The Odd One Out

Chapter 12

Summer put the pills back into the bottle and put them back into her pocket before lying down on her bed and picking up her phone to continue what she had been doing. She tried to look up information about her neighbourhood online but found nothing useful. It was an old, ordinary neighbourhood of flats, built thirty years ago, and there was very little information on the internet. There had been no bad accidents, nor was there any news of all the residents moving, let alone any government-planned demolition areas.

It seemed that if she wanted to solve the questions in her mind, she would have to ask her parents, who had always lived here, some other time. Putting these matters aside for the moment, Summer searched her phone for a few novels of interest. She was planning to stay up until dawn tonight. She had woken up with no memory before, and she wanted to see if her memory would suddenly disappear if she stayed awake.

It was not until she was awakened by a thunderclap outside her window that she realised she had unknowingly fallen asleep at some point. The thunder seemed to have exploded right next to the window sill, so loudly that Summer woke up with a buzzing sound from her eardrums to her brain. While her heart was beating so rapidly that it felt like it was about to burst out of her chest.

She closed her eyes for a while and felt a little more comfortable when the ringing in her ears had subsided. And that was enough time for her to figure out what was going on. She was lying under a warm blanket, but Summer felt a chill run up from the soles of her feet to the sky.

She clearly remembered that the light had not been turned off before she fell asleep!

But the darkness in the room was telling Summer that someone other than her had switched off the light in the room. The problem was that she had locked the door to prevent her parents from coming in unexpectedly.

Summer was stiff, and not only that, but she could feel with the utmost clarity that in the darkness beyond her reach, two substantial lines of sight pierced through the thick darkness and were staring at her with deadly intensity. The presence was so strong that she could not ignore it if she wanted to. Summer's heart was beating like a drum as she listened to the thunder outside her window, one after another, and the pouring rain that had grown heavier since nightfall.

It was only a few minutes before she woke up, but the owner of the sight seemed to have sensed something, and then there was the inaudible sound of slippers on the wooden floor, slowly approaching the person in the bed. Sensing the approach, Fanxia tensed her muscles and opened her eyes quietly a crack to see if she could see who was in her room.

Then she saw -

Two pale white faces with an eerie glow, leaning down violently in the light from the lightning, stopping less than a palm above her face. At such a close distance, the dark red, almost black eyes in the two pairs of black holes stared at her unblinkingly, while at the same time, a very cold breath slowly blew onto Summer's face.

"Summer ......"

"Summer ......"

"Summer, are you awake?"

That is ......

Crap, that's her mother's voice!

Summer almost didn't break her face pretending to be asleep. Her mother's voice was still endlessly gentle, a far cry from the cold, inorganic horror Summer had seen before her. She called her name so gently and even had a hint of a doting smile in her voice: "Summer...... Summer, are you awake?"

Summer did not move, even her eyes were always at the same angle, and her breathing was even and long, just like a look in a deep sleep. Summer had only one thought in her head: fortunately, fortunately, her heartbeat was not as strong as it had been when she first woke up. Otherwise, from such a close distance, she would have been discovered.