Chapter 29: I Was Attacked by an Eraser

"This is 'a', this is 'o', and this is 'e'."

"Good, you have mastered the simplest Chinese pinyin. Now you can move on to reading comprehension. Please listen to the question: 'A strange glint flashed in the fish's eyes in the final paragraph of the passage. What does this glint symbolize?'"

Walking toward Luocheng High School, Luo Lixi stared at the Chinese exam paper in her hand, lost in thought.

The temperature had plummeted again recently, and the northwest wind surged into the city through the narrow gaps between the streets. The girl held the exam paper against her chest to reduce wind resistance, but the brown scarf she wore to conceal her exoskeleton was blown behind her.

It was cruel to make someone who had just started learning Chinese do reading comprehension, but Su Yi held firm to the belief that the national essence must be passed down. By showing her the most difficult and incomprehensible parts of Chinese first, everything else would seem simple by comparison.

He wondered how long it would take for a girl with a chip-enhanced brain and extraordinary memory to fully master a foreign language. Days, weeks, or months?

When Su Yi traveled to the Wasteland, it took him over a year to barely adapt, though his memory wasn't as sharp back then.

The incident of the power surge yesterday didn't seem to have blown up. Luocheng had a small local television station that usually loved gossip and would jump at the slightest trivial matter, but Su Yi had followed their official account for a long time, and this time, it was deathly silent. It seemed some big player had suppressed the news.

The only good news this morning was that the white-haired old man who played chess with Old Zhang seemed tired. Both old men had gone home to sleep, and they hadn't crossed paths, saving him a lot of trouble.

...

Not long after, he arrived outside the classroom.

Before he even entered, Su Yi noticed the classroom was much more chaotic than usual. Although the students were inside, they looked worried—this was abnormal. During the time before morning self-study, everyone should have been slumped over, catching up on sleep.

The classroom was unusually lively today.

"Have you heard? That student who went crazy yesterday disappeared after the teachers forced him into a car. His parents can't find him, no matter how they try to reach out," He Cheng muttered, arms crossed, his schoolbag still sitting on his desk.

"He injured so many people yesterday. Didn't he go to the police station?" Lu Guo asked.

"No. My dad said the precinct didn't even file a report. Someone hushed it up."

"There's... there's such a thing? Does his family have that much power?"

"Who knows? I was at the scene yesterday. That guy literally bent an iron railing with one slap. He was basically Superman. If you didn't know better, you'd think you were watching a sci-fi movie. It's a miracle Su Yi wasn't beaten to death..."

As they spoke, Su Yi walked in with his schoolbag and Luo Lixi. However, the students discussing the matter didn't stop immediately as they usually did, nor did they look at him with strange eyes.

Instead, He Cheng took the initiative to talk to him: "Brother Yi, it was a real misunderstanding before. I didn't think you'd be so brave. The whole school is buzzing about how you saved the girl, even though you got beaten up pretty badly..."

"Yeah! Although you got beaten up, you saved her after all!" Lu Guo chimed in.

"Mu Xiaowei hasn't arrived yet. When she gets here, I have to ask her how it felt to be saved."

"Exactly, Brother Yi is too cool. Even if you were beaten up, 'cool' lasts a lifetime."

The people around them began to tease.

High school trends were fickle. The story of him "getting beaten up" to save Mu Xiaowei had spread throughout the campus, and his classmates' opinions of him had shifted significantly. While many were afraid of stepping in during a crisis and preferred to hide from danger, they hoped to have someone around who dared to stand up.

Su Yi, however, didn't feel happy about this. He just nodded slightly.

He didn't know why these people kept repeating that he was "beaten up badly" while praising him. Even if it was an acknowledgment of his acting skills, it was uncomfortable to hear, as if a terrifying bully had finally received their due punishment.

The topic didn't end there. He Cheng was a chatterbox who didn't need a response to keep going:

"Sigh, I feel like this world is going to change. Maybe these new teachers are all part of some terrorist organization, and we're all test subjects. If we show any abnormalities, we'll be snatched away as research material."

"Look at that guy yesterday. Who knows if he's dead or alive now?"

*A prophet, kill him!*

Su Yi couldn't help but agree with that inference, but he didn't know the person who was taken, and he had no desire to play the hero. He wasn't going to risk his life for a stranger, so he couldn't care less about the captive's fate.

Mu Xiaowei hadn't arrived yet, and her seat was empty, making things feel a bit cold.

With no one watching, Su Yi picked up the Chinese dictionary and leaned toward Luo Lixi, marking a few commonly used Wasteland words with their Chinese meanings so she could study them herself. These books and papers would automatically become invisible once in her hands, so there was no need to worry.

Having stayed up all night, Su Yi felt a bit sleepy. He stretched and looked out the window.

At that single glance, he noticed something wrong.

About 600 meters away, on the balcony of an office building near Luocheng High School, a faint glint caught his attention.

It looked like a reflection from a lens.

Su Yi pressed his fingers against his temples, focusing his strength into his eyes to sharpen his vision. There, he saw a man holding binoculars, looking through a small notebook and recording as he watched.

*Damn stalker.*

Su Yi, who had been annoyed by surveillance all day, was in an even worse mood after spotting this guy. The high school was already under control; who was he trying to watch from such a hidden spot?

Could there be another faction involved?

He didn't want to know, and he was too lazy to care. He gently pulled the window open a tiny crack, pinched a soft eraser from his pencil case, and, seeing that no one was looking, flicked it with a snap.

The eraser left a trail of white heat in the air, flying like a small meteor. In the blink of an eye, it smashed the man's binoculars to pieces.

Luo Lixi felt the movement and looked up. Not knowing what had happened, she wrote in the Blue Star language she had just learned: "Officer, what's wrong?"

"Swatted a fly."

"Wait, your stroke order is wrong. You should write the 'pie' (left-falling stroke) before the 'shu-ti' (vertical-hook stroke)."

Su Yi pointed at the character 'Chang' (Long) and reminded her.

The silver-haired girl nodded, lowered her head to look at the dictionary again, and followed the strokes perfectly, producing a character that looked as if it had been printed by a machine.

Su Yi glanced at the watcher outside. The figure had disappeared and didn't dare show his head again. He silently closed the window.

*A warning is enough...*

The biggest beneficiary of this explosion wasn't the students who had awakened because of it.

...

"Report, I've been discovered by the Special Operations Team. Someone attacked me."

The man on the balcony had no idea where the attack came from. He dove to the floor, retreated to a blind spot inside the room, and spoke frantically into a Red Dragonfly communicator.

"Hm? Discovered so quickly? Who attacked you?"

A questioning voice came from the other side.

The watcher held up his mangled binoculars, cold sweat beading on his forehead. "An eraser..."

"An eraser? Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. When it hit, I thought it was a bullet, but I didn't hear any gunshot."

There was a long silence on the other end of the communicator.

"Throwing an eraser at you from 600 meters away with that kind of precision? Even I can't do that. 0147, you're having a mental breakdown. Come back for a reset."

The watcher panicked. "Boss, listen to me, it really was an eraser! An eraser!"

"No need to explain. If you've been discovered, retreat immediately. Our mole just sent word; there's no need to linger."