Chapter 256 - Chapter 256: Chapter 256: Paper Airplanes, Magician and Angry Apple (1/2)
Chapter 256: Chapter 256: Paper Airplanes, Magician and Angry Apple
Translator: 549690339
At 6:58 in the morning, Mijoe woke up before the alarm on her phone went off and sat up in bed.
For a tech geek who had inverted her day and night for years, it was usually the normal that she hadn’t even gone to bed at this time yet.
Watching the sunrise before falling asleep and the sunset after waking up became her routine.
But now it was different. She disciplined herself according to her company’s working hours, very regular, although technically she was not a member of the company.
After freshening up in the master bedroom’s bathroom and changing her clothes, she picked up her laptop bag and left the room, joining Assistant High, who was already up and ready to go.
When they were near their destination, Assistant High parked the car by the road and went to a breakfast shop to buy breakfast.
Although Assistant High had mentioned before that he could always buy breakfast beforehand, when Mijoe first went to the lab, she heard several researchers talking about how the breakfast from the shop nearby was really good. So, she let Assistant High drop by the shop to buy breakfast on the way to the office in the morning.
While Assistant High was queuing for breakfast, Mijoe took her soft-cover notebook out of her bag and took a piece of paper clipped inside it, squinting her eyes to look at it.
This piece of paper was clearly torn from a B5 notebook, crowded with various sizes and curves of circles or lines drawn densely with a black pen, and folded to a complex shape before.
A few days ago, she found a paper airplane on the balcony by accident.
Her first reaction was that the neighbour must have been uncivilized to randomly throw paper planes. She initially wanted to pick it up and throw it in the trash, but after picking it up, she was drawn by the folding of the paper plane.
This was the first time she saw this kind of folding. Although it was complicated, it obviously wasn’t just for looking good. The paper plane still had an excellent aerodynamic structure, and a few complex folds seemed to have been designed for weight distribution. This gave it a unique “industrial aesthetic”.
She tried to fly it in the room, and indeed, it flew very steadily, which led her to think about who else could be its owner from the people living on the 12th floor and above in the surrounding buildings.
So, Mijoe didn’t immediately throw the paper plane away, but unfolded it to study its folding. She didn’t think the paper plane was strange, but simply saw a new and good folding method and instinctively wanted to learn it – even though she actually didn’t have any special interest in folding paper planes.
Under normal circumstances, after learning how to fold, she would have thrown the paper away.
But when she unfolded the paper, Mijoe found the chaotic circles and arcs drawn on it. At first glance, it seemed like someone was randomly doodling, as if they were testing whether the pen could write smoothly. But upon a closer look, the circles and lines didn’t seem randomly drawn, and there was some kind of inexplicable…beauty?
She tried to imitate the same type of circles and arcs on another piece of paper and found the difficulty of the drawings increasingly.
So, she casually put the paper into a soft-cover book. Over the past few days, she looked at it a few times, trying to figure out what the symbols could possibly represent.
However, even though she made many guesses, there still wasn’t a reliable answer. Of course, in her speculation, the highest probability is still – these symbols were randomly doodled by someone, and the person who drew them probably didn’t know what they were drawing.
After buying the breakfast, Assistant High got back in the car and handed the bag to Mijoe who was in the back seat, glanced at the weirdly patterned paper in her hand. Although he was a bit curious, he didn’t ask a single question. He knew what his job was, did things within his job scope, limiting his curiosity, was a rule he knew when he took up this high-salary job.
After taking the breakfast, Mijoe put the piece of paper back into her soft-cover notebook, then casually asked: “Assistant High, if I want to find out more about the other residents in our residential area, is there a way to do so?” She actually knew how to do it herself, but she had previously promised Mr. Liang that she wouldn’t overstep the limits on the internet unless he allowed her to.
Upon hearing her question, Assistant High nodded: “Understood, I will take care of it.” He didn’t ask why she needed the information.
Star City.
These days, Liu Shiling didn’t flip her coin at the kindergarten as frequently as before. On one hand, the kindergarten teacher had spoken to her mother, hoping she could play with the coin less, or even not at all. Recently, there had been a “coin trend” in the kindergarten. Almost every child brought a one-yuan coin and could often be seen playing with the coin. However, not every child had Liu Shiling’s coin-flipping tricks. Most children couldn’t even balance the coin on the back of their hand, not to mention flipping it with their fingers. So, there were often children who bent down to pick up their coins everywhere, crisp sounds of coins falling to the floor were common. There were also frequent fights and quarrels among children because they couldn’t tell which coin was theirs.
On the other hand, Liu Shiling had herself found another way to entertain herself with the coin.
She found that she could now control the two “magic coins” that Uncle Baldy gave her, keeping them attached to her body.
For instance, if she placed a coin in the palm of her hand, flipped her hand over; the coin could “stick” to her palm without falling. Sometimes, when she was in a good state, she could attract the coin directly into her palm from a distance of 2 or 3 centimeters.
Uncle Baldy had told her that her magic abilities should remain a secret, so she could only play when no one was watching, and would never show off in front of others.
Moreover, when she played with the coin in this manner, strange phenomena occasionally occurred, such as the light in the activity room subtly fluctuating, the classroom speaker making a strange noise, or the projector showing some interference, and so on.
So, when she was in kindergarten, she didn’t use this ability as much during the day and practiced more at night in her bed. However, she was unaware of how frustrated Shiling’s Mom next door was, as her mobile game network latency shot up to 460 every time she practiced.
Aside from the coins, Liu Shiling was also gaining new perceptions of the “magic A4 paper”, which was now full of creases.
She had a vague feeling that sometimes there seemed to be a thread connecting her and the magic paper.
So, when she folded the magic paper into a paper plane and threw it out, she could weakly control the plane’s direction and flight pattern in the air.
A paper plane could originally only fly 10 meters, but under her control, it could fly to 18 or even 20 meters. It could change its ordinary rightward trajectory to fly straight under her influence.
Moreover, she vaguely found that there seemed to be an indescribable connection between her and the other ordinary folded papers she had made, as if a finer thread was connecting her with these papers.
But perhaps these “threads” were too thin and weak, so no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t influence these folded papers in any significant way.
However, this discovery still sparked great interest in Liu Shiling. She felt that she had unveiled a new “magic domain”.
If she could master this new magic before meeting Uncle Baldy again, she could definitely surprise him.
So now, even though she was sitting in her seat, her gaze was fixed on a two-headed paper crane on a classmate’s desk not far away. She only knew that she folded it, but she couldn’t remember when. All she knew was that she could vaguely feel the “thread” between herself and the paper crane.
Liu Shiling’s eyes slowly narrowed as she tried to concentrate, imagining that the paper crane would start to move. Even if it moved just a tiny bit, it would be enough.
But after staring for a long time, to the point where her vision started to blur and her eyes were itching to tear up, the two-headed paper crane hadn’t moved at all.
Just when she was about to give up and rub her eyes, the paper crane suddenly left the desk and flew towards her.
Liu Shiling was taken aback, and then she heard a timid voice, “Liu Shiling, I exchanged this paper crane for a doll from Xiao Xue. If you don’t agree, I’ll give it back to her.”
Only then did she realize that the two-headed paper crane was carefully pinched by two small fingers, as if they were afraid of damaging it from touching too much. The owner of those small fingers was a pretty little girl standing next to her desk with a nervous look on her face.
Liu Shiling knew that this girl was one of the most popular kids in their class. Not only was she cute and beautiful, but she was also good at singing and dancing, and even singing songs in English. She always had new clothes and toys, and all the kids loved to play with her.
Of course, that was in the past.
Now the most popular was definitely Liu Shiling. However, she didn’t really care about that because her focus was on the vast starry sea of the “magic world”. Her goal was to improve herself as quickly as possible to have the power to help Uncle Baldy. When that time came, she might be able to go hunt monsters with Uncle Baldy.
As for the other kids, they were the audience she needed to protect.
Yes, Uncle Baldy with his bow and arrow, and her with her magic, just like the elf archers and human magicians in cartoons.
As Liu Shiling imagined herself in a bright red, gold-trimmed magic robe combating monsters, she said to the pretty little girl in front of her, “Whatever I give her is hers. If she gave it to you, then it’s yours. I have no objection.”
The pretty little girl let out a sigh of relief, showed a radiant smile, and two adorable dimples appeared on her cheeks. “Thank you, Liu Shiling!” Then she took the double-headed paper crane back to her seat, as if the paper crane was not something she had exchanged with an expensive Barbie doll, but rather a gift from Liu Shiling.