"Hello, Lu Mingfei!" He stepped forward quickly and grasped Lu Mingfei's hand tightly.
"Hello to you." Lu Mingfei sized up the white-haired old man who wore a sloppy suit and a pair of baggy trousers.
Could this really be a professor from Cassell College, the organization that held power over the world's dark side?
Noticing Lu Mingfei's gaze, Guderian scratched his fluffy hair with quite a bit of embarrassment. "The moment you passed the voiceprint verification, Mingfei, I had Norma push up the flight schedule. The preparation was a bit rushed, haha."
"Thank you for the high regard, Professor." Lu Mingfei offered some polite formalities.
When he first met Sir Gideon Ofnir at Roundtable Hold, he had been warned that outsiders must not commit overstepping acts. Compared to that, Professor Guderian's enthusiasm genuinely felt approachable.
"Mingfei, my boy, this build of yours is truly solid." Guderian pressed down on Lu Mingfei's shoulders and patted them lightly. "You certainly live up to being an 'S'-rank." His gaze wandered over Lu Mingfei, brimming with joy like an elderly father reunited with a long-lost son after a protracted separation, wearing an expression of such pleasant surprise that he did not know where to look.
"I've notified my uncle and aunt, and at tomorrow night's banquet I must ask you to convince them. They feel I've been scammed." Lu Mingfei suddenly felt a trace of unease; just looking at this professor's appearance, he really did resemble a bit of a swindler, leaving him no choice but to speak up and offer a caution.
"No problem, no problem." Guderian did not take this to heart, hurriedly pulling a stack of documents from his briefcase and handing them to Lu Mingfei. "Let's sign first."
Ye Sheng stepped forward in silence and handed Lu Mingfei a pen.
Lu Mingfei glanced through them briefly. They were all sorts of miscellaneous agreements, and even included an insurance policy for shipping back his remains in the event of an accidental death.
Without batting an eye, he signed his full name.
The Law of Causality of Death in the Lands Between was something he had freed from the hands of the Black Blade Malikith and returned to all living things; to a Tarnished, death was as casual as drinking water and eating a meal.
Having signed all the agreements, Lu Mingfei managed with great difficulty to refuse Guderian's earnest entreaties to stay, finally extricating himself from the hotel.
Late at night, in an executive floor suite at the Regent Hotel, Nono sipped her coffee leisurely.
"Did you meet the 'S'-rank after his awakening?" in the chat application's dialogue window, Sonic inquired.
"I saw him." Nono sighed and tapped on the keyboard. "Compared to his profile, you could say he's a completely different person."
"What's your impression of him?"
Nono was speechless. This guy was so concerned about a fiancé's view of a strange man-anyone who didn't know would probably think he had some weird quirk. But she knew he was asking for the psychological profile she had derived as a profiler.
"I don't know, it's a bit contradictory."
"You don't know?" The other party sent a message quickly, seeming quite puzzled.
"Put it this way: do you think the Principal would attend a kindergarten reunion?" Nono thought back to the afternoon when Lu Mingfei, upon seeing the person he used to have a crush on, merely waved a hand, yet upon taking Red Skies became patient and attentive toward his classmates, and even accepted an invitation to their farewell gathering.
"The Principal? You seem to hold a pretty high opinion of him."
"I can't read his emotions through his gaze, movements, or expressions. A person like this is either a monk deep in the mountains with a pristine mind, or someone who constantly controls his own body and thoughts to avoid thinking about certain things. I don't know what that thing might be-it could be his 'S'-rank, or it might be something like a pure-blood dragon," Nono replied.
"In any case, it's not the sort of thing that would go to a high school reunion, right? His previous chat logs showed he actually turned down his classmates' invitations."
"They're having a gathering tomorrow, and I'm going to tag along and take a look," Nono said.
"A genuine 'S'-rank-the Student Union is the place for him to shine and radiate light, and we must never let him fall into the hands of the Lionheart Society!" Sonic was determined to win the 'S'-rank at all costs.
In another chat window, things were also quite lively at the moment.
"Does everyone have time tomorrow?" Chen Wenwen asked in the group chat.
A bunch of people chimed in one after another to say yes, yes, yes. Everyone was a high school senior, and besides studying, there were almost no activities in their lives that took up time-except for Lu Mingfei.
He replied with a single sentence: "I have something to do in the evening."
The chat group fell silent. The lively, jumping messages suddenly stopped, leaving only that sentence-"I have something to do in the evening."-left alone at the bottom of the chat history. After finishing their interviews that afternoon, Chen Wenwen, Zhao Menghua, Su Xiaoqiang, and Liu Miaomiao had already spread the news that Lu Mingfei had been accepted by Cassell College. At this moment, everyone looking at their phone or computer screen fell silent.
A loser had suddenly leaped out from the tail end of the racecourse where they were in the lead, and was now standing on the podium at the finish line, looking down at them. No one knew how to face this former loser. In truth, these kids were still too immature; placed in the adult world, rainbow-flattering praise would have been flying all over the place by now.
Su Xiaoqiang broke the stillness. "You're the only one with so much drama. If you've got something to do in the evening, then do it in the afternoon instead."
She had just finished taking a shower, turned on her computer, and seeing the situation where Lu Mingfei had silenced the entire literature society membership, she showed no mercy.
"Then let's rent out a movie theater in the afternoon to watch a film," Chen Wenwen replied in kind.
The chat group came back to life. Everyone talked over each other, and finally settled on a plan: to watch an animated film titled "WALL-E". It roughly told the story of a trash-collecting robot on Earth who gained artificial intelligence and fell in love with NOVA, an exploration robot sent to Earth by spaceship civilization, ending in a happy ever after.
"Lu Mingfei, come with me to buy the tickets. Everyone can give their money to Lu Mingfei," Chen Wenwen said.
Everyone in the group chimed in with agreement. As a committee member of the literature society, what Lu Mingfei usually did was collect money and run errands; leaving this to him was standard practice. Moreover, everyone finally found a trace of psychological security: even if the loser used connections to leap over the dragon gate, he still had to run errands for them-the shadow of the loser still hung over him.
"Alright, I have no problem with that," Lu Mingfei answered.
The chat group fell quiet again. Lu Mingfei had never officially replied to this sort of arrangement from Chen Wenwen in the past, always defaulting to agreement.
In their eyes, this ordinary reply was just like the vermilion brush annotations presented to an emperor by an eunuch in a memorial. The harsh and unfamiliar words shattered the immature psychological security of these youngsters.
He was no longer a loser. He was Lu Mingfei, and from now on he would be a dazzling figure on par with Chu Zihang; making him run errands was something that required his consent.
The next morning, Lu Mingfei and Chen Wenwen went to rent out a screening hall at the cinema.
Chen Wenwen went to the flower shop again and bought a bag of bellflowers, holding them in her arms. The two walked side by side along the pebble-paved path running alongside the river. The weather was fine and bright, the unique spring scent of grass and trees filled the surroundings, and the river rippled and flowed.
"Lu Mingfei, will you be developing your career in the United States in the future?" Chen Wenwen asked.
"I don't know." Lu Mingfei shook his head.
"Actually, returning to China is pretty good. The employment situation is quite decent right now."
Lu Mingfei remained silent. He felt that the girl walking beside him, wearing a white cotton dress, spoke in a roundabout way; she seemed to be talking about the employment situation, yet it also sounded like she was persuading him to return to China to build his career.
Chapter 8: Farewell (Part 1)
"You place a lot of value on classmate bonds, don't you?" Lu Mingfei remarked.
Chen Wenwen suddenly froze, staring blankly at the gentle-eyed young man beside her. Indeed, she harbored some delicate emotions in her heart, feeling saddened over the bonds and memories between high school classmates that were bound to gradually fade due to separation. But why was Lu Mingfei, who always spoke nonsense, suddenly so sharp and solemn in his words today?
Lu Mingfei stopped in his tracks-not because of Chen Wenwen, but because of a red-haired figure waiting far in the distance.
"You should head back first. I'll arrive punctually for the appointment this afternoon." Lu Mingfei pointed into the distance. "Someone is waiting for me."
Chen Wenwen's eyesight was not as sharp as Lu Mingfei's, but she still vaguely caught sight of a splash of red. Presumably it was that girl from the day of the interview; she must be Lu Mingfei's senior sister now.
Chen Wenwen departed alone, following a fork in the road toward another direction.
Lu Mingfei did not immediately go to meet Nono. Instead, he stepped across the lawn and walked over to the riverside.
Along this entire journey, his communication with Chen Wenwen had mostly consisted of silence and answers. In the Lands Between, the lucid people capable of conversation whom Lu Mingfei encountered were few; beneath a heavy destiny, what he heard more often were suffocating cries-especially the consciousness of the White Spirits occasionally left behind in those corners. Those blunt obsessions, lamentations, despair, and prayers uttered in fragmentary words formed their entire lives, a portrayal of all living things under the Demigod War.
Even the girl who had accompanied him for so long was travel-worn, harboring heavy concerns and destiny. When they sat face to face, through all the times they chatted under the radiance of Golden Grace, her reactions combined did not match the colorful and whimsical variety Chen Wenwen displayed in a mere single hour.
In conversations with an ordinary high school girl like Chen Wenwen, Lu Mingfei finally perceived his own a certain sluggishness and maladjustment.
Perhaps he was no longer suited to face this kind of beautiful life that resembled foam beneath the sunlight.
Yet why tirelessly crowd close to it... because there truly had been someone once who yearned for all of this beyond measure.
He lowered his gaze to the water's surface. Meeting his eyes in the reflection was a pair of bewildered and despairing eyes-that was the youth who had crouched by the small pool near the Church of Elleh. His first death was resurrecting at the Golden Grace of the Church of Elleh, lying there for months, drinking the murky standing water in the small pond, eating cherry-like wild fruits, tattered in clothing and disheveled in appearance like a lonely wandering ghost.
What the youth back then had yearned for was precisely this kind of life: a home with an uncle, aunt, and cousin, a group of classmates who even looked down on him, and that beautiful girl who seemed translucent in the sunlight.
Yet every time he opened his eyes, what he saw remained broken walls and wandering monsters.
Now, Lu Mingfei had eaten a meal cooked by his aunt, heard his uncle boast once more, watched Lu Mingze futilely send romantic messages to "Sunset's Scar" that would never receive a response, attended the literature society classmate gathering, and even spent a long time alone with Chen Wenwen.
Though late by many years, he had arrived after all, fulfilling the obsession of the shadow youth within his memories.
Lu Mingfei dropped a dandelion that grew along the riverbank. It landed on the water's surface, shattering the reflection of the disheveled youth, and a sigh drifted soundlessly into the distance along with the current and faint ripples.
That trace of tenderness and vulnerability, treasured ever since that girl threw herself into the furnace, let it end right here.
The one who returned from that world was Lu Mingfei, the Elden Lord.
Nono quietly arrived behind Lu Mingfei, gazing intently at this 'S'-rank whose behavior had suddenly turned literary. His actions were undoubtedly reminiscent of Daiyu burying flowers, but what on earth was he burying?
Lu Mingfei turned around and exchanged a brief glance with Nono.
A spring breeze swept past, yet for an instant Nono felt a chill-that came from the information her profiling read from Lu Mingfei. This youth no longer suppressed his inner self; if previously he was a sharp blade hidden without a single blind spot inside its scabbard, then now, he had drawn his sword.
Nono had felt the exact same heavy will in a few people: Executive Department head Professor Schneider, Principal Angers, and Lionheart Society president Chu Zihang. Yet Lu Mingfei was different from all of them; those individuals carried varying degrees of hatred, pain, and fury, making them typical avengers, whereas Lu Mingfei's will carried no emotion, resembling more an emperor seeking to accomplish some grandiose ambition.
At this moment, she completely lost interest in this loser.
A person like this was not something a chick who did profiling could handle. Her help to her boyfriend reached its limit right here; whether or not he could be made to join the Student Union would depend on the operational skill of the Student Union president himself after the freshmen enrolled.
"Senior sister..." Lu Mingfei spoke.
"I was just passing by and happened to see you, that's all." Nono pre-empted him. Her words carried the feel of a tsundere maiden from old anime, but she knew the person before her would definitely not misunderstand.
"I see. If there's nothing else, I'll be leaving first." As expected, Lu Mingfei dropped those cold words and parted ways with the stunning senior sister.
After standing in place watching him walk away, Nono approached the riverbank alone. The dandelion Lu Mingfei had just thrown down had already vanished in the current. She curled her lip, stared at the river surface, and muttered in self-deprecating complaint, "The college really ought to open a class to study dragons' interests in flowers and grass..."
In the afternoon, at the cinema.
The lights in the screening hall were on, yet it remained dim. Lu Mingfei sat in the back row, completely alone. Up ahead, the young people were chattering away in lively conversation; with parting imminent, their laughter was invariably tinged with nonstop chatter.
Still, someone finally approached Lu Mingfei to strike up a conversation.
It was Zhao Menghua.
"As a top student of Cassell College, you should give a speech to everyone later. This is some more formal attire." Zhao Menghua handed over a tote bag. Inside the bag were a shirt, a suit, and a tie.
"I'll pass. Better leave the speech to the president or to you." Lu Mingfei had no interest in giving speeches.
Had this been in the past, Zhao Menghua would have certainly tried to persuade him further. Everyone knew that Lu Mingfei, who usually wore a smiling face, was actually quite submissive; with a bit more persuasion, he would definitely have agreed.
Instead, Zhao Menghua walked away in silence. He felt unfamiliar with Lu Mingfei's calm attitude from beginning to end, and could not gauge the other's seriousness or bottom line.
He quickly returned to the crowd, recovering his usual confidence and composure, except that he never cast another glance in the direction where Lu Mingfei sat.
Soon, the lights dimmed, and the projector started up.
On the screen, instead of the classic green screen and golden dragon opening visuals of the State Administration of Film, was a single line of text.
"Chen Wenwen, Love You!"
Three people wearing suits stood precisely in three positions, forming respectively an 'i' and two 'o's, which combined spelled out "Chen Wenwen, i Love You!"
Lu Mingfei realized that Zhao Menghua had lied earlier; wearing a suit to go on stage wasn't for giving a speech.
He looked toward Zhao Menghua, who had stood up, and frowned.
Was this guy deliberately targeting him?
"Today was supposed to be our literature society gathering, but I'm just taking advantage of this opportunity..." Zhao Menghua had already begun his speech in a loud voice, completely unaware of this displeased and probing gaze.
Chapter 9: Farewell (Part 2)