Was I Going to Sit Here and Wait to Die Too?

The next day, Jingxing spent the entire morning in the back row of the classroom.

The white-robed priest on the platform spoke at an extremely fast pace, writing line after line on the blackboard and erasing each line, chalk dust covering his sleeves like a layer of dry, hardened white frost. Below, dozens of students had their heads down, the rustling sound of their pens scraping across parchment so uniform it was almost irritating.

Jingxing couldn't be bothered to cram a single symbol into his brain. He opened his notebook and, using the ink, sketched a sparrow on a blank page.

The strokes begin casually, yet the curve of the wings is perfectly chosen, following the cold white morning light slanting in from the window, as if they are about to flutter out of the pages at any moment.

"The last row."

The wiping sound on the podium stopped abruptly.

The white-robed priest turned around, his greyish-white eyes staring intently through his crystal lenses. "Jingxing student, please define 'topological equivalence' in the simplest terms possible."

The rustling sound that filled the classroom stopped instantly.

Jingxing closed half of the notebook and slowly stood up.

"If you mold a porcelain teacup with a handle into a donut, as long as you don't cut it open or haphazardly glue the edges together, it's still the same thing." He met the priest's cold gaze. "It's like painting a portrait; even if the features are elongated and displaced into an abstract painting, you can still recognize who it is at a glance."

Several young apprentices turned to look at him in surprise.

The white-robed priest stared at him expressionlessly for three seconds.

"Meaningless. The exam doesn't test metaphors. As for drawing, don't let it distract you." The priest turned around, slamming the eraser down on the blackboard, sending up a cloud of white smoke. "A concept that cannot be rigorously proven with a formula is worth zero on the exam. Sit down and copy today's lemma five times."

Jingxing didn't refute, pulled out a chair and sat down, casually turning to the next page of his notebook.

For the next few days, Jingxing didn't even step into the teaching building.

He wandered along the straight, cold stone path outside the Academy, all the way to the low stone wall at the north end. After climbing over the wall, he saw a shady, barren slope with about a hundred small stone tablets scattered sparsely in the White Sand Ground, as neat as if they had been calibrated with a ruler.

Upon closer inspection, each stone tablet was inscribed with words.

"Alexei, a miner on the Seisida Seventh Mining Planet, has been training here for eleven years."

Jingxing paused for a moment, then walked deeper into the hillside.

"Kaufman, P15-level escort for the Building Materials Logistics Department of Interastral Peace Corporation. Nineteen years of training."

"First Mate of the merchant ship 'Sea Swallow,' Link. Thirty-four years of training."

The area beneath the stone tablets was mostly empty, with only a few belongings placed in front of them: a mechanical pocket watch stopped at three o'clock, a dip pen with a worn-down nib, and a company name tag with faded edges.

"The new guy?"

A hoarse, aged voice drifted from behind an old, withered tree at the top of the hill.

Jingxing looked in the direction of the sound. An old man with gray hair was sitting on the ground next to a stone tablet, holding a stiff old velvet cloth in his hand, slowly wiping the sand and dust off the stone surface. He was wearing a faded company uniform, and the metal name tag on his chest was badly worn, with only the faint outline of the Business Consolidation Department barely visible.

"My name is Fansuos, and I'm here to guard the tombs of extraterrestrial visitors," the old man said without looking up. "Please sit down."

Jingxing sat down on the gravel beside him. "Mr. Fansuos, how long have you been here?"

"No more, no less, exactly thirty years." Fansuos exhaled a breath of stale air and rubbed his withered kneecaps. "The year I fell from the spaceship, the department was in court over the ownership of several routes to Thousand Stars City, and I still had sealed case files in my pocket ready to be submitted to the court."

"Was it also pulled down by that tree?"

"None of those who ended up in this sandy land came here willingly," Fansuos said with a self-deprecating smirk. "These hundreds or so people in front of you were all unlucky souls who came here against their will in their previous lives."

Jingxing looked at the silent students. "None of them passed the exam?"

"Not a single one." Fansuos folded the rag into a neat little square. "When I entered the Academy, there were three old seniors still alive here. Later, they ran out of oil and were buried here one after another. A few years ago, only I was left, and now you've joined us."

"But at the very beginning of the Academy's roster, it clearly says several 'qualified'."

"Those are locals," Fansuos shook his head. "They're the kind of kids that Yaxche has nurtured locally; they've been instilled with these rules since they were little. Besides, their exam papers are on a completely different level of difficulty than those from outer space."

Jingxing frowned. "What exactly makes the questions difficult?"

"It will tailor the questions to how much you know." Fansuos's cloudy eyes gazed at the massive, silvery-white treetops on the horizon. "In the first year of the standardized test, I scored fifty-eight, just two points short of passing. I thought to myself, 'I've already passed the incredibly difficult corporate legal department license exam, what's two extra points compared to studying for another year?' But when the test came out the second year, the questions were all replaced with deductive models I'd never seen before, and I only scored forty-one. The third year, thirty-five, and by the fourth year... I couldn't even understand the questions anymore."

He patted the cold stone tablet. "The more you know, the harder the exam becomes. The network of knowledge you painstakingly build will become a sieve in the next exam. Here, the mortal mind grows more and more desperate with each study."

Jingxing lowered his head and rubbed the calluses on his fingertips. "So what does it want?"

"Who knows?" Fansuos gave a wry smile. "Probably those monsters from the Genius Society."

The old man turned his head, his cloudy gaze sweeping over Jingxing's crisp clothes and demeanor. "You look like you work for the company too. May I ask which department you're in and what rank you are?"

"Traditional Projects Department, P47."

Fansuos's hand, which was wiping the stone tablet, suddenly froze.

He stared blankly at Jingxing for several seconds before letting out a dry laugh, "P47... Even someone as important as you, sitting on a cloud, is going to be trapped here?"

"I won't sit idly by and wait to die," Jingxing said calmly.

"Yes, here, P47 and P24 sit on the same hard bench, next to the same old scholar's ruler." Fansuos shook his head, propping himself up on his knees as he shakily stood up. "Let's go back, esteemed P47. The sun is about to set."

Jingxing did not heed the advice.

After leaving the cemetery, he followed the shady mountain gully downhill and into a dense, uncultivated primeval forest.

The shrubs here weren't trimmed stiffly or unsightly; a thick layer of withered leaves had accumulated underfoot. But as he walked, the sense of space around him began to feel off—no matter which direction he took, after a quarter of an hour, he would always find himself back beside the withered branch he had just broken.

Space was distorted into Möbius Strip with its ends connected.

Jingxing stopped, closed his eyes, and subtly plucked out a wisp of pure black ink with his fingertips.

The Imaginary Energy spread silently in all directions like ripples on water. When it reached a distance of over a hundred meters, the ink seemed to collide with an invisible layer of high-dimensional folds and suddenly stopped.

A gaze, vast and indescribable, swept over him from the depths of the void.

Jingxing suddenly opened his eyes.

The thick fog that had been shrouding the dense forest receded, revealing a narrow, secluded path that seemed to have split open out of nowhere. Jingxing walked forward for twenty steps, and the giant trees on both sides disappeared into the distance as if the tide were receding.

What comes into view is a towering tree.

The so-called giant trees he saw on the plains were merely small, epiphytic branches that had pierced through the planet's crust. What stood before him now was the true form of this creation.