High School Youth and 700 Runs of Genji Heavy Industries

"Caesar, your pecs are big, so you're right, but if your legs are badly injured, don't turn back and throw your life away! Arthritis will be a real pain when you're old. Chu Zihang, I'll cover him with firepower while he runs back. After several hundred runs, even a noob like me has been stewed into old duck soup..."

"Gen Chisei, aren't there still mercury rounds left in that flintlock muzzle-loader beside you? Stop thinking about using your King's Authority. The last few times you cast an AOE from that position, you nearly blew Caesar's soul ring apart. You've lost too much blood; you can't control the exact target."

"What do you mean you can't understand me? You're living in Douluo in 2011, so you should already be more than two years ahead, okay? I'm living in 2009 and I've already read over a hundred chapters... Forget it, I won't talk nonsense. Throw me that Sten gun!"

["Genji Heavy Industries Dungeon" loaded for the 700th time. Dungeon difficulty had been upgraded to Hard in advance. Clearing successfully, saving record... A clear record already existed. New clear rating: S]

The summer breeze brushed past, and the eyelashes of someone sprawled over a high school desk fluttered slightly. No one knew whether it was because of dreams or the warm wind.

He sat by the aisle-side window in the second row. His features were delicate, and he slept with his head resting sideways on his arm.

His sleeping posture over the desk was not particularly elegant. His messy black hair hung over the sleeve of his blue-and-white school uniform, while his fingers loosely held a fountain pen nearly out of ink. Its cap swayed amid the fractured patches of sunlight and warm breeze before the window.

In the wild, that carefree sleeping pose would absolutely carry the composure of an apex predator. On the grasslands, he would probably have been an extraordinary existence on the level of a lion king. His nest-like hair would be the mane of a male lion, ironclad proof of a monarch.

But this was a classroom. In a hunter's eyes, he was an arrogant, conspicuous, delectable prey animal—the sort that deserved at least two kicks in the ass.

The hunter currently teaching class gritted her teeth and coughed twice.

"Given f(x)=2lnx-ax. I won't go over the previous sub-question for those who got it. For the third question, if a is greater than 0 and f(x) is less than or equal to e^ax-x^2 for all x, find the range of a. This is a very basic question. Our class is Shilan's golden key to university admission. No one should be getting this wrong."

"Recently, a certain not-so-enthusiastic scale... classmate, sitting near the front means your mind needs to be near the front too. Lu Mingfei, answer this question."

"Lu Mingfei."

"Lu Mingfei?"

"Lu Mingfei? Lu. Ming. Fei!"

The gray pointer struck the blackboard, which bore the words "XX Days Until the Gaokao," with extra force, apparently intending to awaken the "sleeping lion."

In fact, it did work. The lion brother, who had been slaughtering enemies in his dream, grunted twice, shifted his butt on the chair, and unconsciously changed into a more comfortable position before continuing to dream.

"...Lu Mingfei?"

"...Huh."

"The bell has rung. Someone is checking today, so I won't hold class over. Lu Mingfei, come to my office this afternoon if you have time. Chen Wenwen, remind him and make sure he comes."

Her high heels clicked down angrily as she pushed open the door and left.

The dismissal bell was like the ringing bell that fed carnivores at a zoo. Not long after it sounded, someone who should not have woken up finally did.

His dream-memory of dozing through math class was interrupted, and Lu Mingfei slowly raised his head from the wooden desk.

Still bleary-eyed, he ran a hand through the hair hanging over his forehead.

He had just woken from memories of last night's dungeon game.

As a local elite private school, Shilan was unusually true to its name when it came to break times.

"Lu Mingfei, the teacher just asked you... Are you skipping the literature club event at noon again? This time, it's Agatha's 'Philemon Manor.' Xu Miaomiao and Xu Leilei said the two of them couldn't carry all the stuff."

The girl in the first row ahead of him turned around. She wore a white dress that seemed filled with sunlight, her back straight and her hair cascading like a chestnut waterfall, adorned with tiny decorations among the strands.

Everything was as usual.

"Today? I'll be pretty busy soon. I haven't figured out what I'll be busy with yet... I'll definitely go next time. Definitely next time."

Used to the occasional looks his high school classmates sent his way, Lu Mingfei rested his chin on one hand and gazed tiredly out the window, twirling his pen. If he did not support his chin, his head would instinctively droop.

He was too tired—tired enough to look even more exhausted than Makoto Ito from some anime. His entire body seemed wrapped in pitch-black "depression," and every word and action carried an unshakable weariness, as though he had not slept properly in years.

In Shilan Class Seven, Lu Mingfei could be considered a one-of-a-kind foxtail flower... assuming such a flower existed in reality, then he definitely was one. After all, he refused to admit he was merely roadside grass. Now, he had his own secret.

People with secrets had that kind of confidence: I'm different now. Even if the secret could not be shared with outsiders, even if it had once brought him unbearable pain, for a chuunibyou high school student his age, it was still the kind of "transcendent feeling of standing apart from the masses" that made him hum involuntarily just thinking about it.

Stopping his pen, Lu Mingfei avoided the questioning look in Chen Wenwen's eyes. It was an unconscious habit.

As a senior-year student, what had truly woken him was neither the dismissal bell nor a nightmare, but his own absurdly stealthy guilt—his pounding conscience had woken him up.

Every now and then, he would be fired up and listen seriously in class. More often, he would sleep like the dead, oblivious to heaven and earth.

A conflicted person would stay conflicted for life without making a firm resolution. Neither up nor down, like an ostrich, he would spend two and a half minutes agonizing over five minutes of work.

He wanted to become less conflicted. Desperately so, because he had gained a secret little world of his own—ever since two years ago, whenever he closed his eyes and fell asleep, he would lucid dream and enter a dungeon-game world.

At the beginning of the dungeon, he would appear inside a building in Tokyo, Japan, in 2011, a place called Genji Heavy Industries that he had never heard of before. He had three strange NPC hero teammates, one of whom was even a legendary senior from his real-life high school. Then everyone would happily and harmoniously grind dungeons, fighting terrifying monsters called Deadpools... Yeah, right.

Compared to a live-action Resident Evil, that scene would not have paled in the slightest. Those snake-like monsters called Deadpools were far harder to fight than zombies, and in Hard Mode, they had received a massive buff.

Making a mere high school student like him tackle that kind of dungeon was downright unfair. Inside it, he had unlocked dozens of ways to die.

Burning steel, torrents of gunfire suppressing hordes of Deadpools, earthquakes that abruptly extinguished the indoor lights, pervasive mercury vapor... Scene after scene flashed past like a reel of film, lingering constantly before his eyes after he returned to reality.

He leaned out the window slightly. From his third-floor classroom, Lu Mingfei stared blankly at the sports field like a marmot that had spotted a juicy plant but could not reach it.

Outside the window, lush green leaves rustled beneath waves of summer heat. Boys ran past, stirring hot gusts of wind. Basketballs thudded against the ground, and jerseys billowed with grass clippings and wind.

Compared to his dreams, real life was as leisurely as a fairy tale.

Someone lay on the field watching the clouds. Lu Mingfei also glanced at them, but only stingily, once.

Cloud shadows crawled slowly along the sweat-soaked backs of basketball jerseys, like unfinished ballpoint poems smudged by palms. The crowd in the bleachers made him look twice, though. That was the domain of girls in school skirts.

Between swaying skirts and dancing feet, the ever-late summer arrived.

It was a beautiful season. Only now did Lu Mingfei hear her footsteps, because he had been too tired—his heart had been so weary that every day of the past two years felt like rushing through a market.

If he had not randomly selected options and filled things in blindly when he saw that "Life Strategy Game Interface" in his dream two years ago, this season would have been even more beautiful.

There were thirteen dungeons on the "Life Strategy Game Interface," each with a very brief dungeon description and clear requirements.

The thirteen dungeons were: "Genji Heavy Industries Dungeon," "Three Gorges Bronze City Dungeon," "A Day of Freedom Dungeon," "Beijing Subway Station Dungeon," "Takamagahara Flower Path Dungeon," "Kassel Infiltration Dungeon," "Grand Escape and Tokyo Tower Dungeon," "Black Swan Harbor Dungeon," "Rainy Night Overpass Dungeon," "Burial Place of Gods Dungeon," "Red Well Dungeon," "Twin Kings of the Ice Sea Dungeon," and "Gray Unknown Dungeon."

Back then, Lu Mingfei had had no idea what any of it was. He thought it was just a bizarre dream caused by playing too many games, so he selected the "Genji Heavy Industries" dungeon as his beginner village for fun.

He casually set a beginner task of loading from a save seven hundred times, then recklessly selected Hard Mode for the dungeon.

From then on, hell descended into his dreams.

For seven hundred days, nearly two years, he ran Genji Heavy Industries seven hundred times.

Throughout his entire second year of high school and the first semester of his senior year, every night when he closed his eyes and fell asleep, he had to grind Genji Heavy Industries and face swarms of snake-bodied, human-faced monsters screaming with piercing shrieks.

The aftereffects of those brutal dreams had severely affected his life. He occasionally experienced hallucinations and heard things in reality. Yesterday, half-awake, he instinctively counterattacked and nearly finished off his aunt as though she were a Deadpool grunt.

As a result, he had been kicked out of the house and was currently a homeless stray.