Hypothesis

"Maybe there wasn't any underlying principle at all?"

He smacked his lips. After holding his pen poised for ages and hesitating repeatedly, he still did not write down that sentence, [Tomato sauce is plaster.], which felt deeply bizarre just to look at.

After finishing that entry, Lin Yi narrowed his eyes and pondered it over and over. Only after confirming it was more or less right did he put down his pen.

Then he reached into his trouser pocket and felt around again.

He pulled out two slips of paper. The information on these two slips was a little longer, but they were essentially no different from notes.

One slip was neatly folded. The other was neatly folded too, just a little creased.

Lin Yi gave them a quick look to refresh his memory.

He looked at the second entry on the first slip, lost in thought.

[There seems to be something wrong with the Head Teacher, but I can't say what.

Be careful around the Head Teacher. Her eyes turn yellow.]

He remembered that the Head Teacher had come into contact with food containing tomato sauce. Regardless of whether she had eaten it, she had at least touched it.

"Golden-yellow eyes, golden eyes... tsk!"

"Could eating food containing tomato sauce turn your eyes gold?"

"What... principle is that supposed to follow?" He shook his head at the thought. Tomato sauce turning into plaster in sunlight was already absurd enough. Rather than ponder the principle behind it, he might as well accept the concept.

"Come to think of it... I actually accepted the concept that 'tomato sauce turns into plaster' without even realizing it?!"

At that thought, Lin Yi gave a violent shudder.

The instant he thought about accepting the concept that "tomato sauce turns into plaster," a terrifying flash of inspiration tore through his mind like thunder splitting the night sky.

This inspiration had something to do with "cognition," but it was very vague to him.

Yet it vanished in an instant. He wanted to catch hold of it, but simply couldn't!

He scratched his head in frustration, then propped up his chin, rhythmically tapping his pen against the paper with his other hand.

He glanced thoughtfully at the other, heavily creased sheet of paper.

He had taken this sheet from the Head Teacher's office earlier. It was covered in the same sentence, written in different styles of handwriting: [I am the Head Teacher].

He unfolded and smoothed out the sheet, then placed the two together.

His gaze moved back and forth between the two slips.

He now had a third clue in mind-the trash can in the Head Teacher's office contained food with tomato ingredients, possibly tomato meat sauce pasta.

If he put these three clues together, could he find anything useful?

Golden eyes, tomato meat sauce pasta, [I am the Head Teacher]...

"'I am the Head Teacher,' 'I am the Head Teacher,' 'I am the Head Teacher'..."

He muttered the sentence over and over.

Wei Liang noticed him beside him and couldn't help nudging him with his elbow. "Lao Lin, what are you muttering about? What do you mean, you're the Head Teacher? You're not losing it, are you? Aren't you a student?"

His train of thought interrupted, Lin Yi looked at Wei Liang. "Oh, I know I'm a student. I was just thinking something through!"

"Wait...!!"

"I'm a student? I'm a student..."

"I... am a student!"

Something suddenly occurred to Lin Yi, and he muttered it one word at a time: "I. Am. A. Student."

His gaze landed on [I am the Head Teacher].

"'I am a student'..." Those were a student's words.

"'I am the Head Teacher'..." Those were the Head Teacher's words.

Looking at it from this angle, Lin Yi instantly felt as though the clouds had parted to reveal a clear sky.

"Hey, hey, Lao Lin, are you really okay?" Wei Liang looked at him worriedly. Lin Yi had been acting strange this whole time.

Lin Yi looked at him happily and smiled. "I'm fine, I'm fine! Thanks to you, I've thought of something. Take a break. Let me sort this out..."

With that, he stopped paying attention to Wei Liang and focused directly on the sheet bearing [I am the Head Teacher].

There was one point he had kept forgetting to consider.

Some of the handwriting on the paper was neat, some was messy, and some had simply become wild blotches of blue ink.

The Student Rules described how to handle certain special situations: silently tell yourself your name and student number. Then did the Head Teacher also have "Head Teacher Rules"?

And did the Head Teacher Rules include some kind of emergency that required the Head Teacher to keep writing "[I am the Head Teacher]" on paper when she encountered it?

"Is it 'firm resolve,' being certain that she is the 'Head Teacher'?" he murmured.

"Just like..."

"Just like going to the toilet last night. Only by firmly believing that Group B Class 1 was ahead, and that the toilet was ahead of Group B Class 1, would there be a toilet ahead?"

"Only by believing with absolute conviction that she's the Head Teacher can the Head Teacher be the Head Teacher?"

"And tomato sauce... distorts that will?"

Lin Yi remembered something else.

When he obtained his Student ID, the Head Teacher had told him that her students were those who possessed a "Student ID," and that his Head Teacher was the person wearing "Head Teacher-B2-039" on her chest.

"So possessing 'identification' is the physical condition for establishing your identity, while 'unwavering conviction' is the psychological condition?"

"And apparently, having 'identification' alone isn't enough. You need 'will' too!"

"That's why the Student Rules mentioned that losing your Student ID is a very troublesome matter!"

"By the same token, if the Head Teacher loses her 'identification' or her 'conviction' in her identity... that would also be very troublesome!"

Lin Yi narrowed his eyes and recalled the scene in the Teachers' Office.

The stopped grandfather clock...

The dim corners...

An environment that looked incredibly tidy at first glance, but actually had crumpled paper stuffed all through the sofa and floor gaps, and a drawer full of disorganized documents...

Lin Yi suddenly linked the office to the Head Teacher...

"Could the state of the Teachers' Office... reflect her own state?"

"Nothing wrong on the surface, but actually a complete mess?"

The kind of confusion that occurred in the mind.

"Assuming all the guesses above hold true... then the Head Teacher also needs to firmly believe she's the Head Teacher. So if her 'will' isn't strong enough, then she... what would she become?"

Lin Yi thought of the golden eyes, the tomato sauce, the plaster-like substance on the teaching platform, and...

"Stockings..."

"Hmm?!" Wei Liang's ears twitched. "Stockings? What stockings?"

As though an arrow had struck him right in his fetish, he jolted awake from his nap, his hawklike gaze sweeping the surroundings.

Then he heard Lin Yi muttering, "The Head Teacher's stockings were torn. Could there be any information in that..."

The eyebrows beneath Wei Liang's baseball cap suddenly quirked up like Zeng X-xian's.

He couldn't help saying, "A woman would definitely change her stockings if they were torn, unless she didn't know... but based on my experience, those black stockings looked like they'd been scuffed through."

Wei Liang's voice reached Lin Yi's ears, pulling his thoughts back a little.

"Scuffed through?" he mused.

Wei Liang nodded confidently. "From very intense friction. Not something as simple as a snip with scissors or a knife. It looked like a tear that had been singed afterward."

"With an ordinary tear, the threads would contract around the gap, forming an oval area. But the Head Teacher's stockings didn't have loose threads, and it didn't look like a section had been cut out..."

Lin Yi looked at Wei Liang in surprise. "Haven't you never touched stockings wearing legs-no, legs wearing stockings? How have you studied this so thoroughly?"

Wei Liang blushed. "You don't have to eat pork to know what a pig looks like! Do you think my three terabytes of 'postgraduate exam study materials' are fake?"

Lin Yi suddenly sat up straight, filled with respect for Wei Liang.

"Speaking of which, I sent you the magnet link for that latest anime. Have you watched it?" Wei Liang suddenly remembered and lowered his voice.

Lin Yi's mouth twitched. "Hey, I'm thinking about something serious!" he said sternly.

"What I'm talking about is serious!" Wei Liang pressed.

"I mean the stockings!"

"Haven't we been talking about stockings this whole time?"

"I... I'm not talking about that kind of..."

"I get it, I get it, I get it... I'll help you ask for her contact details after the trial class. Sure, one's the trial class teacher and the other's a trial class student, but a wonderful little after-school scenario would still be quite..."

"Get lost! Keep your fantasies to yourself!" Lin Yi held his forehead as the Head Teacher's long, shapely, straight legs in black stockings surfaced in his mind...

"That tear... really didn't look snagged or slashed... it looked more like she'd been running too fast, accidentally brushed against some rough corner, and worn it through..."

"But... did she need to run? Even if she did, the skin on her legs didn't seem scraped..."

"Am I approaching this from the wrong direction?"

He thought it over carefully.

He felt the direction might be right, because the Head Teacher was clearly injured. She walked with a limp.

"She got hurt overnight?"

"Ran into a wall while running at night?"

"Why go running when the fog was so thick last night? Besides, strange things were wandering outside. How dangerous..."

"They weren't just wandering outside. They even came into the classroom!"

Lin Yi thought again of that unknown creature standing at the teaching platform, of how it had been struck by iron chains and then dragged out of the classroom.

"Wait...!!"

When he thought of that scene, another flash of inspiration suddenly struck him. Countless fragments of information collided in his mind, seemingly about to piece together an enormous secret.

The inspiration flickered, like a moth flying into a flame, about to vanish.

Countless pieces of information flashed through Lin Yi's eyes, pieces of the puzzle constantly shifting and rearranging.

Just as that spark was about to go out, he reached out and caught it.

A terrifying conjecture that defied common sense surfaced in his mind.

Merely thinking of it made his face pale slightly and his breathing quicken.

He swallowed and began constructing a framework for his reasoning.

Opening his little notebook, he used symbols only he could understand to record a piece of information:

"Assuming..." His hand began trembling uncontrollably, and then he wrote down a piece of information:

"Assuming the unknown creature that entered the classroom last night was the Head Teacher."

Merely writing that down made the pen in his hand feel as though it weighed a thousand pounds.

He stared fixedly at what he had written, unable to believe this was a hypothesis his own mind had produced.

He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and began working backward:

"Then... the Head Teacher was entangled in the Security Guard's iron chains and dragged off the teaching platform..."

The Security Guard swung his iron chains extremely fast. As they lashed out, they were like a belt running at high speed.

So what if it hadn't been the Head Teacher moving and rubbing her stockings against something, but... the iron chains moving at high speed and rubbing against her stockings?

The iron chains had scuffed through the stockings, leaving a tear that looked as though it had been scorched.

"Then the Security Guard dragged the Head Teacher tumbling down the steps. The two grappled, and in the end, the Head Teacher was injured and left limping..."

As for the idea that the Head Teacher and the Security Guard had fought, although there was an enormous disparity between them, Lin Yi considered that the Head Teacher's eyes shone with the same golden light as the Security Guard's, and provisionally assumed they were similar to some extent.

"Following that reasoning, if I ignore the disparity in fighting strength, it does... just barely seem to fit."

"And... once the Head Teacher no longer remembers she's the Head Teacher, who knows what she might do?"

"And if it really was the Head Teacher who came in... then, before leaving, the Head Teacher turned the lock so many times not to keep someone inside the classroom from picking it and leaving, but to..."

"Keep herself from returning to the classroom after she became 'abnormal'?!"

The pen in Lin Yi's hand fell onto the desktop with a clack. He didn't know what the truth actually was, but having reasoned this far, he felt a chilling atmosphere envelop him.

He had frightened himself.

But he still had to grit his teeth and keep reasoning...

"Assuming the Head Teacher becomes abnormal after losing her 'will,' then if she gets injured, would she bleed... tomato sauce?"

He thought of how the Green Apron Chef had bled tomato sauce after Wei Liang stepped on him.

"And tomato sauce turns into a white, plaster-like substance in sunlight..."

"So if the hypothesis holds, the plaster-like substance at the teaching platform was tomato sauce that flowed out after the Security Guard injured the Head Teacher with his iron chains, then transformed when sunlight fell on it?"

At that thought, he silently rose from his seat and headed toward the classroom door.

"Hey, Lao Lin, it's still early. Going to the Gymnasium already?" Wei Liang called behind him.

"No, just getting some air," Lin Yi replied, turning back.

Then, his mind heavy with concerns, he walked down the steps to the teaching platform.

The plaster-like substance was still on the floor, very conspicuous.

He thought for a moment, then walked to the classroom doorway.

From the doorway, the teaching platform was visible almost at a glance. With just a little attention, one could see the plaster-like substance there.

"From the Head Teacher's perspective, there's no way she wouldn't notice it, unless... she chose to ignore it."

Lin Yi looked at the classroom door.

Something suddenly occurred to him. He lifted the handle and opened the door, then went around to the side facing the corridor.

He lowered his head to look at the door handle.

A little white powder clung to it.

There was white powder around the keyhole too. Not only was it there, but a little more trickled out from time to time.

He took out a napkin and held it against the keyhole.

Before long, something flowed from deep inside the keyhole and soaked into the napkin where it touched.

A little dark-red, viscous substance appeared on the napkin.

Tomato sauce.

Thanks to reader "Medieval Rabbit" for the tip!! Sob, sob, my mighty Rabbit!!