Chapter 110
Chapter 110: They Were Studying Themselves to Death, and Someone Still Came Looking for Trouble
Huang Da Zhuang, Yan Yu, Cheng Xiao Ting, and the others sat ramrod straight, eyes locked on the instructor’s projection board. They listened so hard they barely blinked. This was a battle they’d only ever “seen” in news reports, on the net, or in old campaign histories.
Jiang Tea Tea lounged in her seat. Next to their rigid intensity, she looked downright lazy—loose-limbed, casual—though her gaze never left the screen.
The war from one hundred and thirty years ago unfolded on the massive display, reconstructed from veterans’ oral accounts and careful simulations, with the occasional splice of dramatized footage for clarity.
Back then, when Chong Ming was twenty, he’d taken twenty-eight days, a single warship, and a force of just over three thousand to crush an entire nation and fold it into the empire’s map. Ruthless. Direct. Effective. A record that shook the galaxy.
There was no denying it—he was a monster.
They spent the entire morning on that one campaign: what led to it, how it started, how the firepower differed, how manpower differed, how tactics differed. Everything got pulled apart and analyzed.
The instructor spoke with unapologetic passion, openly praising Chong Ming as Commander-in-Chief as if they were reciting scripture.
For three and a half hours, more than two hundred cadets sat through it. Almost nobody even went to the bathroom. Everyone strained to catch every word, recording the lecture on their lightbrains.
When it finally ended, the instructor assigned two essays.
The first: If you were the commander, how would you conquer Ju Xi Nation with the same troops and firepower as Commander-in-Chief Chong Ming—but in less than twenty-eight days?
The second: If you were the sovereign of Ju Xi Nation, how would you ambush the Zhen Lin Empire and win while the Zhen Lin Empire and the Insect Clan were locked in a bitter war?
Some people memorized until their backs ached and their souls felt shredded, stumbling over their own recitations. Others read smoothly—and still retained nothing.
Jiang Tea Tea, a “great demon” in both name and temperament, skimmed the material once. Ten lines in a single sweep. She remembered most of it, snapped the book shut, dropped her face onto the dining table, and went to sleep.
By the time lunch ended—criminal law still being crammed down throats—the afternoon had arrived: simulated battle command practice.
In the holo-training system, everyone was a commander. Everyone had their own sand table. Everyone had their own unit.
The rule was simple. In a simulated holo-war, whoever led their unit to the smallest losses, seized the most high ground, and dealt the most damage won.
Jiang Tea Tea, a dignified tree demon in theory, lay in the holo-pod like she was napping. Command? Strategy? She didn’t know any of that.
She knew one word.
Charge.
Hit hard, hit fast, catch them off guard, and keep hitting. Stupid as it sounded, momentum like that sometimes produced results nobody expected.
That day, Jiang Tea Tea got absurdly lucky. With nothing but “charge,” she took first place in the command simulation. Her score cleared A and landed in S.
Everyone else in their class—including Sui Xuan Chu—got assigned homework.
She didn’t.
After class, they ate, rested, and went right back to criminal law. When criminal law was done, they moved on to ability control and attack drills.
Jiang Tea Tea’s awakened ability was mutant plant-type, and it had only manifested about four months ago. The instructor gave her extra attention, teaching her how to control it properly.
That meant she learned control, not attack.
Sui Xuan Chu and the other seven trained attack techniques. By the end, every one of them was injured—some on the face, some on the body, all of them bruised in spirit.
After a single day of this schedule, the six-man group that had arrived fired up and ambitious looked like they’d caught some kind of poultry plague. Limp. Hollow-eyed. Barely upright.
A midnight snack was a fantasy. Aside from Jiang Tea Tea, nobody ate one. They trudged back to the dorm building, showered to clear their heads, then forced themselves to write homework.
They wrote until one in the morning. Then they collapsed into bed. Eyes shut—and it felt like they hadn’t even started sleeping before the alarm screamed.
Up. Wash. Downstairs. Run.
Run back to the dorm. Dorm to the cafeteria. Cafeteria to class.
The second day’s courses had nothing in common with the first—so different you couldn’t even call it “similar.” After the second day, the third day was different from both. That pattern repeated until they’d gone through five days of completely different coursework.
After those five days, the cycle snapped back to day one. Hand in assignments. Start learning new battles.
Rest wasn’t an option. Other people rested. They didn’t.
Special tutoring. One-on-one sessions. Finishing one department and rolling straight into another. It was all considered “normal.”
They did it for three straight months. No breaks. Not even a real day off.
The homework never ended. Not even close.
The classes never slowed down. Not even close.
The criminal code refused to stay in their heads. Not even close.
In the first few days, they still made it to the cafeteria for three meals and sometimes even a late snack. Later, once studying really kicked in, they practically lived on nutrient shots and nutrient fluid, pouring it down their throats like medicine.
If Jiang Tea Tea hadn’t torn a few leaves from her own body and shared them—telling everyone to steep them in hot water and drink—those six would’ve collapsed long ago. They didn’t want to be people anymore. They didn’t want to learn. They only wanted to lie down.
Jiang Tea Tea finished three bottles of dragon blood. The comforting mental power that came from Chong Ming’s ability pressure—the soothing that had lingered in her body—had already been eaten clean by the little monsters inside her.
Nearly seven months along, the cubs didn’t have their dad’s mental power to soothe them, but compared to the first three months, they were far better behaved. They no longer gnawed at their mother’s magic power like starving pests. They drew energy from food instead.
So Jiang Tea Tea became the exact opposite of everyone else: when others studied, her mouth didn’t stop moving. When others sucked down nutrient gel, she ate meat, chewing without pause.
After three months, everyone else had grown gaunt, eyes ringed like panda beastfolk. Jiang Tea Tea hadn’t gotten thinner or fatter. Her belly had only puffed slightly.
Thankfully, the uniform was roomy and oversized. Nothing showed. And the cubs—who had started as tiny little worm-things—had only grown a little.
Still, their color had turned ridiculously bright. Gold from the inside out. So gold that even she had to admit, with a faint grimace, that Old Loach’s genes were terrifyingly strong.
After three months of high-intensity training and only three to five hours of sleep a night, the academy finally got nervous that all eight of them might drop dead on the spot. So the school gave them three full days off to recover.
The moment the eight heard, they didn’t do anything else.
They plunged straight into the cafeteria.
They found the biggest round table. Then they started hauling—meat, vegetables, drinks, fruit. Armloads. Tray after tray. They ate like people who’d been starving in a war zone.
The amount they took and the speed they put it away left everyone else gaping. People stared like they were watching an illness. Like these eight were sick—sick in the head.
Of course, nobody said it out loud.
Those eight were famous. They spun through the academy like toy tops, rotating nonstop. Each of them had enrolled in at least eight departments. Their worst grades were B-rank. Their best were S-rank.
The school’s attention—and the instructors’ open favor—made other cadets envy them, resent them, and pity them all at once.
After an hour of eating and drinking, all eight leaned back in their chairs, bellies full, limbs limp.
Someone hugged their rounded stomach and sighed dramatically. “Sister Tea, you eat more than all of us, but your stomach is flatter than ours. What kind of heaven-defying constitution is that?”
“Yeah!” another complained. “Look at my belly. If I cover my face and only show this, people will think I’ve been pregnant for three months!”
“Sister Tea, I thought you didn’t eat much. I didn’t expect you to go this hard again.”
“Oh, right—Sister Tea, today we eat. Tomorrow we sleep all day. The day after, we go out and have fun. Then on the third day we come back and write homework.”
“Fun?” someone snapped. “Sleep? When we get back we sleep, then we wake up and do homework. You’re dragging B-ranks in half the departments you took. You’ve got the nerve to play?”
Huang Da Zhuang instantly became public enemy number one.
Everyone scolded him and pressured him in unison. No one was letting him go out.
Huang Da Zhuang—weak, pitiful, and the one with the worst grades—didn’t dare talk back. He didn’t dare get angry. He just slid closer and closer to Jiang Tea Tea like he was trying to hide behind her.
“Hey,” Jiang Tea Tea said mildly, watching them dogpile him. “Studying is like weight. You don’t gain it in one bite.”
Right then, three new voices cut in—two male and one female—pushing into the conversation like benevolent saints.
“Huang Da Zhuang, as your classmate, and as a beastfolk male without an awakened ability, he’s already impressive for taking so many departments. Don’t be so harsh on him.”
“Exactly. Huang Da Zhuang is your classmate, your friend, your teammate. Teammates and friends should support each other and improve together. If you keep attacking him like that, you’ll crush his motivation.”
Sui Xuan Chu and the others fell silent and turned toward the voices.
Two White Wolf Clan beastfolk—both male—and a White Wolf Clan female walked over, each carrying a tray. On them sat several cups of fruit juice and multiple fruit plates. Like they’d known everyone forever, they set the juice and fruit down neatly in front of the table.
When they finished laying out four fruit plates and eight cups of juice within reach, Jiang Tea Tea stood.
“Sui Xuan Chu, Cheng Lin Yue, Huang Da Zhuang,” she said. “Come with me. We’re going to the academy’s medical department. I’ll stabilize your ability backlash and soothe your mind sea.”
Her gaze landed on Huang Da Zhuang. “Especially you. The leaf water I gave you before helps push you toward an awakening. I’m free today, so we’ll get you checked properly. That way nobody can say you never awakened, and nobody can twist it into ‘we’re bullying you’ just because we pressure you to keep up.”
The three White Wolf Clan cadets who’d brought the fruit were the fake heiress’s fifth sister, sixth brother, and seventh brother.
Over the past three months, they’d wandered around Jiang Tea Tea ten or so times. Every time, they’d hovered without speaking. Every time, she’d ignored them.
She’d barely said “holiday,” and they’d come sniffing for profit like dogs scenting meat.
Huang Da Zhuang shot to his feet and aimed straight at the trio like a cannon. “Hey, hey, hey—who the hell are you three? Why do you get to decide whether my teammates are too harsh on me, whether they scold me, whether they hit me?”
“I’m not excellent. My grades are B. If they get mad at me, it’s because they care. If they hit me, it’s because they care. Do we need you showing up with your sweet little words, trying to stir trouble, acting like you’re defending me?”