After thirty crowded minutes, the streetcar stopped at a wide intersection.
Evan squeezed out from the crowd, jumped off the step, and took a deep breath of the relatively fresh air.
An imposing gate stood before him.
Two square stone pillars supported a classical lintel, where the name of Sage University was inlaid in bronze characters; the script was solemn, mottled with green patina.
Tall, neat red-brick walls extended from both sides of the gateposts, their tops overgrown with ivy, meticulously trimmed.
Inside the wall stood rows of carefully tended green plants; the crowns of oak and elm trees cast large patches of deep shade in the morning light, and the lawn was trimmed like a green velvet carpet.
Several horse-drawn carriages were parked in the circular driveway at the entrance, their bodies polished to a bright sheen and their brass fittings gleaming.
Coachmen dressed in neat uniforms respectfully pulled open the doors, and one appropriately dressed student after another stepped down from the carriages.
Three-piece suits, polished leather shoes; some even carried small calfskin briefcases in their hands, with tie clips styled like family badges pinned to their ties.
Evan looked down at his pocket watch.
Forty past seven.
The first class started at eight.
He had no mind to look at those imposing classmates and beautiful scenery.
He put away his pocket watch, set his legs in motion, and ran.
This was the fastest he had run in a long time.
The cold wind of the late-autumn morning poured into the collar of his jacket, his schoolbag jolted on his back, and his faded leather shoes knocked out a hurried clatter on the flagstone road.
He crossed the tree-lined avenue, bypassed Fountain Square, rushed up the steps of the Teaching Building, and pushed open the heavy Oak Door.
His heels slipped on the marble floor of the corridor, running all the way to the door of the classroom at the far end of the second floor.
Forty-seven past seven.
In the ordinary classroom, forty students had basically all arrived.
Professor Mons of the chemistry class was known for being strict and had an abhorrence of being late.
It was said that in the previous year, a student had been late by three minutes and was reprimanded by him in front of the whole class for a full ten minutes, and from then on no one dared to step through the door right at the chime of the bell.
The students sitting in the classroom generally had fine clothing.
Starched and crisp shirts, well-fitted waistcoats; some had silver cufflinks, and some had fountain pens bought from the Waterman counter.
After all, most of the people who could study here these days were still the children of the wealthy.
When Evan panted his way running into the classroom, forty pairs of eyes turned uniformly over.
Whispers spread like a rustling wind from the front row to the back row.
He could not hear the specific content clearly, but he could catch fragments of a few words:
"That..." "French Pox..." "Still dares to come..."
Someone nudged their seatmate with an elbow, poked their lips out toward his direction, and the two exchanged a knowing look.
Evan panted heavily, acting as if he had heard nothing.
He walked straight to the corner against the wall in the very last row of the classroom, pulled out a chair, and sat down.
The academic workload of pre-med was heavy.
The new medical reform had just been implemented.
To apply to medical school in the future, the grades in all subjects had to reach excellence completely, and a single dragging hind leg could mean being out.
The homework and experiments in science and engineering were so numerous that one could hardly breathe, and every day's time was stuffed to the brim.
Under this kind of high pressure, proper pre-med students generally did not have any real socialization.
Even if there were interactions, they were mostly hypocritical, superficially polite, and secretly competing.
After all, there were only so many professors, and if you took the recommendation letter slot, I wouldn't have it.
In this classroom, everyone was a potential competitor to each other.
As for a poor student of humble background like Evan, he was not even acknowledged to have the qualifications of a competitor; he was merely a joke.
After the textbook was fished out of the schoolbag and spread out on the desk, the violent panting of Evan's weak body was exceptionally grating in the quiet classroom.
Like a leaky bellows, it wheezed back and forth.
A student in the front row with a neat side-part turned back and frowned, his expression looking as if he had smelled something unclean.
Several people nearby whispered to each other, glancing toward this side from time to time, with subtle, undisguised, strange smirks hanging at the corners of their mouths.
The previous Evan could not endure these things, being self-abased and sensitive.
Those gazes pierced him like needles, every single one carrying poison.
He would lower his head, hunch his shoulders, and wish he could fold himself up and stuff himself into the drawer of the desk.
That was how he had worried himself to death.
But Evan was different now.
The twenty-nine-year-old soul from Earth was a small business owner who had already achieved success in his ventures.
After graduating from junior high, he skipped grades and entered the University of Life.
He had worked as a real estate salesman and handed out flyers at intersections under the scorching sun.
He had spent entire days making sales calls in cubicles where people hung up on him, and accompanied clients to housing developments late at night.
He had been cursed out by clients and had his deals stolen by colleagues.
He had hit every wall imaginable while borrowing money everywhere to start his business...
He was a true social phobe.
A social terrorist.
So-called saving face was nothing more than Shackles that made others comfortable and himself miserable.
As long as you kept your head down, there were outhouses everywhere.
As long as I am not embarrassed, the embarrassed ones are others.
He flipped his textbook to today's chapter, his breathing gradually steadying as his gaze fell upon the Book Page, turning a deaf ear to the surrounding snickers.
At eight o'clock sharp, a bald old gentleman walked into the classroom.
He wore a pair of reading glasses with thin wire frames, perched on a lean, hooked nose.
His white shirt was starched crisp and straight, the collar buttoned all the way up to the top button, and he wore a dark gray wool vest on the outside.
His pace was not fast, but every step fell heavily, the sound of Leather Shoes soles tapping against the floor echoing through the classroom.
The whispering in the classroom vanished instantly.
Professor Mons placed a stack of handouts on the podium, took off his glasses to wipe them, put them back on, and swept his gaze across the room from above the lenses.
That gaze was cold and sharp, like an unshielded surgical scalpel.
"Let us first review the material we covered previously."
He picked up a piece of chalk, turned, and wrote several keywords on the blackboard. The screeching sound of the chalk tip scraping the board was sharp and grating, causing a few students to involuntarily shrink their necks.
Mons put down the chalk, clapped the white dust off his hands, and faced the class.
"Who can restate and explain the core tenets of the Dalton Atomic Theory?"
He paused, then added: "Do not simply recite the entries. Explain why it accounts for the law of definite proportions and the law of multiple proportions."
The classroom was quiet enough to hear the chirping of a sparrow on a tree branch outside the window.
Forty students instinctively lowered their heads.
Some began flipping through their textbooks, some stared at their fingernails, and some suddenly developed a deep interest in the wood grain of their desks.
Two weeks from now was the important school sports event: the Sage University-Truth University American Football match.
As the two top institutions of higher learning in the New Continent nowadays, this match garnered a considerable amount of attention.
The game would be held on November 19th, but just as November began, students had already started forming Cheering Squad units and making various slogans and commemorative badges.
Lower-class students engaged in various activities, hoping to become spectator volunteers just to obtain a free ticket to meet more people.
Middle-class students, on the other hand, began scouting for travel companions, custom-tailoring clothes, and planning routes.
This led to a recent restlessness in people's hearts, with only a tiny fraction of students able to maintain their focus.
Professor Mons's brow furrowed, his two graying eyebrows twisting into a displeased knot: "Did none of you do the assignment?"
Silence.
"Lebon, you."
In the middle section of the classroom, a blonde young man wearing a light blue shirt stood up slowly.
His shirt material was quite nice, and a small gold-plated collar pin was pinned to the collar, but at this moment his face was filled with embarrassment.
"Uh... First, elements are composed of indivisible, indestructible atoms."
He licked his lips, his gaze drifting.
"Second, atoms of the same element differ in mass and properties..."
"Wrong." Mons's voice was like a pair of scissors, cleanly and decisively cutting off his words.
The blonde young man's mouth opened, he stammered out half another sentence, and then fell silent.
Mons pointed at a few more people.
The second one to stand up got stuck at the third item, and the third one stumbled even on the first one, mispronouncing "indivisible" as "renewable."
The old gentleman's expression grew increasingly dark, and a storm began brewing in his eyes behind the lenses.
"Not a single person can recite it completely?" His voice was not loud, but every word sounded as though it were squeezed out from between his teeth.
"Then everyone will write a penalty transcription. Copy each item twenty times, and hand it in next class."
A repressed wave of sighs rang out across the classroom.
At this moment, in the corner of the last row, a skin-and-bones hand slowly went up.
"Teacher, I can."
Mons's gaze swept across forty heads, landing on the thin and weak student in the back row wearing a patched jacket.
His graying eyebrows twitched slightly, and his gaze swept from Evan's frayed collar to the front of the jacket lacking a button, completing this inspection in about two seconds.
"You speak."
Evan stood up. The chair slid backward, emitting a short, piercing sound.
He did not look at the textbook, nor did he look at his notes.
The powerful focus during those four hours from three to seven in the morning had already nailed this content into his brain like spikes.
"1: Elements are composed of indivisible and indestructible atoms."
"2: Atoms of the same element are completely identical in mass and properties."
"3: Atoms of different elements differ in mass and properties."
"4: Compounds are formed by different atoms combining in simple whole-number ratios."
"5: Chemical reactions are merely the rearrangement of atoms, neither creating nor destroying atoms."
His speaking speed was neither fast nor slow, his articulation was clear, and he left just the right amount of pause between each point.
Evan did not stop.
"It can explain the law of definite proportions because under Dalton's framework, the ratio of different atoms in a compound is fixed, and no matter how the same compound is prepared, the mass ratio of its constituent elements always remains unchanged."
"It can explain the law of multiple proportions because the same two elements can form multiple different compounds, and the mass of one element in these compounds exhibits a simple whole-number multiple relationship."
"For example, nitrogen and oxygen can form NO, N?O, NO?, in which the mass ratio of oxygen is a simple whole-number multiple."