novelraw Chapter 21 Eyes
Chapter 21 Eyes
“Then what?” Jiang Ran shot back.
“Are you saying that elementary school kid threw a pencil down the hill on purpose to save me, and it just happened to bounce and hop its way down, and it just happened to land tip-up, and it just happened to end up under my neck, and it just happened that my head dropped at that exact moment… what kind of god-tier elementary school kid is that?”
“Doesn’t have to be that kid.”
Qin Feng straightened.
“Could’ve been someone else.”
“Doesn’t matter who it is.”
Jiang Ran raised his hand and flung the green jujube hard at Qin Feng—
Pop!
Qin Feng lifted a hand and caught it, closing his fist around it.
“No one could throw that accurately,” Jiang Ran said, rolling his wrist.“But it’s too coincidental. Coincidental to the point of being abnormal.”
“What’s abnormal about it? If something is coincidental enough, even a monkey with a typewriter can bang out the complete works of Shakespeare.”
“That’s impossible.”
Qin Feng rubbed the green jujube and shook his head.
“In theory, if you give monkeys enough time, random typing could produce Shakespeare.”
“But in reality, it can’t be achieved. Even if the monkeys type until the universe ends, they still won’t type out Shakespeare.”
Jiang Ran chuckled softly.
“Then that only proves the universe doesn’t live long enough.”
“Why are you suddenly not believing in science, Qin Feng? [Probability] works like this—”
“[As long as the probability of something happening isn’t zero, then it will definitely happen.]”
Whoosh.
The green jujube flew back—Jiang Ran caught it again.
“Murphy’s Law,” Qin Feng said.
Murphy’s Law meant that anything that could go wrong would eventually go wrong—roughly speaking, no matter how small the chance of failure or accident, it would still happen.
Professor Zhang Yang had covered that point in their general-education class.
Since the probability of a kid slipping, a backpack popping open, a pencil case bursting and scattering stationery, a pencil rolling down the hill, and it just so happening to bounce beneath someone’s neck was [not zero]…
Then it had a chance of happening.
Like winning the lottery—no matter how small the probability of hitting the jackpot, someone would always stumble into it.
Same with anything else.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t listen to Professor Zhang Yang,” Jiang Ran said, toying with the green jujube as he stepped back onto the viewing deck. “Xiaoxue and I weren’t even interested in that general-ed class. We only took it because you liked it, so we went with you.”
“I listened,” Qin Feng said, unable to refute it.
It was true. Any low-probability event could happen—that was the charm of probability.
Reasonable. Logical.
“Murphy’s Law really is a sad-sounding law,” Jiang Ran said, still idly flipping the jujube between his fingers. “Any error, accident, failure, regret—anything that can happen will eventually happen.”
“But now we’ve mastered time-traveling text messages. For people like us, who can revise history anytime and undo mistakes, Murphy’s Law doesn’t apply anymore.”
Pop.
With one last flick, he caught the green jujube in midair, smiling at Qin Feng.
“Besides—didn’t Professor Zhang Yang already do a reversal derivation of Murphy’s Law in class?”
“Since everything that can happen will definitely happen…”
Jiang Ran drew his right arm back, muscles taut.
“Then that also means—”
He swung forward and hurled the green jujube with all his strength—
“[All beautiful things will come, too!]”
The green jujube became a meteor streaking through the night.
Thrown from the highest point of this sea, it surged toward the stars, split the clouds, tugged at moonlight—then fell into the soundless black ocean.
Swallowed.
…
The next day, the sky opened into a downpour.
Cheng Mengxue didn’t wake up until noon.
She really had blacked out drunk—she didn’t remember a thing she’d said last night.
“My last memory… is Qin Feng saying his dream is to go to a top-tier lab and do research. After that, I don’t remember anything at all.”
Scratching her head, she looked at Jiang Ran.
“What did you say after that? What’s your dream?”
“To become the savior of the world,” Jiang Ran teased her.
“That’s so grand!”
“Einstein-level genius.”
“You… can you do it?”
“Doraemon.”
“You’re messing with me again!”
Amid the bickering, what happened yesterday got waved away in a sentence.
Jiang Ran and Qin Feng shared a silent understanding and both pretended nothing had happened.
When Cheng Mengxue asked, they kept the same story: she hadn’t even gotten a few words out before her face planted into the crab shell and she fell asleep.
…
By the time the three of them returned to school, it was already night.
The storm only grew heavier, lightning striking again and again.
“Donghai’s weather really flips whenever it feels like it.”
Holding umbrellas and fighting the wind, they decided to head to the club room first to get out of the rain.
They reached the club room.
All three were soaked to varying degrees.
After drying off with towels, they made instant noodles and decided to make do with that.
On the small blackboard, the two major unsolved mysteries were still written there:
[1. That mysterious text, those mysterious digits—what do they actually mean?]
[2. Why is it that only Jiang Ran retains memory of the original history, from before the worldline shift?]
The first question still looked unsolvable for now.
Because ever since then, they hadn’t received a single extra message, not a single follow-up clue. They could only stall out.
“So I’ve always said that mysterious text was probably just a malfunction,” Qin Feng said, blowing on his noodles. “A string of digit-garbage with no meaning is way too much like a machine glitch. It might even be a problem on the telecom operator’s end—completely unrelated to us.”
“Have you never gotten random verification-code texts for no reason? Time-traveling texts still have to pass through a base station tower, so it’s very likely some accidental signal interference produced that digit-garbage text.”
…
Qin Feng still insisted on the “glitch theory.”
Because if it was the dangerous warning Jiang Ran imagined…
Then by now they’d already “ignored the warning” and sent a whole bunch of texts.
But as things stood, nothing bad had happened.
Everything was stable.
Everything was regular.
Everything was normal.
“If that mysterious text really was a warning sent by future us…” Qin Feng gave a dry laugh. “Then with how disobedient we’re being, shouldn’t we have gotten punished by now?”
BOOM!!!!
Lightning split the sky, thunder arriving right after.
The fluorescent light flickered a few times, then slowly stabilized.
“Say less,” Jiang Ran said, peeling back his noodle lid and staring at the rising steam as he thought.
Crude words, but not a crude point.
Qin Feng’s argument did have some logic to it.
If ignoring the warning didn’t cause anything bad… then that warning was meaningless—or it wasn’t a warning at all, and he was overthinking it.
“Let’s put that aside for now.”
He stirred the noodles with his fork and looked at the second question on the small blackboard.
“I’ve actually always been curious—this special trait I have, is it really unique to me in the entire world?”
“I searched a bunch of keywords online and couldn’t find anything related. But that doesn’t prove anything… because any sane person wouldn’t post this kind of thing online. They’d get grabbed and hauled into a lab to be sliced up for research.”
“So is it possible…”
“[That there are many people in the world like me—people who can sense worldline shifts and retain memory of the original worldline?]”
…
That one sentence from Jiang Ran made the temperature in the room plummet into silence.
Bang, bang, bang.
The downpour and wind hammered the windows, banging loudly.
The rain turned into a watery curtain clinging to the glass, like a monster peering in at prey.
This was…
a question they had never truly thought through.
Just as Jiang Ran said—what if this “special trait” wasn’t his alone?
Qin Feng and Cheng Mengxue traded a look.
Their brows knit, one after the other.
Once you started thinking down this path, it really was the kind of thing that made your scalp go cold.
If, in corners of the world everywhere, there were many people like Jiang Ran with this special trait…
Then—
Every time the worldline shifted, many people would get dizzy and disoriented just like Jiang Ran.
Every time the worldline shifted, many people would retain the original worldline’s memories just like Jiang Ran.
Which meant—
If any of those people paid attention to the lottery, they would notice that after the worldline shift, five extra second-prize tickets had appeared!
If there was someone like that at Donghai University, they would notice Xu Yan’s death turning into survival!
[Then those people hidden in the dark may have already noticed the three of them doing something abnormal!]
BOOM!!!!
Another bolt of lightning struck, flooding the entire room with white.
Eyes.
Eyes.
Eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes eyes!
In the rolling thunder, hundreds of Rhine Cat eyes lit up, staring at them from all directions.
“We wouldn’t…”
Cheng Mengxue swallowed hard.
She slowly lifted her head, looking at the flickering gaze of the Rhine Cats—
“We wouldn’t… already be being watched, would we?”