novelraw Chapter 10 The Choice
Chapter 10 The Choice
“I don’t agree.”
Qin Feng rejected it on the spot:
“Two things don’t add up.”
“First: if it’s a warning text sent by us from farther in the future, why speak in riddles? Why not say it clearly? Sending a string of numbers—aren’t they just making it hard for us?”
“Second: if they have more advanced technology and can send texts to an even earlier time, then why insist on this exact moment—overlapping with your test message?”
“No matter how you look at it, future us would obviously have a more appropriate, more efficient, more reliable way to warn us than being this vague.”
…
Jiang Ran didn’t speak.
Because he didn’t know how to explain it either.
In the end, it was still that second text—and the mysterious digits—that had appeared too bizarrely, forcing him to be cautious.Rumble rumble rumble!
Footsteps suddenly thundered down the corridor outside—lots of people, loud and chaotic, running hard.
“What’s going on?”
Jiang Ran looked toward the activity room’s wooden door.
“Why are so many people sprinting? Is there an earthquake?”
The three of them opened the door out of curiosity and found it was people from the film club, chasing after one another in anxious panic.
“What happened?”
Jiang Ran stopped a girl.
Why was everyone in the film club so worked up—did they win an award at the festival?
But the timing didn’t match… the preliminaries hadn’t even started yet.
“Something happened to Yan Rui!”
Tears burst from the girl’s eyes as she spoke:
“Senior… Senior—she jumped into the river to save two children who fell in. But she… she didn’t make it. They couldn’t save her at the hospital…”
“What?!”
All three shouted in shock, then rushed out with the crowd.
…
Donghai City People’s Hospital. The lobby was packed shoulder to shoulder.
Besides the regular patients, more than a hundred Donghai University students had gathered outside the emergency room.
Yan Rui was usually warmhearted and kind, always willing to help;
she had a lot of friends. The moment word spread that something had happened to her, students came rushing over, all of them drawn and worried.
Cheng Mengxue was even worse—her face white as paper. She stood trembling in front of Jiang Ran and Qin Feng, nails digging into her palms until they turned blue.
A few minutes later, the emergency room doors opened. A doctor in a mask walked out with their head lowered.
Cheng Mengxue’s aunt and uncle lunged forward, but after a brief exchange…
The woman let out a wail and collapsed on the spot. The man dropped to his knees with a thud, eyes blank.
A huge grief spread through the crowd. Here and there, girls’ sobs broke into small, scattered sounds.
A few minutes after that, a gurney covered with a white sheet was pushed out… The crowd parted, thick and slow, making a narrow passage for it to roll through.
“Big sister…”
Cheng Mengxue’s legs gave out, and she fell against Jiang Ran.
Her tears collapsed all at once. She couldn’t even form words.
The gurney clattered past right in front of them. Jiang Ran stared at the outline beneath the sheet, lips pressed tight, unable to speak.
This was the girl he had watched grow up year after year through his own youth.
And just like that…
She was dead.
They said Yan Rui was gone at the scene.
She could swim, but the current was violent. After saving the two children, she ran out of strength—then her foot got tangled in trash in the riverbed, and in the end she drowned.
The ambulance arrived immediately and tried to resuscitate her on the way back to the hospital, but in the end…
They still couldn’t bring that vivid life back.
…
By the Huangpu River.
The three of them sat side by side on the steps, watching the rippling water.
“She was only twenty…”
Tears clung to the corners of Cheng Mengxue’s eyes.
“Yan Rui is such a good person. She’s never done anything bad… and she died saving two kids. This world is so unfair.”
Jiang Ran lowered his head.
He was devastated too.
Especially because Yan Rui had just helped them resolve something huge.
If it weren’t for Yan Rui, they wouldn’t have been able to keep the Film Camera Club, and they wouldn’t have gotten the Positron Cannon back.
Twenty.
At their age, youth was free, the world felt endless. They’d always thought something like death was very, very far away.
And yet…
It was the young woman right beside them, someone in the prime of her life, who had ended a short life so abruptly.
Death.
So sudden, and so close.
“Jiang Ran…”
Cheng Mengxue tugged at the hem of Jiang Ran’s clothes, her voice thick with tears, lifting her face to look into his eyes.
“You think…”
He knew what she was going to say.
“If we use that Positron Cannon and send a text to us in the past…”
How could he not be torn by the same thought?
“If we told ourselves ahead of time that Senior Yan Rui would die today…”
But that meaningless, inexplicable mysterious text kept cutting across his mind like a blade.
“Could we change history—and save Yan Rui?”
…
…
Cheng Mengxue’s hand tightened around the corner of her clothes.
Qin Feng turned his head, glanced at Jiang Ran, then looked away again.
The river wind swept past.
It lifted Cheng Mengxue’s hair and brushed across Jiang Ran’s face, blocking his line of sight.
Strands danced in front of his eyes. The Huangpu River seemed to flow backward, carrying ships of all sizes back to the start, sailing the same route again.
“Maybe we could.”
He said it softly.
Maybe… it would be worse.
He thought.
…
Evening.
The three of them returned to the student activity building’s club room.
They didn’t eat. They had no appetite. They scattered to three corners of the room, sitting apart.
No one spoke.
But they all knew what they were waiting for.
Jiang Ran lifted his gaze to the small blackboard.
289269426494642—those digits he could already recite backward—glittered under the fluorescent light.
A passcode.
A warning.
A signal.
A malfunction.
It was the biggest unease in this room, the biggest dispute, the biggest culprit.
“[Vote].”
At last, it was Qin Feng who spoke.
He stood up, leaned against the bookshelf, arms folded.
“From the time we met in high school, haven’t the three of us always solved problems this way?”
He looked from one to the other.
“Whenever the three of us disagree, or our opinions don’t align and we can’t convince the other, we vote by raising hands. The minority obeys the majority.”
“We’ve been inseparable for five years now, and we’ve had plenty of times like this—sometimes we even fought so hard we were ready to split up… and in the end didn’t we always settle it with a vote?”
Jiang Ran raised his head and looked at Cheng Mengxue.
She was hugging a blue Rhine Cat, staring straight back at him.
Qin Feng wasn’t wrong.
Their iron triangle—those three—had fought plenty, argued plenty, even “disbanded” more than once back in high school.
So later they made a rule: when there was a disagreement, they’d raise hands and vote. The minority would obey the majority.
When you can’t decide, vote.
Especially facing a situation this tangled—where they couldn’t move forward—voting seemed like the most effective way to break the deadlock.
“Then let’s begin.”
Qin Feng straightened and walked to the experiment bench, patting the shell of the Positron Cannon.
“Facts have proven that we can, in fact, rewrite history by sending [time-traveling text messages].”
“Which means we can send a text to us in the past—prevent this drowning accident ahead of time—and save Yan Rui.”
“That’s how it is. Raise your hands and vote. On using time-traveling text messages to save Yan Rui…”
“Who’s in favor, and who’s against?”