Everly clutched the blanket, grinding her teeth viciously, thinking how cruel fate could be.
In the very beginning—the absolute beginning—it all traced back to a teorite that had fallen from the sky.
On the morning after the teorite landed, an accident occurred while the townspeople were moving it. They accidentally knocked it and cracked it open. At the scene of the split teorite, Everly once saw Carter bend down and pick up sothing small from the ground.
It was a very, very tiny detail. After all, Carter wasn’t the only one collecting stones from the crater that day—Everly herself went later too—so at first glance, nothing seed wrong.
The next day, Everly happened to pass by and overheard Carter bragging to soone about his “alien egg.” That egg was later snatched away by the boy who bullied him and thrown into the grass.
This, too, was an extrely trivial matter. With the recent craze over space and the universe, eight out of ten boys Everly knew were boasting about similar things—claiming they’d seen a UFO on their way out, or that prolonged exposure to teorite radiation had given them superpowers. One boy even called the police to report that his parents were aliens in disguise—because they wouldn’t let him eat chocolate after dinner… After hearing so many ridiculous stories like that, people naturally lost the vigilance they should have had.
And so, through a twist of fate, Everly missed the chance to stop the disaster in advance.
Later, she specifically went around asking people and learned that—including Carter—all the students who had seen the “alien egg” that day died during the mutated cockroach attack on the school.
As a result, even until the very end, Everly was never able to determine whether that terrifying cockroach queen had hatched from the alien egg—or whether a local cockroach had accidentally eaten the egg and mutated as a result.
But from this incident, she learned the following lessons:
The first lesson: precognitive ability is not omnipotent.
For example, in the case of the cockroach incident, Everly had actually received a warning even before the teorite fell. But at that ti, she thought the danger existed only at the very mont the teorite hit the ground. After the teorite landed, she let her guard down—unaware that hidden inside the teorite was a terrifying alien egg, the true source of all the disaster.
From this, it beca clear that when a series of bad events are connected, her “sixth sense” might only warn her about the first one. Whether she can avoid the subsequent disasters depends on her own skill. If she relies solely on precognition, she is very likely to stumble in the future. She would have to be more cautious from now on.
The second lesson: pay attention to the signs.
These signs could be a shoelace snapping right before leaving the house, a black crow fluttering chaotically on the roof as the door closes, an unintended glance or a casual remark from soone, or sothing that occurs repeatedly—like the cockroaches in this incident. Spotting these hints requires intuition, because in horror movies, the way a director gives clues can vary greatly. You can’t guess them—it cos from accumulated experience and sudden flashes of insight.
Even so, since this lesson is extrely useful for avoiding danger, Everly believed it was worth including in her “Horror Movie Survival Rules.”
The third lesson: stick close to the protagonists.
This, too, was a rule worth adding to her survival guide. In the cafeteria, Everly tested this principle firsthand. Had she not followed the male and female protagonists and discovered the approaching cockroach swarm in advance—allowing her to escape through the back door—her na, “Everly Minas,” might have been added to the list of victims.
However, this rule is not universally reliable. In so movies, those who separate from the main characters might survive completely unhard, while those who stick close might beco cannon fodder, dying quickly and horribly to highlight the protagonists. In the end, it still cos down to one thing: intuition!
Everly finished writing her summary, set down her pen with satisfaction, and stretched toward the sunset outside the window.
By now, it had been a week since the cockroach outbreak.
The events of the past few days had been utterly surreal.
In fact, when the cockroach disaster first broke out, a group of townspeople had been lucky enough to escape the town. Once free, they imdiately called the police—but the Micano authorities dismissed the reports, thinking “giant cockroaches eating people” sounded absurd, and gave it no serious attention.
It wasn’t until the majority of the town had been killed or injured in the tidal wave of cockroaches that the town governnt finally sent photos of the mutated cockroaches and video evidence of the insect disaster to higher authorities, pleading for help. Only then did the situation start to receive proper attention.
But what the townspeople got wasn’t a shipnt of supplies or aid workers—it was ard soldiers.
On the third day of the insect disaster, early in the morning, the U.S. military arrived and took full control of the town’s affairs. Everyone who had been on the scene—including the police and dical personnel who had been called in right after the disaster—was required to sign a non-disclosure agreent: they could not reveal anything that had happened here to anyone, nor could they keep anything related to the mutated cockroaches.
The soldiers carried solid, gleaming guns and offered fairly generous compensation. The townspeople were too intimidated to complain, and “voluntarily” signed the agreents.
Dressed in protective suits, the military spent four days cleaning the entire town, taking away all cockroach corpses—including the giant ones—and the cracked teorite. Four days later, the army withdrew, leaving Lemot Town as clean as if a dog had licked it all over.
Sure enough, even a bad movie director dreams of making a sequel… But whatever. Whether or not the bad movie could gather enough money for a second installnt didn’t matter—so long as the sequel didn’t happen near her, even if the sky fell, the tall protagonist would always be there to hold it up!
Due to the confidentiality agreents, the town’s insect disaster was ultimately brushed over and officially labeled as a “sandstorm” in news reports and various official docunts. The four heroes who had saved the town—Jas, Diana, Old John, and Everly—did not receive any public governnt recognition. Still, the townspeople were deeply grateful. On their own initiative, they set aside portions of the compensation money they had received and, through the limping old mayor, handed thick stacks of cash to the four unsung heroes.
Everly sneaked ho to count her share—wow, just her portion alone ca to a full 50,000 US dollars. The townspeople were ridiculously generous!
In addition to the money, Old John received a brand-new truck as compensation for using his beloved vehicle to help defeat the giant cockroaches. Everly didn’t know much about cars, but just seeing the old man’s eyes light up as he circled the vehicle, fondly caressing it again and again, she could tell the car’s performance absolutely outshone his old one.
On the sixth evening after the cockroach disaster ended, Old John drove the new car, with his granddaughter Everly as passenger. Amid the townspeople’s cheers and farewells, they left the town, which still had much to rebuild, and returned to the long-missed gas station.
Thank goodness—they were finally ho. If they hadn’t returned soon, poor Buddy the dog would have starved and wasted away…
Life after that went unusually peacefully.
After more than a month of cleanup and reconstruction, Volcano Rock Canyon Elentary School finally reopened. Everly returned to campus to continue her elentary studies.
Faced with a class reduced by half and a new principal and teachers, everyone—including Everly—was filled with mixed emotions. Having survived a brush with death, they now had a new understanding of the aning and value of life and cherished the present peace and safety. The children beca remarkably united, and the school atmosphere improved greatly. Argunts, disputes, and bullying that had once arisen from childish reasons quietly disappeared without anyone noticing.
At the sa ti, as the “great hero” who had saved the town, Everly’s prestige at school reached an unprecedented height.
Everyone—yes, everyone, including the new principal and teachers—greeted her warmly whenever they saw her on the street. Whether she responded or not, they remained enthusiastic, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Everly herself also beca a role model for all the students.
At first, she felt a huge amount of pressure, similar to an ordinary person suddenly becoming a celebrity overnight and having to face the caras—an awkward, disorienting feeling. But over ti, she gradually got used to it.
Unlike the lazy, carefree days before the cockroach disaster, she was now extrely busy and had no ti to fuss over trivial matters.
Eight years of peaceful life had dulled her vigilance, which made her sluggish during the cockroach outbreak. Learning from that experience, Everly resolved to start training herself, learning all kinds of useful skills to prepare for any future ergencies.
When it ca to survival skills, Everly already had a ready-made teacher: Old John.
Before retiring, Old John had served as a detective in the police departnt for over forty years, gaining a wealth of experience from outsmarting and confronting criminals:
He had a solid understanding of psychology and was skilled at reading microexpressions to detect lies.
He could pick locks, knowing exactly how to use a single paperclip to open an old iron lock.
His experience allowed him to glance at a footprint at a scene and roughly estimate a person’s height and weight in his mind.
He was highly knowledgeable in the law, with a deep understanding of U.S. legal statutes and police procedures.
On top of all this, because he firmly believed that a global apocalypse might one day occur, Old John had also taught himself various survival skills. Shortly after retiring, he enrolled in a hardcore wilderness survival course. The final exam involved surviving three days in the tropical forests of Barsi with the other trainees. Old John earned an A and graduated successfully.
With a grandfather whose résumé shone so brilliantly, there was an endless amount Everly could learn.
She told Old John about the skills she wanted to acquire, and of course, he couldn’t object. A die-hard doomsday enthusiast himself, he was more than happy that Everly was starting to prepare for potential crises.
That said, he wasn’t a professional teacher. His knowledge was vast and scattered, like countless independent beads, impossible to teach systematically from concept to principle like a classroom lesson. He could only pass on what he knew to Everly; understanding the underlying principles and connecting them to other knowledge points would be up to her.
Problem… hmm, not a problem at all.
Everly was a remarkable child with mories of her past life. Organizing a few knowledge points? Piece of cake!
And so began her new routine: spending the day in the school library furiously catching up on reading and lessons, then returning ho at night to learn all sorts of miscellaneous skills from Old John.
So of what Old John taught was genuinely fascinating. Take fire-starting in the wilderness, for example. Besides the common thods like drilling wood or using a magnifying glass, he introduced a lesser-known technique: using the reflector inside a flashlight.
This reflector, a concave mirror, sits behind the bulb. When the bulb’s light hits it, the mirror reflects it as parallel beams. If you remove the reflector, place flammable material where the bulb normally sits, and aim the mirror at sunlight, the reflected rays focus on the material and ignite it in no ti.
Much more fun than just reading about it!
Ti flew by amid these busy study sessions.
Before she knew it, Everly celebrated her 10th birthday, moved up to fifth grade, and shot up to 1.6 ters tall—becoming a graceful, strong, and healthy little girl.
TN
She’s taller than , dang. XD I triple checked “一米六 = 1ter6”, probably because of the banshee milk.
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