Grasping the handle, An Zhe asked, stupefied, "I haven't committed a crime of indecency now?"
"No." Lu Feng turned to go back to the bedroom. "Whether the crime of indecency is established or not depends on the wishes of the victim."
This man had the gall to call himself a victim.
An Zhe had already seen through him. After pulling the suitcase home, he put it in the most inconspicuous corner of the room. He wouldn't allow the Lu Feng inside to see the sun again.
The news broadcast on the TV had just finished and transitioned into the next day's weather forecast. In a sweet voice, the anchor said that the flatland where the base was located would be welcoming a rare windy day and asked everyone to please close their doors and windows.
At the start, when An Zhe was a mushroom, he feared strong winds because they would destroy mushrooms. It wasn't until later, after he snapped and his body changed, that he slowly stopped being afraid of the wind. On the contrary, he liked the feeling of the wind blowing against him.
Once he washed up and returned to his bedroom, he looked at his textbook for a while. After the night gradually deepened, An Zhe planned to sleep.
Right at that moment, a strange low noise sounded in his ear.
Long and undulating, it resembled the sound of the wind echoing in the narrowest of canyons. Sometimes it was a very low whine, and sometimes it would abruptly turn shrill. It was like the sound of the wind outside, yet also like it was coming from the inside of the whole room, but he couldn't find the sound's source.
This was by no means the first time he heard this sound. On many previous nights in this room, the low and distant noise was accompanied by the plip-plop of dripping water, forming a strange harmony. The combination of these two sounds often gave him the illusion that he was still in the Abyss—outside the cave, wind blowing in from the depths of the dense jungle, and the mucus and saliva secreted by animals or plants dripping on the moss-covered rocks. Sometimes the wind and the structure of the cave produced a strange resonance, causing a low noise to sound from all directions, resembling the sleep-talk of some creature.
But tonight, the sound was louder than any other time before, and An Zhe was finally able to confirm that the origin of the sound was in his own room.
He frowned, then closed his eyes and carefully perceived his surroundings. Apart from the sound of the wind outside the window, that kind of sound, the sound near himself—
His eyes flew open, and he got out of bed. Standing barefoot on the floor, he picked up the flashlight on the table and turned it on, then got down on one knee, lifted the bedsheets, and shone the flashlight beam beneath the bed.
A pitch-black round hole appeared before him—it was on the wall the bed was up against, around where the wall connected to the floor.
The hole was the size of a human head and resembled a man-made pipe mouth. Its interior was completely dark, with nothing inside and nothing visible. He felt a wind blowing out from it. The sound that had disturbed him for a month was the sound of the wind in the pipe.
After examining the hole for half a minute, An Zhe put down the bedsheets and climbed back up onto the bed. Human rooms always had some odd structures. He had to sleep early tonight, for tomorrow was a very important day.
———
Your bodies still struggle to return."
And yet the nameless wildflowers have bloomed amply upon your heads.
An Zhe watched Bai Nan write down a poem from memory onto the exam paper. Today was the graduation exam for this group of younglings, and he was responsible for patrolling the examination room to prevent cheating.
The low noise from last night also echoed in the classroom, but everyone seemed used to it. In an inconspicuous part of one of the classroom's corners, An Zhe discovered a similar hole. It seemed that this was a commonly-seen thing in human buildings. He hadn't noticed it before because it was too noisy during the day, causing this sound to be covered up, but today, the strong wind outside made the wind inside the hole stronger as well.
Passing Bai Nan, he walked forward. Ji Sha's exam paper was a mess, full of marks from scribbles and corrections. She had only filled in a scattered few neat and tidy words in the English questions, but when An Zhe took a look, it seemed that she hadn't gotten many correct.
Most of the younglings were in a similar situation as Ji Sha. Some of the other ones hadn't even put forth the effort to make corrections, the exam papers in front of them practically blank. Of course, there were an exceedingly few seven or eight younglings whose exam sheets had been filled out well.
An Zhe looked as he walked, and he came to a corner of the classroom, next to the cold youngling named Si Nan.
Si Nan's exam paper had already been completely filled out although only half an hour had passed since the exam started. He was faster than everyone else.
At the moment, he wasn't checking his answers nor daydreaming, but rather drawing in the blank space of the exam sheet with a black pen.
In truth, it was not appropriate to call it drawing. Those were some irregular black lines, and they messily tangled together, resembling the vines in the Abyss and possessing a madness that broke out of the surface of the paper. By the time the one-and-a-half-hour exam ended, the deranged lines had already filled the entire exam sheet, and only in the answer areas could his writing still be seen.
After the papers were collected, the dormitory teacher took the younglings back to the dormitory. An Zhe took the papers back to the office, where Lin Zuo and Colin were both inside. Lin Zuo had just finished correcting the mathematics and logic exam papers. Upon seeing An Zhe enter, he took the papers and said, "Record the scores with Colin."
An Zhe obediently agreed and came to Colin's side. Colin read out loud the younglings' names and grades, and An Zhe entered the grades into the chart on the computer.
"Si Nan," Colin read out loud. "100."
An Zhe recorded his grade and said softly, "He's so amazing."
He had looked over the mathematics and logics exam sheet. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division were already the simplest of its contents, and An Zhe believed he himself might not be able to solve the geometry and logic questions.
Just then, Lin Zuo, who was correcting the language and literature exam papers, said, "Si Nan is a very rarely-seen genius."
"Mm," An Zhe said.
"But I don't plan on having him enter Class A," Lin Zuo said.
After working with them for the past month, An Zhe now knew the rules governing the younglings' school promotions.
The dormitory teacher had a chart for adding and deducting points, and there was one during class as well. These records of added or deducted points were added to the grades for the typical major and minor exams, and with the scores from the final exam added in the end, they formed the younglings' final grades. The handful of younglings with the best grades in this class would get promoted into Class A and continue receiving the Main City's education, and after they grew up, they would enter the Main City's various organizations based on their own strengths. The other younglings would enter the military base for training and assessments, and after a month, the military would select a dozen or so Class B younglings based on the situation and continue developing them. After those younglings grew up, they would become the military's soldiers. The remaining younglings would be classified as Class C and sent to the Outer City to await adoption by the Outer City's residents. If nobody adopted them, they would continue living a communal life in the district assigned by the Outer City and become Outer City residents from then on.
But Lin Zuo said that he did not plan to allow Si Nan to enter Class A.
An Zhe asked, "Why not?"
"There are problems with his character," Lin Zuo said. "He is also unsuited for joining the military. He lacks emotions and simultaneously harbors resentment against the base, so he cannot serve the Main City. The Garden of Eden also agrees with my assessment of him. He'll be assigned to Class C. I'll be counting on you two in the future."
"... All right," An Zhe said.
"He is a very strange child," Lin Zuo said. "The dormitory teacher told me that he often wakes up at night and will sometimes tremble, but no cause can be found. I heard from the nanny who took care of him before he turned three years old that he had once lost a friend, which may have left a psychological scar."
The morning passed, and the calculations of the final grades were completed. Five of the younglings, including Bai Nan, were selected and sent together with the outstanding younglings of the other classes to the Garden of Eden's seventh floor to be educated. Lin Zuo was transferred to the third floor and began taking care of the new first-years. An Zhe and Colin officially became the teachers in charge of the remaining younglings. Their duty was to take the younglings to the military base and watch them take the military's training and assessments.
The Main City was very efficient. That very afternoon, they took a shuttle to the military training ground on one side of the city, and with them were the younglings from other classes.
The wind at the training ground was strong and brought with it fine grit, but the younglings were in high spirits, running and jumping about in the spacious grounds—the military's personnel who were in charge of screening the younglings were about to come over to take over them, so An Zhe and Colin became idle. All they needed to do was watch from the side.
As they sat side by side on the iron bench, Colin suddenly spoke—in this past month, neither he nor An Zhe made conversation with the other.
"I'm willing to let go of a little of my hatred for the Arbiter now," he said.
An Zhe looked at Colin and noticed his gaze pass through the buildings as he looked at a gray corner of the distant Garden of Eden that stuck out. It was a very cold gaze.
"Because the entire Main City is just as cold and heartless as the Arbiter," Colin said while looking over there.
"How come?" An Zhe asked.
"Have you seen the Garden of Eden?" Colin asked. "It's like a beehive."
The Garden of Eden was a massive hexagonal building, and it did have some similarities to a beehive. An Zhe said nothing, and Colin continued talking to himself.
"The Garden of Eden is the queen bee, producing up to ten thousand children every year. Starting from when they're three years old, they're made to takedifficult assessments so as to cherrypick the small portion with the highest IQ and have them stay in the Main City to do scientific research or whatnot in the future. To the Main City, these children are useful—are drones—so they can receive the Main City's superior living conditions," he said. "The others are all worker bees, and they're allocated to the Outer City, where conditions are poor. The base controls the supply of food and water, and the worker bees can only become mercenaries. Only by going out to struggle in the wilderness and bringing back materials can they survive. And those materials are used by the base to benefit the Main City."
He let out a cold laugh. "This is how the entire base operates. Only people with value to the Main City are people. They wouldn't feel the slightest bit of distress at blowing up District 6 because the people of the Outer City were things they had abandoned in the first place."
An Zhe said, "But the Main City is sufficient for only a very few people to live in."
Colin turned towards him. "Do you think what they're doing is right?"
After briefly hesitating, An Zhe nodded.
"You think what they're doing is right because you survived. You're standing here, taking the Main City's position." Colin became agitated, and his chest heaved.
"Humankind's interests take precedence over all else, so whatever they do is right," he said. "But the people who died—the people they blew up, your family and friends—what did they do wrong? Were they not human?"
An Zhe said nothing. He was by no means perplexed because of Colin's question, for the Abyss also had social creatures. Through his long-term observations, for a solitary creature, living was the most important thing, but fora group of social creatures, the continuation of the entire group was more important. He didn't think that Colin was wrong, it was simply that this person may have been more suited to living in the Virginia Base.
Colin looked into his eyes, and at last, he said, "I get it. You don't have feelings at all."
Their conversation stopped there.
An Zhe turned his gaze back to the younglings once again. The younglings were much cuter than Colin.
But at that moment, the younglings were in total chaos, for a fight was going on.
An Zhe stood up and walked into the group of younglings, and Colin came over as well.
The ones fighting were Si Nan and a sturdy-looking boy. Si Nan's eyes were a little red as he pressed the other boy securely to the ground.
"Let go of him," Colin said. "Si Nan, I'm deducting points."
Si Nan still didn't let go of the boy, so Colin had no choice but to come forward and separate them by force. Adults had much greater strength than children, after all.
Si Nan stood to one side, a cold expression on his face. An Zhe looked down at him and asked, "What's the matter with you two?"
Si Nan said nothing, but the other boy said loudly, "You were sleep-talking at night! You shouted out Lily's name! Lily's been taken away and locked up ages ago, and in any case, you can't find her!"
An Zhe saw Si Nan clench his fists.
Lily. It sounded like a girl's name.
He asked, "Who is Lily?"
This time, Si Nan finally answered him. "My friend."
"Where is she?"
"The Garden of Eden," Si Nan said icily.
An Zhe recalled Lin Zuo saying "he had once lost a friend" and guessed that the reason for this dispute was because that boy had mentioned Si Nan's sore spot.
"Don't be angry anymore." He got down on one knee to get to Si Nan's eye level and gently patted his shoulder. "I won't allow him to mention this in the future."
Si Nan's expression didn't change. He was clearly a youngling, but he had a coldness that was different from all the other younglings.
An Zhe could only pat Si Nan's hair and then stand up. At the training ground, the younglings were in total chaos. Colin, who was next to him, was educating another youngling, and his education was much more successful than An Zhe's. So long as he said the two words "deduct points," the youngling would immediately obey him.
Inspired, An Zhe said to Si Nan, "You aren't allowed to fight in the future, otherwise your points will be deducted."
The corners of Si Nan's mouth curled up, and he said, "You guys don't want to let me stay in the Main City anyway."
At times when the other younglings stumbled over their own words, this youngling knew everything.
An Zhe felt helpless, but nobody could help him.
Right at that moment, in his peripheral vision, a black car stopped and three people emerged from it.
An Zhe looked over and met the eyes of the person in the middle.
He blinked.
Lu Feng had seen him as well. With a slight raise of his eyebrows, Lu Feng walked towards them.
"You were here too?" An Zhe asked.
"For a meeting," Lu Feng said. "What happened to you?"
In An Zhe's voice was a hint of helplessness along with a request for help. "Two of the children were fighting."
"Just give each one a beating," Lu Feng said.
His words made An Zhe laugh involuntarily. Then An Zhe leaned down and said to Si Nan, "Next time you fight, I'll beat you."
Lu Feng looked at him.
"You're so good-natured," he said coolly, "that not only will they continue to fight, they'll beat you too."
An Zhe was speechless.
He adjusted his expression, striving to make himself look a bit fiercer. If he had even one-tenth of Lu Feng's fierceness, everything would go smoothly when he taught the younglings.
As Lu Feng looked at him, the corners of his lips curled up, and then he turned his gaze to Si Nan.
His gaze froze in place.
"Get away from him," Lu Feng said coldly.
Uncomprehending, An Zhe obeyed Lu Feng almost on reflex and backed two steps away.
Lu Feng took two steps forward, placing himself between An Zhe and Si Nan. He put on gloves, grabbed Si Nan's jaw, and forced the child to look at the sun.
The sunlight was glaring, and Si Nan's pupils contracted.
"There's something wrong with him." Lu Feng effortlessly held Si Nan in place. "Contact the Lighthouse."