Chapter 19: The Peculiar Diary

“Fuzzball, do you think I could keep a Cimo for myself?” Curious, Chao Xu ran her hands all over Cimo, who had no real sense of what constituted common knowledge in this world, and turned to Fuzzball for confirmation.

Fuzzball, whose bottle of water was always less than half full, pondered the question for a long time before replying with grave seriousness, “Host, you cannot do that. In this world, keeping people as livestock is illegal! Pull yourself together, ahhh!”

Her host was truly a headache—frail, yes, but it was her mind that was the real trouble. It seemed to be full of all sorts of dangerous ideas. Managing her was truly exhausting for the system.

“Oh, I see,” Chao Xu answered, her tone crestfallen. She continued sulkingly to tousle Cimo’s hair.

So soft, like a cat. She liked it, but she couldn't keep it. That made her unhappy.

Click.

Just as Chao Xu was wallowing in disappointment, something suddenly fell from under the bed, perfectly shattering the mood.

Her irritation instantly found a new target. With a frosty expression, she crouched down, intent on fishing out whatever had ruined the moment and smashing it to pieces.

But when she crouched down and peered into the space beneath the bed, she discovered a diary with an ancient, rustic design.

Curiosity piqued, Chao Xu reached out and hooked the diary out from under the bed.

The cover was simple, both top and bottom edges stained with the marks of time, but the center patch looked relatively new, as if the book had always been tucked under the bed and pressed down by something else. Looking more closely, she noticed a clasp-like contraption under the bed, clearly meant to hold the diary in place. The sound just now must have come from that device breaking.

With the diary in her hands, Chao Xu felt a powerful urge to snoop.

“Tell me, Fuzzball,” she asked, “do you think a good person would peek at someone else’s diary?”

Faced with her host’s sudden inquiry, the upright and morally sound Fuzzball immediately nodded, “Of course not!”

Chao Xu let out a sigh of relief and nimbly flipped the diary open.

“That’s great. I’m not a good person.”

If good people couldn't peek, then obviously, not being good meant she had every right to read it openly.

She really was a genius.

So, before Fuzzball could even realize what had just happened, Chao Xu was already poring over the diary’s contents.

Judging from the date on the first page, this little book had been left behind twelve years ago by the original owner, Chao Si, at age five. Surprisingly, though the handwriting was atrocious—more like a demon’s scrawl—the logic throughout was remarkably clear.

Scattered here and there, she found little plans and schemes that no five-year-old should be able to devise.

Frowning, Chao Xu gnawed her nails as she continued to flip through the pages.

Chao Si’s original diary entries were indeed all highly logical, frequently bursting with startlingly bright insights. But then, for a stretch of a whole year, the diary was left blank. When the entries resumed, the book had become nothing more than a child’s sketchpad—no coherent words, just wobbly phonetic scribbles and brilliant, wild doodles.

Chao Si had started the diary on her fifth birthday, the year she’d received it. But just five years later, on her tenth birthday, everything changed.

The girl whose strange charm once sparkled through her words suddenly turned into a fool who couldn’t even write.

What on earth had happened in that missing year?

Hiss—

So absorbed was Chao Xu in reading, and so lost in gnawing her fingernails, that she accidentally bit into flesh and only then did her thoughts retreat from the pages of that strange diary.