August 29, Year 413 of the Cataclysm Era.
7:20 AM.
The first day of the term at Tianmen University.
Ji Jue slowly woke from his exquisite slumber, opened his eyes, and looked out at the sky through the window. A light rain had fallen in the early morning; now that the morning sun had risen, the sky was clear and the streets were washed pristine and fresh.
A cool breeze drifted in through the open window.
On such a lovely day, flowers bloomed, birds sang... while some unlucky bastards were about to plunge straight into the fires of hell.
Take Ji Jue, for example.
After jolting awake from a nightmare, he felt his pillow—practically drenched in tears—and for the longest time lacked the courage to pick up his phone. Especially after discovering that aside from promotional spam, there was still no reply in his inbox, he desperately wanted to cremate himself and climb into a neat little urn!
He was screwed. Totally and utterly screwed!
Professor Ye still hadn't replied. He was perhaps, possibly, most likely, well and truly doomed!
Looking back on the past month, Ji Jue felt as if an entire lifetime had passed.
Too much chaos had happened, and his summer vacation had been entirely too packed, filled with far too many twists and turns, to the point that he had completely forgotten about the paper he was originally supposed to turn in...
There was no helping it!
Even if he wanted to submit something, he needed the physical capacity, okay?!
For the better part of that time, Ji Jue had been bedridden in the hospital, completely out of commission. His severe physical exhaustion had him sleeping eighteen hours a day, while repeated severe overdraws on his spiritus left him in a near-vegetative stupor most of the time.
Asking him what he wanted for lunch took ages to register, and when he picked up chopsticks, his hands shook like he had Parkinson's.
He had been like a dying sloth.
Never mind academic research—he couldn't even manage basic arithmetic. When he bought a bowl of rice noodle rolls, simple addition and subtraction within ten nearly led him to the miraculous conclusion that the shop owner owed him six-fifty in change.
By the time he had mostly recovered and finally noticed the looming deadline, there were only three days left before school started!
Three days?
He couldn't have pulled it off if someone held a gun to his head!
In desperation, Ji Jue could only go out to an internet cafe, pop a RAM stick in his mouth, and crunch away all night. He barely managed to slap together a piece of work so watered down that even the Dragon King would bow in reverence. Full of dread, he plucked up the courage and sent it to the professor's inbox.
And as of now, there was still no reply...
Looking on the bright side, perhaps Professor Ye was too busy to have read it yet, right? Maybe she had forgotten all about it and didn't care in the least.
Or maybe after reading it, she felt that an oversized piece of academic garbage like him was beyond redemption, and had gone off to custom-order an incinerator for hazardous waste, just waiting for him to dare show up so she could grant him a swift and clean death.
Doomsday was upon him.
There wasn't a glimmer of hope!
Yet no matter how inescapable the dead end, Ji Jue dragged, squirmed, and crawled his way out of bed in the end, washing up and changing clothes like a sleepwalker.
When he went downstairs, he found his mutated Little Sheep sprawled in the living room, licking a television older than he was, machine oil leaking everywhere... which only made him want to die even more!
Supposedly, before the Cataclysm Era, there was a famous saying: *Life is a magnificent gown, crawling with lice.*
Ji Jue felt that his life was nothing but magnificent lice, without a damn gown in sight! But aside from wearing that mess, he had no other clothes...
It wasn't as though he could streak naked, could he?
Make do and scrape by—wasn't everyone living like that?
And so, fighting back tears, he rode his bike, dawdling all the way to the entrance of Dalu Auto Repair Shop. A crowd was already waiting there. Today was the first day of college for the second daughter, Lu Ling. As the only remaining scholarly seed of the Lu family to finally bear fruit—and at Tianmen University, the very same school as Ji Jue—Mother Lu wished she could set off two more strings of firecrackers outside the door to celebrate.
As her honorary second older brother, Ji Jue had to drop by to give her a ride anyway.
And mooch breakfast while he was at it.
"Aiya, no need to bring so much stuff. The first day is just checking in, meeting teachers and classmates. Besides, the girl's a local and registered as a commuter; she'll be home this afternoon. What does she need all this for?"
Seeing the heaps of bags Mother Lu had packed, Ji Jue couldn't help shaking his head. After much coaxing, he finally managed to cut more than half of it, leaving only the essential documents. Once he had the second daughter seated behind him, the Little Sheep puttered off.
On the back seat, Lu Ling squirmed with excitement, savoring the wind on her face, radiating youthful sunshine that formed a sharp contrast to Ji Jue's corpse-like expression.
"Second Brother, did you get a new ride?" She finally caught the key detail, causing Ji Jue to stiffen all over.
"N-no, it's the same old one. Look, isn't that scratch in the back from when the youngest gouged it with a knife?"
"Oh, yeah."
Lu Ling patted the seat in bewilderment. After all, Lu Feng had ridden this thing every day to take her to high school for three years; there was no reason she wouldn't recognize it. It was just...
"Why does it feel so much bigger?"
The Little Sheep, which originally had an engine displacement of just 110cc, was now almost the size of a mid-sized motorcycle. It had gained more than a little weight; only a blind idiot wouldn't see something was off.
Ji Jue rolled his eyes and retorted loudly, "You're allowed to go to college, but it isn't allowed to hit a growth spurt in puberty?"
Lu Ling had no comeback. Instead, the silently listening Little Sheep beneath their backsides seemed to realize it was being talked about and began wriggling in excitement, until Ji Jue gave its footrest two annoyed kicks, instantly making it behave.
What does it feel like when your scooter suddenly turns into a dog?
It makes you want to die.
Originally, Ji Jue had worried that one day it might snap, bite his head off, and kick it around like a soccer ball. But it turned out that as a mutated byproduct born from absorbing the vast majority of the dragon blood and influenced by Ji Jue's abilities and Vortex Planting, its temperament was bizarrely stable. It was exceptionally obedient and fawning, just like a dog.
When communicating with it via his abilities, it was no different from a canine.
Sit, and it sat; roll over, and it rolled over, its mudguard wagging so hard it nearly flew off.
Plus, it saved fuel and electricity. After mutating, it didn't even need gas, and its horsepower was absurdly overpowered—having somehow swallowed the engine of some sports car, it went from zero to a hundred in just two seconds, with a top speed that pegged the speedometer at 470 kilometers per hour. So much so that rumors of a haunting had recently started circulating on the highway near Ji Jue's home.
Those were all advantages. The only drawback was...
It was too damn picky with its food!
On average, it consumed half a poached chicken every hundred kilometers. Braised chicken wouldn't do, nor would frozen chicken drumsticks from the supermarket; it would only eat freshly slaughtered and boiled chicken...
To the point that Ji Jue, already in dire poverty, was now teetering on absolute bankruptcy.
Of course, Ji Jue knew full well that this flaw was his, not the scooter's.
After all, what bad intentions could a little puppy have? It hadn't asked to reincarnate into his scooter. If it had followed someone wealthy, it would have achieved poached-chicken freedom long ago.
Nothing could be done; he had to keep it. Could he really just throw it away?
Forbidding it from entering his bedroom and making it sleep in the living room was already the limit of Ji Jue's cruelty.
Fortunately, when masquerading as an ordinary scooter, it was quite quiet. Otherwise, Ji Jue wouldn't have dared take it out of the house.
In the morning, Tianmen University, having been quiet for over a month, was gradually coming alive. Traffic flowed like water at the main gates, and freshmen from various districts and even other cities craned their necks in excitement, snapping photos with their phones.
The excited second daughter dragged Ji Jue along to snap pictures at several viral photo spots to post on her feed, while Mother Lu, working her magic on the other end, instantly liked and praised every post.
The lighthearted, cheerful mood lasted until the very end of the orientation registration process, right up to the fee payment.
The bank staff waiting behind the counter smiled warmly as they handed her a loan contract, looking just like vampires eyeing blood bags delivered right to their doorstep in an orderly queue.
Tianmen University was by no means a charity. As one of the Federation's Big Five, its prestige was notoriously high, its admissions threshold was notoriously high, and its tuition was notoriously high.
Of course, once you were admitted, you naturally didn't have to worry about being unable to afford tuition... There were plenty of kind, benevolent, and generous banks coming right to your door to help, inviting you to serve as their debt slave for the next twenty years.
Even though Ji Jue and Lu Feng had run around all the municipal departments during the first half of summer vacation to process every conceivable certificate, discount, and subsidy, the annual interest rate was still as steep as 4.1 percent.
In just a few minutes, the girl's life was saddled with over eight hundred thousand in student loans. Clutching her bag, her little pearl tears were on the verge of falling.
"Don't worry, don't worry. Tianmen's economics majors have the easiest time finding work. If all else fails, you still have Big Dog and Second Brother, right?" Ji Jue ruffled her hair and comforted her. "Come on, let's go check out the teaching buildings first. Later, Second Brother will take you to the cafeteria for some braised pork rice!"
"I'm not eating braised pork rice."
Lu Ling rubbed her eyes, feeling even more miserable. "Second Brother, you ended up in the hospital eating that two years ago..."
Ji Jue's smile stiffened. *Why does this brat still remember that garbage? Besides, the cafeteria paid out a fortune in compensation, all right?! Have you forgotten where that little dress of yours came from?! That was all earned bite by bite in the emergency room from a bowl of braised pork rice!*
Just as he was about to say something, his phone suddenly buzzed.
The moment the screen lit up, his stiff smile vanished completely, and his heart stopped.
Professor Ye: [Done with registration? Come to my office.]
"..."
Ji Jue swallowed hard and slipped his phone back into his pocket. "Go with that senior from earlier to get familiar with the campus. Something came up, so I have to go ahead."
"What is it?" Lu Ling asked, bewildered.
Ji Jue paused for a moment, then squeezed out a standard smile suited for a memorial portrait:
"To face execution."
.
Breaking into a jog, Ji Jue hurried all the way to the fourth-floor corridor of the office building. The moment he stepped inside, he saw a tear-streaked face full of profound moved emotion barreling straight toward him.
It was none other than Ye Chun!
"Wuu-wuu-wuu, Ji Jue, you're the best!"
The senior vigorously clapped his shoulder, as if seeing him in a whole new light, theatrically dabbing at the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. "Turns out you really didn't join the grindset crowd! I'm so touched! I'll add a chicken leg to your lunch today! No, two!"
"Save it, I want to die!"
Ji Jue had lost all will to live, practically slumping to the floor. God only knew how he was supposed to explain that heap of trash to the professor. He couldn't exactly claim he had been swept up in a terrorist attack, battled Lawrence side by side with a big sister from the Security Bureau, and combined for ninety-three points, could he?
"Come on, come on, right this way! Brave warrior, off to your execution!"
Gleefully gloating, Ye Chun led him to the office door, pulled it open for him, and kicked him right onto the 'tribunal.'
In the dead silence, the only sound left was the ticking of the clock.
Under the morning sunlight, the person behind the desk seemed to have been waiting for quite some time. She wasn't putting on airs by reviewing documents; she merely held a well-worn teacup, sipping strong tea so dark it was almost black.
Without a trace of makeup, the face of Professor Ye Xian, now over forty, bore wrinkles carved deep like knife cuts, which only accentuated her innate severity and coldness.
Watching Ji Jue squirm his way inside, rubbing his hands together with a fawning smile as he offered his greetings, she did not lose her temper. She merely pointed toward a freshly printed stack of papers.
"Evaluate it yourself first,"
she said. "This... 'academic' achievement you turned in."
Chapter 26