Today, Let's Raise a Toast to the Ordinary!

Su Ling, Fang Ke, and Zhou Xiaotang are three perfectly ordinary high school girls at Lanhai No. 1 High School.

Every day, they go to school and come home, rush through homework, complain about the cafeteria, and make plans to visit an amusement park or order takeout at someone's house on the weekend. Su Ling runs middle-distance events on the school track team, and after training she always buys two grilled sausages by the school gate. Fang Ke is the kind of person who can flip through a textbook once before an exam and place in the top three, but would rather squat in a corner of the library taking apart old radios. Zhou Xiaotang is the star of the drama club, yet her schoolbag is always stuffed with tasty little snacks to share with her friends, just like someone from the cooking club.

Every now and then, they run into something a little out of the ordinary.

Like something knocking on the walls in the basement of the old school building, a pocket watch that won't stop ticking unearthed at a demolition site in the old district, or a girl terrified out of her wits by some living thing in a newly opened haunted house.

The three of them investigate after school, on weekends, or during their holidays, and figure things out in their own way.

After all, Su Ling has the best sense of direction, Fang Ke can hear sounds no one else can, and Zhou Xiaotang is especially good at dealing with all kinds of people and... well, not all of them are people.

Once a case is solved, they sometimes find one or two unwanted antiques. If they seem worth keeping as mementos, they take them home as decorations.

So a bronze ink box that no longer leaks now sits on Su Ling's desk, holding her keys and loose change. The pocket watch that no longer runs backward rests on Fang Ke's nightstand. She's taken it apart twice to study it and learned nothing. Zhou Xiaotang has a thread-bound diary on her bookshelf that no longer fills itself with random writing when opened. Her cat loves sleeping on it.

Meanwhile, on the hidden side of the city, the folk containment organization Zhiewuzhi, with a thousand years of history, is sorting through every unexplained anomaly recorded over the past six months.

They've found that within a five-kilometer radius of Lanhai City's old district, multiple confirmed cases of possessed objects activating were resolved before the organization intervened.

The overlapping zones dissipated, the possessed objects fell dormant, and the identities of those who contained them remained unknown. When hypnotized witnesses were questioned, three keywords kept appearing in their descriptions: high school girls, school uniforms, Lanhai No. 1 High School.

Within Zhiewuzhi, they are known as:

"Unconfirmed Containment Unit of the Old District," "Boundary Walkers," "Ferrymen of the Hibernating Objects," and "Them."

At that very moment, the three girls involved were sitting in a bubble tea shop by the school, trying to figure out why the answer to question three on page seventeen of their physics homework was C.

Su Ling said they'd calculated the acceleration wrong. Fang Ke said they'd plugged in the formula backward. Zhou Xiaotang pushed freshly baked egg tarts in front of them and told them to eat before they argued.

"By the way," Su Ling said around her straw, gazing at the Lanhai sky outside the window as autumn approached, "do you want to go to that new haunted house again sometime?"

They still didn't know that a folder codenamed "Ordinary" in Zhiewuzhi's archives was quietly growing thicker.

*

A few notes for readers

1. No matter what I write, I still love a story about taking time out to save the world, while remembering that school and midterms are waiting after the holidays.

2. The high school setting differs somewhat from real life and isn't entirely realistic.

3. The three girls in the main cast are all platonic friends.

4. This is an episodic story with an overall slow-burn pace.

Theme: Adventure never ends