Chapter 144: Judging People By Their Feet
“Did someone just call you?”
Hoshihara Ai pressed down on Sakamoto Ken’s shoulder and looked to the side.
Sakamoto Ken also looked in the same direction as her. Hoshihara Ai couldn’t make it out, but he heard it very clearly—it was obviously Mio’s voice.
A bad thought popped into his mind, completely distracting him to the point where he lost his entire state.
Hoshihara Ai looked down and said, “What’s going on?”
Sakamoto Ken looked in the direction the voice had come from and said, “Didn’t you say there were only the two of us in the dream?”
Hoshihara Ai said, “It should be like that… but in the dream, you can actually perceive some sounds from reality, though they’re not like the one just now.”
“How is it different?” Sakamoto Ken asked.
Hoshihara Ai said, “First, I locked the door. Second, if it were someone talking nearby in reality, the sound would come from all directions, without a clear direction.”
Sakamoto Ken stared at the vending machine and didn’t notice any movement, but he had no interest in continuing with Hoshihara Ai.
Sakamoto Ken stood up and walked toward it, with Hoshihara Ai following close behind.
As he got closer to where the voice had come from, Sakamoto Ken felt his heart rate quicken. He suddenly turned and jumped to the other side of the vending machine.
No one was there.
He immediately checked the adjacent public restroom, and it was also empty.
“This isn’t right. I couldn’t have had an auditory hallucination, could I?” Sakamoto Ken said.
“I heard it too, so it couldn’t be an auditory hallucination,” Hoshihara Ai said. “It was a woman’s voice. What’s going on?”
Hoshihara Ai looked at Sakamoto Ken with a hint of accusation in her eyes.
Sakamoto Ken coughed lightly and said, “I don’t know… I’m just wondering why someone would call me.”
“And they called you A Jian, very intimately,” Hoshihara Ai said, crossing her arms and staring at Sakamoto Ken.
Sakamoto Ken thought for a moment and said, “After all, this is a dream, so anything could happen, right?”
Hoshihara Ai shook her head. “This isn’t like an ordinary dream. No matter what, there shouldn’t be anyone else appearing… Hmm?”
She suddenly thought of something, furrowed her brows, and stared at Sakamoto Ken. “That voice just now—was it one of them?”
Faced with Hoshihara Ai’s question, the muscles at the corner of Sakamoto Ken’s mouth twitched awkwardly. After thinking it over, he decided to tell the truth directly.
“It was indeed…”
“One of the other two you were dating behind my back, right?”
“Uh… no, that was from another timeline. That Sakamoto Ken was dating you and two others behind your back—it has nothing to do with me.”
Hoshihara Ai stepped closer to Sakamoto Ken, lifted his chin with her hand, stared straight at him, and asked, “Name.”
“…”
“Not saying?”
“…It doesn’t matter, does it?”
Hoshihara Ai said, “What, afraid I’ll deal with them?”
“Not exactly…” Sakamoto Ken touched his chest and said, “Mainly, you’ve stabbed me with a knife before, so it’s normal to have some psychological shadow. Understand.”
Hoshihara Ai grabbed Sakamoto Ken and said, “Take me to see them.”
“It’s not time yet…”
“I won’t say anything about your relationship with them. I just want to see them, and I don’t even have to exchange with them,” Hoshihara Ai said.
“Let go first…”
Hoshihara Ai let go, took a few steps forward, and looked around left and right. There really was no one else there.
“Anyway, time’s about up. Let’s get out first,” Hoshihara Ai said.
“So how do we get out?” Sakamoto Ken asked.
“Just wake up,” Hoshihara Ai said.
“Wake up…” Sakamoto Ken said. “Didn’t we not set an alarm clock earlier? And you locked the door—how do we wake up?”
Hoshihara Ai stood still and closed her eyes directly.
Sakamoto Ken walked up to her. Seeing her motionless, he reached out to touch her body.
As soon as his fingertip touched her, the Hoshihara Ai in front of him suddenly disappeared.
“Eh?” Sakamoto Ken went to where Hoshihara Ai had been standing. On the park ground covered with fine sand, there were still two footprints left.
Right, footprints.
Sakamoto Ken remembered upon seeing Hoshihara Ai’s footprints and immediately looked down nearby.
The open area of Civic Park was covered with fine sand, so any walk left traces.
Soon, he saw a series of footprints next to the public restroom. These were completely different from the bare footprints he and Hoshihara Ai had made—clearly from shoes.
This shoe print had diamond-shaped patterns, the anti-slip texture on the sole, but Sakamoto Ken had no reason to look at their soles, so he didn’t know which pair of shoes it was.
But judging by the size…
Sakamoto Ken put his own foot next to it.
His foot was 27cm long, and this footprint was about two centimeters shorter than his.
But considering shoes are slightly longer than the actual foot, the owner of this footprint had a foot length of around 24cm.
Haruna’s feet were small, about 22.5cm. Hoshihara Ai was 24.5cm, slightly longer than Natsume Mio, with the difference mainly in foot shape rather than length.
Combined with the voice he’d heard earlier, it was definitely left by Natsume Mio.
Could she have appeared here just now? But how did she disappear after just one sound?
He’d looked over here immediately, and there was nowhere else around to hide.
This dream had one characteristic: the basic environment was based on his memory, but the clothes they wore matched what they had on in reality at the time.
It should have recreated the impression in their own consciousness of what they were wearing when they entered the dream.
This had been verified on Hoshihara Ai—before leaving her place, she’d changed into that outfit, and Sakamoto Ken had seen it in the dream too.
Of course, not on her, but taken off and thrown on the back of the sofa.
If—and just if—Mio had entered this dream just now and seen him with Hoshihara Ai…
No, why was he suddenly having a sensation.
Sakamoto Ken patted his forehead to shake off the random thoughts and calm himself down.
He stood up and walked around alone to confirm again that no one else was there.
At that moment, he suddenly heard Hoshihara Ai’s voice.
“A Jian, wake up. Time to get up.”
Sure enough, as Hoshihara Ai had said earlier, sounds from outside seemed to come from all directions at once.
Then he felt the whole world shaking, everything in front of him rapidly contracting, and his vision returning to darkness.
He slowly opened his eyes and saw Hoshihara Ai sitting on the edge of the bed holding a tablet.
Sakamoto Ken sat up and saw various data and charts on the screen. He asked, “So what was the experiment result?”
Hoshihara Ai looked at the tablet in her hand and said, “Strange… there’s suddenly a peak in the middle.”
The basic data was actually the same as her previous self-tests. In this dream, the brain’s reaction was different from normal dreaming—more like high-intensity thinking.
Today’s monitoring data matched expectations in the initial stage for both of them, until a period before waking, when Sakamoto Ken’s brainwave data suddenly spiked for a few minutes at twice the previous intensity—exactly double.
Just like a server whose load suddenly doubled.
She stared at Sakamoto Ken and said seriously, “Someone did enter our dream just now.”
“You can tell from this?” Sakamoto Ken asked curiously.
“Never mind that,” Hoshihara Ai set down the tablet computer and said. “Now take me to see them. Don’t worry, I won’t care about them. You old scumbag, stop worrying I’ll kill you.”
“Not an old scumbag…”
“Not?”
“Not old…”
Still over 100 monthly tickets short of 2000… but only a few hours left. Does anyone have unused monthly tickets? Can you help Lemon reach 2000? or2
