Chapter 47: Two years ago
"No problem, I understand now."
Hoang Tuan sat on the bed and turned off the content on the novel's control panel.
He glanced at the closed door and then looked out the window.
Outside was quiet, with only a slight cold breeze blowing in from the window, making the bedroom not too warm.
The clock on the wall ticked loudly.
It was already eleven o'clock at night...
"The rule to look up seems simple, revolving around what my mother said."
He took out a notebook from the desk behind and wrote down his thoughts with a pen.
"Because Dinh Phuc didn't eat dinner earlier, I understand that he didn't listen to his mother, which made her want to kill him..."
"Just now, Mom told him to stay obediently in the room."
"So, does this mean that every time Mom makes a rule, there will be an accident?"
"If it follows this direction..."
"Does that mean it will start with me tonight?"
The pen glided on the paper.
Black ink flowed from the pen tip, recording the information that Hoang Tuan had gathered so far.
He stopped writing here and stood up, starting to observe other things in his bedroom, preparing to familiarize himself with the room's layout.
He pulled the wardrobe down to the bottom...
Apart from the clothes scattered around, there were only a few items for leisure and some sets of beddings.
The bed was placed very low, next to the wardrobe, with only a small gap left under the bed.
He couldn't even sweep the dust with a broom and could eliminate the possibility of someone hiding under the bed.
The study desk was very simple.
Apart from the messy notebooks on the table, there was a broken cabinet underneath, slightly larger, and it seemed to contain several schoolbooks for the whole semester.
Hoang Tuan opened the cabinet under the table.
Inside was a wooden cabinet.
What caught his eye was a stack of large yellow-brown envelopes...
There were no zippers or postage stamps, but when he picked up the envelopes, it was clear that there was something inside.
"Even though this era is a bit backward, without convenient smartphones and communication software, considering the development of the timeline, even push-button phones with antennas must be prevalent."
"Even if strict management doesn't allow buying a cellphone, there should be a landline phone... not to the point of communicating by letter."
While feeling strange, Hoang Tuan opened the envelope.
Inside was a neatly folded white paper.
Perhaps due to folding multiple times, the creases on the paper were deep.
He doubted opening the letter, wondering if there was any important clue in it...
But after looking at the contents.
A sense of suspicion arose, and he realized that this was somewhat different from what he had imagined.
…
"To Hồ Thanh Đoan, I really like you, but I'm not good at expressing myself, so I have never dared to come close to you. Do you know, since sitting at the same table with you, I have had a very strange feeling."
"I don't know how to express this feeling, it's wonderful, I clearly tried to control this feeling, but I can't stop thinking about you."
"…."
"I've said too much, I don't even know what I want to express. If possible, I want to have a relationship with you!"
"Signature: Hoàng Tuân."
"10/03/2006."
…
After being stunned,
Hoang Tuan sealed the envelope again and placed it on the table. He never expected that "himself" in this world had secretly written a love letter and hidden it in the drawer.
With a desire to find clues.
He patiently continued to open all the remaining envelopes and read them from beginning to end.
Unfortunately, after reading one by one, Hoang Tuan's current mood could not be fully expressed in words.
There were more than one love letter like this.
To be precise, all the envelopes in the drawer were love letters...
It was almost filling the entire cabinet.
The folds of each letter were deep...
It was not difficult for Hoang Tuan to imagine "himself" in this world, the high school boy...
Every night sitting at the study desk, the boy used his life experience to write love letters expressing innocent thoughts, wanting to convey the love in his heart on a piece of paper.
Perhaps every time he finished writing and read it again.
Perhaps he always felt that the sentence structure was not right.
If he directly made changes on it, he might think that it would make the whole love letter messy and unattractive, so he painstakingly rewrote it under the warm yellow light of the desk lamp at night to perfect the letter.
He was very serious.
He feared that his handwriting would be messy and ugly, and it could be seen that he used a ruler to draw horizontal lines to write each emotional stroke.
The content was naive and childish.
He was eager to express his heart to the other person.
He truly wanted the other person to know what he was thinking.
He wrote a lot of letters, densely packed, just reading them felt tiring. Judging from the date marked below, these love letters consumed quite a bit of his time.
Unfortunately.
The boy who was always bullied was so timid...
In fact, he was quite a "weak" person.
Perhaps because he was afraid of rejection and ridicule, in the end, the love letters he wrote were still discarded.
Thrown into the drawer.
It was already covered with dust...
Hoang Tuan didn't pay much attention to the love history of "himself."
He casually put all the envelopes aside because he saw a class photo at the bottom of the drawer.
The date of the photo was marked as the year when they entered grade 10.
When he picked it up, he immediately turned it over to check the names of the students printed on it.
Fortunately, he guessed right.
The names of the students were usually printed on the back of the class photo...
"Hoang Tuan" was the last name in the third row.
It didn't take long for him to find the boy standing in the corner, looking a bit shy.
Although the appearance of "himself" in the photo still had the childishness, it looked quite similar to him.
Even Hoang Tuan himself saw this photo.
He thought he might look like this when he was in high school.
"Why is Thanh Linh in the photo?!"
Hoang Tuan frowned, carefully looking at the figure in white ao dai in the photo. Although the facial features were not clear because of the distance, he could still recognize that the girl looked almost identical to Thanh Linh.
"Has Thanh Linh come to this world before me?"
He paid attention to the direction of the eyes in the photo.
That was the boy with a baby face in the photo.
"Why are you looking at him?"
"If it follows the timeline of this world, it happened two years ago..."
"Could she have come here two years ago and knew Hoang Tuan in this world?"
"What is happening..."
While he was lost in thought, a strange sound suddenly came from the wardrobe behind Hoang Tuan.
He turned back and looked.
The wardrobe looked as usual, nothing strange at all, as if the sound he heard just now was an auditory illusion.
Hoang Tuan stared at the wardrobe and raised his attention.
When this auditory illusion usually occurred in a horror story, most of the time it would happen.
At this moment, Hoang Tuan suddenly remembered.
He was still under his mother's rule...
After his mother gave the order, strange things would start happening.
The clock on the wall had passed halfway.
The closer it got to the classic midnight hour in horror stories.
Alright.
Before Hoang Tuan solved the entire puzzle in here.
He had to get through tonight first...