It was getting dark, and Ikeda finally arrived at home, but his father had not yet returned, and he was probably still soaking in the izakaya.

Pulling a snack stick out of the fridge, getting into the heater and turning on the TV, Ikeda cherishes the time he spends in front of the TV eating junk food that only the poorest families stockpile.

From a very young age, television seemed to be Ikeda's father, and in his book, there is a sentence like this: "Television doesn't go home drunk, it doesn't forget me in the zoo, it doesn't beat and scold me, it's the guy who taught me how to behave."

He had fantasized more than once that he could be like the protagonists of those fictional stories, who one day would suddenly encounter aliens, or meet mysterious girls, or be recruited by government secret agencies, or even be taken to another world by a lightning bolt, and change his life, and he preferred that he could be relied on like the heroes in those films, rather than despised and oppressed.

But every moment he opens his eyes, Ikeda has to face a harsh reality.

Life is so painful for a seventeen-year-old boy.

The deepest horror does not come from the present, but from the future, and the most complete despair is not that you do not know the future, but that even if you are young, you can already foresee your miserable life.

At some point, Ikeda's pen stopped, and he glanced at the clock on the wall, and at 10:20 a.m., his father still hadn't come home.

Ikeda emerged from the stove, returned to the door, put on his shoes, and walked briskly into the night.

On the secluded street, the young man showed a serious expression that he had never seen before, and his eyes under the glasses were even quite terrifying and hideous.

Tianyi's bookstore had closed, and Ikeda had wanted to go in and check again when he passed by, but apparently knocking on the door would get no response.

"Now that you're out, don't look back!" Ikeda told himself.

He walked for more than an hour, and it was almost midnight when he arrived at school. The campus is pitch black, with only a little light in the doorman's hut.

By this point, the security guards on duty should have already fallen asleep, because the school rules that the security guards on the night shift should patrol once after midnight and between five o'clock, and these guys usually go to bed early, get up around four o'clock the next day, and go out to buy some breakfast or something after the patrol.

The school's gate is not high, and Ikeda doesn't have much trouble turning into it, and he finally stops when he walks to the front of the school building.

When he arrives at the building, he discovers that the door of the school building is locked at night with a ring lock, which may not be a problem for the fictional heroes, but Ikeda is helpless.

"What am I thinking......" Ikeda smiled wryly.

He turned around to go back, muttering to himself in a low voice, "I can't help it...... Not to mention that I am empty-handed now, even if I had anticipated this situation in advance and brought root canal pliers, it would be very serious to damage the school's public property. ”

Ikeda really hated himself, and he knew that there was no point in talking nonsense, and the truth was that even if he was determined to do something, he would easily give up because of the slightest accident.

"Am I really just a piece of shit...... You deserve to be called a wet mosquito coil......" Ikeda's heart began to torture himself, and he reluctantly looked back at the school building again, as if by doing so, there was still a chance to find a glimmer of hope.

"That's it!" Ikeda's eyes widened suddenly, and hope really came to him, and there would be unexpected good fortune in his miserable life.

The closer he got, the more distinct Ikeda became: there was a small gap in the corridor on the first floor that was not closed properly, but it was discovered by himself when he looked back.

Coming to the window, taking a deep breath, the cold air of the cold night rushed into his head, he reached out and opened the window. After a few seconds, he managed to crawl into the hallway.

Ikeda couldn't contain the excitement in his heart, and his whole body was trembling, and the words of Tenichi a few hours ago were still in his ears: "Sneak into Matsuo's office at midnight, take out any of his things, and I'll allow you to read Miura's book." ”

Although I don't know why the other party made such a request, and I don't know why the other party knew Matsuo and Miura, there is that kind of weird book full of voices as a foreshadowing, and this kind of thing can't be said to be weird.

Until he stood in front of the door of the faculty office, Ikeda's heart could not be said to be very firm, after all, he was Ikeda, the Ikeda who was beaten and did not dare to fight back, even he could not believe that he was doing such an outrageous thing at the moment, but this experience that he had never tasted before also made him feel more thrilled than before, I am afraid that at this moment his adrenaline secretion was a little too much, and the hand that stretched out to pull the door trembled very much.

The door opened, and in the clear moonlight, Ikeda's first sight was a pair of feet.

A pair of feet off the ground, with the toes of both feet tilted inward, hanging waddly in the air.

Ikeda felt his heart stop beating, and his gaze instinctively moved upward, and soon he saw Matsuo's face.

The eyeballs of the eyes were bulging, the tongue was half-sticking out, and the face was purple, which was obviously dead.

"Ah...... Yes...... Cough...... After...... Ikeda sat down on the ground and retreated sharply, his back quickly pressed against the wall of the hallway, and he tried to scream and then vomit, but in the end, he covered his mouth with both hands, and he was holding back both the screaming and the stomach acid.

He couldn't shout because he couldn't explain why he came to school in the middle of the night after calling the security guard, and he couldn't vomit because it would leave obvious marks on the scene.

Ikeda himself did not know why such a clear and rational thought in his mind, such a calm judgment could have emerged in such a terrifying environment, could he be cruel by nature, or insensitive to death?

He couldn't help but think too much, and the question he needed to think about now was, what should he do next?

"Judging from this situation, Matsuo Yasei committed suicide, but if I call the police, I can't tell how I sneaked into the school at midnight, and even if the investigation confirms that Matsuo's death has nothing to do with me, the school will definitely expel me. Ikeda weighed it and thumped his thigh a few times, then barely stood up. Although his legs were still a little weak, at least the pain allowed him to regain some consciousness and be able to walk.

Ikeda walked into the faculty office, his gaze deliberately avoiding Matsuo's terrifying face. He hurriedly walked around the hanging corpse, grabbed a pen from the pen holder on Matsuo's desk, and ran without looking back.

Rushing from the third floor to the first floor, Ikeda came to the window where he had entered, and was about to step out, but when he looked down, he suddenly noticed two different footprints on the windowsill!

When he came in just now, it was backlit, and his shadow covered the edge of the window without noticing, and at this moment, in the white moonlight, this discovery made him creepy. There are two shoe prints on the windowsill, both with the toe facing the corridor, one of which is noticeably larger than the other. The smaller shoe print is probably your own, but what about the larger one?

At such times, his mind was surprisingly quick, and Ikeda soon had the answer that the larger footprints were probably left by Matsuo. Because at seven or eight o'clock in the evening, the security guard will inspect every room in the teaching building and gymnasium before going to bed to make sure that there is nothing unusual before locking the door. So Matsuo couldn't have committed suicide before then, he must have sneaked into the school after eight o'clock before he died, which explains why there were only footprints in the hallway and no return.

With this in mind, there was nothing to be afraid of, and Ikeda turned over the window and carefully wiped his footprints as he entered and exited, even erasing the fingerprints on the edge of the window, but he did not touch Matsuo's footprints.

Realizing that he had left no trace, Ikeda tucked his hands into his cuffs and carefully closed the window to return to the way he had come, and then quickly escaped the campus and ran wildly on his way home.

At the same time, in the dark corridor of the teaching building, a figure stood silently looking at Ikeda's departing back.