Chapter 91
Chapter 91
The dismissal bell rang. The self-study period was finally over.
Qin Lan instantly appeared beside Xue Chuan’s desk and asked anxiously, “Buddy, are you still alive?”
Xue Chuan lay sprawled across his desk, barely breathing.
“Old Qin…”
“I feel like… something very important has vanished from my life…”
“Tell me, what is the meaning of being alive?”
Qin Lan glanced at the mustard smeared across Xue Chuan’s pants, and his nose stung.
“You’ve suffered…”
During that self-study period, Xue Chuan had demonstrated what it meant for a mortal body to stand shoulder to shoulder with a god. At least, Qin Lan believed only a god could have accomplished such a feat.
“Get some rest.” Qin Lan solemnly patted his shoulder. “Leave everything that comes next to me–”
Before he could finish, the classroom speakers suddenly came to life.
Instead of a voice, they played a rousing piece of music with a powerful rhythm.
“That music…”
Qin Lan’s heart sank as an intense pressure washed over him.
It did not come from some overwhelmingly powerful anomaly. The music had simply dredged up several deeply unpleasant memories.
In fact, it was music that could awaken bad memories in countless people.
“Wait, at this time of day–”
Qin Lan suddenly realized something and looked up at the schedule on the blackboard.
A chalk line had been drawn between “Chinese,” “Self-Study,” and the third class, “Physics.”
Far too many students were familiar with what that line meant.
“Fuck!”
“The mass exercise break!”
Qin Lan’s eyes widened.
Yes, the mass exercise break–a period of physical activity that had plunged countless elementary and middle school students into despair.
Not only did it forcibly steal ten minutes of break time, but it began with a school administrator delivering a meaningless, soul-crushing speech from the podium.
Next came an impassioned dose of indoctrination from some carefully selected student representative.
Finally, the ordeal ended with either a set of popular broadcast calisthenics or a supposedly cool formation run.
“Buddy, you…”
Qin Lan looked at Xue Chuan in horror. The man had barely sacrificed most of his life to survive self-study.
Making him run in formation now would surely finish him off.
“I’m fine…”
Xue Chuan raised his head with difficulty and forced out a tragic smile. “My item could only last thirty minutes. My pants are clean now…”
“Help me up.”
What admirable willpower.
With Qin Lan supporting him, Xue Chuan staggered forward with his feet turned awkwardly inward.
He followed the packed procession of ghosts through the corridor and down the teaching building.
When they reached the athletic field, the sky was blanketed in gray clouds.
The entire field looked dim and colorless, steeped in a suffocating gloom.
Dense curse power saturated the area around the podium. A bubbling mass of black slime could just be seen there–the Dean of Students.
“All right. Let me begin with a few brief remarks…”
The Dean’s hoarse voice came through the speakers on either side of the podium.
“Stand properly… Quiet.”
“Look at the sky above you. Gray and heavy, like an old rag that was never washed clean.”
“That is fitting. You do not need sunlight. You do not need color. What you need are scores, rankings, and the report card that decides which floor of this building you stand on, which classroom you enter, and which desk you sit behind.”
“I know you are tired. I know some of you wonder what the wind outside the window smells like, or what sound the fallen leaves make beneath your feet at the end of the track…”
The Dean of Students coughed, and its voice grew even darker.
“But those thoughts are useless weeds!”
“There should be no weeds growing in your minds. Every inch of space must be packed with formulas, vocabulary, and principles. Fitted together without a single crack and leaving no room for anything else.”
“What is happiness?”
“Happiness is the instant your pen comes to a stop after solving the final problem.”
“What is meaning? Meaning is seeing your name at the very top of the rankings.”
“Beyond that, every flutter of emotion you feel and every dream you yearn for… is a deviation! A malfunction! An error that must be corrected immediately!”
“Behind you lie only the sighs of those who were eliminated!”
“Do not ask why you must run. When your body begins to scream and your mind starts to shrink away, tell yourself that this is the necessary price… You are forging a skeleton for your future self, one hard enough to crush every obstacle!”
“The pain you endure now is the only value you are permitted to possess!”
“So keep running. Run until your lungs burn. Run until your vision blurs. Run until you forget that you ever knew how to dream… When nothing of you remains, you will have become a perfect, precise, useful… good child.”
“Your parents will be proud.”
The Dean of Students’ voice pressed on Qin Lan’s heart like an enormous boulder.
Although the speech was not directed at him, he could still feel the unprecedented despair contained within it.
Dreams were useless things thrown into the trash can in the corner of the classroom. Creativity was a terrifying enemy that disrupted the process of solving problems. Teachers were the executioners guarding the prison.
And parents?
They added a second lock to the cage. They stood behind the executioners, guarding the gates and becoming willing accomplices to the crime.
This was Dead Silence Academy.
There were no youthful, vibrant voices here. There were only tireless machines, painstakingly carved into gears by the examination system.
“That speech was seriously deranged…” Xue Chuan said weakly, hunched over. “At the trashy school I attended, any administrator who talked like that would have been dragged into an alley after class, had a sack thrown over his head, and gotten beaten.”
“These students really know how to put up with abuse.”
Qin Lan stared toward the podium and spoke coldly.
“Because these children were obedient.”
“Only obedient children can be conditioned and controlled without ever thinking of resisting.”
“And only obedient children, when crushed by unbearable pressure, choose to leap from a building instead of picking up a brick and smashing the bastard who put that pressure on them.”
Xue Chuan was still pale, but he nodded in agreement. “True.”
“At my school, you could step on the exam paper and still place in the top ten of the class.”
“The teachers never cared about the college admission rate. They only cared about the class’s population growth. If no one disappeared after class and no extra person appeared, that counted as a huge success.”
“If one bad student is a rat dropping in the soup, then my school was a public toilet.”
Xue Chuan forced out a proud smile. “Hahaha… Those really were nostalgic days.”
Qin Lan gave him a speechless look.
“I have no idea why you’re boasting. Did the human-head wind chime outside the Anomaly Hunter Bureau scare you senseless and send you to a school like that?”
“Try surviving the formation run first.”
Xue Chuan immediately bristled.
“Who are you looking down on?”
“You think one little tube of mustard can hurt me? Ever heard of the Armstrong Cyclone Jet Armstrong Cannon? I’ll whip it out and scare you stupid, little brother!”
He straightened his back with great bravado.
Then he immediately doubled over again. “Ow, fuck! That hurts…”
Qin Lan rubbed his forehead, unwilling to engage with this extraordinary specimen any further.
At that moment, the Dean of Students finished speaking, and a nerve-grating whistle shrilled across the field.
[One! Two! Three! Four!]
[One, two, three! Four!]