Genius Playground

They left the barbecue stand and headed to Jiang Ran’s house.

When he opened the door, Dad Jiang was still awake, watching TV in the living room.

"Hey, Wang Hao, you’re here! Long time no see. You’ve put on some weight again! Time to go on a diet!"

"Hahaha!"

Wang Hao laughed, patting his belly.

"The food at school is great! Once I graduate and start working, I’ll be living on scraps and I’ll naturally lose the weight!"

Jiang Ran watched them banter.

In his memories of World Line 0’s history, Wang Hao’s relationship with his parents hadn’t been this good. They had barely even met a few times.

But in World Line 1, thanks to the Butterfly Effect, that relationship had changed.

First, they had been inseparable best friends in high school, so Wang Hao must have come over to his house all the time, just like Qin Feng had in World Line 0...

Second, after Cheng Mengxue’s car accident, his parents had been worried he wouldn’t be able to cope and might do something drastic. They had specifically enrolled him in the same vocational college as Wang Hao and asked Wang Hao to keep an eye on him. With that responsibility, they must have called Wang Hao regularly to ask how he was doing.

"Have you eaten yet?" Dad Jiang asked.

"Yeah, we already ate."

Jiang Ran walked over to the sideboard, pulled open a drawer, and rummaged inside for the basement key.

"Dad, you can go back to watching TV. Wang Hao and I are going to the basement to look for something."

"So late?"

Dad Jiang tried to talk him out of it.

"Why not look for it tomorrow during the day? What’s the rush at this hour?"

"It’s urgent."

Jiang Ran pulled Wang Hao along.

"We’re off. You go on and watch your show."

With that,

the two of them went down to the basement, turned on the light, and began to turn the place upside down.

The Jiang family’s basement was huge and piled high with stuff. Finding a single draft notebook from many years ago in all this mess was not going to be easy.

The main issue was that his father was a pack rat. Just like a hamster, he couldn’t bear to throw anything away, no matter how useless. That included all of Jiang Ran’s old textbooks, workbooks, and extracurricular readers, which were all piled up in a corner of the basement.

It wasn’t just his middle school textbooks and miscellaneous items; even his elementary school textbooks and notebooks, and his childhood picture books and comics were still here!

"Your dad really knows how to hang on to stuff."

Wang Hao couldn’t help but remark,

"If that were my dad, he would’ve packed up all my textbooks and notebooks and sold them for scrap the day after I graduated."

"It’s not like you’d ever look at them again anyway," Jiang Ran retorted.

"Oh yeah? Look at this!"

Wang Hao tossed him a comic book, Huluwa vs. Transformers.

"Go on, have a good look! A bootleg comic!"

Jiang Ran caught it with a faint smile.

"Believe it or not, this isn’t a bootleg. It’s actually part of a series."

As he spoke, Wang Hao, sure enough, pulled out another one: Huluwa vs. Saint Seiya.

They wouldn’t have known without looking, but a glance was all it took to see it was, shockingly, an officially licensed publication.

’This world is just too bizarre.’

...

The various items in the basement were stored much more chaotically than Jiang Ran had imagined. The books, in particular, were kept with no rhyme or reason, a complete mess.

"It’s way messier than I remembered."

Jiang Ran wiped the sweat from his brow.

"As I recall, it shouldn’t have been this messy. My dad should have saved my textbooks and workbooks in separate piles, organized chronologically by school year."

"After all, once this stuff was put away, it was unlikely to ever be taken out again. How did it get so disorganized? My elementary, middle, and high school textbooks are all mixed up."

This chaos made their search for the Setting Collection much more difficult. It meant they would have to comb through everything meticulously... opening every stack of books, every piece of scratch paper, and every notebook to check.

The result was disheartening.

They searched for three or four hours, well into the early morning, turning over every corner of the basement, but they still couldn’t find that old Setting Collection.

"That’s so weird."

Jiang Ran scratched his head.

’Could the Setting Collection have been thrown out with the recycling?’

’No, that shouldn’t be possible.’

’It just doesn’t fit with my dad’s pack rat personality.’

’My father was always thinking, "What if this is useful later?" or "Let’s just keep it for now," or "It’d be a shame to sell good books for scrap," or "I’ll keep it as a memento..." He couldn’t bear to throw anything away, and he couldn’t bear to sell anything either.’

’So how could the Setting Collection be missing?’

"Still at it this late?"

Suddenly,

his father’s voice came from the basement doorway.

He looked up.

Jiang Ran saw his father in his pajamas, using his phone’s flashlight and yawning as he walked in.

"I already got a whole sleep cycle in. I woke up to use the bathroom and saw your room was empty and Wang Hao wasn’t sleeping over, so I figured I’d check the basement."

Pressing his hands to his aching back, Jiang Ran stood up from the floor.

"We’re looking for one of my old scratch notebooks from middle school, but we haven’t been able to find it."

"Ooooh."

His father said, a look of realization dawning on his face.

"Well, it makes sense you can’t find it then. Son, have you forgotten? Back when you were a freshman or sophomore in high school, a thief broke into the basement and completely tossed the place."

"There wasn’t anything valuable in the basement back then, just a few cases of old liquor that weren’t worth much, so the thief didn’t take anything."

"But all those books and things were thrown all over the floor. It made your mom so mad she even called the police."

"The police came and investigated, and after taking stock, they saw nothing valuable was missing. They didn’t make a big deal out of it and just told us to change the lock on the basement."

"Later, when we were cleaning up, a lot of the books were ruined, so your mom called a scrap collector to haul some of it away in his tricycle. The scratch notebook you’re looking for was probably taken away back then."

Huh?

Jiang Ran’s head snapped up.

’A thief... broke into our basement?’

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