Just as Heyue was losing consciousness, a group of people in white coats rushed into her inverted field of vision.
Startled by the scene, someone screamed for Wang Xiuya to let go. Several sturdy male orderlies immediately grabbed Wang Xiuya by the arms and pulled her away from Heyue, while the nurse at the back had already prepared a sedative for her.
Heyue hadn't expected that a temporary lack of oxygen to her brain would actually trigger a portion of her memories.
Lying on the floor, she grabbed a nurse by the ankle and asked breathlessly, "Is it... currently... 2012?"
"Yes. You aren't a patient here too, are you? You look like a new face..."
Heyue remembered. In 2012, she, Lin Xialing, and Luo Yilan had come to a psychiatric hospital to volunteer for a school practical activity!
"Would you like to go to the clinic for a checkup?" The nurse bent down to check on Heyue.
Heyue shook her head, declining the kind offer. She scrambled excitedly to her feet. Her legs felt as if she were stepping on cotton, and she stumbled every few steps, yet she grabbed blindly and rushed downstairs regardless.
Don't let it be a dream. This cannot be a dream.
Relying on her memory, Heyue ran forward. Right at a fork in the road, she caught sight of two familiar figures rushing toward her simultaneously.
"Yue, babe!"
"Xiaohe!"
Right at the center of the intersection, everyone stopped in their tracks.
Out of breath from running, they looked at each other, too rushed to get a single word out.
Finally, Luo Yilan caught her breath and grabbed Heyue's hand. "Xiaohe, we heard a patient was acting up over by your side. Are you alright?"
Lin Xialing was a person of action, having already pulled Heyue around to inspect her from top to bottom. "Is your neck..."
Before she could finish, Heyue had already thrown herself into their arms.
Ten years.
To an eighteen-year-old Lin Xialing and Luo Yilan, the three of them were together almost every single day, but to Heyue, she hadn't seen them in ten years.
"Xiaohe, what's wrong?" Luo Yilan patted her back, her face full of worry. "Were you scared?"
Tears fell uncontrollably from Heyue's eyes as she sobbed, "I thought... I would never see you two again."Hearing Heyue say this, Lin Xialing also stepped forward and wrapped her arms around both of them, softly comforting Heyue: "Little Yue, with me around, I will never let anyone bully you again!"
Lin Xialing was unexpectedly serious, which caused Luo Yilan to pinch her ear: "You really think you're a martial arts heroine! Aside from Louis Cha, could you please read a little more of your math textbook?"
"Have you ever seen a character in Louis Cha who also knows quadratic equations with one unknown?" Lin Xialing talked back, unconvinced.
Knowing they were deliberately trying to make her laugh, Heyue put on a bright, cooperative smile.
Looking past their shoulders at the azure sky, she thought.
Perhaps this was the solution her thirty-eight-year-old self had spoken of: a dead end that could be resolved by starting all over again.
Starting over, she would not let the tragedy of the three of them happen again. If someone had to kill Chen Song, she would be the one to do it!
Senior year of high school seemed to have no summer vacation; classes let out late and resumed early.
In the scorching summer heat, everyone sat in the classroom feeling drowsy. Lin Xialing had already propped up her head and gone off to dreamland, yet she still managed to keep her back straight as if pretending to listen to the lecture. Luo Yilan wasn't sleeping; she was diligently working through problem sets as usual, except she was working on a math test during history class.
Li Li, the history teacher, pushed up his glasses and muttered quietly, "I told them not to give me the first class in the afternoon."
Despite grumbling like that, he still had to maintain his dignity as a teacher!
Li Li rolled up his textbook, scanned the room, and noticed that besides Luo Yilan, hardly anyone in the class was awake. Everyone was propping up their heads and nodding off like pecking chicks, and the bolder ones were lying flat on their desks, even using a book to cover their heads because the sun was too bright.
And it wasn't even a history book!
This was the last straw! Just as Li Li was about to flare up, his gaze shifted, and he actually saw someone among the poor students in the back row furiously writing away.
Well, well, well! You truly should never underestimate any student; the drive to improve is always more important than grades!Sitting among the underachieving students, Heyue had no inkling of what was going through Li Li's mind up on the platform. She was earnestly writing down one question after another on her paper: Why would the thirty-eight-year-old Heyue want to kill her? Why had she returned to this point ten years in the past? Was all of this engineered by Dahe? Yet she had never met Wang Xiuya in her previous life; why was she the very first person she encountered this time? Could there be some connection between Wang Xiuya and herself?
She listed the questions one by one, then diligently tried to find a reasonable explanation for each.
Heyue's pen scratched and doodled across the paper: The thirty-eight-year-old Heyue had deliberately come from the future. Her injuries did not look fake, and the choked sobs and tears when she spoke to her had been utterly sincere. It stood to reason that Dahe genuinely wanted to help her break free from Jiang Shaoming.
Dahe had also used Luo Yilan's impending marriage to lure her back to Qucheng. Coupled with the eerie blood-red moon that night, it felt as though Dahe had deliberately orchestrated a specific time and place simply to tear open a time loop and send her back.
Writing up to this point, Heyue thought: Perhaps this really was a chance to start over and alter her destiny.
If so, the second question could be explained: the futures of three people—Heyue, Lin Xialing, and Luo Yilan—had all been altered by a single man, Chen Song.
Heyue glanced at the calendar hanging on the wall: August 26th. In the latter half of this year, Luo Yilan would cross paths with Chen Song, become the target of his frantic harassment, and have one of her eyes gouged out by him alive.
At this thought, Heyue instinctively tightened her grip on her pen. She must never let Chen Song meet Luoluo. If she could change this single event, perhaps destiny itself would be rewritten.
Her pen finally stopped at the three characters *Wang Xiuya*, and Heyue truly could not come up with a reason. In her past life, she had never even heard of this person, and what did the affairs of the three of them have to do with Wang Xiuya?
The encounter with Wang Xiuya had never happened in her previous life. She remembered that she had been in a rush at the time and had paid no attention whatsoever to any singing.
Yet, was it really just a chance encounter? Or was it a deliberate arrangement of fate?
Just as Heyue's brows furrowed tighter and tighter, a voice dripping with bitter disappointment sounded from above her head: "Heyue, what are you doing to my history test paper?"
Heyue snapped her head up and met Li Li's expression of boundless grief and indignation. What pained him so, however, was the test paper that Heyue had scribbled all over.
He had thought that his student, under his tireless guidance, had finally developed an interest in history. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected this—he really shouldn't have thought so highly of himself!
Seeing Li Li's exaggerated reaction, Heyue finally realized that the piece of paper she had pulled out at random was actually the initial diagnostic exam. Her brain short-circuited for a moment, and she could only offer a dry, awkward smile: "Teacher..."
"What on earth are you scribbling all this nonsense for?!" Li Li reached out to snatch the paper away. "Every single one of these questions is one I custom-crafted specifically for the college entrance examination!"
Li Li was heartbroken to the core, but seeing the test paper filled with her deepest secrets, Heyue felt her heart leap into her throat. Watching the history teacher's hand draw closer and closer, she suddenly sprang to his feet: "Teacher Li, I'm sorry!"
Before Li Li could recover from the fright, Heyue balled the test paper up into a wad, violently shoved it straight into her mouth, and—hardly chewing it twice—swallowed it whole.
The classroom fell silent for a single second, then instantly erupted into a frenzy.
"Heyue, you're a beast!"
Knowledge really is bone-dry, after all.
Between the taste of printer ink and the rough texture of the paper, Heyue instinctively wanted to vomit the paper back up, but she managed to hold it in, keeping her mouth clamped shut as she looked at Li Li with an expression of heroic resolve.
"Heyue, you were never like this before." Shaken by Heyue's stunt, Li Li stammered.
Once he regained his senses, he immediately took a step back and waved his hands at the class to clear himself of any association: "She swallowed that all on her own, mind you."
The end-of-class bell rang on cue. Everyone sprang to their feet and swarmed toward Heyue, only for the back door to be flung open with a loud bang, cutting off their clamor.
They all turned their heads in unison, fell abruptly silent, and scrambled back to their seats in a flash. Even Luo Yilan and Lin Xialing, who had wanted to hand over a bottle of water, retreated to their seats with deeply awkward postures.
In truth, there was no need to look to know who it was. The only person capable of keeping everyone this well-behaved was their head teacher, Zhou Wenhe.