Cooking in the Monster Sanctuary - Chapter 11 - Part 1

The Cloak Man stranger was dumbfounded.

He stood up, only to have his punch effortlessly blocked. There wasn’t much left to say.

—Did he just run into a super-powered punch?

Under the faint moonlight, Lin Yu’s eyes, as dark as the night, and seemed to be infused with a coldness akin to the surface of a serene lake. As if the next moment would engulf someone in freezing depths.

This wasn’t the kind of look that asked about one’s favorite eye color; it was blatantly an invitation for him to choose his preferred method of demise.

No matter how he answered, it was a one-way ticket to doom; a rule he had set for himself.

The stone he had picked up landed squarely on his foot, and he could see his entire being getting crushed.

“Wait, wait!” The Cloak Man utterly baffled, and started pleading. “If you spare me, I can give you anything! That includes a long-preserved dried beetle specimen, the soil stepped on by the school’s beauty queen, and the blueprints of the boys’ restroom!”

Lin Yu found herself in a state of bewilderment.

What kind of precious collection is this? And isn’t the soil supposedly stepped on by the beauty queen a bit too much of a brown-nosing move! So, you use your supernatural powers to collect these weird things?

Suggestion: This person should be expelled from the Supernatural Phenomena Association.

“I don’t want to answer that question, so tell me the answer to the next one.” Lin Yu looked at him with a bit of sympathy in her eyes. “Have you seen people coming here to explore the seven wonders at the same time these past few days?”

“I have, I have!” The Cloak Man nodded vigorously. “They come and go in a hurry, just taking a glance at the bamboo forest and then running away.”

“You didn’t attack them?”

“As long as they don’t answer the question, I won’t do anything to them.”

There was one more thing he didn’t say out loud:

“Unlike you, who indiscriminately beats people up!”

Lin Yu smiled and moved her foot off him, “I didn’t expect you to have a sense of professional ethics.”

“Of course!” The Cloak Man smirked victoriously. “Among all the supernatural phenomena, I will always be the most…”

Wait a minute, something’s not right.

Why did he feel so smug about her compliment? He had just been scolded not too long ago! Even if he were to be beaten to death today and jumped from here, he wouldn’t give her a friendly face again!

Lin Yu paused for a few seconds, then looked at the gleaming blade and continued to ask, “Do you know the reason for your corporealization?”

She had asked this question without much thought, but it made the Cloak Man suddenly feel a chilling sense of crisis. His black and white eyes rolled around, in sharp contrast to the smiling eyes behind the mask. 

“Because of a boy. The moment I became corporeal, I saw him. He told me to ‘remember my responsibility’ with a half-smile, and he’s been wandering around the school lately.”

A picture stored in her memory appeared vividly in her mind, and her gaze darkened slightly, “What does he look like?”

“Eighteen or nineteen years old, long, slender eyes, and a mole at the corner of his mouth,” he struggled to say, his tone tinged with a pleading tone. “I really don’t know anything else.”

Lin Yu’s smile remained gentle as she retracted the dagger, “Thank you for your cooperation.”

The Cloak Man smiled sheepishly, “Hehe, no need to thank me.”

Only after laughing did he realize that he had totally failed to keep his resolve not to give her a friendly face.

He was useless.

Pathetic.

As the Cloak Man left in a daze, Qin Huai Shu, who had been quietly observing on the side, finally spoke, “The description of the boy he mentioned, could it be Zhou Hangxing, the younger brother of the victim of the lake incident ten years ago?”

“Matching age and appearance, a strong motive, not to mention that their parents passed away long ago, leaving only the two brothers to rely on each other. If anyone were to seek revenge for him, it would most likely be Zhou Hangxing.”

Lin Yu had considered him the prime suspect from the beginning, so she wasn’t surprised by this revelation.

Qin Huai Shu responded with a dazed nod, then heard the person beside him ask softly with a gentle tone, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing much. I was just thinking,” he moistened his dry lips, “that boy was bullied when he was alive, died under mysterious circumstances, and the only one who remembered him afterward seems to be his younger brother. It just feels… a bit pitiful.”

Lin Yu chuckled softly in response, not engaging with his words. Instead, she casually changed the topic, “Let’s continue forward.”

As they walked further, Qin Huai Shu couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off.

They passed through the path and reached the school’s main building, but the structure had lost all its modern freshness and now resembled a dilapidated old building from many years ago.

The gray-white walls were covered with dim black lines, and the bulky structure cast a heavy silent shadow. With the moonlight fading away and dark clouds churning, the entire building stood like a tombstone in the darkness which added a touch of eerie gloom.

He felt an inexplicable chill, “I can’t help but feel that… something’s not right with this building.”

Lin Yu didn’t say a word but used a flashlight to illuminate a massive signboard in front of the building.

Neat black letters like tiny insects were densely arranged on a white background. Qin Huai Shu’s breath caught as he read the content, “Congratulations to our student, Zhou Hangyu for winning first prize in the Qichuan City Mathematics Competition. The school rewards him with a cash prize of two thousand yuan.”

The date was May 8, 2009, the day before Zhou Hangyu’s death.

“This should be the main building from ten years ago.” Lin Yu walked around it. “After passing through the path, the entire school seems to have aged a lot. Sanzhong High School underwent a complete renovation in 2013, so there’s no way it could look like this.”

First, they were made to experience the seven campus supernatural phenomena as if they were real, and now the setting had been recreated to match how it looked ten years ago.

A thought crossed Lin Yu’s mind, and she checked her watch.