CH 51

In the haze, sunlight shone through the yellowed glass onto the floor, warming the room.

A faint scent of milk permeated the kindergarten, from candy or something else. 

The principal collected the recommendation forms from them and then said placidly, “A very warm welcome to intern in Little Apple Kindergarten. Your internship will be for one week. May we get along well during this week.”

“This is our senior teacher, Teacher Zhao. You will be learning from Teacher Zhao for this internship.”

After the brief introduction, the principal grabbed her bag and left hurriedly.

“Hello, my surname is Zhao. You can call me Teacher Zhao.” Teacher Zhao spoke in a very gentle voice. She issued a blank work badge to each of the eight people and said, “This is your intern badge. Please remember to bring it when you come to school. If you don’t, you won’t be able to enter.” 

“Classes have ended by this time. I’ll show you the basic facilities of the kindergarten first, and then I’ll take you to the dormitory.”

Teacher Zhao spoke as she led Gu Xizhou and the other seven people on a tour around the kindergarten.

“This is the canteen. The daily mealtimes for the students are 8-9 am, 11.30-12.30 pm and 4-5 pm. We teachers need to eat half an hour earlier; latecomers won’t be served.”

“Finally, this is the children’s play area. The children spend most of their time here.”

In addition to Gu Xizhou and company, there were four women and one man in the group.

Gu Xizhou looked towards the play area and had just taken two steps when he noticed a broken piece of chalk at his feet. On the ground not far away, an irregular closed shape was drawn in white chalk. Strangely, this drawing gave him rather uncomfortable vibes.

He exchanged a look with Si Yu. Clearly, both of them had had the same feeling. He whispered, “What is that white shape……”

“I don’t know,” Si Yu shook his head at him and turned to warn Fang Zhi, “Stay away from the shape on the ground.” 

After a while, Gu Xizhou had subconsciously got used to the scent of milk in the kindergarten. To be honest, the smell was not too bad if one was used to it.

“Come on, I’ll take you to the dormitory now.”

With that, Teacher Zhao glanced at the time on the wall and motioned everyone to follow her out of the school gate.

The beautiful woman at the entrance had yet to leave. She stood at the entrance and seemed to be waiting for someone, looking inside the school from time to time. 

“Are there any children still in the kindergarten?” Si Yu asked Teacher Zhao next to him blandly. “She seems to be here to pick up her child.”

“Oh, her. Don’t mind her, she’s a mental patient. She’ll stand at the school gate every day after school and leave after a while.” Teacher Zhao waved a hand and pointed at the bus stop in front of her. “The bus is coming. Come with me.”

“Our kindergarten is rather remote; there’s only one bus back. This is the last bus and can’t be missed!”

Having said this, she walked straight to the bus stop. 

The rest looked at one another, then chose to ignore the beautiful woman at the side and followed Teacher Zhao onto the bus. Surprisingly, the beautiful woman got on the bus with them. There were a lot of people on the bus. The beautiful woman found a seat after getting on and sat there quietly, saying nothing.

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Curious, one of the girls asked Gu Xizhou quietly, “Why do you keep looking at that woman?”

Gu Xizhou responded, “Why not? She’s pretty.”

Hearing Gu Xizhou’s reply, the girl rolled her eyes at him in disdain. 

At this point, everyone was a little tired. When they finally arrived at the dormitory, Teacher Zhao said tonelessly, “You can decide the living arrangements amongst yourselves. Oh, right, don’t go out alone at night.”

“What will happen if we go out at night?” The same girl asked.

Instead of answering her question, Teacher Zhao showed a peculiar smile and simply shut the door.

Bang—— 

No one spoke in the room. After a moment, it was Gu Xizhou who finally broke the silence, “Hello, my name is Gu Ran.”

After everyone introduced themselves and confirmed that there were no newbies amongst them, they quickly divided the living quarters. As there were four rooms in total with two beds each, and having experienced the three-person rule in Lin Meng’s world, the few of them decided to have two people sleep in one room for the night. Everything else would be discussed the next day.

At night, Gu Xizhou had just washed up and lain down on the bed when Si Yu lifted the blankets on his bed. Confused, he looked at Si Yu and frowned, “What are you doing?”

Si Yu held his hand out and raised an eyebrow, “Give me the handcuffs.” 

Gu Xizhou silently handed over the handcuffs. With a click, their hands were cuffed together.

Gu Xizhou shook his hand out while muttering, “Is this necessary? There’s no newspaper on this window! I really won’t……”

Si Yu ignored Gu Xizhou’s chattering and laid in bed. He had checked the room and found nothing wrong.

“Wait, are you serious? You’re sleeping just like this?” Gu Xizhou scratched his head, a little lost for words. Taking one look at Si Yu’s face in front of him, Gu Xizhou turned around in a huff. 

This was a humiliation, a show of blatant distrust!

So what if he tore the newspaper up? He could beat the ghost into tearfully helping him cheat!

No dreams came that night. The next day, as there had been no food the night before, everyone got up very early in the morning and got ready to go to the kindergarten canteen to eat.

The eight of them got to the canteen and started wolfing down food. About half an hour later, the students began drifting into the school and the whole campus suddenly became much livelier. 

“Children, you’re all being very obedient today. It’s free time now, but you mustn’t leave where, hmm?” Teacher Zhao closed her textbook and said gently to the children below.

Clear children’s voices chimed in unison, “We can’t leave the playground, we can’t leave the teachers’ sight!”

After announcing that it was free time, Teacher Zhao asked Gu Xizhou and the others to take the children to the playground and watch over them.

Standing at the edge of the playground with their eyes fixed on the children, Gu Xizhou and the others started discussing the mission world in low voices. 

“What do you think our mission is? The time limit’s a week of interning here, but these children aren’t ghosts!” Wu Qi pointed to the children playing on the playground and asked.

“I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any problems with this kindergarten.”

A few of them whispered amongst themselves for some time.

Gu Xizhou quietly asked Si Yu next to him, “Any discoveries?” 

“Look over there.” Si Yu suddenly said and Gu Xizhou followed his line of sight. Several children were drawing a shape on the ground with chalk. Si Yu took a step forward and asked the children softly, “What are you drawing?”

The few children looked up at Si Yu, blinked their big doe eyes, and giggled, “We’re drawing people!”

“Teacher, is my drawing good?”

Si Yu smiled at the little girl and said, exuding all the charm within him, “I’m sorry, I couldn’t tell that it was a person.” 

The little girl huffed in annoyance and pointed to different parts of the irregular shape on the ground, explaining to Si Yu, “You’re so stupid! Let me show you——here’s the head, here are the hands……”

Hearing this, their teammate Wu Qi chuckled and, looking at the strange shape on the ground, said under his breath, “These children are really imaginative. Is this supposed to be a disabled person?”

After Wu Qi spoke, a few of the children dropped the chalk in their hands and ran to find other children to play with.

“Teacher, we want to play hide and seek, but no one wants to be ‘it’……” The little girl from earlier tearfully grabbed onto Wu Qi’s pant legs. “Can you be ‘it’ in the first game?” 

Wu Qi instinctively glanced at the nearby Teacher Zhao. Thinking of Teacher Zhao’s words from the day before, he swallowed hard and said, “Okay……” 

“Thank you, Teacher!” The little girl twirled with excitement.

In the sky, the sun was getting bigger and bigger. When lunchtime came, all the children came back. However, Gu Xizhou and the others did not move to leave——because Wu Qi was missing.

“Wu Qi! Wu Qi! Where are you?” 

The few of them called Wu Qi’s name over and over again on the playground, but no one answered.

“It was just the blink of an eye…… How could he be gone?!”

“Yeah, I’d been suffering from dealing with those children, and then he was gone when I turned! Where do you think he could’ve gone?”

Wu Qi did not show up again even until the afternoon. While Teacher Zhao was teaching in front, Gu Xizhou and the others talked quietly in the back. 

Si Yu was silent for a moment and then said, “He’s…… probably already dead.”

“What? Why? How?”

Upon hearing Si Yu’s words, the few girls covered their mouths in surprise and asked, “But nothing out of the ordinary has happened all day today?!”

“He agreed to be ‘it’ for the children.” Si Yu said softly. 

Gu Xizhou looked at Si Yu, his face stiff for a moment. After listening to Si Yu, he immediately understood the meaning of his words——Wu Qi had agreed to play hide and seek as ‘it’, so he really became ‘it’ and died!

As the others started to comprehend, their faces turned ashen.

Skit of the Day

Si Yu: First touching another man’s ass, now staring at another woman and calling her pretty? 

Gu Xizhou: …… I thought we were over the first one. Also, you know that it’s all for the mission! I’m being completely professional!

Si Yu (narrows eyes): Being professional involves calling another woman pretty?

Gu Xizhou: Y-yes?

Gu Xizhou (hurriedly changes the subject): A-anyway! What do you have to say about climbing into my bed and handcuffing us together? 

Si Yu: Oh, sorry, I forgot that I haven’t confessed yet.

Gu Xizhou: …… wait, w-what are you talking about? I meant the show of blatant distrust!

Si Yu: (blank stare)

(By the way, their first kiss will be in Ch 90…… Please be patient. Hopefully, these skits will suffice until then.) 

Glacestorm: Hello, so sorry again for the late update! I’ve been a bit overwhelmed with, well, everything, the past 2 weeks. In addition, as final exams and project deadlines are coming up, the update schedule for the next 3 weeks will be sporadic (read: Sunday 2359), and I’ll be taking a break for 2 weeks after that. That’ll affect Chapters 52 to 56, I believe. Updates will go back to normal (or as normal as possible) the second week of December, and I’ll try to stock up translated chapters over the December holidays so this doesn’t happen again! (I took over at the start of the school semester so I haven’t got to do that yet.)

To make up for this and if you guys are interested, I’m thinking of making an interactive fiction game for MADC using Twine. For the uninitiated, an interactive fiction game is a primarily text-based Choose Your Own Adventure-style story. It’ll be like alternative fanfiction, maybe SY/GXZ’s marriage proposal?