Chapter 68: Who did it ?
Eiden reached his home rather quickly, mostly due to him rushing back without sparing much thought on the way. As soon as he entered, he made a beeline for his room, ignoring everything else. Without wasting a second, he pulled out the pendrive he had received from the professor, the same one that contained his group project, and plugged it into his laptop. The screen lit up, and he opened the folder labeled with his group’s name.
With narrowed eyes, he went through each file in detail, his gaze sharpening with every passing second. What he found left him dumbfounded. The project followed the same structure, same base layout, and the same key ideas that he and his group had worked on, but something was different. It had been cleaned, polished, and perfected to a point where it almost looked like a new creation.
It wasn’t just touched up. It had been rewritten with a level of finesse that none of his group members, including himself, could’ve pulled off. Not even on a good day. Whoever worked on it didn’t just improve the presentation, they understood the core concept so well that they elevated it. It looked like something worthy of being archived in the university records. It was that good.
Eiden leaned back on his chair, arms crossed, eyes fixated on the screen. No wonder the notoriously strict professor had praised it in front of everyone. That man didn’t hand out compliments like candy, and yet he spoke as if the project was something extraordinary. Now Eiden could see why. But the question was who did it?
His thoughts began spinning. The original pendrive, he had dropped it. That much he remembered vividly. It was when he fell off the tree trying to check on the cat with the questionable accessory. A glowing plug up its butt, of all things. Could it be that someone found the pendrive after that?
Someone who opened it, saw his name on the project, and out of some godforsaken goodwill, decided to finish the entire thing? And then, not just that, but submitted it to the professor? Which meant that person had to be from the same college. But who would do something like that? And more importantly, why?
There were no answers. Just more questions piling up like a tower of uncertainty. Eiden stared at the screen, blankly, as if the files might magically whisper the answer to him. The silence in his room made the ticking of the wall clock feel louder. His mind ran through names, people he’d met, interactions he might have overlooked.
As he was swimming in his thoughts, his phone buzzed on the desk, breaking the silence. The caller ID read: John. Eiden picked it up. "Hello, hi, what is it?" he asked with his usual disinterested tone. John, on the other end, seemed to hesitate for a bit. Then, in a roundabout and awkward manner, he started, "Hey, so, um, about that... study session I mentioned a while back? I was thinking maybe I could drop by your place soon... Exams and all, you know?"