Lin Yi looked at the words on the Notice Board, feeling as though he recognized every one of them individually, yet could not understand them together.
It was like doing some strange reading comprehension exercise, with the questions written in another country's language.
"There is one and only one path to the Gymnasium...?"
He leaned half his head past the Notice Board and looked toward the Gymnasium.
Excluding the stretch they had already walked before reaching the Notice Board, there was indeed one and only one path from the board to the Gymnasium. There were streetlamps along it, too; no path without streetlamps existed at all.
"If the path doesn't exist, why specifically mention it?"
"Is it because of what comes afterward?"
"If it rains on the way, you have to rush to the Gymnasium or the Teaching Building immediately..."
"That matches what the Student Rules say, too. Rain and fog count as abnormal weather, and you have to seek safety immediately when you encounter them, but..."
But [gym class is canceled if it rains.]
"Gym class is clearly canceled if it rains, yet the Notice Board lists emergency measures for encountering rain..."
"If they specifically wrote these things down, that means this situation is common and happens frequently."
He looked up at the sky. It was clear, without a single rain cloud anywhere.
He felt the conditions around him again. A gentle breeze blew; there was no strong wind, either.
"Could it be... the weather is fine when you leave the Teaching Building, but turns bad once you enter the Gymnasium's area?"
The "strong winds" that warranted a specific mention on the Notice Board might have something to do with the weather...
"It's a little strange, but... good weather like this is rare. I'll stop speculating about that for now."
He shook his head, then read over the Notice Board several more times. Only after making sure he remembered all the emergencies clearly did he prepare to leave.
Wei Liang had already been waiting beside him for ages.
He's been here once before, after all. Liangzi has clearly learned the rules by heart.
As Lin Yi marveled inwardly, he noticed that Wei Liang was staring nonstop at the streetlamp poles along the path, as though trying to sear their locations into his eyes.
"Liangzi, let's go!" Lin Yi prompted.
"Let's go, let's go!" Wei Liang said. "Oh, right, have you memorized everything? We're short on time. If you haven't, it's not-"
"I've memorized it," Lin Yi interrupted.
The corner of Wei Liang's mouth twitched, and he swallowed the words, "If you haven't, that's fine. I've got a special trick."
Instead, he muttered, "Uh... you memorized something this convoluted?"
"Huh?" Lin Yi froze. "Didn't you?"
Wei Liang shook his head. "Memorize it, my ass."
"Wha...?"
"It's too convoluted." Wei Liang waved a hand. "You really only need a simple understanding of it. Listen, this entire board of text boils down to just one thing you need to do."
"Huh? One thing?" Lin Yi was astonished.
All this time, he had thought Wei Liang was on the giving-up level, only to discover that Wei Liang had climbed many levels above him.
Holy shit!
Chang Wei, and you still claim you don't know martial arts?!
Seeing Lin Yi's astonishment, Wei Liang immediately grew smug and launched into an expansive explanation. "Look at this whole board covered in rules. It seems to cover everything, but in reality, we only need to look at this one."
He pointed at rule four, tapping emphatically on "hold tightly to this streetlamp."
"As soon as it rains, we don't do anything else. Forget the Teaching Building, the Gymnasium, all of it. We simply give up looking! We go straight to a streetlamp pole, hug it, and idle there until a Security Guard or the Gym Teacher comes."
"Well..." Lin Yi was stunned. This bastard's approach sounded ridiculous, but... it didn't seem unworkable?
"Am I right?" Wei Liang asked smugly.
Lin Yi was still dazed. Wei Liang's approach effectively skipped the first three options and "actively" chose the fourth.
In other words, only two situations existed in Wei Liang's world:
First, the weather was good, and he naturally reached the Gymnasium;
Second, the weather was bad, and he idled under the tower while requesting jungle support.
He had not condensed several options into one. He had simply crossed out every option except idling.
Two techniques that fundamentally chose giving up.
Lin Yi looked at Wei Liang, and admiration welled up within him.
He slowly raised a thumb and uttered one word: "Brilliant."
"But... if we really encounter the second situation, wouldn't it be windy and rainy? Are you sure hugging a streetlamp pole won't leave you soaked to the skin?" He raised the fatal question.
Before he had even finished speaking, Wei Liang began fumbling around in the pocket at his crotch for ages, then pulled out something resembling a plastic bag scrunched into a small ball.
"I brought a raincoat."
"Oh, right..." He reached into his back pocket and rummaged around again, then produced another little plastic ball and offered it to Lin Yi. "I prepared one for you, too."
"Pick one?"
Lin Yi stared almost blankly at the raincoats in his hands. He had never imagined this guy had actually come prepared.
"Stop spacing out. Come on, let's go!" Wei Liang stuffed a raincoat into Lin Yi's hands and pointed at the classmates filing onto the path around them. "Look, they're all heading out. It's getting late. Let's hurry!"
"Come on, come on!"
Urging him along, Wei Liang stepped past the Notice Board.
Helplessly, Lin Yi put away the raincoat and hurried after him.
As he passed the Notice Board, something occurred to him, and he glanced down at his watch to note the time.
14:14.
May 7, X023, 14:15.
Lin Yi and Wei Liang walked together along the path to the Gymnasium, with quite a few classmates traveling alongside them.
Keeping the Notice Board's warnings firmly in mind, Lin Yi checked the streetlamp numbers along the path as he walked.
After walking like this for two minutes, Lin Yi suddenly sniffed.
"Liangzi," he said quietly, "do you smell something?"
Wei Liang kept walking forward as though he had not heard him.
"Hm?" Lin Yi frowned instinctively, hurried over, and tapped Wei Liang's shoulder. "Liangzi!"
Wei Liang started and turned around in confusion. "What's wrong?"
"I asked if you smelled anything," Lin Yi said. "Also, did you hear me calling you just now?"
"You called me?" Wei Liang pointed at his own nose. "I probably wasn't paying attention. Anyway, what smell? Why don't I smell anything?"
"You don't smell it..." Lin Yi suddenly remembered how he had been unable to see the Teaching Building earlier. After hesitating, he said, "Then would it be better if I didn't tell you?"
Wei Liang froze briefly, and his expression suddenly grew serious.
He narrowed his eyes and studied Lin Yi for a while, then handed him the other raincoat as well.
Just as Lin Yi was wondering whether there was some deeper significance to this, Wei Liang ventured cautiously, "Why don't you sniff it... could it be the smell of the raincoats? Considering where they were, they did absorb a little of the atmosphere..."
Lin Yi: "..."
The mood suddenly became very strange. Lin Yi's hand shook, and he wanted nothing more than to stuff the raincoat into Wei Liang's mouth.
"Piss off!" he snapped.
Wei Liang ducked his head, sheepishly took back the raincoat, and continued toward the Gymnasium.
Lin Yi glanced at the raincoat in his hand and hesitated for a moment, but ultimately could not bring himself to force himself to sniff it.
He closed his eyes, focused on his sense of smell, and drew a deep breath...
Air slipped into his nostrils like smoke, traveled down his airways into his lungs, circulated through them, then slowly flowed out between his lips...
"There really is a smell..."
He caught a faint fishy odor mixed with a thin trace of putrid stench.
It was as though someone upwind had smacked a patch of sludge with a shovel, sending the smell of dead fish and shrimp mixed with rotten mud drifting down into his nostrils.
He opened his eyes, feeling somewhat puzzled.
Just then, he heard leaves rustling in the woods. Gust after gust swept over the treetops, and the sound of surging leaves continued without end.
The wind had picked up.
According to the Notice Board's instructions, this was normal and no cause for alarm.
Yet as the wind struck his face, Lin Yi could smell nothing related to "trees."
There was no earthy scent or fragrance of flowers and grass in the wind, only an increasingly strong fishy stench.
It smelled like rotten fish and shrimp that had died baking in the sun, then been tossed into sludge and stirred around.
"Whoosh-"
"Whoosh-"
"Whoosh-"
The wind grew stronger, carrying a salty, damp yet dry breath that battered his face.
He abruptly realized that this was no ordinary wind. It was...
"Sea wind!"
"It's foul-smelling sea wind!"
That explained the smell of rotten fish and shrimp, too. Since it was sea wind, it naturally carried some scent of fish and shrimp.
It came from fish and shrimp washed ashore by the wind and waves, unable to escape before the sun baked them to death.
Lin Yi had found the answer.
But he also abruptly realized a grave problem:
"No!"
"I'm in the mountains. Where would sea wind come from?!"
He looked around and suddenly discovered that the many classmates along the long path had disappeared.
Only he remained, along with Wei Liang walking ahead of him.
"Where is everyone?! Why has everyone else disappeared?!"
"Liangzi? Liangzi! Liangzi!"
He quickened his pace to catch up with Wei Liang, but before he had run more than a few steps, the wind around him intensified at a visibly rapid rate.
"Whoosh... whoosh-"
The gale raged like an army charging straight at Lin Yi, pushing against him and preventing him from advancing.
Leaves rattled in the woods like countless people giving strained, chilling laughs.
"The wind! It's picking up!!"
He suddenly sensed that the light around him had dimmed at some unknown point, and he jerked his head up toward the sky.
The cloud beside the mountain had drifted overhead without him noticing!
"Was it blown here by the wind?"
"Or...?!"
He glanced down at his watch.
14:18.
"One minute. Only one minute has passed!"
The sky had darkened in just one minute?!
"Impossible! Absolutely impossible!"
"Liangzi... Liangzi! Liangzi!!!" Lin Yi drew a deep breath, summoned all his strength, and ran into the gale toward Wei Liang's retreating figure.
Wei Liang walked through the gale as though on level ground.
It seemed as though the gale had descended upon Lin Yi alone.
Lin Yi had no attention to spare for that. He sensed that something had gone wrong, but did not know what.
"Whoosh-"
"Whoooosh-"
All Lin Yi could hear was the wind and the leaves. Foul-smelling sea wind poured into his lungs through his mouth and nose in great gulps, creating an oppressive sensation of near suffocation.
He pushed into the gale, alternating between his shod foot and his bare foot, closing the distance to Wei Liang one step at a time.
Wei Liang truly seemed to have suddenly become immune to the gale. Lin Yi did not know which of them had something wrong with him.
"Liangzi!"
He caught up to Wei Liang with difficulty, clenched his teeth, and laboriously stretched out a hand to tap his shoulder.
Wei Liang's body was extremely stiff. Touching him felt like touching a hard rock.
Lin Yi froze.
Wei Liang suddenly stopped as well.
Then he slowly turned around with a stiff movement, like an enormous eraser being twisted by a pair of invisible hands.
An unfamiliar face appeared on "Wei Liang's" face, entering Lin Yi's sight.
Little Genius.
"?!"
Lin Yi's pupils shook. His footing faltered, his body swayed, and he stumbled backward through the gale, rolled twice, and landed on his backside.
The person before him who should have been "Wei Liang" had turned into Little Genius wearing Wei Liang's clothes the instant he turned around!
More precisely, it was Little Genius's sculpture.
The sculpture of Little Genius with its face contorted, its expression frozen in intense fear and horror!
The sculpture of Little Genius that had disappeared in the Wooded Belt!
At this moment, Little Genius's sculpture faced Lin Yi, as motionless as a dead object.
Suddenly, it slowly shifted its feet, laboring toward Lin Yi like a robot running low on power.
But it could not lift its feet at all, only inch them forward with difficulty.
It laboriously extended a hand as though trying to seize Lin Yi's throat, but there was still some distance between them, and it could only reach its hand out of its sleeve.
It was a sculpted arm. As it moved, fine cracks continually spread across it, and wafer-thin fragments of plaster flaked off with a series of cracks, like peeling skin.
The plaster fragments shattered on contact with the wind, turning into countless specks of white powder that vanished without a trace.
The gale grew fiercer, and faint, muffled thunder rumbled in the sky.
"Rumble... rumble..."
A terrifying storm was gathering, and the dull thunder sounded like the sky's final cry before the tempest descended.
"Boom-crack!!"
A thunderclap tore through the storm, and a dazzling white arc of lightning flashed across the gloomy sky.
The Little Genius sculpture froze midway through its movement. Then, for some unknown reason, he slowly and stiffly turned around and continued along the path he had been following.
The wind howled, but the Little Genius sculpture remained completely unaffected.
Lin Yi suddenly realized why "Wei Liang" had looked so at ease as he walked.
Because the sculpture's surface details were fixed in place, no wind, however strong, could stir them.
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