During the ti when Bai Liu was holding the doll and thinking, the teacher called over the remaining five children.
The five children left in this welfare ho stood in a row with numb expressions. They didn’t dare look up at Mu Ke and their eyes were fixed on their toes. So of these children were la while so had a crooked or hunched back. They were more or less disabled. They were like a group of chicks who hadn’t co out of the nest yet. The five children pushed and shoved together. They were like cheap goods under scrutiny. They were humble and reticent since they knew they weren’t worth a few yuan.
Bai Liu frowned the mont he approached the children. The mushroom sll on these children was even worse than what he had slled from the corpses in the hospital. Mu Ke couldn’t bear it and waved his hand in front of his nose. “Are you only eating mushrooms here? Why is the mushroom sll so strong?”
The teacher hugged the five children slightly awkwardly. “In fact, they don’t really eat much.”
Bai Liu’s eyes swept past the teacher and the five children. “Did you eat a lot of mushrooms that day?”
The teacher was taken aback. “We ate with these five children and it was quite a lot.”
“Did the poisoned children eat less? For example, they only drank a mouthful of the mushroom soup?”
The teacher looked back before replying to Bai Liu, “Yes. It is because so children like the taste of mushrooms while others don’t like it. So only ate a very small amount but they were still poisoned.”
Bai Liu retracted his gaze. So children weren’t poisoned when eating too much and others were poisoned when eating only a little bit. It seed that the poisoning had nothing to do with the dosage.
Then why mushrooms… why was it mushrooms every ti sothing happened in this welfare ho? In addition, what was the condition under which the weird mushrooms poisoned people?
Lu Yizhan saw that the blood drawing and various tests on the surviving children of the welfare ho showed nothing abnormal. Like Liu Jiayi, they only had slight anemia. The five surviving children and Liu Jiayi had only one thing in common—it was that they had congenital or genetic defects. Liu Jiayi was blind while these five children also had various disabilities.
Bai Liu was lost in thought.
The teacher continued to take Bai Liu and Mu Ke around the interior of the welfare ho. They entered a room full of photos, trophies and children’s drawings. The teacher turned to Bai Liu. “This is the exhibition hall of our welfare ho.”
No one had been to the exhibition hall in a long ti. Many of the trophies and certificates were gray from the dust. Still, it could be seen that this was a well-developed welfare ho in the past. There were still many children’s drawings and so awards hanging on the wall. The photos of the annual Children’s Day performance were also hung on the wall. The color of the photos changed due to distortion. In the last photo, more than 40 children were smiling softly and docilely but only six survived. Five of them were following the teacher with numb expressions.
Many of the things exhibited were from the dead so it gave the exhibition room a lingering feeling of gloom. Bai Liu glanced at the entire room and seed to find sothing. He turned to the teacher. “Can I take so of the photos and drawings down?”
Originally, it wasn’t easy to move these things but the children’s welfare ho had beco like this. Not much attention was paid to this room so the teacher nodded in agreent.
Mu Ke curiously watched as Bai Liu removed so children’s drawings from the wall and placed them on the ground to observe. He leaned in and asked in a low voice, “Bai Liu, have you found anything?”
“Yes,” Bai Liu responded softly. He didn’t give Mu Ke a look as he fiddled with the drawings. Mu Ke’s eyes followed Bai Liu’s hand. The children drew quite well. He felt that they were drawn by children who should have a good background in drawing.
The drawings included character sketches, still lifes, colored drawings done in pencils and crayon and simple black and white sketches. The style of drawing was different. The color of so of the drawings was very strong and saturated to the point where people were uncomfortable seeing it. The subjects of the drawings also seed illogical.
There was one with a thin girl sitting on a hospital bed with white cloth over her eyes, a beautiful silver-blue scaled fish in a jar and a wooden, broken mirror on a charred and lted toy train. The drawings all seed to be things that this welfare ho had.
Mu Ku stared at it for a while before discovering sothing. He spoke in a surprised voice, “Are these all drawn by one person? All the signatures are a ‘W’.”
The drawings taken down by Bai Liu were all different but there was a ‘W’ drawn on each one. It was a strange curly writing and it was consistent in each drawing. Bai Liu finally glanced at Mu Ke. His voice was low and soft like he was whispering. “This is my signature.”
Mu Ke was surprised. “Yours? Why is it here?!”
Bai Liu didn’t give a further explanation. Mu Ke was curious but seeing that Bai Liu wasn’t prepared to say anything, he also shut up. The W stood for ‘W’ which was Bai Liu’s na and it was his customary signature. (Bai= white)
Bai Liu saw instantly that these drawings were his. They might be younger and more immature than his current drawings but they were indeed his.
The little girl with the cloth over her eyes was obviously Liu Jiayi. The hospital gown was the sa style as the one he saw in the hospital this morning. The beautiful silver-blue fish in the jar should refer to the first ga Siren Town while the broken mirror placed on the lting toy train was Bai Liu’s second ga Exploding Last Train.
However, these drawings were signed 10 years ago. 10 years ago, Bai Liu wasn’t in this private welfare ho at all. The Bai Liu of 10 years ago also couldn’t know this information. There was only one possibility. Bai Liu went back 10 years ago in so form and drew these drawings, leaving them in this private children’s welfare ho.
Ordinary people would panic when encountering such a bizarre thing but it just made Bai Liu further confirm that this children’s welfare ho was an ‘official’ instance in the real world. The only reasonable explanation for the tiline confusion was the official plot developnt ti of the ga instance. Judging from the signature on the drawings he left behind, it wasn’t now but 10 years ago.
Bai Liu’s fingers skimd over the signatures on these drawings and his eyes sank.
It was likely that he would enter this ga in the future and leave so traces in the ‘children’s welfare ho ga instance 10 years ago’. Then the official version of the ga instance was loaded into the real world and it loaded the traces that Bai Liu left in the ga.
This wasn’t a good thing.
A player’s traces remaining in a ga forever was usually sothing that only appeared after a failed clearance. For example, Puppet Zhang alienated into a burning monster and stayed in Exploding Last Train forever. These marks of death and failure would beco part of the ga and were loaded into reality with the instance.
Even so, this dood ending didn’t scare Bai Liu. He just thought calmly.
Currently, there were two places where Bai Liu was puzzled. His eyes slowly fell on the face of a boy in the corner of a photo of 200X.
The boy had no emotions on his face. When he stared at people, there was a type of ‘you stupid mortals’ feeling. There was a sense of incompatibility with his environnt. This was the 14 year old Bai Liu. Bai Liu glanced at the drawings that were sharp and exaggerated in color.
This feeling when taking photos and the style of drawing was indeed the sa as when he was 14. It was even his usual posture when taking photos.
Bai Liu had long stopped using this colorful drawing style. It was because he was criticized several tis by his boss for ntal pollution and the market acceptance wasn’t high. Bai Liu decisively gave up on this style and never drew like this again.
These drawings and the photographed ‘Bai Liu’ were indeed his style when he was 14 years old. The strange thing was that the information in these drawings was only known to the 24 year old Bai Liu. The problem was that if his 24 year old self went into the ga, Bai Liu was certain he wouldn’t draw like this.
If the setting of the ga caused Bai Liu to regress in all aspects of his mory and his body to 10 years ago, he wouldn’t be able to draw information he knew now.
This was a Bai Liu who had the mories of his 24 year old self but the style and personality of his 14 year old self. Logically speaking, Bai Liu thought it was impossible. It was because mory was an important factor in determining a person’s style and personality. If he had the mories of his 24 year old self then he definitely wouldn’t be the sa as he was 10 years ago.
The 14 year old and 24 year old Bai Liu existed separately in the ga instance ‘children’s welfare ho’ 10 years ago. This was the first question that made Bai Liu puzzled.
The second question was—Bai Liu looked at a black and white character sketch. A girl was sitting on a hospital bed with a doll. She was curled up and hugging her knees with a white cloth covering her eyes. It was a very finely drawn character sketch.
Bai Liu clearly rembered that his 14 year old self hated drawing sketches. It was because this was the period where he liked things with heavy colors and sketching in a strong docuntary style repulsed him. He generally practiced drawing by doing still lifes and he basically didn’t draw people.
Why did the 14 year old Bai Liu draw Liu Jiayi when he hated character sketches? At that ti, Liu Jiayi shouldn’t have been born and shouldn’t have left any traces. Did it an that Liu Jiayi would also enter this instance?
However, even if Liu Jiayi entered the ga, she was a newcor and her first instance should be a single player ga. This welfare ho instance was clearly a multiplayer one. The only possibility was if Liu Jiayi quickly cleared her first ga. After that, she entered the multiplayer ga that Bai Liu was in and ended up being drawn.
Yet Liu Huai was an experienced player and shouldn’t allow his sister to enter this way. So why was this kid here?
Bai Liu scanned the entire drawing and finally stopped on the doll Liu Jiayi was holding.
The doll in the drawing had a white shirt and black pants. Its face was turned to the outside while smiling and it seed like nothing was wrong. However, Bai Liu stared at it for a while and soon found what was wrong. The doll’s head was turned too far. It wasn’t like it was turned back. It was like its head had been twisted 180 degrees.
Bai Liu looked at the picture and fiddled with the coin hanging over his heart, eyes narrowed slightly.
Proofreader: Purichan
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