Chapter 120
At dawn, the two of them walked out of the public toilet and went straight to the delivery lockers.
Lin Yi glanced at the mail room. They’d arrived very early and the door of the mail room was still closed. It seemed that the mail room auntie wasn’t up yet.
“Quickly,” Lin Yi said.
Cheng Yang became nervous. “O-… okay.”
They looked through the delivery lockers they hadn’t opened last night. But after searching the remaining lockers, they still didn’t find the package.
Cheng Yang’s face suddenly turned pale. “Could it…could it be…”
Lin Yi was silent for a moment and said, “Probably not.”
They’d rushed here from the toilet as soon as first ray of light appeared. The others wouldn’t have had time to take the package away.
The package was gone and that meant it had been tampered with last night.
If so, there were two possibilities.
Either Xia Hui put the package in some place other than the delivery lockers or those things that chased them last night moved the package.
Lin Yi quickly rejected the first possibility. Baoxiang Middle School only had one teaching building, one road and one dormitory. Even if Xia Hui really wanted to transfer the package, it would be difficult to find some other place. The only viable hiding place was the delivery lockers.
Thus the answer came out; those things must have moved the package.
Lin Yi stared at the rows of delivery lockers in front of him. Finally, his eyes fell on locker no. 101.
He squatted down and approached the door of locker no. 101.
All these delivery lockers looked old and dilapidated. A layer of dirt even covered their surfaces. Now thanks to this dirt, Lin Yi was able to make out numerous fresh scratches on the surface of locker no. 101.
We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection. If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.
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Olc Tl atbeuta obg j wbwfca, atfc gjlrfv tlr tfjv jcv jrxfv Jtfcu Tjcu. “Jtfcu Tjcu Wlbcu, vb atfrf rmgjamtfr ibbx ilxf atfs kfgf wjvf ys mja mijkr?”
Cheng Yang quickly knelt down and immediately confirmed after taking a look, “It’s a cat.”
Cheng Yang explained to Lin Yi, “My mother is very fond of cats and she has several cats at home. Every time I try to pet one, it would claw at me. These scratches are almost identical to the scratches on my body.”
At this point, Cheng Yang suddenly slapped his knee. “Those were cats chasing us last night, wasn’t it?”
Cats are very fast. They have thick pads on the bottom of their feet, so they don’t make much noise when walking. Their entire skeletal structure is held together by strong and flexible ligaments, and their limbs are slender and strong, supporting a narrow thorax and a highly flexible spine.
Because a cat’s shoulder blades are not connected to the main frame, this allows them to remain highly flexible and nimble while traveling at any speed.
Lin Yi pursed his lips, “A black cat.”
Cheng Yang was momentarily stunned, then turned to look at the scratches on the door. “You can tell the color of the cat from these? What about the breed of the cat?”
Lin Yi said, “No.”
Some all black cats are difficult to spot with the naked eye even while just standing in front of a TV with the screen turned off during the day, let alone at night. Lin Yi had found out the reason why he wasn’t able to spot anything last night. However, he didn’t bother explaining it to Cheng Yang. He only answered Cheng Yang’s question about the cat breed.
“A Chinese pastoral cat.” Lin Yi said.
Cheng Yang looked at the scratches on the locker door; feeling like an absolute good-for-nothing. “Fuck, how… how can you tell?”
Lin Yi said, “In terms of combat effectiveness, Chinese pastoral cats generally rank among the highest. ”
Thus, the scratches were somewhat deep and smooth.
The breed and color of the cat was not particularly important at this time. Lin Yi reached out and opened locker no. 101 again. He and Cheng Yang had their knees bent, squatting in front of locker no. 101, so that they were very close to it. This time, they smelled something they hadn’t when they’d opened locker no. 101 before.
The lingering smell of the package.
Xia Hui had put the package in locker No. 101 last night.
Xia Hui’s transfer of the package to locker no. 101 was also in line with Lin Yi’s guess. Locker no. 101 was at the bottom left of the locker cabinet. You would need to squat to look at it or take out any package, so it was less likely to attract attention. Moreover, it was to a diagonal to Xia Hui’s locker no. 204 and the farthest possible locker.
Lin Yi looked at the empty locker. He then began to look around inside.
Cheng Yang said, “What are you looking for?”
He also wanted to help.
Lin Yi said, “I’m trying to see if there are any remnants of the package.”
The smell of the package wasn’t coming from the package itself, but from what was in it. To be precise, it wasn’t the box of the package that attracted these black cats, but the contents of the package.
Even if the black cats scratched open locker no. 101 and took out the package, they would have continued on to tear the package until the contents of the package was revealed. Then, there should be fragments of the package lying around.
Sure enough, Lin Yi found some carton fragments at the bottom right side of the locker cabinet.
He stood up and walked over to pick up the pieces of carton. He brought them to the tip of his nose and sniffed them gently.
The smell that poured into his nose confirmed that these fragments came from the package that had appeared in the delivery locker. And Lin Yi discovered something else – there was blood on the inner side of the carton fragments.
Cheng Yang came over. He’d been asking Lin Yi so many questions since last night that he was starting to feel embarrassed.
But there was no other way, his IQ simply couldn’t keep up.
Cheng Yang sheepishly rubbed the back of his head. “Lin Yi Xiong, what are we going to do now?”
Lin Yi put down the fragments and looked at the mail room.
He saw that the light in the mail room had now turned on. The mail room auntie was awake.
It was a mail room, not the duty room or the dorm manager’s room. If they stay loitering around the delivery lockers for too long, the mail room auntie might suspect them of attempting to steal other people’s packages.
“Let’s check in on Xia Hui.” Lin Yi said.
Cheng Yang: “…Okay.”
Neither of them felt very optimistic about Xia Hui’s situation, but they still knocked on room 204’s door.
After knocking several times, there was still no sound of movement from inside.
Cheng Yang and Lin Yi looked at each other. Cheng Yang shouted, “Xia Hui, open the door, it’s me.”
Dorm room 204 remained quiet. No one responded to Cheng Yang’s call and no one came to open the door for them.
Now, Lin Yi was even more sure that Xia Hui had probably encountered something unexpected.
Lin Yi glanced at the door lock. The lock was a Class A lock with only a row of teeth in it’s barrel. However, Lin Yi didn’t have any tools at hand that could open the lock. He thought for a moment and said, “Through the window.”
This dormitory was built many years ago and each floor wasn’t very tall. Standing in the dormitory, with Lin Yi’s height, he felt a little cramped. He thought to himself that had Qin Zhou come too, he would feel even more irritatingly cramped.
Before climbing through the window, Lin Yi made a trip to the public toilet on the first floor. This was the only toilet in the entire dorm.
He had just touched that piece of cardboard and the smell had gotten on his hands. If he didn’t wash away the smell, it might make the room smell as well when he returned.
After washing their hands, Lin Yi and Cheng Yang went to Cheng Yang’s room 203. Room 204 was right next door. They could easily climb out of the window and into Xia Hui’s room.
Lin Yi took the lead and crawled out, followed closely by Cheng Yang.
Stepping on the palm-wide window sill, Lin Yi carefully made his way to room 204. Upon reaching room 204’s window, Lin Yi looked up and his heart skipped a beat.
Next to him, Cheng Yang also saw the scene in room 204. He let out an ‘Oh!’. His legs went weak and he slipped, falling directly from the second floor.
Ah rip, at least its only the second floor.
Did that Xiao Hui scratched to death by the cat,hm? Mutilated to ☠️?
I’m getting the feeling that this author doesn’t particularly like cats.
i love cats and i don’t like what my hypothesis on the box’s content is…
I don’t particularly like cats and I only have dogs on my house so I don’t really get what you guys might have thought of😅
Is it like a catnip or smthg?
It is probably cat’s corpse. That is why the black cat is chasing after the one who got the package. It wants it’s body back.
Just my theory though. I am also a dog lover (see my profile picture) but from what I know, many culture put black cat as bad luck which I think is rubbish. There is even an urban legend about people adopting black cat from shelter during October so you know, “sacrifice” stuff on Halloween.
Just my 2 cent, I probably wrong but as soon as I read black cat this pop out in my mind.
There’s also some Shrodinger’s cat symbolism at play, with the cat in the box being what drew them into the world and the question of the Shrodinger thought experiment being “is the cat in the box alive or dead?”
This author always has me so nervous when characters look through doors or windows.
Don’t tell me his intestines were all eaten by the cat !!! 😱😨