At 6:50 a.m., Zhang Shutong was woken up by his alarm clock.
He opened his eyes.
The ceiling was unfamiliar.
His heart suddenly skipped a beat. He lay there for a while before he realized where he was.
He had really returned to eight years ago. This wasn't a dream.
He was completely awake now.
What is the first thing a person who has returned from eight years in the future does when they wake up?
Zhang Shutong felt that it was to first look at his phone.
It wasn't necessarily because someone needed him, it was just a habit.
He squinted and entered the password. He was a little nostalgic for fingerprint unlocking. He put on his slippers while yawning and padded out of the bedroom.
He only realized there was nothing to see after he turned on the phone screen. There were no work-related messages, no entertainment apps, and he only had a few friends on QQ.
The small group of four had been chatting until past midnight.
Only then did Zhang Shutong notice that the group chat name was a very chuunibyou name.
It was called "The four."
Hmm, it seemed he was the one who came up with it.
The morning is when a person's memory is at its best. While he was washing up, he recalled how this group name came to be.
It seemed that Du Kang originally wanted to name it "Fish Nest," but Ruoping thought it was too old-fashioned and vetoed it;
Then Qingyi said they should just call it "Dragon Nest," and the four of them would each take a title:
The King of Bronze and Fire, the King of Earth and Mountain, the King of Ocean and Water, and the King of Sky and Wind. This way, all the great minds would be here, and they would be complete.
But the Four Dragon Kings were almost all dead, which was very unlucky, so Ruoping vetoed it.
In the end, he was the one who came up with the compromise name, and everyone voted for it unanimously.
He glanced at the chat history. It had already gone off-topic a long time ago. In the end, only Du Kang was sending panda head emojis in the group. Zhang Shutong felt that it was a waste of time and couldn't be bothered to scroll up and look at it, so he started to wash his face.
In the mirror was a face with clear features, a broad forehead, a straight nose bridge, and thin lips. The only flaw was that he didn't have much of an expression. Zhang Shutong had never understood why he liked to have a cold face, but after spending a night with Lu Qinglian, he suddenly understood. He tried to raise his eyebrows in the mirror. He actually had a condescending look, which made him look even more unapproachable, so he stopped.
Actually, he wasn't like this when he was a child.
Zhang Shutong looked like a girl when he was a child. His mother's favorite thing to do was to grab his face and call him "Tongtong, Tongtong." He once had a hat with a Mickey Mouse head on it, a big red hat with two ears. His mother would nod repeatedly in the fitting room of a department store. Zhang Shutong would pull on his mother's hand, his eyes glued to the Ultraman hat next to them.
But the conditions for being Ultraman were very strict. You had to believe in the light. His mother would say very seriously that he didn't meet the requirements yet and would have to wait a few more years to grow up. Zhang Shutong believed her. He waited until he was a teenager, and from then on, he never asked for her opinion when buying clothes again.
He also remembered Du Kang saying that he always liked to wear black clothes. He thought about it and realized it was true. It was more that he was so tormented as a child that he couldn't find a single bright color in his wardrobe.
Zhang Shutong felt that his mother was a very refined person. Not in a vain way, but she lived a very refined life. For example, she made him eat an egg every day, made him chew his food slowly, and made him drink warm water... These habits inadvertently left their mark on him, like a wooden stick trying to keep a sapling from growing crooked. But that wooden stick couldn't be there forever, and later, he grew crooked again.
He didn't use face wash, only soap. It was just a bit dry, nothing else. After drying his face, Zhang Shutong stared at the almond milk next to the sink for a while.
Over the years, he had always tried to find a symbolic moment that marked his transition from a boy to a man, but he felt that no single thing was convincing enough. But now, he felt he had found it. A boy would never take a second look at something that was probably "skincare." He would consider it a favor to his face to even wash it for more than a minute;
But now, he poured the almond milk into his palm, rubbed it on his face, and immediately felt that he smelled fragrant. He felt a little melancholic.
Why did he have to become like this one day?
But he still had to go to the Forbidden Zone this morning. If he didn't put something on, his skin would peel from the wind.
The time was neither too tight nor too loose, but he never procrastinated. Ten minutes was enough to get himself and his clothes ready. Before he left, he remembered one thing and ran back to his desk and opened the drawer.
On the table were comics, books, crayons, and even Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. Only Lu Qinglian's notebook was missing. So it must be at school. He rushed out of the house, ran down the stairs in a few steps, and rode his bike toward the Forbidden Zone.
He had eaten the steamed bun last night, so he had to get breakfast on the way.
—A fish fillet sandwich. It was probably a specialty of the island. Anyway, Zhang Shutong never saw it sold anywhere else in the future. The black fish fillet, wrapped in steamed bun crumbs, was fried until golden brown. It was then placed with some fried vegetables and soy products in a bun. A black sauce was spread inside the bun, and it was a half-bite sandwich. But the truly special part was that a salted duck egg yolk would be crushed and put inside the bun.
It was a light red color and had a sandy texture. It was like a sauce, but not a sauce. One bite would fill his mouth with oil and a unique rich aroma. Besides fish and shrimp, the small island also produced ducks, and salted duck eggs were also a specialty. When they read Wang Zengqi's "The Duck Eggs of the Dragon Boat Festival" in their second year of junior high, kids from other places might have been drooling, but the kids on the island never found it special.
The morning air was filled with a faint white mist. It was the water vapor rising from the surrounding lake after a night. It was truly refreshing, and his nose was also truly stinging from the cold.
So he wore a scarf today, a black one. He hadn't worn one in who knows how long. His neck felt a little itchy. After finishing his sandwich in front of the pushcart, Zhang Shutong continued on his way. The bustling sounds of people quickly faded behind him.
When he could no longer see any signs of human life, he arrived at his destination.
The mist around the "Forbidden Zone" was even thicker. It was a vast expanse of white. The sky was high and distant, and everything was wide open. The reeds swayed gently in the wind. He walked to the water's edge and saw that the fishing line was still tied there in good condition.
Zhang Shutong was a bit skeptical of Du Kang's words now. It wasn't about the credibility of the words themselves, but rather, who exactly did the fishermen see in the days before the incident?
The killer? Or was it actually the two poachers?
The bald guy had an electrofishing net on him. Maybe he had been here to do some electrofishing in the past few days?
Did the killer himself ever come to the Forbidden Zone?
These clues were not enough, but besides these, there were no other decent leads.
If he could go back to eight years later, he would definitely use the internet to do a thorough search. This was the only thing Zhang Shutong felt was more useful about the "future" than the "past" when it came to this murder case.
He could only wait until after school today to check again.
He was thinking as he rode back on his bike. At 7:25 a.m., Zhang Shutong arrived at the school gate on time and helplessly squeezed the brake.
The gate of their school was a bit small. The reason he said this wasn't because he disliked his school. As the saying goes, a son doesn't dislike his mother's looks, a dog doesn't dislike its home's poverty, and a black Audi never dislikes blocking other people's way—
He saw a black sedan blocking the entrance;
A girl in a red scarf got out of the car. The pendant on her hair swung with her movement.
The time was 7:25 a.m. on the second day after the reversion;
The boy stopped his bike, waiting for the young miss to get out of the car, not knowing what was about to happen in the classroom.
If he had known, he would definitely not have come out wearing a black scarf.