutures at the wound. A large amount of black blood suddenly spurted out. I don't know whether it was the pain that strengthened his consciousness or the effect of bloodletting. The abnormality in his body just now was obvious. It has lightened a lot, and even the corridor in my eyes has returned to its original appearance.
Bangdang...
Lin Qing pushed open the door of her ward with force, and the door frame hit the wall with a crisp sound, which also woke up her sleeping mother.
"Son, what's going on!"
With no time to explain, Lin Qing limped and gritted her teeth as she walked to the head of her bed. She struggled to tear off the liquid that had just been delivered to her body, opened a small opening, and tasted a drop of it with her tongue.
"It's indeed a lake."
Lin Qing cursed secretly. In order not to involve his mother in this weird incident, he still held up his body, smiled, and lied to his mother:
"It's nothing. I just went to the toilet and accidentally fell down and the thread broke."
"Why are you so careless! I'll call a doctor for you right now."
Lin Qing's mother trotted away with a worried look on her face.
Lin Qing was alone in the ward again, and the sudden solitude made him feel uneasy again.
There were footsteps in the corridor, and Lin Qing could feel something approaching her.
"Is that the substitute just now? Or something..."
Even though his body was extremely weak and the blood loss in his legs had not improved, Lin Qing was ready to deal with everything.
Unlike in the lake, this time he was with his mother.
However, the footsteps stopped suddenly, and it was Li Huixi who appeared at the door of the ward, still saying the same words just now:
"Have you found the owner of the diary?"
Lin Qing nodded. He had recovered the memory of being in the lake when his body was corroded by the lake water. Although those memories began to dissipate as the black blood was discharged, Lin Qing still remembered the experience when he was with Li Huixi. He was on guard. My heart immediately relaxed.
After explaining everything to Li Huixi, Lin Qing originally thought that Li Huixi, who also lost his memory, would think he was a lunatic. However, what was waiting for him was the same absolute trust he had placed in Lin Qing when he drank the lake water without hesitation.
Lin Qing looked at the expressionless girl in front of him, his eyes a little moved.
The mother also called the doctor and prepared to push him for sutures.
Before leaving, Lin Qing asked about Chen Chichi:
"Where is Chen Chichi? Why didn't you see her?"
"Go back to school first, and I'll leave first."
One second Lin Qing had just been pushed into the operating room, and Li Huixi had just left the hospital. The next second Lin Qing from the lake appeared in the corridor of the hospital.
Lin Qing's mother, who was pacing anxiously outside the door, was so shocked that she couldn't speak for a moment when she saw this scene, but she just felt that the child in front of her looked similar to her own Lin Qing.
"You and my son look strangely alike."
The other party just looked at her with resentful eyes, stretched out a bone needle from his sleeve, suddenly dragged Lin Qing's mother's hand, and pierced the bone needle into her hand.
Lin Qing's mother changed her worried expression. She was shocked at first, then shed tears uncontrollably and said with sobs:
"Little cub, it's mom who's sorry for you..."
Lin Qing remained silent, just quietly holding her mother's hand, and the two of them disappeared at the end of the corridor.
Before leaving, Lin Qing's mother's empty, guilty eyes were reflected in the corridor mirror.
In the lake world on the other side of the school, when Li Huixi and Chen Zhenchi arrived at the boys' dormitory, they only saw a mess on the ground and blood that had dried and fallen off on the windows.
Both of them felt that they were being affected by this place and their bodies were being corroded.
The two of them still didn't know how to go back. Chen Chichi had been here for too long and was inevitably a little anxious.
"Are there any places in the school that students are not allowed to enter?"
Li Huixi changed her mind and asked Chen Chichi.
"Well... Speaking of which, the school history museum is always closed."
They left as soon as they could. Fortunately, the two of them didn't encounter any more twisted monsters along the way, but even if they did, with Li Huixi here, it wouldn't be a problem.
Walking to the door of the school history museum, compared with the real world, the school history museum in Huzhong is in a dilapidated state, and the lock at the door falls off when touched.
The heavier smell of mold and dust rushed into their nostrils. It was difficult to breathe here without covering their mouths and noses.
The books here are very chronological. Except for those from decades ago, you can even find books bound in ancient ways.
With this clue, the voice in Li Huixi's mind rang again:
"Do you think...could this place exist before the school was built?"
"Isn't it weird because of school? On the contrary?"
The bookshelf in the corner column is filled with items from different eras. The records here can be traced back as far as a book with bronze inscriptions. The two guessed it was from the Yuan Dynasty.
Fortunately, there is also a rotten late Qing Dynasty document that you can refer to:
The terrain of Sri Lanka is strange, strange things happen frequently, and the grievances and disasters accumulated in the world are huge and immeasurable. They can only be suppressed by filling in the lake.
And a thin book written in Mandarin, just right to connect the content:
There is a substitute for each person in the real world in the lake, but they will only repeat the behavior of the original body. They are called larvae, with turbid liquid attached to the outside and a solid body inside.
After the main body enters the lake, the corresponding larvae will have independent consciousness and synchronize the main body's memory, which is called a strange body.
Chen Chichi took the book, and a piece of paper sandwiched in the book, which had a completely different era from other books in the library and had no signs of corrosion, fell out. It was obviously a page of notes left by someone here. Chen Chichi bent down to pick it up. After reading the contents above, he was so shocked that he could not speak.
