Doomsday Wonderland Vol. 13: Sleepwalking in Dreamland

1563: Qiao Yuansi Alone

After extinguishing the fire and pulling out the key, Qiao Yuansi sat quietly in the driver's seat for a few minutes before pushing open the car door.

As she walked past the car, she lifted her hand, her fingers lightly grazing the central deformed and collapsed rear trunk. The car body was warm under the sun, with some bends very sharp, so she carefully avoided them. Her fingertips quickly gathered a layer of dust, dull and smooth, filling the textures of her skin.

The rear cover had collapsed severely, and the trunk could no longer close properly, deformed and twisted together. The remaining camping supplies inside seemed impossible to retrieve. Thinking about this, Qiao Yuansi smiled slightly, slowly retracting her hand.

Approaching the teaching building, the flow of people gradually increased. Young students played and laughed in the sun, making it hard to believe that the familiar old world had already died. Occasionally, students from her class would greet her, and Qiao Yuansi would smile and nod, saying good morning—regardless of whether the face opposite her was normal or not.

Even if someone's face suddenly changed in front of her, she wouldn't be surprised. Not because she was used to it, but because Qiao Yuansi felt that she was not really here.

Her body moved among the deformed people, pressing the elevator button, answering "I've eaten" when a faceless colleague asked, "Have you had breakfast?" But in reality, she wasn't there.

She had detached herself from the world of the deformed, not knowing where she had gone, perhaps to a faraway place. She had been swept up and dispersed by the sea breeze, drifting between the gray-blue sky and sea.

This building, this school, was merely a mime stage for the crowds coming and going. Her ears were filled with the sounds of students' laughter, sneakers scraping the floor, doors opening and closing. For the first time, she realized that the school could have such a quiet, enduring day.

She hung the remaining "travel photos" of herself in the most conspicuous place in her office, receiving several compliments about their beauty. No one expressed surprise at her face in the photos; either they already knew not to show surprise, or the deformation had spread so much that there were almost no normal people left in the school. Specifically which, Qiao Yuansi found that she didn't care much.

Before class, she took out a small box of bird food and prepared a small bowl of water, placing them outside the window, not knowing when Manmiao would come. Manmiao, although now only able to move around her, had a wide range of movement, and had its own bird life to lead, so it might not always be by her side.

Speaking of which, the items of the apocalyptic world were truly magical, connecting the last incurable bird to her life, surviving together. As long as she lived one more day, Manmiao would live one more day.

Fortunately, she seemed to have left something behind.

Qiao Yuansi made a slight change to her class schedule: the first task of the first class was to write a short understanding of a subject, a few sentences to a couple of hundred words. She didn't even have to wait to collect the assignments, just walking around the classroom while they were writing, glancing at each person's paper, and knowing their status.

What they wrote was not nonsense, at least most of it appeared coherent with subjects, objects, and connecting words, but lacking in understanding and logic, confusing fact with fiction, filled with chaos and self-contradiction, without realizing it. By looking more, she could even judge from the content of the assignments how far a person had deteriorated.

The most severe student's face had never changed, appearing more stable than her, but the content in that assignment was completely unrecognizable, the text itself so simplified that it was incomprehensible. Qiao Yuansi only glanced a few times and never dared to approach that female student again.