Chapter 152: College Entrance Examination (Gaokao)
When the disheveled woman appeared at the doorway with a gloomy face, what she saw was Tang Xinjue quietly writing her exam paper.
The pale-skinned girl’s eyelashes fluttered. She casually glanced at the figure at the door and sucked in a breath as if startled: “Tsk, Teacher Lü, did you just go jump into the sea to save someone? Why do you look like a drowned monkey?”
She went straight into sarcastic mockery the moment she opened her mouth.
Teacher Lü pulled the corner of her mouth into a smile that wasn’t a smile, revealing a mouthful of eerie white teeth: “I just got tricked a little by a student who didn’t follow the rules. Tell me, should I punish them back?”
Without waiting for Tang Xinjue to answer, she had already lifted her leg and stepped inside the door. She didn’t react at all to the papers stuffed into her hand by the examinee beside her. Her eyes were fixed dead on Tang Xinjue alone, full of venom as if pus were about to ooze out.
Tang Xinjue’s gaze paused on the papers for one brief second.
As expected, there was no reaction.
Looks like the real admission ticket has a rather complicated usage.
The next second, the girl shook her head as if nothing had happened and raised a smile: “That’s not quite right. Teacher personally told me that if anything happened I must call your name, so I just tried calling it once. I didn’t expect Teacher to immediately lock onto my position and rush over. What a coincidence.”
“As for students remembering the teacher’s instructions and teachers and students being harmonious, how can that be called tricking someone?”
——It’s clearly lifting a rock only to smash your own foot.
Teacher Lü’s smile already looked as if the bones of her face had been distorted by some force, or like she had just come down from a failed plastic surgery operation. Every inch of muscle was diligently pulling upward, making it look even more bizarre.
“You’re right, I shouldn’t waste words with you anymore.” The woman spoke softly, but her feet pressed closer and closer toward Tang Xinjue. “I should…”
Tang Xinjue lazily lifted her eyelids. The pen rotated smoothly between her fingers as she quietly waited for the other party’s next move.
However, what arrived faster than the woman was another voice that suddenly appeared beside her ear:
“…Xinjue… Xinjue, can you hear me?”
It was Zhang You’s voice.
Her fingertip movement stopped. Tang Xinjue’s gaze instantly sharpened, and the pen in her hand flew straight toward Teacher Lü!
Teacher Lü didn’t even dodge. She directly slapped the gel pen away with her bloodstained hand, not caring about her image at all——after all, she already looked like a vicious ghost, with no room left to fall further.
At the same instant, Tang Xinjue snatched back the papers from the other party’s hand. While nimbly flipping over the desk, she answered:
“I can hear you.”
“That’s great!”
The joyful voice on the other end switched from Zhang You to Zheng Wanqing, and she spoke impatiently: “Xinjue, hurry up and kill the chief invigilator in your exam hall, then we can regroup!”
“Thank you for the suggestion.” Tang Xinjue leaned back to dodge Teacher Lü’s grab, her speaking speed steady and fast: “Then let Zhang You talk to me.”
Zheng Wanqing: “…I explained it pretty clearly though.”
The background muttering switched back to Zhang You again. This time it was obviously much more orderly. Zhang You finished explaining the matter of regrouping with Wanqing in the shortest time possible.
“Violent stage-breaking?”
Tang Xinjue pondered, casually pulling over an unconscious invigilator to block in front of herself. The next moment, this person’s body was mercilessly pierced straight through by a pair of sharp palms.
“It’s a tempting suggestion, but the difficulty of execution is a bit high.”
Throwing out the other invigilator as well, Tang Xinjue kicked open the main door. A dark mass of invigilators, as if copied and pasted, swarmed in. Half the exam hall was instantly packed airtight.
By the time all the invigilators had poured in, Tang Xinjue’s figure had already switched to outside the door without anyone noticing.
Whether it was ordering these invigilators to withdraw, or violently forcing open a passage, this brief obstruction was more than enough time for Tang Xinjue to disappear into any position in the corridor. After being tricked many times, Lina Lü understood this better than anyone.
With a grotesque smile on her face, she looked at Tang Xinjue from afar. Both hands extended at the same time and mercilessly pierced through the two invigilators at the very front.
Then the third, the fourth, the fifth—
Amid a continuous series of wet splashing sounds of flesh and blood flying, from in front of her all the way to the doorway, every single invigilator was killed in the blink of an eye!
Facing this act that could no longer be called “accidentally hurting our own teammates,” but had fast-forwarded straight to “slaughtering our own teammates,” Tang Xinjue blinked and vanished from the doorway without hesitation.
“Heeheehee…”
The small mountain of corpses collapsed with a loud crash. Lina Lü, now no longer recognizable as human, walked out from within. Her eyeballs rolled around on her blood-soaked face as she called out ever more gently:
“Tang tongxue, where are you? Teacher has come to see you. I still have the band-aids you wanted in my hand. Do you need Teacher to help bandage your wounds? Teacher is coming——”
On the other end of the communication, Zheng Wanqing felt goosebumps rise all over her body and said with certainty: “The chief invigilator in my exam hall wasn’t this deranged.”
Zhang You: “Mine isn’t at this level either… Is it because it’s Xinjue that the difficulty she encounters is the highest?”
Talking about helping you bandage wounds, yet sounding no different from chopping off your head. The more syrupy and nauseatingly gentle this brutally acting “Teacher Lü” became, the more it set off alarm bells.
Tang Xinjue didn’t say much and asked Zhang You concisely: “How is your exam hall now?”
Zhang You immediately understood and quickly began to recount what happened after regrouping with Wanqing.
It turned out that their original plan was for the two of them to join forces and defeat Bing Lanlan again, violently clearing the exam hall in the same way. But when the two chased out, they discovered that Bing Lanlan, who had been spouting threats, had already disappeared without a trace.
With the chief invigilator gone, the robot-like ordinary invigilators would refresh endlessly. No matter how strong the two of them were, they couldn’t withstand the sea of people. They could only temporarily find a remote corner of the teaching building to hide, waiting to find Bing Lanlan before acting.
“Being irritable is just her setting as an invigilator. This ghost itself has a brain.”
Tang Xinjue gave her conclusion quickly and pointed out an important piece of information: “Everything in this dungeon is currently simulating the real college entrance exam. All examinees and invigilators have characteristics belonging to ordinary people, or rather, settings. These settings are most obvious on the chief invigilators, that is, the dungeon bosses, and can even restrain their behavior.”
For example, Lina Lü’s setting is “gentle,” so even though she hates Tang Xinjue to the point of wanting to tear her apart immediately, she still cannot drop the smile on her face.
And according to Zheng Wanqing and Zhang You’s descriptions, the “Liuli Zi” from the previous exam hall had a meticulous and rigid persona, while the “Bing Lanlan” from the later exam hall had an impulsive and irritable persona.
Just as examinees’ abilities have strengths and weaknesses, NPC personas also have their own advantages and disadvantages. The weaker the offensive nature of the persona, the more unfavorable it is for ghosts to attack examinees; conversely, the stronger the offensive nature, the easier it is to go berserk.
Tang Xinjue: “So I guess that these ghosts’ original attributes might be exactly opposite to their personas.”
She continued without pause: “Bing Lanlan’s invigilator persona is irritable and impulsive, so the ghost needs to be calm and intelligent in order to restrain itself from going crazy, and to slip away in advance when it senses danger, letting the ordinary invigilators wear you down.”
“And the invigilator persona I encountered is the gentlest and least aggressive, so correspondingly, her combat power might be the most dangerous one.”
As soon as Tang Xinjue’s words fell, a thin, flesh-white blade suddenly punched through the door beside her. From the hole in the door panel emerged a face with a mouth split high at the corners, eyeballs rotating three hundred and sixty degrees: “I heard your voice… I smelled your scent… Student Tang!”
Rip, rip—after a few tearing sounds, the door to Exam Hall 305 was completely ripped apart. The “flesh-white blade” finally revealed its true form: that was not a tool at all, but Teacher Lü’s mutated arm after going berserk.
This arm had already been stretched into a long strip of flesh skin. The tip was thicker and sharper than a saw blade, while the other parts served as extensible, stretchable segments, dividing Lina Lü’s limbs into countless freely movable joints, each joint attacking a separate exam hall.
Before finding Tang Xinjue, basically none of the exam halls on the third floor had survived. The air was filled with a thick stench of blood.
“Xinjue, are you okay over there right now? Do you need help?”
Zheng Wanqing was so anxious she was like an ant on a hot pan, wishing she could teleport over immediately to fight monsters together with Tang Xinjue.
“…Still okay.” After several minutes, Tang Xinjue’s slightly panting voice sounded again.
“This teaching building has a total of five floors. It’s enough for her to wreck things for a while.”
Zheng Wanqing and Zhang You: “……”
So you’re playing hide-and-seek over there?
Anyway it’s dungeon property, so even if it’s broken you don’t have to pay for it, right?
However, Zhang You soon sensed that Tang Xinjue’s situation might not be as optimistic as imagined: “You’re injured?”
Tang Xinjue: “Surface wounds.”
She calmly bandaged a gash on her arm deep enough to see bone. “I got injured earlier while searching for clues and didn’t treat it. Now it’s stacking up and a bit troublesome, but it’s not a big problem.”
After all, the first thing she recovered was her mental power ability. With it almost completely depleted, its boost to combat effectiveness was practically nonexistent.
What allowed her to handle things with ease now was largely supported by combat experience accumulated from past nightmares. Tang Xinjue was very clear about this. At least in the second loop, it was not the best timing to directly face the dungeon boss.
As for why Zheng Wanqing could rise so explosively, the answer was probably also very simple——
That was because from beginning to end, she had only evolved and enhanced one ability: the combat skill of fists as big as iron.
No matter how many exam loops there were, as long as the dungeon returned abilities to her, it had to return them completely intact. The only place it could suppress her strength was the duration of skill condensation.
Zheng Wanqing suddenly realized: “I get it! No wonder the endurance time of my fists was especially short this time. Even when I wanted to punch people I had to conserve it. I thought it was some NPC trick.”
If Tang Xinjue hadn’t analyzed the reason, she almost wouldn’t have noticed that the dungeon had restricted her.
“——So now, we only have three methods to resolve this.”
Tang Xinjue’s voice suddenly lowered, meaning that Teacher Lü had once again found her location.
“The first method: I hold out until the exam time ends, automatically enter the third exam loop, then cooperate with you to break through the dungeon.”
“The second method: you find the missing invigilator and kill her. There’s a 50% chance you’ll come to me, or regroup with Guoguo.”
“As for the third method,”
She paused lightly, then continued after switching into high-speed movement mode:
“I need more information about the dungeon, so that I can solve all of them in one go.”
Only this time, for the four invigilator NPCs, it would be another kind of ‘solution.’
Zhang You’s eyes flickered slightly, and she immediately understood: “More information about the dungeon… for example, the exam rules book?”
The author has something to say: ---------
Zheng Wanqing: So the dungeon restricted my strength!
Dungeon: Do you have any manners?
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