Ch78 – “Come to my office after school.”

Sponsored Content

Everyone’s gazes promptly snapped over to the most eye-catching person at the quadrangle, the white-haired Magician.

[Huh? Fuck, what’s this? Is the Devil surnamed Nan?] 

[You actually believed that lol.
Nan Bowan, Number one, it’s so obvious it’s a fake name.]

[Ah, so Mr.
Nan will be guiding students, on live?]

 

 

[No way, isn’t the Magician a newcomer that has gained No.
1’s admiration? Why is he suddenly putting him on the spot in front of everyone now?]

[I also wanted to ask that.
He’d even given him his rose.] 

[Back at upstairs, have y’all forgotten what happened last time when the Magician accepted the Night Clan’s invitation? Isn’t that blatantly slapping No.
1 in the face? It serves him right that he’s getting put on the spot now!]

 

The focus of everyone’s attention, Zong Jiu, “…?”

His smile had congealed on his face, which instantly turned expressionless.

Zong Jiu really wanted to ask Mr.
Nan if his esteemed self had a wee bit of a problem with his eyes.

 

There were so many trainees on the quadrangle hailing from all corners of the land and hair of every colour across the colour wheel.

Letting off the grey-haired Van Zhuo to catch a classical albino like him—was this bastard even a man?!

And Mr.
Nan, fashionably dressed and carrying himself with dignity, still refused to go easy on him, slowly walking down the flag-raising platform instead.

 

All of the B-rank trainees were watching him, yet the man stepped neatly into every shadow cast by the tables, like a hunter who had locked onto its prey, or like a Victorian gentleman with a black umbrella, exuding unhurried grace. 

As he approached, the Devil deliberately drawled, “He didn’t only dye his hair, he’s even wearing beauty lenses.
This is a blatant violation of school rules and regulations.”

[Fuck, goddamn dyed hair and beauty contacts???]

[Tragic, the Magician’s too tragic.
/What have us albinos done wrong.jpg]

[Wouldn’t a high school as strict as this one drag him backstage to dye his hair black…] 

[Uh-uh, aren’t there too many trainees for them to drag to the back if so?]

At his words, the teaching director naturally nodded, toadying up, “It’s our mistake.
We forgot to inform the parents to cut and dye their hair black before school starts.”

“According to the school rules, how should this situation be handled?”

“This—” 

Sponsored Content

The director looked hard-pressed.
“The school gates have already been locked.
It’s impossible to have these misbehaving students leave the premises to get it fixed.
How about…”  He carefully watched Mr.
Nan’s expression, “…we note it down as a demerit?”

At this, Zong Jiu refused to stand down.

 

He raised his hand.
“My hair colour is caused by albinism, not because I dyed it.”

Albinism? 

This shut the teaching director up.
He looked at the Devil, obviously allowing the other the final say.

No.
1 said with considerable interest.
“Oh? Then come to my office after school for a check-up.”

Zong Jiu, “…”

This stage line was very familiar and very horrid—practically giving him flashbacks to the perverted doctor in the mental asylum. 

“Of course, of course.” The teaching director wiped his sweat.
“This is a student from your class, you can decide how you want to settle this.”

Many gloating trainees, having assumed the Magician offended the Devil, snapped back to their senses at this.

We’re sorry for MTLers or people who like using reading mode, but our translations keep getting stolen by aggregators so we’re going to bring back the copy protection.
If you need to MTL please retype the gibberish parts.

Good lord, it turned out that all this time, the other didn’t even mean to punish the Magician.
Deliberately arrowing him in front of everyone whilst creating opportunities for alone time—wasn’t this more as though he was swearing sovereignty and flaunting his power, rubbing it in front of the Night Clan?

Lfjglcu atlr, wjcs qfbqif reggfqalalberis qffxfv ja atf fzqgfrrlbc bo Rb.
2, ifjvfg bo atf Rluta Jijc. 

Qtlif atf Gfnli kjr jc ecabemtjyif ifufcv lc atf lcolclaf ibbq, lo tf kfgf ab ub tfjv ab tfjv klat atf Rluta Jijc, fnfgsbcf kbeiv ibbx obgkjgv ab atf rtbk.

Dea ab atflg vlrjqqblcawfca, Njc Iteb vlvc’a rtbk jcs qjgalmeijg fwbalbc.
Llr fzqgfrrlbc lr ralii jr rajafis jcv mbiv jr yfobgf.

Though the leader of the Night Clan was not in his military uniform, but a blue and white school uniform at the moment, the biting cold of ruthlessness radiating from him wasn’t diminished in the slightest.

[I got it.
No.
1 must have felt all miffed inside seeing the person he liked get snatched.] 

[Now that you’re putting it this way, it does sound quite plausible.
If he really wanted to do him over, he would have gotten a pair of scissors and shaved him bald on the spot.]

[Upstairs, are you a demon?? My white-haired Magician beauty must never become a baldie.
Just imagining it is making my face-con heart weep.]

[AHHH someone bleach the image from my brain! Although (whispers) even baldness will not deplete the Magician’s beauty by a smidge! Shocker!]

[Hold, hold.
As an old fan, I feel the duty to speak up.
Don’t use a normal person’s logic to speculate what the Devil is thinking.
He always does whatever he likes.] 

After this episode, everyone’s attention returned to the teachers who were correcting examination scripts in front of the flag-raising platform.

It was chilling to see most booklets in front had already been marked in the span of this brief conversation.

 

At the side, a bespectacled teacher stacked booklets on the table, sorting them according to scores.

As the unmarked scripts lessened, the onlooking trainees also began to tremble with fear. 

The atmosphere became even more fraught and agitated.

Sponsored Content

Amongst the instances put out by the system in the past, even S+ rank instances wouldn’t make people feel like this, as if the ground had been pulled out beneath their feet.

Under the gloomy sky, the flag fluttered in the wind.
The leaden grey concrete quadrangle was dead silent.

Shadows shifted down, and soon, the last paper was marked. 

The teacher began to transcribe marks onto the year ranking.
Red paper was pasted on the side, contrasting so intensely with the midnight black ink smeared upon it, almost as if it was blood about to gush down.

The teaching director took the microphone.
“All rise.”

The trainees, guided by teaching assistants, stood in the middle of the space between the desks, lining up according to their class.

“We will begin to announce rankings according to the total score.” 

“Each class will be ranked internally according to the placements read out.
The first place sits at class index 1, and henceforth this index number will be your student ID.
In the next hundred and twenty days of revision, no one will care what your name is.
You will be referred to uniformly as index X in Class X.”

Unsurprisingly, the laurel of first placing was bestowed to No.
2, Van Zhuo.

However, the awkward thing was that even though he was first in the cohort, he only managed to score just over half of the 1150 marks for the nine subjects plus Olympiad questions.

When the script was returned, the grey-haired half-vampire sat at the first seat of Class 1, looking at the red all over his booklet with pinched brows. 

The second placing, Black Shaman, did even more miserably, his score plummeting by almost a hundred marks from Van Zhuo’s.

However, for better or for worse, he was still second in the year.
It could only get worse from here on out.

Black Shaman was from Class 3, thus he took the index 1 seat in Class 3.

It was logically impossible for third place to go to the last S-rank trainee, Tsuchimikado, considering his damned luck.
It ended up going to an unremarkable half-vampire. 

What surprised everyone was that he was actually from Class 1 as well.

With that, Class 1 took two places of the top three, and he became index 2 of Class 1.

 

The bullet chat was discussing the top three placings.

[Holy shit, the scores bombed.
If this wasn’t a dimension inside an instance but irl, no one would be able to get into university, /crylaugh.] 

[Which high school finals in the real world require you to do ALL nine subjects and Olympiad questions? It’s pointless to draw comparisons.]

[But you got one thing right.
The system got everyone stupefied.
The scores truly look too shabby.]

[But what can they do about that! Specialising requires concentrated effort.
We learned what we had to survive in the infinite loop.
Are you suggesting you can fight monsters with Maths and English?]

[Van Zhuo is incredible, getting almost half the questions right.
If you threw me in there I couldn’t have scored higher than that even if I memorized the answer key.] 

[Hahahahha /crylaugh, but the Night Clan is seriously solid.
That third place guy is also a half-vamp, amazing.]

After that came the fourth to tenth placings.

“Fourth in the year; Class 9, Zong Jiu.”

Sponsored Content

Zong Jiu’s brows raised.
He walked to the index 1 seat of his class and sat down amidst countless astonished gazes. 

Without paying them any mind, he picked up the script that the teaching assistant set on his table.

During the four hours, Zong Jiu had written everything he could, even tackling political science during the final ten minutes.

Besides having a fairly good memory, he also had another advantage—Zong Jiu had strengthened his hand dexterity to its peak.

What did this imply? Not only were his wrist and five fingers exceptionally strong, when writing at full throttle, his hand also left flickering afterimages in its wake, comparable to those faceless NPCs who graded the papers. 

Thanks to this, Zong Jiu’s writing speed was faster than anyone else, allowing him to buff the word count in his humanities like mad after he finished the sciences, fishing quite a number of marks from that.

However…

The white-haired young man looked at the big fat zero he got for political science and arched his brows, completely unsurprised.

Soon, the announcements for the first ten placings concluded. 

It couldn’t be told whether it was intentional or not, but aside from Class 1 which had two from the top ten and Class 10 which had none, the top ten were evenly distributed between classes.

Immediately after, the speed of announcements increased.

 

Each trainee got their class index and took their respective seats in accordance to their placings.

The further back the rankings went, the more nervous the trainees who had yet to have their names called became. 

In a survival instance like this, it went without a doubt that falling to the bottom placings was equivalent to a death sentence.
Furthermore, it wouldn’t even be death by the hands of a monster, but such a hopelessly stupid reason.

No one was willing to kick the bucket this way.

[The standard in this placement exam sucks balls.
Everyone’s a noob, and the top ten are just the least noob of the noobs.]

[Rightttt, and there’s still a hundred and twenty days to go.
If the trainees were given a bit of time for revision before being examined, they definitely wouldn’t have gone in without making their battle prep like this.
Man, I really feel bad for the bottom ten trainees; the most rotten of luck, seriously.] 

[Totally, it wouldn’t be like this if they got a bit of time for revision.
I have reason to believe that the next exam will be horrible.]

Then came the last fifty places.

What was even more astonishing to most was that Tsuchimikado, an S-rank, had yet to have his name called.

Not only the bullet chat, even the seated trainees were exchanging glances amongst each other. 

It wouldn’t be as bad as having an S-rank punished, would it?!

Finally, right as everyone was on tenterhooks, Tsuchimikado’s name was finally announced in the thirteenth-last slot.

“987th place: Class 7, Tsuchimikado.”

The Yin-Yang Master exhaled, unsure if he should count himself lucky or unlucky. 

He had never been good with his studies back in school, and it was the same after entering and excelling in the infinite loop.
He wouldn’t miraculously become a top student just because he had become an S-rank.

Fortunately, he had just barely made it to safety, hot tears brimming in his eyes.

Sponsored Content

The teaching director kept the namelist.
“That’s all for the year rankings.”

At this time, the bottom ten were finally revealed. 

The ten B-rank trainees left standing in place froze in disbelief.

At once, someone objected loudly, “This is unfair!”

 

“Exactly.
Why should our life and death be decided by a placement exam at the start of the term?! We haven’t learned this before!”

“It’s been so many years, who the hell can remember the high school syllabus.
This has got to be a joke, right?” 

The teaching faculty didn’t waver in the face of their objection.

The director simply ordered coldly, “Execute them!”

The next second, barbed whips sliced through the air onto these ten trainees, immediately flaying skin from flesh, spilling blood everywhere.

There were no lack of those among them who desperately tried to resist with special props, but they couldn’t move, as though something arcane and mysterious fixed them to the spot, and they could only watch wide-eyed as whips were swung at them. 

Blood-curling screeches echoed through the quadrangle, instantly knocking the standing trainees to the ground.

Swathes of scarlet blood and shredded flesh came with every rise and fall of the whip, the wounds ripping open to reveal ghastly white bones, striking fear into everyone’s hearts.

The bullet chat and the quadrangle were submerged in silence.

Even if their former teammates and friends were among the bottom ten placings, no one dared to resist an NPC’s order.
Deep down, they knew the only consequence of that was death. 

Under the system’s unyielding oppression, even if an S-rank fell into the bottom ten, there was still only one word—’death’.

Only then did everyone recognise a fact.

This instance was different from every other horror instance they had experienced.
All the highest ranking special props and life-saving cards that they possessed had become useless.

In here, you study or you die!  

Amidst shrill screams, the teaching director said in a low voice, “About that… Mr.
Nan.”

“Hm?”

“The student with dyed hair just now scored fourth in the cohort.”

The director wrung his hands, saying ingratiatingly, “Our school has always given preferential treatment to students with excellent academic performance.
They’re the ones who ensure our high university acceptance rate! Do you think—” 

“Rest assured.”

A superficial smile of understanding spread across the Devil’s face.
He coldly threw down three words.

 

“I have my boundaries.”