Chapter 16

The next day, the sun was shining brightly, but Hizuki looked rather listless.

After that hazy kiss the day before, Hizuki let go of Mizuki and fled into her room, spending the entire night tossing and turning, thinking about all sorts of messy things. For example, Liu Siqian, for example, "Yosuzora," and even her sister's lips, and then Qin Shou, that beast.

"Yes, it's all because of that bastard." Hizuki mentally tortured her deskmate countless times, spending most of the night on this, and not much on other things.

When Hizuki appeared in the living room with a pair of panda eyes, Mizuki was frying eggs. The frail girl gently held the egg with her slender fingers, cracked it against the edge of the pan, and then, with a twist of her hands, the white egg yolk flowed out. Mizuki drained the egg white before forcefully breaking the yolk into the pan.

Hizuki was deeply impressed by her sister's innate cooking skills, as his dexterous hands in mechanics couldn't handle that small spatula at all.

Her sister turned around and greeted her brother, then laughed uncontrollably at the two panda eyes.

"Idiot, if you keep laughing, the eggs will burn."

"Let them burn, they'll be crispier and tastier. You're the idiot, brother." Mizuki, without turning her head, scooped the eggs with the spatula, and the golden eggs drew a nearly vertical arc before falling back into the pan, already flipped over.

"Right... I am indeed an idiot." Hizuki nodded in agreement and turned to pack his bag.

......

"Brother, come here, apply this to reduce the dark circles."

"Eh, no thanks. It looks so sticky and disgusting."

"It has to be sticky to stick, listen to me, okay~"

"Hey, don't be so disrespectful, I'm your brother."

"Okay, okay, I know you're my brother, okay~"

......

Mizuki's special homemade medicine seemed to work, as Hizuki's dark circles had faded significantly by the time they left. This made Hizuki feel relieved.

Hizuki had originally planned to inflict all the extreme punishments he had imagined during the night on his deskmate, but it seemed that was no longer possible.

Because when Hizuki arrived at school, he found that the seat next to him was gone, yes, it was gone. The last row was left with only Hizuki's seat standing alone.

Confused, Hizuki found Liu Siqian, and the following conversation made his back break out in a cold sweat.

"Sis Qian, where's my deskmate? Why is the desk gone?"

"Deskmate? You've always been alone, where did you get a deskmate? You must be crazy."

"I don't have a deskmate? Then who was Qin Shou, who sat next to me for over a month?"

"You're crazy, who would name their child Qin Shou, such an extreme name." Liu Siqian reached out to touch Hizuki's forehead, "You don't have a fever, maybe your nerve fibers are malfunctioning."

"Fiber girl, you don't remember Qin Shou at all?"

"There's no such person, why should I remember? Look, here are the surveillance videos from the past few days, no one is sitting next to you."

As she spoke, Liu Siqian opened the computer's surveillance system for Hizuki to see, and indeed, the seat next to Hizuki was empty.

====================== Disappearance Line ======================

Qin Shou had vanished from the lives of the two siblings in such a strange way that no one except Hizuki and Mizuki remembered him. This supernatural phenomenon made Hizuki and Mizuki feel uneasy, especially when they saw the CD still inserted in the computer at home.

In this eerie atmosphere, the taboo relationship between Hizuki and Mizuki, which had just made a breakthrough, came to a halt again.

But even the most mysterious things can be forgotten over time. As time passed, this mysterious incident gradually ceased to be an obstacle to the two siblings' emotional connection. Hizuki and Mizuki's shameless cohabitation life returned to normal, and perhaps only when Hizuki opened the drawer under the keyboard and saw the gradually dusty "Yosuzora" would he remember that he once had a beastly deskmate.

Before they knew it, it was mid-February 2020. The Chinese people, who had just finished the New Year, began to busy themselves with their lives again. Adults went back to work to handle the backlog of New Year's affairs, and students had to return to school to study the courses they had neglected for a month.

Just when no one noticed, or when everyone had noticed but was no longer surprised, promotional posters for an online game were plastered all over the streets. The advertisements for this great game occupied vast territories, from the huge LED screens at the entrance of Tianyang to the utility poles.

Hizuki didn't know why a game that was supposed to start public testing in the summer of 2022 was already advertising now, but maybe no one in the world understood it either.

Yes, the whole world. Hizuki became interested in the game after learning that it was also advertised abroad. After some research, he was surprised to find that the advertisements for this online game called "Dream" covered the entire world, from the battlefields of South Africa to Times Square in the United States, from the wildlife reserves of Australia to the igloos of the Eskimos in the polar regions, it was everywhere.

Unfortunately, this online game, which boasted of "100% realistic simulation," had not released any screenshots, so it was unknown whether the in-game graphics were as realistic as the advertisements claimed.

But this did not stop people from discussing it, as in the conversation between Hizuki and Mizuki on their way home one day.

Walking on the curb they had walked for half a year, Mizuki, with one hand on Hizuki's shoulder and the other holding a black rabbit doll, carefully walked along the tactile paving.

"Brother."

"?"

"You said," Mizuki pointed to the huge advertisement screen on the opposite street, which was broadcasting an advertisement for "Star," "will there really be a place without pollution in that game?"

"Probably, if they said so, it would be self-defeating if it didn't exist."

"Um~ then when it comes out, let's go on a trip inside it."

"Ah? Why would you think of that?"

"I don't know, it just feels like we've never been anywhere except for the First Emperor Island, Daihe, and Shangjing. I want to go out and see the world."

"I'll take you out when I have time, why wait for that?"

"No, we're still students, we don't have long holidays. And..." Mizuki shook her head and fell silent.

Mizuki's health had not been good for the past few months. It wasn't that she was sick, but she lacked energy and couldn't muster the spirit to do anything. Fortunately, it wasn't serious and didn't affect her life much. But she had developed a new problem: motion sickness, feeling nauseous as soon as she got in a car.

"......Okay, when this game comes out, I'll take you on a trip inside it."

"(*^_^*) Brother is so nice."

Mizuki, two steps behind, jumped forward and pounced on Hizuki's back. Hizuki instinctively grabbed her long legs to prevent her from falling. They had done this countless times and had perfect默契 (coordination).

"You've gained weight, Mizuki."

"I haven't, I weighed 41 kilograms yesterday."

"But I feel like carrying you is getting harder, it feels like you're always leaning back."

"......Is brother an idiot?"

"Hey, what's wrong with me?" Hizuki weakly defended himself.

The next moment, Mizuki wrapped her arms around her brother's neck, pressing her upper body tightly against his back, a soft and hard sensation that should have been conflicting perfectly combined on Hizuki's back.

"Brother, you didn't do it on purpose, right?" The girl confided her deepest secret to her closest person, "It's already 33C, it hurts if you press too hard."

......

On the bizarre streets, under the colorful streetlights, in the bustling steel forest, in front of the quiet rows of shops, two half-grown figures moved slowly but steadily.