He Yuan was the adjutant of Team 7. He really should be the person in charge of such things.
Specifically… Zong Yan clearly remembered He Yuan saying the benefits provided by the Dragon Group only included free tuition and room and board. Why hadn’t he heard of a monthly allowance for minors?
Zong Yan paused in the corridor but still put the card in his pocket. He set up the facial recognition lock according to the system prompts, then opened the door with a feeling of nervousness.
Yesterday it had only been a joke, but today, the Dragon Group really did put Zong Yan’s name on the door. He actually felt a little embarrassed about it.
It was still morning and it was a beautiful day in Jiangzhou. The golden sun peeked out from a few clouds.
The moment Zong Yan opened the door, sunlight poured in through the white curtains and projected across the light brown floor, like it was spreading a warm layer of beeswax on the ground.
The apartment was quite large and completely furnished. The scene was full of brown, white, and black, three cold colors. A thick white lambswool carpet overlaid a linear pattern of black marble, which was typical of Scandinavian interior design.
Perhaps earlier in the day, a housekeeping aunt had come for a final check and turned on the mock fireplace in the corner, dissipating the chill of the summer morning, then turned on the central air conditioning. The room was just the right temperature.
The cross section of the apartment was all glass. If he opened the curtains, he could have a panoramic view of the slow-moving Huangpu River below. Sunlight glittered on the river like flowing gold.
The bathroom was semi-open, and the sunken tub was built into a platform. If he had the inclination, he could take a bath while enjoying a night view of Jiangzhou.
Although the design was minimalist and cold, there were pillows scattered on the sofa and carpet, which gave a natural, comfortable feeling to everything.
Was he going to live here from now on?
Zong Yan hesitated, then bent down to take off his shoes and arranged them neatly in the rack. He stepped barefoot onto the thick woolen carpet, shut the door, and unzipped his school bag to begin to tidy up his things.
He owned a few items of clothes which he wore over and over. At school he only ever wore his school uniform. He’d washed several sets of uniforms so many times they were faded white.
Zong Yan pulled open the closet to put his clothes inside, but then he froze in place.
The closet was full of clothes. And they were obviously new—they were still covered in dust bags. The brand-new clothes looked like they’d been shipped up from the shopping mall downstairs. The price tags had been carefully cut off.
Although Zong Yan wasn’t interested in brands, he’d encountered them in class and guessed the price wasn’t low.
Like the Off-White Marilyn sweatshirt. Ye JingMing had previously worn one inside his school uniform and set off a trend in class. Everyone imitated him, unzipping their school uniform half-way, revealing the Off-White speed bump logo. The boys in gym class took off their school clothes and played basketball in those T-shirts, as if they couldn’t play small group basketball unless they wore this shirt.
Zong Yan had looked at the basketball court from a distance when he was cleaning the blackboard, then silently opened the book placed on the desk, 《The Stranger》.
A packed closet, a spacious and bright first-class apartment. From straitened circumstances to a privileged life.
He had a very surreal feeling.
Zong Yan would occasionally drift into his own thoughts while sitting in class, but from the moment a helicopter actually picked him up from school, saying the world needs you and we need you, he felt like everything was magical beyond belief.
For so many years he’d been hunkered down in his own little world. The craziest thing about it was that he was going to college but still had to do his high school summer homework.
Zong Yan stood in the same place for a long while. He didn’t touch the clothes in the closet. After he finally put away his things, he scratched his hair and dutifully took out the test worksheets from his school bag.
The amount of homework assigned for summer vacation of senior two really moved the soul. It wasn’t called senior three prep for nothing. The teachers had gone all out to assign homework. Every subject had a thick stack of test papers.
He still had no idea what Miskatonic University was all about, but Zong Yan figured he wouldn’t have much free time this summer.
Starting now, he would fight on the front line, battling these test problems.
—
“How about it? Was everything ready?”
He Yuan didn’t have a single moment’s rest until nightfall. He turned back to wave to his colleagues before he went outside the room, then turned on his cell phone and dialed the number.
Of course, it was impossible for him to call the boss, who’d been woken up early in the morning during his break. He Yuan was afraid the captain’s anger tank was already overflowing. How dare he beard the crown prince in his den.
“You can rest assured, everything was taken care of this morning. We called the mall downstairs and had them send up some clothes and daily necessities. Everything’s been sorted.”
“Okay, good job.”
He Yuan hung up the phone and put it back in his pocket. He thought for a while but didn’t go up.
He was too busy with things down here. Barely half of the information had been integrated. A huge amount of survey data hadn’t been summarized yet.
This was the data that “Zong Yan”, the person, had generated from birth to the present.
As for why the workload was so heavy, it was because—
“How’s it going? Any results?”
He Yuan rubbed his temples and turned to look at the stereoscopic projection screen suspended in mid-air, where a complex series of data streams were flickering.
“Not yet.”
The leader of the profiling team, who was wearing a white coat, looked up at him with a tightly-knit frown. “So far, the search still hasn’t turned up any similarities in the DNA library.”
The profiling team was supposed to produce a detailed file for the new tenth Monarch. They hadn’t expected to get stuck here.
That was why the whole team’s workload had increased several times. Now the moon was hanging high and they were still working overtime. He didn’t know when the comparison results would be available.
He Yuan sighed. “Do you think he knows about this himself?”
“There’s no guarantee.” The team leader placed the file on the table, sat down wearily and crossed his arms. “Dragon Group agents were out canvassing all day. According to the summary, sixteen years ago some witnesses confirmed seeing the gray cloth bag that was abandoned at 12 Jianshe Street. During the same time period, Zong YanLan moved from Jianshe Street to that old building, and that’s where the child first appeared on the record. Before that, we know nothing.
“Zong YanLan passed away in early spring of last year. When the funeral home collected the remains, they didn’t see anything that could prove his identity. Either those things were left behind, or they never existed.”
The half-completed profile was neatly placed in front of He Yuan. The printed text was square and unmistakable in black and white.
Name: Zong Yan
Age: 17
File Number: S10
Next of Kin: Unknown
Ability: Monarch level, 10 elements
Assessment Factor: Priority observation
In the otherwise blank section at the bottom, there was a dragon with teeth and claws. This seal belonged exclusively to the representative of the commander in chief of the Dragon Group.
“Priority observation ah…”
Once the assessment factor was set to “priority”, it meant this person would be under the strict monitoring of the Dragon Group’s special agents at all times.
From the very beginning, when the top brass instructed Zong Yan to move to the base, He Yuan had a vague premonition. But he didn’t really expect the system evaluation and various circumstances to produce this result.
Agents had gone to Qingyang High School to do a survey. Aside from a few teachers, Zong Yan was basically labeled a “misfit”, “withdrawn”, “silent”, “mysterious”, and so on.
There was a quote that received extra attention from the system assessment, which came from the head teacher of year two, Class 3.
He Yuan casually activated the recording pen labeled with the number seven. A muffled female voice began to speak.
“Zong Yan? Well, he’s a very withdrawn student. He barely interacts with his classmates. In the first year of senior high he received exceptional admission after winning a prize in the junior high school league. He also enjoyed the school’s preferential tuition policy. He handed in the application form to me.”
The better schools had what were known as competition classes, and Qingyang High School was no exception.
The students in these classes were quite special. They wouldn’t switch to the International Department of Qingyang High School in the future, and they basically didn’t participate in the ordinary college entrance examination coursework. The difficulty of the class was much higher than for regular high school students.
Especially when it came to mathematics, physics, chemistry, information science, and biology.
These five subjects had Olympiad competition events at the national and world levels. Let alone internationally, if a student was ranked at the national level, they could directly enjoy benefits such as reducing the required score on the college entrance exams, and guaranteed admission to one of the top two elite universities.
“In junior high school Zong Yan took first prize in the mathematics league. I heard that he signed up without any guidance or training from an Olympiad class. When he first enrolled in Qingyang, the teachers had high expectations. We all hoped he’d be a credit to our country in the IMO.
“But then I don’t know what happened. At the end of his last semester in senior one, he suddenly submitted an application to withdraw from the Olympiad class. The math Olympiad teacher even went to ask him about it, but he just said that something happened at home and he couldn’t participate in the Olympiad training on weekends anymore. Next semester, Zong Yan was transferred to the ordinary class, and his academic performance began to decline significantly. Because he was recruited for the mathematics competition at the start, he has a serious learning bias for certain subjects.”
The second semester of senior high school coincided with the time on the file.
The agent asked another question. “Anything unusual?”
The head teacher seemed a bit confused, then appeared to think of something and spoke hesitantly. “If… if I had to say something unusual, that child rarely looks at people. But once I… I accidentally looked him straight in the eyes.
“Those eyes—
“Those eyes frightened me. I don’t know why, but the moment I looked at him… I felt terror, like something was strangling my neck. It was almost suffocating.
“Ah, I’m sorry, I forgot myself for a moment.”
It took a little while for the head teacher to gather herself. She seemed surprised to say such a thing to a stranger. Maybe it was because of the search warrant in his hand, or because the agent was affiliated with a state institution.
“Please don’t pay too much attention to what I just said. Now that I think about it, it’s a little unfair to him.”
“It’s true that Zong Yan is a bit withdrawn, but he really is a good child.”
The recording stopped abruptly, and He Yuan put the recording pen back on the desk.
It was this recording that had raised Zong Yan’s final assessment score by an entire grade.
As investigators, the Dragon Group had extensive experience with fighting otherworldly creatures and were well aware of the powerful, unnamable terrors that existed beyond the universe’s boundaries. This statement was treated as an important reference and entered into the file.
The boy in the faded school uniform had no idea how closely he would be watched in the future.
He might not know his own life history, what kind of place Miskatonic University was, or what a new Monarch would face in a world turned upside down.
He Yuan thought of the voices echoing in the stairwell of the dilapidated tube building and was silent for a long time.
“But he’s a good kid,” the adjutant of Team 7 muttered to himself.
—
The author has something to say:
IMO: The International Mathematical Olympiad competition for pre-university students
TL Notes:
Off-White is an Italian luxury fashion label founded by American designer Virgil Abloh in Milan in 2012 (Wikipedia)
Off-White Marilyn sweatshirt – Circa 2013-2017 or so. USD 620
Off-White short-sleeved T-shirt – Current price USD 280-425
The Stranger – A 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus’ philosophy, absurdism coupled with existentialism (Wikipedia). Source of the classic quote: “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe”.
test worksheets – 试卷 – examination papers, test papers
beard the crown prince in his den – 头上动土 – from 太岁头上动土, “breaking ground on Tai Sui’s head” – provoke sb. far superior in power or strength; beard the lion in his den; challenge the marshal; provoke the almighty; scratch the Buddha’s head
top two elite universities – from 清北复交 – I believe this refers to Tsinghua University and Peking University
Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:
Zong YanLan – 宗燕兰
He Yuan was the adjutant of Team 7. He really should be the person in charge of such things.
Specifically… Zong Yan clearly remembered He Yuan saying the benefits provided by the Dragon Group only included free tuition and room and board. Why hadn’t he heard of a monthly allowance for minors?
Zong Yan paused in the corridor but still put the card in his pocket. He set up the facial recognition lock according to the system prompts, then opened the door with a feeling of nervousness.
Yesterday it had only been a joke, but today, the Dragon Group really did put Zong Yan’s name on the door. He actually felt a little embarrassed about it.
It was still morning and it was a beautiful day in Jiangzhou. The golden sun peeked out from a few clouds.
The moment Zong Yan opened the door, sunlight poured in through the white curtains and projected across the light brown floor, like it was spreading a warm layer of beeswax on the ground.
The apartment was quite large and completely furnished. The scene was full of brown, white, and black, three cold colors. A thick white lambswool carpet overlaid a linear pattern of black marble, which was typical of Scandinavian interior design.
Perhaps earlier in the day, a housekeeping aunt had come for a final check and turned on the mock fireplace in the corner, dissipating the chill of the summer morning, then turned on the central air conditioning. The room was just the right temperature.
The cross section of the apartment was all glass. If he opened the curtains, he could have a panoramic view of the slow-moving Huangpu River below. Sunlight glittered on the river like flowing gold.
The bathroom was semi-open, and the sunken tub was built into a platform. If he had the inclination, he could take a bath while enjoying a night view of Jiangzhou.
Although the design was minimalist and cold, there were pillows scattered on the sofa and carpet, which gave a natural, comfortable feeling to everything.
Was he going to live here from now on?
Zong Yan hesitated, then bent down to take off his shoes and arranged them neatly in the rack. He stepped barefoot onto the thick woolen carpet, shut the door, and unzipped his school bag to begin to tidy up his things.
He owned a few items of clothes which he wore over and over. At school he only ever wore his school uniform. He’d washed several sets of uniforms so many times they were faded white.
Zong Yan pulled open the closet to put his clothes inside, but then he froze in place.
The closet was full of clothes. And they were obviously new—they were still covered in dust bags. The brand-new clothes looked like they’d been shipped up from the shopping mall downstairs. The price tags had been carefully cut off.
Although Zong Yan wasn’t interested in brands, he’d encountered them in class and guessed the price wasn’t low.
Like the Off-White Marilyn sweatshirt. Ye JingMing had previously worn one inside his school uniform and set off a trend in class. Everyone imitated him, unzipping their school uniform half-way, revealing the Off-White speed bump logo. The boys in gym class took off their school clothes and played basketball in those T-shirts, as if they couldn’t play small group basketball unless they wore this shirt.
Zong Yan had looked at the basketball court from a distance when he was cleaning the blackboard, then silently opened the book placed on the desk, 《The Stranger》.
A packed closet, a spacious and bright first-class apartment. From straitened circumstances to a privileged life.
He had a very surreal feeling.
Zong Yan would occasionally drift into his own thoughts while sitting in class, but from the moment a helicopter actually picked him up from school, saying the world needs you and we need you, he felt like everything was magical beyond belief.
For so many years he’d been hunkered down in his own little world. The craziest thing about it was that he was going to college but still had to do his high school summer homework.
Zong Yan stood in the same place for a long while. He didn’t touch the clothes in the closet. After he finally put away his things, he scratched his hair and dutifully took out the test worksheets from his school bag.
The amount of homework assigned for summer vacation of senior two really moved the soul. It wasn’t called senior three prep for nothing. The teachers had gone all out to assign homework. Every subject had a thick stack of test papers.
He still had no idea what Miskatonic University was all about, but Zong Yan figured he wouldn’t have much free time this summer.
Starting now, he would fight on the front line, battling these test problems.
—
“How about it? Was everything ready?”
He Yuan didn’t have a single moment’s rest until nightfall. He turned back to wave to his colleagues before he went outside the room, then turned on his cell phone and dialed the number.
Of course, it was impossible for him to call the boss, who’d been woken up early in the morning during his break. He Yuan was afraid the captain’s anger tank was already overflowing. How dare he beard the crown prince in his den.
“You can rest assured, everything was taken care of this morning. We called the mall downstairs and had them send up some clothes and daily necessities. Everything’s been sorted.”
“Okay, good job.”
He Yuan hung up the phone and put it back in his pocket. He thought for a while but didn’t go up.
He was too busy with things down here. Barely half of the information had been integrated. A huge amount of survey data hadn’t been summarized yet.
This was the data that “Zong Yan”, the person, had generated from birth to the present.
As for why the workload was so heavy, it was because—
“How’s it going? Any results?”
He Yuan rubbed his temples and turned to look at the stereoscopic projection screen suspended in mid-air, where a complex series of data streams were flickering.
“Not yet.”
The leader of the profiling team, who was wearing a white coat, looked up at him with a tightly-knit frown. “So far, the search still hasn’t turned up any similarities in the DNA library.”
The profiling team was supposed to produce a detailed file for the new tenth Monarch. They hadn’t expected to get stuck here.
That was why the whole team’s workload had increased several times. Now the moon was hanging high and they were still working overtime. He didn’t know when the comparison results would be available.
He Yuan sighed. “Do you think he knows about this himself?”
“There’s no guarantee.” The team leader placed the file on the table, sat down wearily and crossed his arms. “Dragon Group agents were out canvassing all day. According to the summary, sixteen years ago some witnesses confirmed seeing the gray cloth bag that was abandoned at 12 Jianshe Street. During the same time period, Zong YanLan moved from Jianshe Street to that old building, and that’s where the child first appeared on the record. Before that, we know nothing.
“Zong YanLan passed away in early spring of last year. When the funeral home collected the remains, they didn’t see anything that could prove his identity. Either those things were left behind, or they never existed.”
The half-completed profile was neatly placed in front of He Yuan. The printed text was square and unmistakable in black and white.
Name: Zong Yan
Age: 17
File Number: S10
Next of Kin: Unknown
Ability: Monarch level, 10 elements
Assessment Factor: Priority observation
In the otherwise blank section at the bottom, there was a dragon with teeth and claws. This seal belonged exclusively to the representative of the commander in chief of the Dragon Group.
“Priority observation ah…”
Once the assessment factor was set to “priority”, it meant this person would be under the strict monitoring of the Dragon Group’s special agents at all times.
From the very beginning, when the top brass instructed Zong Yan to move to the base, He Yuan had a vague premonition. But he didn’t really expect the system evaluation and various circumstances to produce this result.
Agents had gone to Qingyang High School to do a survey. Aside from a few teachers, Zong Yan was basically labeled a “misfit”, “withdrawn”, “silent”, “mysterious”, and so on.
There was a quote that received extra attention from the system assessment, which came from the head teacher of year two, Class 3.
He Yuan casually activated the recording pen labeled with the number seven. A muffled female voice began to speak.
“Zong Yan? Well, he’s a very withdrawn student. He barely interacts with his classmates. In the first year of senior high he received exceptional admission after winning a prize in the junior high school league. He also enjoyed the school’s preferential tuition policy. He handed in the application form to me.”
The better schools had what were known as competition classes, and Qingyang High School was no exception.
The students in these classes were quite special. They wouldn’t switch to the International Department of Qingyang High School in the future, and they basically didn’t participate in the ordinary college entrance examination coursework. The difficulty of the class was much higher than for regular high school students.
Especially when it came to mathematics, physics, chemistry, information science, and biology.
These five subjects had Olympiad competition events at the national and world levels. Let alone internationally, if a student was ranked at the national level, they could directly enjoy benefits such as reducing the required score on the college entrance exams, and guaranteed admission to one of the top two elite universities.
“In junior high school Zong Yan took first prize in the mathematics league. I heard that he signed up without any guidance or training from an Olympiad class. When he first enrolled in Qingyang, the teachers had high expectations. We all hoped he’d be a credit to our country in the IMO.
“But then I don’t know what happened. At the end of his last semester in senior one, he suddenly submitted an application to withdraw from the Olympiad class. The math Olympiad teacher even went to ask him about it, but he just said that something happened at home and he couldn’t participate in the Olympiad training on weekends anymore. Next semester, Zong Yan was transferred to the ordinary class, and his academic performance began to decline significantly. Because he was recruited for the mathematics competition at the start, he has a serious learning bias for certain subjects.”
The second semester of senior high school coincided with the time on the file.
The agent asked another question. “Anything unusual?”
The head teacher seemed a bit confused, then appeared to think of something and spoke hesitantly. “If… if I had to say something unusual, that child rarely looks at people. But once I… I accidentally looked him straight in the eyes.
“Those eyes—
“Those eyes frightened me. I don’t know why, but the moment I looked at him… I felt terror, like something was strangling my neck. It was almost suffocating.
“Ah, I’m sorry, I forgot myself for a moment.”
It took a little while for the head teacher to gather herself. She seemed surprised to say such a thing to a stranger. Maybe it was because of the search warrant in his hand, or because the agent was affiliated with a state institution.
“Please don’t pay too much attention to what I just said. Now that I think about it, it’s a little unfair to him.”
“It’s true that Zong Yan is a bit withdrawn, but he really is a good child.”
The recording stopped abruptly, and He Yuan put the recording pen back on the desk.
It was this recording that had raised Zong Yan’s final assessment score by an entire grade.
As investigators, the Dragon Group had extensive experience with fighting otherworldly creatures and were well aware of the powerful, unnamable terrors that existed beyond the universe’s boundaries. This statement was treated as an important reference and entered into the file.
The boy in the faded school uniform had no idea how closely he would be watched in the future.
He might not know his own life history, what kind of place Miskatonic University was, or what a new Monarch would face in a world turned upside down.
He Yuan thought of the voices echoing in the stairwell of the dilapidated tube building and was silent for a long time.
“But he’s a good kid,” the adjutant of Team 7 muttered to himself.
—
The author has something to say:
IMO: The International Mathematical Olympiad competition for pre-university students
TL Notes:
Off-White is an Italian luxury fashion label founded by American designer Virgil Abloh in Milan in 2012 (Wikipedia)
Off-White Marilyn sweatshirt – Circa 2013-2017 or so. USD 620
Off-White short-sleeved T-shirt – Current price USD 280-425
The Stranger – A 1942 novella by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and outlook are often cited as examples of Camus’ philosophy, absurdism coupled with existentialism (Wikipedia). Source of the classic quote: “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe”.
test worksheets – 试卷 – examination papers, test papers
beard the crown prince in his den – 头上动土 – from 太岁头上动土, “breaking ground on Tai Sui’s head” – provoke sb. far superior in power or strength; beard the lion in his den; challenge the marshal; provoke the almighty; scratch the Buddha’s head
top two elite universities – from 清北复交 – I believe this refers to Tsinghua University and Peking University
Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter:
Zong YanLan – 宗燕兰
