The aftereffects of Wednesday's beating at the Iron Thorn Combat Hall only began to show on Thursday morning.
After getting beaten up yesterday, Zhang Tie had still felt well enough to take a nice, hot shower in the Combat Hall's staff bathroom before heading home. He had a few bruises on his body, but luckily his face was fine, so he didn't have to worry about his parents noticing anything.
After dinner, he chatted with his parents and his future sister-in-law for a while. Once he had washed up, he sneaked into the kitchen, grabbed two sweet potatoes and a handful of soybeans, and returned to his little room.
Then, naturally, he set about opening up new land in Castle of Black Iron. Beside the cornfield and potato patch that had already sprouted, he quietly buried two sweet potatoes in the soil and planted a row of soybeans, just as he had planted the corn.
He would have to wait until the sweet potatoes had grown more shoots before separating them into pits, just like potatoes. The teachers had covered that in school. As for the soybeans, they were planted much like corn: poke a hole with a steel bar, bury them, and leave them alone.
The Spirit Qi Value in Castle of Black Iron kept rising. It had already passed 13. Besides the corn gradually sprouting, Zhang Tie had noticed on Wednesday that the grass seeds Mother Theresa had given him, which he had scattered randomly on the ground, seemed to have sprouted too. Tiny green shoots had pushed through the soil all over the places where he had scattered them.
There was just over a day left until the first Flawless Fruit ripened. Meanwhile, another branch of the little tree had produced a tiny silver fruit. Zhang Tie reached out to check and found that the Iron Fetus Fruit's ripening progress had passed one-quarter. It looked like getting beaten up four or five more times in the same way would be enough to ripen this fruit too.
Flawless Fruit... Iron Fetus Fruit... hehehe...
After finishing his planned cultivation, Zhang Tie murmured those two names as he drifted off to sleep...
On Thursday morning, Zhang Tie's biological clock woke him from a deep sleep right on schedule, a quarter past six. He was just about to roll out of bed when his face went pale, and a fine sheen of sweat appeared on his forehead. There was only one word for the feeling: pain! His whole body hurt all over! Everywhere he'd taken repeated blows yesterday hurt, especially his two arms, which he'd used to block and defend himself. They felt as if they were broken. The sharp, bone-deep pain came partly from his body's delayed reaction to the blows, and partly, it seemed, because he'd really overdone it the day before. After a night's rest, his muscles had begun to retaliate with aching soreness. When those two kinds of pain came together, Zhang Tie suffered.
Hissing through clenched teeth, Zhang Tie slowly and carefully got dressed. Even the slightest movement hurt like hell.
Only then did Zhang Tie understand that yesterday's beating hadn't come cheap. Iron Fetus Fruit wasn't so easy to get his hands on, either.
It took Zhang Tie twice as long as usual to get from home to school on Thursday. He moved like he was in a slow-motion performance. Any bigger gesture, no matter how small, sent a wave of pain through him.
When Zhang Tie arrived at school, he saw the imposing One-Eyed Dragon standing at the entrance again, smacking an iron rod against his palm. The boys coming to school lowered their heads like quails and filed through the gate farthest from him.
"Kid, I heard you did pretty well yesterday. You didn't let me down!" Zhang Tie hadn't even greeted Captain Colin when the captain surprised him by praising him first.
Zhang Tie managed a smile, making his facial muscles twitch. He looked a little embarrassed. At that moment, even Zhang Tie himself wasn't sure whether he ought to be grateful to this One-Eyed Dragon or hate him.
When he got to class, he found the boys there gossiping. They weren't talking about how nobody had wiped down their desks and chairs that day. Instead, one of their classmates had arrived early and lain in wait in the classroom next door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the "idiot" who came every morning to clean their desks and chairs. Unfortunately, the boys who'd come before dawn to expose the mystery man had waited until more than half the class had arrived without seeing him. Their plan had fallen flat.
Damn, I guess I should keep a low profile when I do good deeds from now on, Zhang Tie thought. My classmates are way too curious. This path to earning Merit Value is a dead end.
Perhaps it was because he felt guilty, but after obtaining Castle of Black Iron, Zhang Tie didn't particularly want to become a topic of conversation at school or in his class. It would be pretty strange for an ordinary student who'd never stood out to suddenly become enthusiastic about doing good deeds. It was unlikely anyone would connect Zhang Tie's good deeds to something as ethereal as Merit Value, but given his usual cautious nature, keeping a low profile whenever he had something good was always the right move.
The morning classes were much the same as usual, with little worth mentioning. Everything proceeded as normal. Perhaps because the teachers felt that Zhang Tie and the others would all be leaving school for good in two weeks, they were teaching less theory and more practical experience. Sometimes, the students were simply listening as their teachers shared stories and lessons from their lives.
Next month, in keeping with the custom at every school in Black Flame City, all graduating students in the city would take a two-month Survival Class in the wilderness, from June 1 to July 31. This course was a major test of everything the students had learned and every skill they had developed over the years. The school held no exams, because in this era, anyone unfit to survive would be eliminated. The wilderness Survival Class for Black Flame City's graduates had a certain casualty rate every year. Last year, five students from Black Flame City's Seventh National Boys' Middle School were eliminated during the course: four died, and one was crippled. It was said that in the most brutal year on record, more than twenty students from Seventh National Boys' Middle School had been eliminated during a single month of wilderness survival. For all the graduating students, that month of Survival Class was their coming-of-age ceremony in this era!
A coming-of-age ceremony that had to be met with blood, even with one's life! A ceremony where they left the shelter of Black Flame City's towering walls and faced the raw truth of their era.
After two months of Survival Class, the students' school days would more or less be over. Then came a three-month break, followed for most people by the long years of military service that awaited their restless youth. During those three months, before the official military service notices arrived, a few lucky students with exceptional talent had a chance to leap up the ladder after receiving a school recommendation. They could study somewhere more advanced, becoming the elite of the era, trained by great powers and organizations. For many, the course of their lives would be set from that point onward. Military service lasted as long as the period of compulsory education: one was a right, the other an obligation, and they were equal. Nobody objected. But eight years later, when ordinary people had completed their military service, they would find themselves standing on an entirely different rung of life from those who had been given the chance at a better education—those former classmates of theirs.
When the four morning classes ended, the graduating boys swarmed into the cafeteria again. Naturally, just as everyone lined up to collect their trays, Gelis and his cronies sauntered in late as usual. After driving away a few unlucky fellows who didn't dare complain, they took their places at the very front of the line.
Watching Gelis and his cronies these past few days, Zhang Tie often asked himself what he would do if this misfortune ever befell him. He had a vague answer in mind, but whenever he lined up for a meal, he deliberately chose a spot toward the back of the line, doing his best to put off the moment when he would have to make that choice. For a fifteen-year-old boy, it wasn't an easy decision.
During lunch, Barry, that fat bastard, told Zhang Tie that next week he would help him complete another kind of coming-of-age ceremony.
"From now on, every brother in our Airplane Brotherhood will have shed his virginity!" At Barry's grand declaration, the boys of the Airplane Brotherhood burst into lewd laughter around the table.
To be honest, Zhang Tie had still been fantasizing yesterday about a "wonderful life" and a "passionate romance" with the goddess Daina. But when Barry announced that they would be completing their "coming-of-age ceremony" next week, Zhang Tie's heart leaped against his will. He even felt a faint longing. That longing turned into images in his mind, and when those images finally became a little tent standing high in his pants, Zhang Tie had to admit it: all right, he was one of the school's herd of boys, no better than the other animals in the Airplane Brotherhood. But his love for Teacher Daina was still sacred! Zhang Tie consoled himself.
The second half of lunch was taken up with the Airplane Brotherhood's various jeers, taunts, and put-downs about Zhang Tie's little tent. Zhang Tie was completely immune to their attacks by now. After lunch, the boys went to the classroom to play cards, their usual lunchtime pastime, while Zhang Tie headed to the Small Woods beside the cafeteria, found a place to sit, and practiced Abacus Mental Calculation. According to the book, the first step to mastering Abacus Mental Calculation was to be able to visualize the three-deck abacus in an instant, then use the abacus in his mind to calculate any three-digit-or-smaller arithmetic problem in an instant.
Zhang Tie was still some distance from the two "instants" required to master that first step of Abacus Mental Calculation. He could now visualize the three-deck abacus in under fifteen seconds, but he still needed more than four seconds to work out an arithmetic problem involving numbers of three digits or fewer. Remembering the words on the book's cover—"Supplementary Reading for Elementary School Students"—Zhang Tie couldn't help breaking into a cold sweat. This was apparently a skill elementary school students were supposed to have mastered, yet after so many days of struggling, he was still at this level. How embarrassing...
Just as Zhang Tie was feeling embarrassed, as if someone wanted to make him feel even worse, one of Gelis's lackeys appeared in front of him. Zhang Tie was wondering why the guy was standing there when the gloomy-looking fellow suddenly tossed a stack of trays onto the grass by his feet with a loud smack.
"Wash these trays and take them to the cafeteria!" The guy dropped the trays, didn't even look at Zhang Tie, and turned to leave, as if it had never occurred to him that an unremarkable fellow sitting against a tree might refuse.
Looking at the four filthy trays by his feet, Zhang Tie scratched his head and realized, a little glumly, that some difficult choices in life couldn't be avoided just because you wanted to...
I'll try to update another chapter tonight. Thanks for all your support!