[I am the head teacher]

But the sculpture that looked like Little Genius was already badly damaged.

The damage did not look as though someone had first made a sculpture modeled on Little Genius's corpse, then broken it.

It looked more as though some beast had gnawed Little Genius's corpse apart, and only then had someone made a sculpture of Little Genius in that state.

But... who would make a sculpture like that?!

A sculpture modeled on a corpse?

What sort of pervert would do something like that?

At that moment, despite standing in the sunlight, Lin Yi still felt a powerful chill and discomfort well up from deep within him.

The memories of last night began to assault him...

After Little Genius died, that classmate had dragged him away...

He did not know whether the classmates in the room had seen Little Genius's corpse or the other classmates' appearances, but screams had risen one after another...

Then he had evaded that classmate's hunt...

Some time later, a security guard had passed the classroom and taken away the unidentified creatures inside...

"When the classroom lights came back on, those abnormal classmates had all returned to their seats, and some of the normal classmates had disappeared too, along with Little Genius's corpse..."

"Tsk..." Lin Yi clicked his tongue, unable to figure it out.

Just as he was about to stop thinking about it for now and continue organizing the second point, Wei Liang returned with an armful of comic books.

Lin Yi glanced at him and suddenly noticed a little white powder on his shoes.

He asked, "Huh? Liangzi, how did you get plaster powder on your shoes?"

Wei Liang paused. After setting down the comic books, he looked at his feet and frowned. "Huh? That's really strange. I don't know where I stepped in it either. Hang on, let me check..."

Puzzled, he turned and retraced his steps, then came back again. "Found it, found it!"

He pointed at the floor.

"Look, there's a patch of plaster powder here. Someone spilled it and dragged it all over the floor!"

"Let me see." Lin Yi looked where Wei Liang was pointing. At some point, a faint trail of plaster powder had appeared on the steps of the Circular Lecture Hall, as though someone had walked through the classroom dragging a torn bag of plaster.

Lin Yi hurried to his feet and followed the trail of plaster powder around, finally finding its starting point-

The desk area.

Lin Yi looked toward the starting point of the plaster powder and froze as though struck by lightning, his eyes fixed on a certain spot among the desks, his pupils shrinking to pinpoints!

At the spot where he remembered Little Genius's hiding desk being, a large patch of plaster powder had appeared for some unknown reason!

Not only that, there were faint traces of plaster powder in front of and on top of the desk where he had hidden yesterday too!

The path formed by this plaster powder... is the route along which Little Genius's corpse was dragged!

He followed the trail of plaster powder with his eyes in the opposite direction. It led all the way to the lectern, and then... vanished.

That classmate took Little Genius's corpse to the lectern, and only then did it disappear!

The traces of plaster powder throughout the classroom...

The sculpture fragments in front of the lectern...

The sculpture resembling Little Genius's corpse in the Wooded Belt outside the Teaching Building...

These three clues churned madly through Lin Yi's mind. He kept feeling that there was some strong connection between them.

But it was like a spiderweb with its most crucial section hidden. No matter how he thought about it, he could not connect the clues.

Something even more important happened last night! Something that involved the truth behind this...

But I have no way of knowing, and I can't investigate it, unless... I fucking want to die.

There was a fundamental difference between discovering problems, thinking about problems, and risking one's life looking for problems.

Lin Yi did not want to die. He only wanted to figure out some of the logic of survival, then stay alive without trouble.

But the more he did so, the bigger the problems beneath it all seemed.

It was like someone walking along a road who saw a mountain on the distant horizon, only to discover upon approaching that vast ranges of mountains lay before it.

"Well? Found anything?" Wei Liang followed him over and asked.

Lin Yi glanced at him and nodded, then said, "A little, but I can't tell you."

Far from being angry, Wei Liang was delighted. "Good, don't tell me! Looks like your thoughts are flowing really well today! I'll go back to reading comics, then. I won't disturb you."

"Thinking things over in the sun really is nice." Lin Yi nodded. "Don't rush off. Wait for me!"

Lin Yi was the one sitting by the window, so Wei Liang had to let him get in and sit down first.

Lin Yi returned to his seat and glanced out the window again.

The sculpture of Little Genius was still there.

"Still there..." For some reason, seeing that the sculpture was still there made Lin Yi instinctively sigh with relief.

Then he pulled his thoughts back and began writing the second point on the paper:

"2. Something seems wrong with the head teacher, but I can't say what."

"Be careful around the head teacher. Her eyes turn yellow."

At this point, Lin Yi looked beside his hand, where there was another piece of paper, covered in creases but folded neatly.

It was the crumpled scrap he had slipped out of the Teachers' Office.

Xu Shunkang said we could think about problems during the day. I originally planned to read this paper once I got back to the Dormitory...

Lin Yi sat in his chair, warm sunlight spilling through the window onto him, as though gilding him.

He lowered his eyes to the scrap pinched between his fingertips. After some consideration, he decided to open it now after all.

I don't believe in that superstitious stuff, but with so much yang energy right now, surely it couldn't... ahem!

Lin Yi took a deep breath and carefully gripped the paper with his fingers, as though it were not a piece of paper but a parchment bearing an earth-shattering secret.

Rustle, rustle... The paper made crisp sounds as Lin Yi slowly unfolded it.

"Hm?" Lin Yi's eyebrows lifted slightly when he saw its contents.

There was no shocking secret on the paper, only one sentence scrawled repeatedly in messy blue handwriting-

[I am the head teacher.]

"I am the head teacher"? Lin Yi was immediately baffled. She wore a name badge, handled his enrollment, gave him his Student ID, told him what to watch out for, and came to the classroom in the mornings and evenings... wasn't she the head teacher?

Why write this?

And the handwriting... some of it was neat, some sloppy, and some so frenzied that it looked like clumps of blue ink. It was hard to imagine the same person had written it all...

Or rather, it was hard to imagine the head teacher's mental state as she repeatedly wrote this sentence.

But after staring at the sentence for a long time, an image suddenly surfaced in Lin Yi's mind.

In the office, the head teacher repeatedly wrote "I am the head teacher" on paper, her handwriting growing messier and messier. Finally, for some reason, she tore the paper off in a frenzy, crumpled it into balls, and threw them everywhere.

At that moment, Lin Yi thought of Wei Liang. Wei Liang's Student Number was X0230506096; he had entered the office one step before him.

"Liangzi."

He called to Wei Liang.

"Hm?" Wei Liang looked at him.

"When you first met the head teacher, did you notice anything wrong with the office?"

"Huh? What could be wrong with it?" Wei Liang asked in confusion.

Lin Yi prompted him, "For example, was it messy? Was the trash can overflowing? Were there scraps of paper on the floor? Anything like that?"

Wei Liang thought seriously for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't remember. It seemed pretty clean..."

Seeing Wei Liang's expression, which said, "I definitely couldn't be remembering wrong," Lin Yi could easily imagine him entering the Teachers' Office with his eyes lowered, keeping to himself. Even if anything had been wrong, he would have instinctively blocked it out immediately...

Besides, what Lin Yi believed even more strongly was that the moment Wei Liang entered the office, his eyes had glued themselves to her stockings...

He could not look away. Not even a little.

"So..." This note definitely hides some information, but what exactly does "I am the head teacher" mean?

Unable to make sense of it no matter how hard he thought, Lin Yi could only leave it for now. He put the note together with his notepaper, planning to pool their ideas once he returned to the Dormitory and met up with Tian Bufan and the others.

May 7, X023, Teachers' Office, Building B of the Teaching Building.

Head Teacher-B2-039 returned to the office, reached for the handle, and slowly closed the office door.

The moment the door closed, she leaned back against it, placing her entire weight on the door, then slowly slid down to sit on the floor.

"Hah... hah..."

She panted violently, her fair face turning pale, her smooth forehead covered in fine beads of sweat.

She swallowed and looked toward the Grandfather Clock against the wall.

7:59.

She tossed the folder in her hand aside, then struggled to push herself up and shuffled toward the desk on stiff legs.

"Hah..."

She found her vision somewhat blurry. Everything she saw seemed to overlap...

"Hah..."

She moved her body laboriously.

"Hah... hah..."

Crossing the space of a little over ten square meters felt like an entire lifetime.

At last, she reached the desk. Without bothering to go around to the side with the chair, she sprawled over the desktop and reached out a trembling hand to open the drawer.

She looked inside. There, in one corner of the drawer, lay a green envelope.

"Gr... green?!"

She contracted sharply, her whole body trembling.

"This is bad... this is bad..."

She looked toward the Grandfather Clock again.

8:02.

"Those few steps took me... took me three minutes?!"

She put the green envelope into the drawer, then frantically reached inside and pulled out a stack of white paper. Taking a pen from her pocket, she yanked off the cap and threw it straight aside, then gripped the pen tightly!

She lowered her head to look at the head teacher badge on her chest, took a deep breath, then clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut. As she tried to steady herself, she began repeating silently:

I am the head teacher!

I am the head teacher!

I am the head teacher...

Her eyes snapped open, her golden irises as brilliant as the sun. Gripping the pen tightly, she scribbled ceaselessly across the paper with a trembling hand and frenzied strokes:

I am the head teacher, I am the head teacher, I am the head teacher...

She quickly filled a sheet of paper and glanced at it.

For some reason, although she had written the words herself, she looked at them as though she had seen something terrifying. Her entire body continued trembling, the light in her eyes wavering with fear...

"No, no, no, no... it shouldn't be like this..." Gritting her teeth, she tore up the paper, crumpled it, and tossed it everywhere, then continued writing.

After an unknown length of time, the office was filled with crumpled paper, but the head teacher's breathing had become much steadier, and her handwriting much neater.

Finally, after reading the paper, she became much calmer, though a trace of panic still lingered in her eyes.

She put down the pen, then looked uneasily at the closed drawer.

She stared at the drawer for a very, very long time.

At last, she mustered her courage and slowly opened it.

In one corner of the drawer lay a blue envelope.

"Phew-"

The head teacher's brow instantly relaxed. She let out a long breath, slid off the desk, and slumped to the floor. Her hair was disheveled and her clothes untidy, but her black eyes were filled with relief.

"Thank goodness... thank goodness..."

She rested for a while and looked at the Grandfather Clock against the wall. Before she knew it, it was already 10:20. She stood, patted down her fitted business suit, then began dragging herself around to tidy the messy office.

She gathered up the crumpled paper and tossed it into the trash can.

There were two lunch boxes in the trash can. At their partly open corners, faint traces of a dark red, viscous substance clung...

May 7, X023, 11:00, Group B Class 2.

"Class is over! Time to eat!" Watching the time on the Grandfather Clock against the wall, Wei Liang raised both hands and cheered, as though he had finally won a long battle.

Lin Yi glanced at the Grandfather Clock, then at his watch, and shook his head helplessly. "Is that really necessary? Getting so excited?"

Wei Liang put away his comic book and teased, "As the saying goes, if you aren't eager to eat, there's something wrong with your brain. Besides, you've only eaten a few biscuits since yesterday evening. Aren't you hungry at all?"

Lin Yi said, "I'm just not acting as hungry as you."

"Come on, come on, let's eat!" Wei Liang got up and pulled at Lin Yi.

"All right, all right. You don't need to pull me. I can get up myself," Lin Yi said, speechless. Then he rose from his seat, not forgetting to glance at the Wooded Belt.

Once he confirmed that Little Genius's sculpture was still there, he felt considerably more at ease.

Lin Yi and Wei Liang left the classroom together, along with some other students.

If I'm lucky, maybe I can meet Young Master Tian and the others early...

In the Wooded Belt by Building 2, Group B of the Teaching Building...

As the sun's course shifted, shadows cast by the higher vegetation and the Teaching Building slowly covered the Wooded Belt.

A gust swept through, and the Wooded Belt rustled. Something white flickered in and out of sight between the leaves...

"Whoosh-whoosh-"

The wind blew in gusts.

"Rustle-rustle-"

The leaves rustled on and on.

Suddenly, a gust twisted through the trees. The bushes beside Little Genius's sculpture shook, revealing a more distinct patch of white.

It looked like a cluster of sculptures someone had hidden in the woods, their heads accidentally showing.

I'd originally expected today's update to reach the Cafeteria Rules, but things turned out a little slower than planned. In that case, the Cafeteria Rules will appear tomorrow. Please wait a little longer, everyone...

Thanks to the readers "Public-Spirited Citizen Mr. Cheng," "silent Knight," and "Ye Chenxi" for the tips!!