Chapter 1: Quite the Ruthless Character
“The Thermohaline Circulation is a crucial meridional circulation system for maintaining the energy balance of Earth’s climate system. It—”
The deep, elderly, and somewhat dry voice of a male professor echoed through the back door of the grand lecture hall.
Post-Disaster Ecology and Environmental Reconstruction was an exceedingly popular elective at the Southern United Highlands First University. It gave high grades and required minimal effort.
The professor was nearly seventy—an age where one was practically guaranteed not to make life difficult for students.
Chi Xiaoxian pushed open the back door of the lecture hall, holding the printed final paper for the course, and looked around for a vacant seat in the last row.
However, he had miscalculated.
The back four rows were completely packed. Among the dense cluster of heads, not a single empty seat remained. They had likely all shown up for this rare full house just to hand in their final assignments.
Shielding his face with his paper, Chi Xiaoxian tiptoed over to an empty seat on the outer edge of the middle section.
Only after settling in quietly did he remove the paper from his face, letting out a soft sigh of relief.
Fortunately, it was an aisle seat. If it had been in the middle, he would have had to make everyone stand up one by one to let him through—a truly spectacular social death.
Just as he sat down, he felt something off about the surrounding atmosphere. To be precise, there was a strange, discordant energy in the air.
This odd vibe originated from the guy sitting next to him.
The male student possessed an exceptionally striking side profile, resembling a meticulously crafted silhouette from a poster. He was currently typing, the glow of the laptop screen reflecting in his focused eyes, shimmering with a clear, sharp light.
Chi Xiaoxian stole a glance. The screen was packed with dense, wall-to-wall text.
He’s actually taking lecture notes?!
In a course with no final exam where you just turn in a paper to pass, he’s taking lecture notes?!
Chi Xiaoxian couldn’t help but gasp internally.
After settling into his seat, he played a few rounds of Match-3 before remembering the real purpose of his trip: handing in his assignment.
He looked around. The distance between the podium and the back rows was quite far. The simplest way was to ask the guy sitting next to him.
Seeing that the male student had just finished taking a sip of water, Chi Xiaoxian nudged him gently. “Hey, classmate, who do we hand the assignment for this course to?”
The guy paused slightly, turned his head to stare at him for a moment, and said indifferently, “The TA.”
“Who’s the TA?”
“You don’t know who the TA is?” The guy raised an eyebrow, barely perceptibly. “This is the third assignment submission.”
“?”
“Th—This course has already had two assignment submissions?” Chi Xiaoxian was in disbelief. “Didn’t they say there were no regular assignments?”
When he selected the course, he had heard from seniors that this class only required a short final paper, with zero work during the term—an absolute breeze.
“Curriculum reform. It was just added this semester. Didn’t you check the system?” Seeing Chi Xiaoxian’s face crumble slightly, the guy pieced it together, yet his tone remained calm. There was no mockery, just genuine inquiry.
Chi Xiaoxian froze for two seconds before quickly tapping his phone to log into the academic system. He had only checked the final task column before and hadn’t even considered that this course might have regular assignments.
He hadn’t really missed regular assignments in his other courses because he took them with his roommate, Zhang Wensheng. Whenever there was a task, Zhang Wensheng would dutifully remind him like a nagging mother, sparing him from personally reading through those chaotic course group messages. Chi Xiaoxian had even muted all of them in one go.
But for this insanely popular elective, Zhang Wensheng hadn’t managed to get a spot…
The network in the large lecture hall was terrible, and Chi Xiaoxian couldn’t open the system right away.
“How many points were those two regular assignments worth?” he asked desperately, attempting to save himself.
“Thirty points total. The remaining seventy points are for the final paper,” the guy said.
“Thirty points… If I can get sixty on the paper, I still have a chance to pass,” Chi Xiaoxian comforted himself optimistically. “Not bad, not bad.”
“Right,” he suddenly remembered. “Who’s the TA? Let me turn in my paper first.”
“Me,” the guy said flatly.
“Huh?!”
After handing over his paper, Chi Xiaoxian sat awkwardly in his seat, unsure for a moment whether he should pull out his phone to play games again.
The guy didn’t say anything further. Taking the paper, he briefly checked the name and student ID. Just as he was about to put it into the desk drawer, he felt it necessary, as the TA, to remind the clueless student beside him.
“Did you meet the word count requirement?” the guy opened his mouth to ask.
“No less than five thousand words, right?” Chi Xiaoxian asked back, somewhat puzzled. “I didn’t misremember, did I?”
“How much did you write?”
“Five thousand and one,” Chi Xiaoxian replied earnestly.
The guy fell silent, merely furrowing his brows as if weighing his words.
“What’s wrong? Did I get it wrong?” Chi Xiaoxian panicked.
Don’t tell me I got the word count for the final paper wrong too?! He remembered checking it several times back then, deliberately stopping right at five thousand words after finishing his paper…
Leaning aside, the guy pulled out two items from his desk drawer. Only then did Chi Xiaoxian notice a massive stack of papers inside.
Though the stack pulled out by the guy looked tall, it was actually just two papers, both as thick as books.
Chi Xiaoxian flipped through them and found that not only were they thick, but their binding was also exquisite. The logo of Southern United Highlands First University on the cover was actually printed in color. Under the bright LED lights of the lecture hall, it shimmered with a vivid, full-spectrum glow.
In stark contrast, the paper he had just handed in was pitifully thin—just a few sheets of paper held together by a staple that seemed so loose it practically wobbled…
Chi Xiaoxian meekly pulled his hand back.
Damn it, these people are getting way too competitive just for GPA.
A paper copy didn’t show a digital word count. The professor wouldn’t know if he had actually hit five thousand words; he would only see that Chi Xiaoxian’s paper was the thinnest in the entire room…
This flimsy paper of his screamed a complete lack of effort!
At this point, Chi Xiaoxian could only salvage his dignity by saying, “Anti-tryharding starts with me.”
The guy glanced at him, offering no comment.
The end-of-class bell finally rang, and Chi Xiaoxian let out a sigh of relief. He was just one lunch away from going back to his dorm to lie down, but the professor was still going on about his closing thoughts.
“You might be the last cohort I ever teach. I was originally retired, but the university invited me back. I didn’t expect so many people to still come to my class. I—” mid-sentence, his voice abruptly cut out, like a speaker having its power yanked. Then, a bizarre noise gurgled from his throat, soundly like bubbling cement.
“Professor—” A student was the first to stand up, rushing onto the podium to support the old man.
Just as he was about to ask what was wrong, he saw the professor’s eyes suddenly snap wide open.
A layer of grayish-white haze clouded those eyes—creepy and terrifying.
The student recoiled two steps in horror.
The students in the front row exchanged glances, unable to tell what was happening.
Just as the student on stage was at a complete loss, the professor lunged forward and bit straight into his face.
“Ahhh—!” A female student in the classroom screamed.
Blood splattered everywhere. Nearly half of the male student’s face was ripped away, staining his white shirt a deep red. Clutching his bloody, mutilated face, he stumbled down the podium. After just two steps, as if he had lost all sense of pain, he dropped his hands, letting the chunk of flesh hang and sway loosely on his face.
Then he raised his eyes—a pair of lifeless orbs clouded over with a grayish-white mist. His pupils were noticeably smaller than a normal human’s, making him look like an indescribable spectre.
Screams erupted across the classroom, rattling everyone’s eardrums.
Students in the back row sprang from their seats, sprinting for the rear exit. Everyone swarmed toward the corridor, jamming together in a desperate attempt to escape this bizarre hellhole.
The professor and the student who was bitten first shuffled forward, giving chase.
Instantly, wails and shrieks merged into a single wave of chaos.
Chi Xiaoxian was also squeezed inside the crowd, trying to push his way out. However, the classroom was too large and the door too narrow to accommodate so many people at once. Everyone was jammed tight at the back exit, frozen in place so that no one could move.
Someone was pushed down onto the floor, but the people behind kept surging forward, stepping on their hands and trampling their back.
“You can jump out the windows!” a clear, cold voice shouted over the din.
Chi Xiaoxian turned his head and realized it was the student TA. The guy was not far behind him, separated by only a few people.
The windows in the tiered lecture hall were positioned differently from normal classrooms; they were so high up they were practically skylights. The TA stepped onto a desk, kicked off, and leaped onto the window frame as nimbly as a swallow before sliding the latch open.
Chi Xiaoxian felt a surge of envy—his athletic ability was nowhere near enough to support such high-difficulty acrobatics.
Just as he thought this, someone rammed hard into him from behind, slamming his waist violently against the corner of a desk.
Chi Xiaoxian arched his back, gasping in pain, but the crowd behind continued to shove. Losing his footing, he nearly tumbled down.
“Get up on the desk!” The TA noticed Chi Xiaoxian and shouted to him.
No sooner had Chi Xiaoxian scrambled onto the desk than another accident occurred.
A student who had been bitten had somehow climbed onto the desks as well, his limbs twisting unnaturally as he crawled, leaving a jagged trail of smeared blood in his wake.
“Jump up here!”
“It’s too high, I can’t climb up!”
With a thud, the TA jumped down from the sill, dropping into a half-squat to signal Chi Xiaoxian to step on his shoulders.
Without time to express his gratitude, Chi Xiaoxian stepped onto his shoulders and grabbed the window frame with both hands. The guy hoisted him up with the momentum. Seeing Chi Xiaoxian scramble through, he leaped with effortless grace and caught the window sill once more.
The two jumped down from the high window. The landing left Chi Xiaoxian’s ankles numb for a couple of seconds, but before he could even catch his breath, he saw a massive, dense crowd of people sprinting frantically down the corridor from the end of the hall toward the stairwell, making the floor vibrate beneath their feet.
Clearly, this wasn’t the only classroom experiencing abnormal incidents.
“Emergency! Emergency! All students, please return to your dormitories immediately and do not go outside for the time being! Emergency! Emergency—”
The broadcast suddenly blared, deafeningly harsh. Screams, footsteps, and frantic shouts filled the building, turning the hallway into total chaos.
Fortunately, their classroom was on the second floor. Chi Xiaoxian and the TA dashed down to the first floor without stopping and successfully burst out of the academic building.
The plaza outside was an equal scene of mayhem. Everyone was surging toward the dormitories, and the large fleet of shared scooters parked beside the academic building had already been entirely cleaned out.
Chi Xiaoxian turned his head, only to find the TA frowning, looking somewhat hesitant.
“Aren’t you going?” Chi Xiaoxian asked anxiously. After surviving that ordeal together, he practically viewed the guy as a comrade-in-arms.
“I need to head to the biology building,” the guy said, uttering something completely unexpected.
“But it’s dangerous right now! The broadcast told us to go back to the dorms immediately,” Chi Xiaoxian urged kindly.
“I haven’t compiled today’s experimental data yet.”
Tossing out those words casually, he turned and ran in the opposite direction.
Watching his receding figure as he sprinted away without looking back, Chi Xiaoxian muttered under his breath, “Is he out of his mind?”
At a time like this, who had the energy to care about a tryhard? Chi Xiaoxian plunged headfirst into the dense, dark crowd of people rushing back to the dorms.
