Seven years ago, Qi Si was fifteen, in his third year of middle school, just like Lu Ming.
At the time, he had not yet transferred to the middle school in the countryside. He attended a private school in Jiang City, where he was the least welcome child among the crowd—the "black sheep" isolated from every group.
As the world's will rejected an unwelcome intruder, malice and exclusion pieced together the entirety of his memories, growing rather than diminishing as he aged.
He was like a rat that had scurried into the city, or an insect that had suddenly appeared inside a greenhouse. People loathed his existence, yet could not help paying him excessive attention.
They scorned him while watching his every move, waiting for a chance to mock him. Familiar surroundings made it easy to dig into someone's past, especially when the incident had been so well known and those involved made no effort to hide it.
Stories about Qi Si spread among the students. Before long, most of the school knew that the withdrawn, gloomy, solitary boy was a strange sort of monster.
Not only did he frequently receive treatment at a psychiatric hospital and enjoy reading bloody, dark books, but he also bore the curse of calamity and had caused the death of a former "friend."
Most children that age were curious about the unusual. Once they heard what they considered novel rumors, they whispered and passed them around. Some of the bolder ones even gathered around Qi Si and deliberately spoke loudly.
"Everyone should stay away from Qi Si. He's a jinx—anyone close to him comes to a bad end. Haven't you heard? That good friend of his from elementary school died horribly!"
"Who hasn't heard? It was huge! They didn't find him until a whole