Puzzle Madness

Chapter 191 Levitation Technique (Part 9)
With each breath, the belly continued to expand to the left and right, creating an increasingly exaggerated visual effect. It trembled precariously, looking as if it might burst at any moment.

DouDou pressed his fist against his chin, intrigued by the strange turn of events. However, he still crouched down and stepped aside, moving past the obese man's legs.
"He ate something bad! He ate something bad! I told you he shouldn't eat too much. Should we open the iron gate? I think he's going to have diarrhea, and if he starts spewing nonsense, it'll be troublesome."

bark.
This seems to confirm what DouDou said--
A sharp, hissing sound suddenly emanated from the obese man's body, but it came from his navel.

The initially thin, coiled column of smoke rose higher and higher, like incense sticks in a temple, accompanied by a high-pitched sound like a kettle boiling.

Snapped!
Ai Xi acted first. She tore a canvas off a nearby iron rack, threw it over the fat man to cover him, then pulled her goldfish eyes tight and shrank behind her pockets:

"DouDou, help me separate the two of them; there's a chance it might explode."

Dou Dou quickly understood what Ai Xi meant: the explosion was a minor matter; Dou Dou could withstand the impact or shrapnel and wouldn't hurt Ai Xi and Jin Yu Yan; but if the flying blood and flesh got their school uniforms dirty, they would have to spend a lot of time cleaning them up.

Not to mention the "lunar surface," which is much closer, where everything might have been reduced to ashes. The canvas barrier was barely enough to protect them, and curiosity ultimately outweighed this small risk.

DouDou grabbed one of the ankles of "the lunar surface" and the fat man with each hand, trying to shake them off and pull her classmate behind her.

But we just tore the lunar surface apart and dragged it aside--
The canvas that Ai Xi threw onto the obese man suddenly bulged up. Then it quickly levitated, rose, and floated above the obese man's chest and abdomen.

The canvas twisted and turned, uneven and rough; it was as if the gas had materialized, shifting and distorting under the cover.

Like a ghost with a classical design hidden inside, tightly wrapped in a bed sheet; or like a garbage bag dancing in a storm.
-
"Oh—why are you suddenly dressing up as a ghost?"

DouDou sprang up and brought his face close. Without a word, he ripped the canvas off.
The smoke beneath the canvas still swirled, rising upwards from the obese man's navel. DouDou reached into the thicker smoke and stirred it a couple of times; but she couldn't grasp anything tangible.

brush!
Doudou shrugged, then unfolded the canvas again and tossed it into the smoke.
The canvas seemed to be held aloft by some kind of glass sculpture, refusing to fall; it remained suspended above the obese man. And the smoke, which shouldn't have been able to support the two-meter square canvas, was instead a problem.

"This, this, this..."

His goldfish eyes stammered, dumbfounded, and his body trembled like a leaf.

Compared to normal students, the members of the Taro Society have a high tolerance for strange and bizarre things—after all, being connected with others in a lucid dream is a bizarre and outlandish thing in itself.

But witnessing such inexplicable anomalies firsthand in reality is still too impactful.

Tuk Tuk.

With a blank expression, Ai Xi raised her hand and tapped the notebook that the goldfish-eyed man was holding with her knuckles.

"No—I'm not awake? Uh...no, no, I'll remember that."

Suddenly, Goldfish Eyes opened the diving notebook in her arms, grabbed a pen from her pocket, and began to write; it was unclear what she was writing, perhaps just recording the bizarre scene before her.

But the canvas underwent a new change:

Its surface began to ripple, with tiny, dense objects constantly poking at the canvas. First, there were angled, slanted bulges, the tips of which bent and formed half a triangle.

Then DouDou realized—it was a nose.

Because the other facial features also emerge on the canvas along with the surface's contours: a mouth that is recessed inwards due to its openness, teeth that are pressed out in neat rows, and eyes with only a hazy outline.
There's more, and more of it.

No one could have such a dense array of facial features; hidden beneath the canvas are countless faces. Those must be the hollows of mouths, constantly clenching and clenching, the teeth striking silently; or opening to their limit, almost tearing the corners of the mouth apart.

The undulations on the canvas became dense and crowded, as if countless faces were buried beneath them, emitting silent, ferocious roars—
"Why does this look so familiar?"

DouDou propped her chin up with one hand and brought her face even closer.

These faces, so densely packed and stuck together, seemed familiar to him; as if he had seen them countless times before.

Although the canvas obstructs the view, making it difficult to discern the specific facial features—
But without a doubt: the way these faces are coupled and fused together is just like the sky that DouDou sees every day.

His parents, too, spread and occupied the entire sky, extending to where the sun rises and sets; even the stars were obscured behind them.

As he observed, DouDou gradually became able to discern some features on the canvas. The bumps and depressions resembled facial bones; and the more he looked, the more strikingly similar they became to the two faces he remembered.

DouDou hesitated, unsure whether she should reach out and touch the strange, condensed matter before her.
Crunch.

With a dry, rustling sound, the canvas suddenly fell down. It covered the obese man, and beneath the spread fabric, only the rounded curve of his bulging belly was visible.

Those thronging, twisting faces and silent roars vanished in an instant.

"Hey, it suddenly stopped."

After turning around, Ai Xi had already opened the iron gate; she was standing outside the gate, holding onto one of "lunar surface"'s legs.

Sometime later, she had dragged the "lunar surface" outside the storage room—and the strange occurrences from before ceased.

Ai Xi shook her head slightly at Dou Dou. The meaning was very clear:

Whatever is hidden under the canvas, it's best not to touch it yet. Clearly, these bulging faces are quite different from the smoke from before.

".Um."

Dou Dou shrugged—he trusted Ai Xi's judgment more than his curiosity. Besides, he had a strange, inexplicable feeling even before his fingers touched those faces.
It's not a good thing. It might not be that dangerous, but it's still not a good thing.

Goldfish Eyes was still holding his diving notebook, the pen scratching on the paper. He muttered to himself as he wrote:

"The president forcibly interrupted the dive by increasing physical contact with the divers—the strange phenomenon disappeared simultaneously. Preparations are underway to question and record the conversations with the members [on the lunar surface]. See attached page for details."

"It is inferred that this anomaly is a byproduct of the water release process, pending further verification."

Immersed in recording, Goldfish Eyes seemed to forget his nervousness.

The wide-open iron gate allowed DouDou to see the campus:

Sometime later, the athletes' march had stopped; on the vast playground, only two or three students were slowly crossing the track and heading towards the teaching building.

(End of this chapter)