On Friday morning at six, Zheng Qing awoke from a chaotic dream.
In the dream, giant purple spiders crawled into the pitch-black dormitory, with a row of white spindle shapes of varying sizes hanging from the ceiling. The spiders waved their sharp forelimbs, tearing open those web-woven spindles, revealing the rotting, moldy green bodies of all the members of dorm 403.
Among them were young wizards like Zheng Qing and Xiao Xiao, as well as the little sprites he kept, and that fat cat—it held a half-eaten chicken leg in its mouth, covered in mottled mold.
"Crack crack!"
A sound of fine and dense collisions came from between the spider's joints, quickly coalescing into a strange-sounding sentence: "… What a beautiful row of fruits… what a pity they aren't in my orchard."
The night wind blew into the dormitory through the crack the spider crawled through, and the young public student felt the shattered strands of web fluttering up and blocking his nose, making it hard to breathe.
