Eyes

"Otherwise?"

Jiang Ran countered:

"Are you saying some elementary school kid threw a pencil down the mountain just to save me, and it just happened to bounce along, land point-up, and hit me right below the neck, just as my head fell? What kind of god-tier elementary school kid would that be?"

"It might not have been that kid."

Qin Feng straightened up:

"It could've been someone else."

"Whoever it was, it couldn't have happened."

Jiang Ran raised his hand and hurled the green date at Qin Feng with all his strength—

Smack!

Qin Feng raised his hand too and caught it, closing his fist around it.

"No matter who threw it, nobody could've aimed that accurately." Jiang Ran shook his wrist.

"But it's too much of a coincidence. It's so unlikely that it feels wrong."

"What's wrong with it? If something is unlikely enough, even a monkey could type out Shakespeare's complete works on a typewriter."

"That's impossible."

Qin Feng rubbed the green date and shook his head:

"In theory, if you gave monkeys enough time, they could randomly hit the keys on a typewriter and produce Shakespeare."

"But in reality, that's impossible. They couldn't type out Shakespeare even if they kept at it until the universe ended."

Jiang Ran chuckled:

"That only proves the universe hasn't been around long enough."

"Why have you suddenly stopped believing in science, Qin Feng? That's how probability works—

"If the probability of something happening isn't zero, then it's bound to happen."

Whoosh.

The green date flew back, and Jiang Ran caught it again.

"Murphy's law,"

Qin Feng said.

Murphy's law stated that anything that could go wrong eventually would. In other words, no matter how small the chance of failure or an accident, it was bound to happen.

Professor Zhang Yang had covered this in their general education class.

If the probability of a child falling over, their backpack coming open, their pencil case spilling its contents, and a pencil rolling down the mountain and bouncing right beneath someone's neck wasn't zero...

Then it was possible.

It was like winning the lottery. Even if the odds of winning the jackpot were tiny, someone would eventually hit it.

The same went for anything.

"Don't tell me you weren't listening in Professor Zhang Yang's class."

Jiang Ran tossed the green date in his hand as he walked back to the observation deck:

"Xue and I weren't interested in Professor Zhang Yang's general education class. We only signed up because you liked it, so we went with you."

"Of course I listened." Qin Feng had no rebuttal.

It was true. Anything with a nonzero probability could happen. That was the beauty of probability.

The reasoning was sound.

"Murphy's law really is a depressing law."

Jiang Ran continued tossing the date:

"Any possible mistake, accident, failure, or regret will eventually happen."

"But now we have the Spacetime Bulletin. We can change history whenever we want and make up for our mistakes, so Murphy's law doesn't apply to us anymore."

Smack.

With one final toss, he caught the green date in midair and smiled at Qin Feng:

"Besides, didn't Professor Zhang Yang turn Murphy's law on its head in class?"

"If everything that could happen is bound to happen..."

Jiang Ran drew back his right arm and tensed his muscles:

"Then that means—"

He swung his arm forward and hurled the green date with all his might—

"Everything wonderful will come to pass, too!"

The green date streaked across the night like a meteor.

Thrown from the highest point above the ocean, it shot into the starry sky, parted the clouds, clutched at the moonlight, then fell into the silent black sea.

And vanished.

The next day, heavy rain fell from the sky.

Cheng Mengxue didn't wake up until noon.

She'd really blacked out from drinking and couldn't remember anything she'd said the day before.

"The last thing I remember... was Qin Feng saying his dream was to do research at a top laboratory. I don't remember anything after that."

She scratched her head and looked at Jiang Ran:

"What did you say after that? What's your dream?"

"To become a savior." Jiang Ran teased her.

"How noble!"

"To be a genius like Einstein."

"You... think you can?"

"Doraemon."

"You're teasing me again!"

Amid their bickering, they let the events of the previous day slide.

Jiang Ran and Qin Feng exchanged a knowing look and pretended nothing had happened.

When Cheng Mengxue asked, they stuck to the same story: she'd barely said a few words before her face hit a crab shell and she fell asleep.

By the time the three of them got back to campus, it was already evening.

The rain was coming down harder and harder, with frequent flashes of lightning.

"The weather in Donghai really can change in an instant."

The three of them braved the wind under their umbrellas and decided to head to their clubroom to wait out the rain.

They reached the clubroom.

All three of them were soaked to varying degrees.

After drying off with towels, they made instant noodles and decided that would have to do for dinner.

The two unsolved mysteries were still written on the small blackboard:

[1. What do the mysterious message and mysterious numbers mean?]

[2. Why is Jiang Ran the only one who remembers the original history from before the Worldline changed?]

The first question still seemed impossible to answer.

They hadn't received any more strange messages since then, and there were no further clues. They could only wait.

"That's why I keep saying that mysterious message was probably just a glitch."

Qin Feng blew on his noodles:

"Those garbled numbers with no meaning look way too much like some kind of machine malfunction. It might even have been a problem with the telecom provider, and have nothing to do with us."

"Have you never gotten a random verification code by text? The Spacetime Bulletin has to be transmitted through signal towers, so it was probably just some interference that happened to produce that garbled message."

Qin Feng still insisted it was a glitch.

Because if Jiang Ran's theory was right and the message had been a warning from the future... then they had already sent plenty of messages while "ignoring the warning."

Yet so far, nothing bad had happened.

Everything was stable.

Everything was consistent.

Everything was normal.

"If that mysterious message really was a warning from our future selves..."

Qin Feng gave a dry laugh:

"Shouldn't we have been punished by now for not listening?"

Boom!!!!

A bolt of lightning struck, followed by a thunderclap.

The fluorescent light flickered a few times, then slowly steadied.

"Maybe don't say that."

Jiang Ran opened the lid of his instant noodles and watched the steam rise as he thought.

Qin Feng's words weren't unreasonable.

If nothing bad happened when they ignored the warning, then maybe it meant the warning was meaningless—or maybe it hadn't been a warning at all, and he'd just been overthinking it.

"Let's set that question aside for now."

He stirred the noodles with his fork and looked at the second question on the blackboard:

"I've always wondered: am I really the only person in the whole world with this special constitution?"

"I've searched all kinds of keywords online, and I haven't found anything relevant. But that doesn't prove anything... Anyone with common sense wouldn't post something like this online, or they'd risk getting taken to a lab and cut open for research."

"So is it possible that..."

"There are lots of people in the world like me, who can sense changes to the Worldline and retain their memories of the original Worldline?"

Jiang Ran's words made the temperature in the clubroom plummet, and silence fell.

Clang, clang, clang.

The heavy rain and wind battered the windows, making them rattle.

The rain sheeted down the glass like a curtain of water, as if a monster were peering in at its prey.

This was...

A question they'd never really considered.

As Jiang Ran had said, what if this special constitution wasn't unique to him?

Qin Feng and Cheng Mengxue exchanged a look.

They both furrowed their brows.

Once they started thinking about it, the possibility was genuinely terrifying.

If there were many people in every corner of the world like Jiang Ran, with this special constitution...

Then.

Every time the Worldline changed, many people would feel dizzy, just like Jiang Ran.

Every time the Worldline changed, many people would retain their memories of the original Worldline, just like Jiang Ran.

Which meant—

If any of them followed the lottery, they would notice that after the Worldline changed, five more people had won second prize!

If there was someone like that at Donghai University, they would notice Xu Yan had come back to life!

[Those people lurking in the shadows might have already noticed the three of them acting strangely!]

Boom!!!!

Another bolt of lightning struck, lighting up the whole room.

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!

Amid the rumbling thunder, hundreds of Rhine Cat eyes lit up, staring at them from every direction.

"We haven't..."

Cheng Mengxue swallowed.

She slowly looked up at the Rhine Cats' fleeting gazes:

"Could we... already be under surveillance?"