CH 137.1

On the eleventh day, Bai Lixin sat on the steps by the gate with his chin on his hand, silently watching the little creature eating.

After eleven days of good food and drink, coupled with the fact that Bai Lixin had added some nutritional supplements specifically made to nourish the body, the little creature’s dirty and frizzy hair had also softened up.

From afar, it looked like a quiet young boy.

Bai Lixin could see that the little creature could understand human language and could respond by nodding and shaking its head, but it’s intelligence was not too high, it was almost like that of a five or six year old child.

After getting along for ten days, the little creature had come to trust him completely.

It peeked at Bai Lixin and its gaze fell on Bai Lixin’s cheek.

The lustrous jade fingers were embedded in his cheek, and a small indentation had appeared on the otherwise delicate cheek.

It mimicked Bai Lixin’s posture, and touched its own face.

Its fingertips touched the cold, hard mask and the little creature froze for a moment, then its long, thin arms reached out as if for something.

It took Bai Lixin a second to understand what the other party meant.

He smiled and bent down to bring his face to the little creature’s.

The little creature’s fingers trembled slightly, and with a hint of shyness, it took a few tentative steps before putting its palm to Bai Lixin’s face.

The warm, soft touch immediately invaded the rough palm and the little creature froze again.

It placed one hand on Bai Lixin’s face and the other on its own, its mouth opening wide in surprise.

The little creature trembled and leapt to one side, babbling incoherently as it pointed at its face and then at Bai Lixin’s.

Seeing the little one’s frightened look, Bai Lixin said soothingly, “You just have a mask on your face.”

The little creature looked at Bai Lixin’s face and then touched its face. Despite Bai Lixin’s words of comfort, the little creature went mad and tried to rip the mask off its face.

Unfortunately, the nails were embedded through the mask and all the way into the skull.

Each struggle to free itself was painful.

Its body shuddered in pain, but it gritted its teeth and didn’t let up on the force.

Sticky, dark red blood flowed down the spots where the nails had been embedded, and it was painful just watching.

Bai Lixin reached into the gate and stopped the little creature with quick precision.

“You want to take the mask off?”

The little creature babbled and nodded woefully.

Bai Lixin pondered for two seconds, “I have an idea, there is someone who might be able to help you.”

“But it requires you to follow me to a place.”

“This could be a great challenge for you, would you like to come out with me?”

The little creature looked into Bai Lixin’s eyes with trepidation, and the frank calmness in his pupils gradually calmed the little creature.

It looked at Bai Lixin and nodded vigorously.

Bai Lixin smiled, and the two obsidian like eyes immediately curved into the shape of a crescent moon.

“I’ll tell the doctor in advance and come pick you up when I’m ready.”

He said goodbye to the little creature, and returned to Class B-1 before the students entered the school building.

He looked at the messy and cramped room, and silently went to his seat.

Perhaps it was an illusion, but the space in between the tables seemed more cramped.

Just as he sat down, a notebook fell out of the hole in the table.

Puzzlement flashed in his eyes when he saw the notebook, but he picked it up anyway.

In the crevices of the paper were two lines of words in a dragon-like handwriting.

—Backpack, Lost Beauty, Roster.

—The corners are 7m long and 5.5m wide.

It was his handwriting but he could not recall when he had written this.

Despite his doubts, Bai Lixin took the crystal ball out of his backpack and found a roster inside.

Familiar names appeared on it one by one, and forgotten memories returned to his mind once again.

The ninth day was just the beginning, and although the self-introduction slowed down the frequency of players disappearing, players were still quietly disappearing.

And with each disappearance came a loss of memory.

In order to be able to retrieve the lost memories, Bai Lixin had set up a very subtle mechanism in the table hole.

Every time the table shook, the notebook would fall down.

And he could always keep up with the disappearances.

Three people disappeared on the ninth day.

Because of the self introductions in Dijia’s class, no one else disappeared by the end of the evening study period.

But on the tenth day, there was another disappearance. This time, only one person disappeared.

And another person disappeared today.

Although the frequency of disappearances slowed down, the disappearances still continued.

Bai Lixin took out a red pen, circled someone’s name on the list and wrote “12.1” next to it.

This was to mark the player who disappeared today.

When he finished writing, he put the roster back into the crystal ball and put it back into his backpack.

Then he looked at the second sentence thoughtfully.

‘The corners are 7 meters long and 5.5 meters wide…..’

Bai Lixin looked around the room, and scammed every corner of it. His gaze eventually fell on the scale taped to the corner of the door.

Length, width, perhaps it was referring to the room’s size.

He visually measured the length of the room today and estimated 6.6 meters while the width was only 5.2 meters.

Bai Lixin flipped through the notebook and found more words on the next page and in his handwriting.

The first line was the same as the previous page, it was a hint to look into the crystal ball.

The second line contained the new data.

—7.5 long and 6.0 wide.

He flipped to the next page and found more data.

There were five records and the data became smaller each time.

Bai Lixin calculated and noticed that from the first record to now, the length and width of the room had been shortened by a full 1.5 meters.

No one would notice this.

The B classes were like frogs boiled in warm water, the already limited resources were slowly being compressed but the players were already numb to the cramped oppression so they wouldn’t notice.

Bai Lixin went and looked at the NPC classes, there were only about 30 tables and chairs left in their rooms without them even noticing.

But their rooms were still crowded, and their situation was the same as the players’ classroom.

This means that not only the players’ classroom shrunk, but also the NPCs’.

Now the space between tables was less than 20cm, and at this rate of reduction, the players will soon be crammed to a pulp.

It was not enough to just let the players brush up on their presence; curbing the quietly shrinking space should be a priority.

A steady stream of footsteps came from the stairway. Bai Lixin was just about to go back into the classroom when he was stopped by a familiar hard tone, “Bai Lixin, stop.”

Bai Lixin glanced at Teacher Zhao and stood still amidst the curious gazes of the players and NPC students.

The tiles in the corridor were clear and translucent, the sunlight filtered through the windows and the reflective corridor immediately reflected Bai Lixin’s helpless expression.

When the panting students had all entered the room, Teacher Zhao then walked up to Bai Lixin and said sternly, “Why are you standing outside and sneaking around instead of sitting in the room?”

Bai Lixin, “…Would you believe me when I say I was waiting for you?”

“Uh,” Teacher Zhao’s expression was instantly serious, “Student Bai Lixin, I know I have not lost my charm but we are teacher and student, it’s impossible, don’t get any illusions.”

“And be self-aware, not everyone covets you. You should reflect on yourself.”

Teacher Zhao’s expression suddenly eased a bit, “Ahem, this idea is wrong, but it is not a big problem, you are in the ignorant stage of adolescence, it is inevitable that you will be attracted to outstanding people or things. The problem is with me, not you, so I will not punish you this time.”

Bai Lixin: “

‘A man should be self aware.’

“I meant to ask you, do you know that the classroom is shrinking?”

Bai Lixin didn’t want to deal with this self-absorbed teacher so he asked the question in his mind.

Teacher Zhao’s warm expression changed immediately, “How do you know that the room is shrinking?”

Bai Lixin, “Not only do I know that the room is shrinking, I also know that people are missing, disappearing into thin air, and that the people around me have lost their memories of those people.”

“You should know all these things, right Teacher Zhao?”

Teacher Zhao stared at Bai Lixin for a couple of moments before he said in a low voice, “Yes, I know.”

“I don’t know how you didn’t lose your memory, but believe me, forgetting is far better than remembering.”

“You’ll watch the room shrink bit by bit but be powerless to stop it, you’ll see your resources gradually squeezed and plundered, and you’ll see classmates you used to know disappear one by one.”

“Knowing that death is just around the corner but being unable to do anything about it, that feeling of despair is simply too much for the average person to bear.”

Bai Lixin, “So what is the root cause of the disappearance of students?”

Teacher Zhao, “The school will send its best students to a national quiz competition soon, and in order to have those few students compete for the school, the school has to squeeze resources from the other classrooms.”

“That’s why the exams that were originally scheduled were suddenly canceled, there isn’t that much energy to take care of that many students.”

“If you have the ability to help the students expand the room, then maybe you can save them.”

—

In the live broadcast room

[Teacher Zhao’s narcissism makes me believe that the world is really beautiful.]

[What can I say? Even an ordinary man like Teacher Zhao has this confidence, am I not better than him?]

[Hahahaha, Teacher Zhao thinks so too.]

[This school’s double standard makes me feel like the top students are the school’s own children.]

[They are not children, they are parents. The top students are the school’s bread and butter, so of course the school has to take care of them.]

[Where does that come from?]

[The criteria for evaluating whether a school is an institution of higher learning is to look at the students who come out of the school. The better the students perform, the more respectable the school becomes. Which school would you choose if one had seven graduates who got into Qingbei and the other had one graduate who got into Qingbei?]

[Even if the overall pass rate of this seven-student school is 30 percent less than that of a school with only one Qingbei student, they gain more respect.]

[You’re so right, I can’t even refute it.]

[Then isn’t Class B miserable? What Teacher Zhao’s words mean is that, the room space will continue to be compressed and Class B players will continue to disappear.]

[I don’t think even God Xin can do anything this time. There is simply no solution.]

—

Bai Lixin looked at Teacher Zhao, thought carefully and asked, “You mean that, if I solve the problem of lack of resources, the students will stop disappearing?”

Teacher Zhao, “In theory, yes, but there are no extra classrooms. We’ve expanded in the past two years and have many more students than ever before.”

“Who says there isn’t,” Bai Lixin suddenly laughed softly, “isn’t there a ready-made one right here?”