Player Reload

Nap time is a necessity for high school students.

A day packed with eight classes plus tests and self-study sessions, severely draining on the brain, requires a few dozen minutes of sleep for rejuvenation—this is an objective law of human physiology, immune to personal will.

Even if the top students sneak in some study time during naps, their efficiency might not necessarily be any better. As some teachers say, most of it is empty effort.

"..."

Eyelashes fluttering, Ye Jiaying suddenly woke up with a start, lifting her head from the desk.

The cheek resting on her arm was slightly reddened, faintly marked with the impression of a button, and her sleepy eyes noticed the clock on the classroom wall. It was twelve-fifty in the afternoon, forty-five minutes left until the end of nap time.

Should she go back to sleep? No, wait, something isn't right...

She furrowed her brows, looking around. Everything in the classroom—including the ceiling, walls, curtains, air conditioner, podium, desks, and benches, and even every one of her sleeping classmates—was covered with a shadowy overlay.

It was as though a filter had been applied.

The seat to her right, Li Cheng's, was empty. She hesitated before extending a finger to touch the arm of the girl at the desk to her left.

Click.

Her finger sank in as if she had poked into wet sand.

The other girl maintained her sleeping posture, her chest rising and falling gently, without waking up. As Ye Jiaying withdrew her finger, the sandy depression in the girl's arm rapidly self-repaired, leaving no visible damage.

"?!"

A surge of astonishment and fear filled her heart, and Ye Jiaying instinctively stood up, leaving her seat.

Peering through the gap in the curtains, she could see a gigantic shuttle-shaped crack across the sky outside the window.

Vast, radiant stars of various colors twinkled non-stop within the crack.

Every single thing was signaling that the current situation was abnormal.

She pinched herself several times to confirm she wasn't dreaming; her cellphone had no signal and couldn't contact the outside world; all the students were like they were in another world, unresponsive. Or perhaps, it was she who was in another world.

After much hesitation, she walked to the back of the classroom and slowly pushed open the door, peering outside through the crack.

Her pupils contracted sharply at the sight of the hallway outside covered with layers of spiderwebs. The white silky threads were stacked upon each other, hanging down like curtains.

And within the hallway stood a familiar figure, not shadowed—the eccentric and genius girl, Yuan Zhixia, with her backpack on, seriously inspecting the spiderweb in front of her.

"Yuan..."

Before she could finish whispering the word "classmate," Yuan Zhixia noticed her and immediately held up a finger to her lips, signaling her to be silent.

Sshhh—

Six giant spiders, each the size of a medium-sized dog, crawled across the outside of the web.

Their shadows cast upon the wall, a multitude of legs pulling on the web, making it tremble slightly.

And between the six giant spiders, something was hung with spider silk. It looked like a silhouette of a person, wrapped in a cocoon, struggling and writhing.

Intense fear gripped her heart. Only after the shadows of the spiders had disappeared did Yuan Zhixia move her feet, silently approaching the back door of Class 5 to join Ye Jiaying and enter the classroom.

"Classmate Yuan, what in the world is happening? Why are we awake? And those spiders..."

Too many questions pressed in her heart, Ye Jiaying asked in a rapid, low voice.

"This is not the place to talk."

Yuan Zhixia looked around Class 5, her gaze sweeping over the dried black bloodstain on the right side of the podium, then focusing on the large wooden cabinet at the back of the room.

For the sake of tidiness and aesthetics in the classroom, items like brooms and dustpans used for cleaning are arranged and stored inside the cabinet, so there is a lot of space inside.

The two crawled into the cabinet, with Yuan Zhixia turning on her phone's flashlight function and handing it to Ye Jiaying to help with lighting.

She, on the other hand, took off her backpack and unzipped it.

Until this moment, Ye Jiaying finally noticed that Yuan Zhixia's backpack was a quick-response bulletproof model.

In addition to the shoulder straps on both sides, there was a waist strap in the middle. By pulling on two ropes, she could quickly flip the outer compartment of the backpack over her head to cover her chest, using it as a vest.

The compartment was hollow inside, containing ceramic bulletproof plates—the same design was present in the back of the backpack.

Come on, what normal student would carry such a backpack to school? This isn't the war-torn Middle East, nor the Africa full of warlords, and it's certainly not the United States, where gunfights are a daily occurrence.

Ye Jiaying's eyes widened, more astonished by the items inside Yuan Zhixia's backpack than the backpack itself.

Beeping alarms, Chili Water Sprays, Electric Shock Devices, Swiss Army Knives, Hand Axes, foldable multi-rotor drones, handheld GPS radios, sponge earplugs, strap-on tourniquets, Anti-toxic Masks, paper maps, Lighting Sticks, Waterproof Space Blankets...

All these items were fixed inside the backpack with straps and buckles, allowing her to walk or run without causing them to collide with each other and make noise.

Yuan Zhixia reached into the backpack, pulled on a well-concealed zipper, and opened a hidden compartment, from which she took out... a handgun?!

Ye Jiaying stared, dumbfounded, as the other party withdrew the gun body and magazine, and from another compartment, found the barrel and spring.

"Classmate Yuan... what exactly is this...?"

"Shh."

Yuan Zhixia interrupted Ye Jiaying's soft inquiry, then took out a Finger Spinner and dismantled it to reveal the hidden brass bullets inside.

She had made the gun herself.

Students who often engaged in illegal firearms manufacturing knew that with the maturation of 3D printing technology, as long as one had blueprints, it was not too difficult to create the profile of a gun.

Especially for firearms like the Glock 17 with relatively few parts, where components including the magazine body, the bullet pushing plate, the firing pin seat, and the sleeve were all made of plastic.

The real challenge was the barrel, spring, firing pin, bullets, propellant, and primer.

Yuan Zhixia easily won various scholarships like dining and drinking water, and occasionally she would buy and sell virtual currencies online. She had saved a fair amount of money just after starting high school, eventually convincing her parents to let her buy the standalone garage under her apartment complex.

She spent money to renovate the garage, installed sound-absorbing panels, purchased a small CNC lathe, 3D plastic printers, 3D metal printers, and a series of chemical equipment.

After all the prep work was done, she first used an industrial-grade printer to produce the gun body, magazine body, and trigger and other structural parts that were as strong as those produced with whole-piece injection molding.

Then, she used the CNC lathe to machine the barrel.

Some springs and firing pins, as well as casings were resolved through the all-capable Taobao—casings are not forbidden items, and discarded casings from a legal shooting range are plentiful.

For propellant, she used her own mixture of single-base gunpowder, guncotton with a decelerant, burning at a relatively slow and stable rate, ensuring adequate chamber pressure without the risk of explosively high pressure and bursting the chamber.

(For fireworks that strive for sound and light effects, the burning rate is very fast; using such fireworks powder in bullets would most likely lead to explosion)

As for the primer, Yuan Zhixia used Mercury Fulminate, which she also prepared herself using mercury and nitric acid—modern ammunition primers often use non-corrosive materials like tetrazene, Antimony Sulfide, Potassium Chlorate, but considering the difficulty of preparation and the amount of noise it makes, she opted for the corrosive Mercury Fulminate. After all, it would make do.

Having sorted out all of the above, what was left was just reloading the bullets—simple with the right equipment. Abroad, reloaded bullets offer more precision in controlling the amount of propellant and thus offer better accuracy than factory-made bullets, and they're also cheaper.

Of course, manufacturing firearms and ammunition clandestinely is illegal and a dark secret.

She had to be mindful of her neighbors' comings and goings, lest her next-door neighbors find the sound of the lathe too noisy and report it to the property management.

She had to carefully handle all sorts of chemicals, fearing that any odor might leak and attract the police.

Even after the handgun and ammunition were entirely manufactured, they had to be disassembled into parts and stashed in various places within her backpack, disguised as toy guns. She dared not take the subway when she carried her bag out.

All this effort, if viewed purely from a self-defense standpoint, seemed rather unnecessary.

Electric Shock Guns, Chili Water Spray, Beeping alarms, and such were already sufficient to fend off criminals.

If push came to shove, specially modified Hand Crossbows, Air Guns, Nail Guns, and Electric Shock Guns pack enough power to kill large animals and could also serve as a means of protection.

If caught, the punishment would be less severe than manufacturing real firearms.

"Click, click, click, click."

Yuan Zhixia used a magazine loader to rapidly load bullets, her lips subconsciously tightening.

The primary reason she expended so much effort and passion to possess a firearm was due to an intense feeling of unease.

Unlike other ordinary, ignorant people, as a genius, she had already discerned through traces on the internet that there were abnormalities in this world.

Beneath those urban legends with obscure beginnings and ends, some terrible truth was hidden.