Puzzle Madness

Chapter 96: First Day Blues
The investment hotline for Shouzhu 151 Building was quietly removed at some point, and the construction team started coming in and out again.

The postponement of the opening of this new landmark building was published in a corner of the Mong Cai Daily, becoming a hot topic in the market:
There are many different opinions on the reasons.

Some people say it’s bad feng shui - solitary yang cannot produce life, solitary yin cannot grow.

Shouzhu 151 Building is too abrupt and tall, standing out from the crowd in the entire Mong Cai City, and is "exposed to the strong winds". It is naturally destined to be lonely and short-lived, and cannot last long.

Because this statement was too vague, a more specific and bizarre story soon emerged:
It is said that a few days ago, in the middle of the night, a group of bats came out of the sewer in Mong Cai and crashed into Shouzhu 151, causing their heads to burst and glass to scatter; there was even an entire floor that was dyed scarlet and the ground was piled with broken meat as a carpet.

This statement was quickly iterated, with more witnesses and details emerging:
A drunkard saw in the middle of the night two bat spirits that had been practicing for thousands of years, hiding in the Shouzhu 151 Building to survive a catastrophe. At that time, thunder rumbled in the high-rise building, the earth trembled, and the window panes shattered, but the poor and hateful monsters eventually died before dawn.

Most of the stories revolve around bats.

It just so happened that several cinemas in Mong Cai City joined together and bought copies of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" to prepare for screening, so these newly emerged urban legends seemed to be marketing packaging methods launched to increase attendance.

But just like other rumors in Mong Cai City, it is difficult to verify their authenticity; in the end, no conclusion was reached.

However, the box office of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" in Mong Cai was quite good, and for a time, things like vampires became a fresh and fashionable concept and became all the rage.

Doudou and Ai Xi also rushed to see a show before the summer vacation was over:
It was pretty good, but Doudou felt uneasy all over when he thought about September approaching; he ended up eating an extra bucket of popcorn.

Even though he was extremely reluctant, Doudou still welcomed the start of school.
-
On September 1st, Doudou was walking on his way to school when a wonderful inspiration suddenly landed in his mind like a meteor from the sky -
[Eh? Come on, maybe I could start an extracurricular group?]

It wasn't that Doudou wanted to meet more talented people in various disciplines, to get a glimpse of the truths and answers in their homework books—most of the time, copying Ai Xi's homework was enough for him—nor was it to make more friends. According to his theory, anyone who wasn't an enemy could be considered a friend; at most, he had billions of relatives and friends.

The first and foremost reason is that it is more convenient.

When fighting with the "Witch in the Building" in a mess, with her spine spinning and dancing in his arms like a python and her two rows of teeth chattering, Doudou discovered for the first time.
How great it would be if I could grow five or six more arms!
After all, given the complexity of the situation at the time, even if he had bought the second-hand film camera from the video game store, he probably wouldn't have been able to produce footage that would satisfy Doudou.

First, there was no proper lighting - the incandescent lights in the underground secret base in Mong Cai were so glaring that the resulting photos would probably be overexposed with blurred faces; I would have needed two extra arms to hold up the lighting cloth.

It would be best if these arms were ten meters long with six or seven ball joints.

Second, of course, I don’t have any hands free to take pictures.

Even if I set up a tripod and camera nearby and set the shooting time, there's no way to find a suitable camera position in the narrow aisle! If I set it to automatic continuous shooting, I'm afraid I'll waste a lot of film; film is not cheap.

Not to mention that a random slap would blow the camera away; Doudou was quite stingy with money: apart from the fixed compensation he received every month, he had no chance to work at all.

She is not Ai Xi, who can use all kinds of weird methods to earn pocket money from her classmates; sometimes she can even earn some of the teachers' salary. She is really smart.

Third, there was no experienced action director: the witch in the building was jumping around like crazy, pulled by wires, from beginning to end, and was not a cooperative subject at all.

Although those photos that are blurred and mysterious due to high-speed motion may be popular in magazines such as "Parapsychological Exploration", Doudou himself prefers clear depictions.

Doudou himself was too busy wrestling with the witch in the building to think about which postures could better show off the witch's skinny yet strangely shriveled body.

As for the chase with the section chief, Doudou didn't think about taking pictures:
The section chief's appearance is still far less impactful than that of her daughter; and I don't know if her "maternal love" can be captured with a camera.

Thinking in this direction, it would be even better if I could grow another head and act as a stage manager, coordinating everyone's division of labor and even clothing matching.

fourth
As he walked, Doudou counted to twenty-five in his head. If he really had to list them all one by one, he could still think of many more.

Of course, Doudou didn't just think about it casually. He carefully considered how to grow a few more limbs:
It is said that among those poor fellows who were abducted by aliens at midnight, some were transformed in the flying saucer, growing a few more arms or body organs; some even ended up hooking up with a superhuman alien species, and reaping a forbidden and abnormal love affair that was unacceptable to the ethics of the universe.
However, such anecdotes are very rare in "Parapsychological Explorations", and there are even no pictures to accompany them, they are just randomly piled up in the margins.

Sightings of UFOs are extremely rare in Mong Cai City—at most one or two. And those were just weather balloons being wrongly accused, misread by tired citizens suffering from glaucoma. Now that school has started, DouDou can't go to those places where aliens roam freely and cause trouble—like Utah or Nevada in the United States, or even the Easter Islands in the South Pacific—to demand a cataract surgery.

Of course, science is advancing by leaps and bounds, and technological inventions are emerging in an endless stream. Newer and more fashionable products appear every day: maybe one day you will be able to install a few more robotic arms and legs on your body.
With his head full of strange ideas, he yawned and walked into the alley in front of the school in a daze.

Before even entering the school gate, I saw the dean of studies digging his fingers into the students' hair, measuring the length. The duty committee member stood by, stopping students whose hairstyles looked a little off.

Seeing how they cooperated calmly, Doudou's thoughts returned to the starting point again -
In the final analysis, you should find some help!

Just like Robin to Batman, Sancho to Don Quixote, and Brother Haier to Brother Haier; if a person cannot have more hands and feet, then he cannot do all the work by himself.

An assistant, or maybe an assistant? It's always just Doudou, and he's really too busy.

If we want to be more sophisticated, we should probably set up a camera crew or something to help film these weird things we might encounter.
Although Doudou's hair was quite long, exceeding the school regulations, he was unaware of it and was still busy pondering these ideas.

Bang!
The crowd entering the school gate suddenly rushed against the dean of studies like waves, causing his belly, which hung over his belt and waistband, to shake a few times.

The dean was busy pinching students' hair with his fingers, like grabbing a bowling ball without finger holes.
But as he turned around following the crowd, he saw a new target; a bright yellow figure, particularly conspicuous:
"Hey! Stop right there, classmate! Which class are you from?"

But somehow, his voice became lower and lower; as if there was a little person hiding in his throat, slowly soothing his trembling vocal cords.

A circle quietly formed among the crowd entering the school gate; students pushing bicycles squeezed towards the corners, and their pedals were stuck on the legs of the students around them.

But no student seemed to notice this inconvenience, even though the school gate became as crowded as a temple fair - they still just continued to walk on their own, occasionally chatting.

In the middle of this circular space, the boy was pacing and mumbling to himself. It was a hot day, and he was wearing a yellow raincoat over his school uniform:

No matter how much the dean relaxed his standards, he couldn't let hair that hung so low it touched his neck pass.
It should be like this.

But—after the dean of studies had completely spit out the roar that had turned into a mosquito's murmur, he suddenly turned back and continued to catch the next bowling ball.

He didn't know why he did it, but he did it anyway.

By the time the school gate closed and the morning reading bell rang, the dean had completely forgotten about the matter.

Doudou didn't notice the little incident at the school gate at all - and he didn't realize that on the first day of school, he was almost caught by the dean and given a free haircut.

He walked across the playground, around a group of students trying to touch the basketball hoop, and walked into his class.

The classroom was filled with the smell of breakfast; soy milk, bread, and fried taro cakes, which tasted greasy.

I don't know who quietly opened the terminal on the podium, and the screen next to the blackboard played the answers to the summer homework:
Several students were holding food in their mouths and clenching pens in their hands; they were huddled in the back row of the classroom, their heads heaving as they copied their homework frantically.

I even stuffed a tape into the socket in the wall - this audio system was originally used for listening comprehension exercises - and played Zhang Yusheng's "My Future Is Not a Dream" to speed up the students' work.

[Hahaha! Cram at the last minute——]

Doudou folded his arms, chin tilted to the sky; he walked quickly across the classroom without even glancing at the monitor:
Normally, Doudou would be one of these diligent students.
But today is different.

Doudou proudly held the finished booklets in his hands and shook them gently, immersed in the envious gazes of his classmates in the back row.
When she watched a movie with Ai Xi two days ago, she brought him the answers to her summer homework that she bought at Xinhua Book City.

(End of this chapter)