Chapter 3 – The Teachers Are Just Looking Out for You
An hour passed, and the pain in his body gradually eased.
Chen Xing sat up and rushed to the bathroom to check his reflection in the mirror.
Nothing seemed different.
Did he get more handsome?
He couldn't tell, he had face-blindness anyway.
Thinking for a moment, Chen Xing began to sense how different his body felt. Slowly, he pulled up the hem of his shirt.
Whoa! he had muscles now.
His once-flat stomach had developed abs. Along the sides were the so-called "V-lines" people always talked about. Even his chest muscles were clearly defined. Though he looked about the same with clothes on, his strength had easily more than doubled.
Was this really what the system meant by "health"?
In modern times, nearly everyone had some minor health issue. It wasn't like centuries ago, when medicine was primitive and anyone who could work without collapsing was considered healthy.
These days, there were endless medical checkups. If something in your body was off, like an irregular heartbeat, high or low blood pressure, or abnormal blood sugar, it didn't count as healthy anymore.
Looking at it that way, these three starter rewards were pretty incredible.
One made him lose his Sichuan accent, letting him speak standard Mandarin fluently.
One taught him photography from scratch, as if by magic.
And the last one had given him…
He touched his abs.
The body of Spider-Man.
Amazing.
You could debate whether he looked more handsome, but whether his physique had improved, that was obvious at a glance.
To commemorate the moment, he took out his phone to snap a picture of his muscles.
He held up his shirt with one hand and took the shot with the other. It was a casual selfie, but somehow the result had a kind of professional polish to it.
So this is what real photography was like.
He opened the built-in editing app. In the past, terms like "contrast" and "color temperature" were just meaningless sliders to him. Now, with photography knowledge fresh in his mind, he adjusted them with ease. He gave the picture a retro Hong Kong-style tone.
Looking at the final result, Chen Xing went quiet.
Then his finger slipped, and he accidentally swiped to the photo he had taken yesterday, the one with his face right up in the camera, zero technique, just raw emotion.
Wait, I took this?
So embarrassing.
He thought about deleting yesterday's post from his Moments feed, but when he opened it, he saw over twenty comments and more than thirty likes. Everyone who was going to see it had already seen it. Deleting it now wouldn't help much.
Forget it. It would serve as a memento of the day he first got the system.
At the very least, he really liked the genuine smile in that photo.
His phone rang.
It was Zhou Peng. Just seeing the name made Chen Xing relax a little.
He had been worried it might be Sister Fang calling.
"Hello?"
"Chen Xing, I called you a bunch of times and you didn't answer. What's wrong? Still hungover from last night?"
"Come on, I'm nothing compared to you."
Chen Xing laughed.
Zhou Peng's family ran a business, and both of his parents were heavy drinkers. Maybe it was genetic, because Chen Xing had never once seen Zhou Peng truly drunk. Every time Chen Xing got dizzy from drinking, Zhou Peng would still be calmly pouring him another glass.
"It's no big deal. Just drink more and you'll build up tolerance. Nobody's born with it. Anyway, now that you're up, come down for breakfast. Bring your luggage, we'll leave after we eat."
"Isn't the flight at nine tonight? Why the rush?"
"Better early than late. It's way better to wait in the terminal than to risk missing the flight. Once you've flown once, you'll understand."
"Alright."
Just thinking about flying made Chen Xing a little excited.
It would be his first time.
He hoped everything would go smoothly.
Dragging his suitcase downstairs, he ran into a few people who had worked the night shift and were now awake. One of them saw him and nodded, showing a look that said "I figured as much."
"Heading out, cousin?"
"Yeah."
The man stepped aside to let him pass.
Every year, the factory saw a wave of student workers. Very few stuck it out. The regulars had seen it all before.
Just as Chen Xing got to the ground floor, two people stormed over, looking furious.
A man and a woman.
The man was Wang Zeming, the supervising teacher for this internship group. The woman was also a teacher from the school, named Zhou Xiaoqing.
"Chen Xing! So you've got all your stuff packed up? Planning to run off somewhere?"
"I'm going home."
To be fair, Chen Xing's only real concern was whether his leaving would cause problems for Sister Fang. But from what he had gathered, students like him bailed every year, and no one at the factory really cared. So he wasn't too worried about the company's side.
As for these two teachers, he couldn't care less.
Wang Zeming was the same teacher who had given speeches and recruited students back in junior high. Chen Xing had disliked him for a long time.
Of all the vocational schools in the province, how had he ended up at this no-name one?
He could thank Mr. Wang for that.
Ms. Zhou always played the good cop, pretending to side with the students, but she never actually helped. All she did was smooth things over between the school and the students.
Mr. Wang was the first to explode.
"Going home? Do you know we all came out here together for this internship? You're just leaving on your own? And do you have any idea how chaotic the train was when we came? How could I let someone your age travel alone? What if something happens? How am I supposed to explain it to your parents?"
"I thought about that. That's why I booked a flight, just two hours, and I'll be home." Chen Xing smiled.
"That's not the point! Don't make trouble for us. Consider today your day off. Tomorrow, be back at work, you hear me?"
Chen Xing didn't reply. He stared toward the factory gates in the distance. That must be Zhou Peng and Quan Jing up ahead.
His calm, almost lazy attitude made Wang Zeming furious.
He already knew many students had left, but most of them had gone early in the morning, so he couldn't catch them. Now that he finally had one in front of him, he had to make an example of him. The others needed to see what happened to those who defied the school.
This one could not be allowed to leave.
Otherwise, the rest would be impossible to control.
Ms. Zhou changed her approach, softening her tone.
"Don't be so stubborn. Even if you're taking a flight, the teachers still worry. Why not wait a bit and leave with everyone later? We know the work is tiring, but that's what society is like. Getting a little taste of it early isn't a bad thing. It's for your own good."
That last part "it's for your own good" made Chen Xing almost laugh.
Before he could respond, Mr. Wang stepped forward and tried to grab his arm, but Chen Xing quickly dodged.
"Hey, hands off."
"What do you mean 'hands off'? Don't talk back to me. Get back to work, now!"
Wang glared at him, trying to look fierce.
But Chen Xing wasn't intimidated.
Back in junior high, he had gotten into fights and even been hospitalized.
While other kids were rebellious in the worst ways, bullying the weak, attacking classmates, Chen Xing's rebellion came from a strong sense of justice. Whenever he saw something unfair, he jumped in. That meant he often fought with school bullies.
And those thugs were far scarier than this weak, stern-faced teacher.
Just before things could get worse, Zhou Peng arrived.
(End of Chapter)