NOVEL NEXT Ch. 6
Chapter 6: Disappearance
Lu Feng had been stunned speechless by Yu Mo’s father’s answer; he almost wondered if he had misheard.
“Did you just… say what?” he asked.
“…Xiao Feng, are you sick?” came the other side’s worried voice through the receiver.
“I never had a daughter. You should go to the hospital and get checked out,” Yu Mo’s father said.
At that moment, other voices suddenly sounded on the far end of the line.
Yu Mo’s father hurriedly added, “I have something to do, I’ll hang up first,” and the call was abruptly cut off.
Lu Feng stood frozen, still holding the phone aloft until it slipped from his hand and clattered to the floor; only then did he snap back to his senses.
What had Yu Mo’s father just said?
He’d said… he’d never had a daughter named Yu Mo?
“What kind of joke is this!?” Lu Feng snarled.
He bent down, grabbed his phone, and opened the call log—
For a moment, the room fell into an eerie, suffocating silence.
Lu Feng stared at the call history on his screen.
He remembered very clearly that he had called Yu Mo only ten-odd minutes earlier, yet there was no record of her in the call log now; previous records had vanished too.
A search in his contacts turned up nothing.
He hurried to open QQ and WeChat—nothing.
Everything was gone; even the photos of Yu Mo that had been on his phone had disappeared.
Everything to do with Yu Mo had been erased, as if… she had never existed.
Cold sweat ran down Lu Feng’s face.
He dialed Yu Mo’s number from memory—
“Sorry, the number you have dialed is not in service.”
The number that had connected just ten minutes ago was now a dead line.
Dazed and reeling from the shock of reality, Lu Feng clutched his head and staggered.
He opened his phone again and dialed another number—
“Beep… beep… Hello, what is it, son?”
“Mom… do you know Yu Mo?”
“Who are you talking about? Yu Mo? Who is she?”
“……”
“What’s wrong? Did something happen?”
“Click.” The call was cut off.
After the call ended, Lu Feng sat on the bed in a daze, trembling uncontrollably.
He wasn’t sure whether he had gone mad or the world had gone mad.
The memories of being with her were so vivid—so real—that Lu Feng could still recall every detail…
Could those memories all have been delusions born of his own madness?
He tried to recall the first time he had met Yu Mo—
It had been when he was about ten.
Fresh from his parents’ divorce, Lu Feng had sat silently on a park bench.
It rained heavily that day; the cold rain washed the world in front of him and mixed with his tears.
Then a little girl wearing rain boots and holding a small pink umbrella had come over.
She had sat beside him and tilted the umbrella toward him.
The umbrella wasn’t large, and soon the girl’s clothes were soaked.
Lu Feng had stared blankly at her.
He didn’t know her name, had only seen her twice in the neighborhood before, and he didn’t understand why she was doing this.
But Lu Feng had said nothing; he accepted her presence.
So the two children had sat together shoulder to shoulder until the clouds passed and the rain stopped.
Later, both of them had come down with high fevers.
Years after, when Lu Feng had asked Yu Mo why she had stayed with him that day, she had said,
“Because Xiao Feng looked really sad back then. I couldn’t just leave you.”
Yu Mo had said it as if it were the most natural thing, then thought for a moment and added,
“Although… maybe I wouldn’t have done it for someone else.”
“Huh? Why not?”
“Because… ah, I can’t really explain it!” she had blushed and avoided the topic.
There had been so many firsts besides that: the first present she gave him on his birthday, the first time she tried to cook for him, the first time she skipped class with him to play games…
Those countless memories of her had long since become part of Lu Feng’s life, yet now someone was telling him it had all been false—that Yu Mo had never existed at all?
“What a joke!!” Lu Feng refused to accept that Yu Mo had never existed.
She had undoubtedly been real!
He forced himself to breathe and to calm down.
In such an abnormal and inexplicable situation, he could not afford to lose his reason.
He thought logically: why did Yu Mo’s father and his own mother not remember her? Why had everything about her suddenly vanished?
It was as if her existence had been completely wiped away.
Lu Feng recalled a plot from a novel, in which beings beyond human comprehension could easily erase all traces of a person’s existence from the world; anything connected to that person would disappear without a trace.
But that couldn’t be right—if that were the case, how could he still retain memories of Yu Mo?
Suddenly, he remembered what Liuli had said—
Tomorrow, something bad would happen at school.
Something bad…
Connecting that phrase to the bizarre situation now, Lu Feng was almost certain that Liuli’s warning about “something bad” was directly related to Yu Mo’s disappearance.
…Right, the others, the other classmates!
He remembered that Yu Mo had not been the only one going to school that day.
He immediately opened his contacts and found that the call records, phone numbers, QQ and WeChat contacts for other people had also vanished—everything associated with them had dissipated.
The other students in the class had disappeared just like Yu Mo!
If Yu Mo’s disappearance alone could perhaps be explained as his own delusion, the simultaneous disappearance of so many people could only mean one thing—
Something had happened at the school, something beyond ordinary understanding, something bizarre.
What should he do? Call the police?
But those people existed only in his memory now; all proof of their existence had been erased.
If he went to the police… would it even do any good?
What other options were there…
Who could possibly help in a situation like this…?
The answer was: no one.
Every student in Grade 3, Class 2 had vanished, along with anything that could have proved they had existed.
No one remembered them; he had no way to prove they had ever been.
In the end, Lu Feng reached one conclusion—
He could only rely on himself.
What had happened had shaken Lu Feng’s worldview, but he didn’t have time to ruminate.
Recalling his promise to Liuli the previous day—“don’t go to school”—he hesitated for a moment, but then threw on his shoes and dashed out the door.
He had once thought that if he simply didn’t go to school, everything would remain safe.
But now, even though he hadn’t gone to school, the “bad thing” had still taken place.
Obviously, Liuli had been wrong; whether or not he went to school, the bad thing would occur.
Lu Feng no longer cared about breaking his promise to Liuli; he only wanted to get to the school immediately to find out what had happened and to find his childhood friend Yu Mo.
He grabbed his bike keys and ran outside, mounting the old bicycle that had sat unused downstairs for a long time, and pedaled as fast as he could toward the school.
Yet, if Lu Feng had been calmer in that moment and had firmly kept his promise to Liuli, none of the things that followed would have happened.
But there was no “if” in this world.
If Lu Feng could return to that moment, he would have fought with all his strength to stop himself, and he would have told him—
Don’t go to school!
Even if it meant dying, don’t go!