Chapter Thirty-Three: The 3E Examination

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The physical fitness test caused no disturbance in Lin Nian’s life. During his first two days at Cassell College, the dragon-slaying academy left him with a surprisingly plain and unremarkable impression.

At first, Lin Nian had assumed that everyone at the academy would attend class with an AK slung over one shoulder, and that whenever someone was caught cheating, a professor would press a Glock to the student’s head and roar, “Are you going to do it again?” Perhaps the student would even sneer and reply, “I bet that gun isn’t loaded.”

Reality, however, was rather different. The students of Cassell College dressed neatly. They attended classes when they were supposed to and gathered for meals when they were supposed to. The Night’s Watch forum even had gaming groups for DOTA and CS. Lin Nian had joined one and played a few rounds himself. The atmosphere of campus life was entirely in keeping with the spirit of modern university students—provided one ignored the female student he had once glimpsed on passing the gym, leaping three meters into the air to dunk a basketball.

Since he had no classes and therefore no opportunity to make new friends, Lin Nian spent most of those two days wandering aimlessly around campus with Fingel. Built against the mountains, Cassell College covered quite a bit of ground. At the very least, he had managed to locate the most important teaching buildings. The price of that knowledge was several lunches he had been forced to pay for.

Time soon moved on to the third day—the most important day since Lin Nian had arrived at Cassell College, and the day countless people had been eagerly awaiting.

The 3E examination.

To establish a separate examination venue, Professor Manstein, director of the Disciplinary Committee, had applied to the school for an entire teaching building. His stated reason was to guarantee fairness and prevent outsiders from gathering and engaging in the vile practice of favoritism and cheating.

In simpler terms, for this special 3E examination, Manstein had emptied an entire teaching building on Lin Nian’s account. As a result, quite a few students with classes that day had unexpectedly been given time off, and with nothing better to do, they had all turned their attention toward the “promising prospect” sitting alone inside the building.

In the empty classroom, Lin Nian sat solitary at a desk in the exact center. Every other object, including the podium, had been removed. Outside the classroom stood Professor Manstein, holding a file that had never been opened and bore an extremely confidential seal. Every so often he raised his wrist to check the time. Instructor Masashi Toyama, whom Lin Nian had met earlier, carried a medical kit and greeted him with a smile from the doorway.

Unexpectedly, Lin Nian and Lin Xian were not in the same examination room, though they were in the same building. He was on the first floor, while Lin Xian was on the third. Lin Nian had not asked why Professor Manstein had arranged it that way. In any case, there was no need for him to copy Lin Xian’s answers. Rather than worrying about Lin Xian, he would have been better off worrying about himself. After all, ever since he could remember, Lin Xian had been the one tutoring him.

“There are twelve minutes left until nine o’clock. I’ll distribute the papers two minutes early. Are you ready?” Professor Manstein glanced at his watch, then looked toward Lin Nian.

“The last thing I did before going to bed was play two rounds of a game. Since I don’t even know what material this test covers, I have no idea how I’m supposed to prepare,” Lin Nian joked, trying to ease the tense atmosphere.

“When the examination begins, you’ll understand everything.”

When the time was nearly upon them, Manstein entered the classroom and inspected the integrity of the document’s seal in front of Lin Nian. After breaking it open, he placed the examination paper on the desk, along with a number-two pencil and a white eraser.

Lin Nian pinched the bridge of his nose and inhaled deeply to clear his head. Then he picked up the examination paper, glanced at it—and froze.

It was white.

The paper was completely blank.

There were no questions, no sign that anything had been printed on it, not even a line for the seal or an underline where he was supposed to write his name.

After a moment of stunned confusion, Lin Nian seemed to understand. Could the 3E examination include a listening component? Perhaps all the questions would be broadcast through the speakers, and all he had to do was write the answers on the blank sheet. He raised his head and inspected the classroom, and sure enough, there was a speaker mounted in the corner.

“The examination papers have been distributed. There is nothing wrong with the paper itself. The examination will officially begin in ten minutes. You are not permitted to leave the classroom during the examination, but within the classroom you may move about freely, converse, or even sleep. So long as you do not engage in favoritism or cheating, no one will interfere,” Manstein said with a nod.

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As befitted the director of the Disciplinary Committee, he managed to restrain himself at this crucial moment and did not reveal a single hint of the examination’s content to his subordinate student. After reciting the prescribed instructions, Manstein took the document envelope and left the classroom, closing the door behind him. Lin Nian was left sitting alone inside.

Once the door had shut, Lin Nian picked up the blank sheet and examined both sides carefully. He flicked the paper with a finger. Its thin, crisp feel suggested that it was a single layer, with none of the covertly embedded compartments used in spycraft. He carried it to the window and inspected it in the sunlight, then scrutinized the shadow it cast on the floor. He found nothing unusual.

After trying every method he could think of, Lin Nian finally confirmed that it was an ordinary sheet of A4 paper with nothing peculiar about it. He even inspected the pencil and eraser. He was being so cautious because he genuinely suspected that Cassell College’s examinations might not follow conventional rules—that the test was really assessing his investigative abilities, powers of observation, or something of the sort.

He glanced up at the clock on the wall. One minute remained before the official start of the examination. Lin Nian returned to his seat, spread the blank sheet flat on the desk, and looked toward the speaker hanging from the ceiling in the corner.

He felt this had to be the final possibility.

The hour hand reached nine.

Contrary to Lin Nian’s hopes, the speaker mounted in the corner of the classroom really did come alive. It began playing the familiar sound of Bach’s First Cello Suite in G major.

The pencil Lin Nian had just raised stopped in midair. His expression became as miserable as if he had bitten into a pork knuckle covered in hair. He set the pencil down and stared strangely at the speaker, desperately hoping that the graceful, soothing cello music would suddenly come to an end, followed by a flustered temporary worker coughing awkwardly and announcing that the wrong audio file had been played. When the speaker came to life again, perhaps he would hear that all-too-familiar song about the nine-pound fifteen-shilling shirt.

But reality did not oblige him. The cello’s melody continued as though performed by a professional orchestra. Until the conductor’s powerful arm finally descended, the strings would go on vibrating through the air, again and again, producing beautiful music.

Lin Nian’s brows knitted so tightly they looked ready to drip water. He repeatedly raised and lowered the pencil, his face twisted into an expression of utter conflict.

He even began to suspect that Cassell College was actually a conservatory. If music determined whether students were admitted or expelled, then all the great dragon slayers of previous generations must have been master musicians, skilled at the piano, cello, violin, zither, and countless other instruments.

Dragons, meanwhile, were just as likely to be a race of music fanatics. Whenever they encountered humans, differences in musical taste arising from their different species would make them furious, prompting them to produce their instruments and challenge one another to musical duels. Humans had repeatedly found themselves at a disadvantage in their battles against dragons, probably because their instruments were not large enough to match the dragons’. Thus, they had established the Secret Party and formed an orchestra. Under the direction of veteran dragon-slaying conductors, they would unleash music of such overwhelming grandeur that it summoned miraculous Words of Spirit, allowing them to defeat the dragons.

From then on, the Sydney Opera House would become a place of pilgrimage for dragon slayers. Whenever night fell, the theater would be filled with young agents—no, young members of the Secret Party—listening through tear-filled eyes to the epic compositions written by generations of dragon-slaying masters in their quest to overcome the dragons.

And why, exactly, did it have to be the Sydney Opera House?

Because only a venue that large could accommodate dragons engaged in musical duels.

Damn it, had the history of dragon slaying really been this poetic?

Lin Nian felt as though his entire understanding of life had collapsed. Yet he was also somewhat relieved that he had at least studied the piano. If dragons were to be slain through music, he could still find a way to make a living in the profession. But if his predecessors carried violins, zithers, and cellos into battle, would carrying a piano make him look excessively cumbersome?

In a place as solemn as the examination room for the 3E test, Lin Nian was now letting his imagination run wild. Yet he felt anyone would have done the same. This examination was sheer nonsense. Did all those people who believed they possessed S-level potential look a little like Mozart or Bach? Lin Nian would much rather resemble Richard Clayderman.

Bach continued to play softly through the classroom. Lin Nian lowered his pencil, sighed, and looked out the window. He wondered what expression Lin Xian was wearing upstairs. Most likely, she was just as bewildered as he was.

Unfortunately, he had no chance to confirm his guess. He was forbidden to leave the classroom during the examination. The empty room contained no one but him, resembling nothing so much as a—

A cage.

A black sky. Snow and wind rampaging like white serpents. A dark and solitary fortress. Cage bars as dense as a forest. Pale hands reaching outward through them.

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Suddenly, a bone-deep chill surged through Lin Nian’s heart. He shuddered and braced both hands against the desk.

Countless distorted images began flashing before his eyes for no apparent reason. A mass of static spread across his retinas. The sound of Bach’s cello began to recede like the withdrawing tide, while the notes twisted and spiraled upward until they became a piercing shriek that his eardrums could scarcely endure.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

Little by little, Lin Nian began to hear knocking. The sound climbed from faint and indistinct to deafening, as though someone had pressed an ear against the door and was listening intently to a violent figure battering it from the other side. He tried to rise from his chair, only to discover that he had no strength left. The knocking grew louder and louder, thunderous enough to split the crown of his skull and drive straight into his brain.

What was happening? Lin Nian did not know.

The distorted, fragmentary images surged toward him like a rising tide. Black water swallowed him as he stood upon the beach, yet when the flood engulfed him, what blinded his eyes was not darkness, but endless whiteness.

Lin Nian smelled the distinctive scent of ice and snow. Before him stretched a boundless snowfield, so white that the cold seemed capable of freezing shards of ice inside his very bones.

“Someone is knocking, Lin Nian,” someone whispered beside his ear.

For a moment, Lin Nian could not tell whether he was imagining the voice or whether someone was truly speaking to him. The speaker’s voice seemed strangely familiar, as though long ago they had sat together beside the flames of a hearth, sharing a solitude colder than the ice plains as though it were a meal of snow.

Lin Nian struggled desperately to rise. He twisted his head toward the window, hoping to see Manstein patrolling the corridor. But in that brief turn of his head, he caught a glimpse of a scene he had never seen in his life, yet which felt strangely familiar—as though he had encountered it before in a dream.

Beyond the classroom windows, icy peaks towered into the clouds. A black serpent coiled around the mountains. Scalding blood melted the snow and flowed into a black sea. Thunder gathered within the storm and slowly advanced from the horizon. The roar of a dragon hid within the blizzard, shrill and terrifying.

At some unknown moment, the classroom door had become black iron. Arabic numerals were painted across it in a red more vivid than blood, resembling either a serial number or a slaughterhouse inspection mark for pigs and sheep. The ceaseless knocking came from outside. Whoever stood beyond the door knocked with savage authority, and the agitation radiating from them burned against Lin Nian’s nerves like fire.

I have to open the door. Someone is waiting for me.

The thought took root in his mind like a spell. Lin Nian struggled down from his desk and chair. A weight as immense as a mountain pressed upon him, leaving him no choice but to crawl toward the iron door. Gritting his teeth, he reached out and gripped the handle, drawing back the bolt.

The door swung open.

A golden-haired girl stood before Lin Nian. The blizzard tossed her hair across her face, hiding her features. Lin Nian looked up and saw only the faint smile at the corner of her mouth.

“You should not have come back,” she said.

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