Wake-Up Call

Lin Xiao sensed something was off and tried to climb out of bed, but a hand had already dragged her from under the covers.

She was yanked up in a daze, and then the sharp crash of a glass bottle shattering snapped her fully awake.

Flustered, she remembered the route Xu Lingqu had laid out before bed—run to the bathroom, lock the door, open the window, and climb out. She was just scrambling off the bed and darting toward the bathroom when a hand grabbed her and pulled her back.

The person pulling her was Liu Zheng.

Lin Xiao turned around in panic, about to ask why they weren't running, when she saw Liu Zheng standing there expressionless, pointing at the doorway.

Xu Lingqu stood at the door. In front of her lay a puddle of glass shards and a toppled chair. In her hands, she held a snake about one and a half meters long, as thick as a human arm.

Lin Xiao's face went white in an instant, cold sweat beading on her forehead. She opened her mouth at Xu Lingqu, but not a single word came out.

Was Xu Lingqu really this bold? And why would a snake like this show up in the dorm at night?

"Relax, it's fake." Xu Lingqu squeezed the snake in her hand, clearly feeling the metallic texture. It was a biomimetic mechanical snake, and the tactile simulation was half-hearted. Sent into the student dorms at night, it had to be Kai Ang's little surprise.

Liu Zheng released Lin Xiao's arm and stepped forward to fetch tools, cleaning up the glass shards on the floor without a word.

Lin Xiao stood by the bed, still in shock from the snake, until Xu Lingqu spoke.

"Let's go." The culprit behind all this was probably waiting on the training ground to enjoy the show.

Thanks to Xu Lingqu's reminder, all three of them had changed into clean training uniforms before bed, so there was no need to fuss over clothes—they could head out immediately.

Xu Lingqu led the way with the mechanical snake in her grip, Liu Zheng and Lin Xiao following close behind. In the hallway, screams began erupting from the various dorms one after another. By the time they walked out of the dorm building, the shouts and the sounds of lights switching on were rising in waves. Out on the training ground, Kai Ang was grinning with smug satisfaction.

It wasn't just snakes. The batch of small- and medium-sized mechanical animals he'd brought this time was varied—the largest was a wolf, the smallest a toad, and he'd sent ten toads to wake up one entire dorm.

Instructor Chen clapped helplessly from the side, never able to understand his colleague's twisted sense of humor, but respecting it all the same.

Kai Ang was still waiting to see how long it'd take these little brats to realize it was all fake, when three figures strolled toward him through the night.

"Instructor." Though Xu Lingqu knew full well this was their handiwork, she kept up the act on the surface, raising the mechanical snake in her hand and reporting flatly, "We found a mechanical snake in our room."

Kai Ang's grin widened. "Good work. You can put it down now."

Xu Lingqu set it down as instructed, and the snake scurried behind Kai Ang as if escaping the clutches of a demon.

"You noticed it that early?" Kai Ang looked at the mechanical snake he'd sent to scare people scurrying back in such a panic, and couldn't help feeling a little embarrassed. He gave the snake's head a light kick and asked.

"Not that early. I just make a habit of setting a few little traps by the dorm door." Xu Lingqu's answer fit the image of a B-rank psychic with a sharp mind and plenty of tricks up her sleeve.

In truth, she'd woken up the moment the snake started moving through the corridor. As the days since her activation ticked by, her SS-rank psychic power was gradually revealing its superiority, steadily expanding her perception.

But she chose not to act. She waited for Liu Zheng, an S-rank, to get up first, then pretended to be woken by her and went to lie in wait at the door.

Thanks to Xu Lingqu's heads-up, Xu Xiqin's group got through the night relatively unscathed. Jin, following Xu Lingqu's advice to sleep with one eye open, stayed fully alert, staring wide-eyed until several toads hopped into their dorm.

The real reason the two of them dragged their feet coming down was that Shen Shouli flat-out refused to touch the toads. Even after Jin insisted over and over that they were fake, not dirty, just ugly, he still wouldn't budge.

In the end, Jin had to handle the toad infestation alone, cursing under his breath the whole way down, while Shen Shouli, the young master, descended with his hands in his pockets, looking utterly unhurried.

Xu Xiqin's side was even easier. The girls in her dorm mostly trusted her completely, and it went much the same as Xu Lingqu's dorm at the start—everyone prepped a contingency plan for night emergencies before going to sleep.

The only hiccup was the mechanical jackal that showed up at their door. Everyone was genuinely scared at first, but Xu Xiqin subdued it and discovered it was mechanical—a false alarm.

The one who fared worst was Tang Muwen. In his dorm, he carried little weight, and one of his roommates was close with Sun Liao. That roommate dismissed Xu Lingqu's words entirely and told Tang Muwen to sleep or get out. When the mechanical wolf burst in, the lot of them scrambled to cram themselves into the bathroom in a panic, too terrified to even try climbing out the window. They were on the fourth floor. It was only when Tang Muwen, who'd gone to bunk in the next dorm, came back and told them it was just a mechanical wolf that they settled down.

To be fair, Instructor Kai Ang's night raid had been quite a success. Some students performed with their usual startling composure, while others were scared just as he'd predicted, putting on a spectacular display of comedic terror.

Kai Ang was especially pleased with the wide range of student reactions this time.

Students who'd touched the animals generally realized it was another one of the instructor's pranks and brought the mechanical creatures to the training ground on their own. Those too frightened to come out, locked in the bathroom, were fetched by the other instructors going door to door. Eventually, all the students trickled in.

The training ground lights came on, and the students were a sight in every conceivable state—some in pajamas, some bare-chested, some with hair sticking up every which way. Suddenly, Xu Lingqu's trio, calm and composed in their clean uniforms, stood out like a sore thumb.

"So? How'd you all enjoy this wake-up call?" Kai Ang made no effort to hide his amusement. Behind him, the mechanical animals gathered, making him look less like the chief instructor of the six military academies and more like a zookeeper. He let out a couple of sniffs. "I originally had some bigger mechanical beast models—brown bears, lions, tigers—but I was afraid you little brats would piss yourselves, so I picked these cute little ones. Didn't expect you'd still get scared out of your wits."

Just imagine waking up half-asleep to a brown bear lying by your bed. The students couldn't help shivering, their minds filling with the image of writing their own wills.

Xu Lingqu looked at the animals gathered behind Instructor Kai Ang, a nagging sense of something off creeping through her mind, though she couldn't quite put her finger on it.

It wasn't until Kai Ang mentioned the large beasts—lions, tigers, brown bears—that Xu Lingqu finally realized what was wrong.

Ever since she'd arrived in this interstellar era, every animal she'd seen was one that existed on Earth. This era had no creatures distinct from Earth's, yet some bizarre plant materials had no counterpart on Earth at all.

And then, recalling the name the Galaxy Admiral had given to Yuheng, a wave of turmoil surged through Xu Lingqu's mind.

This interstellar era was neither another world nor a parallel dimension of Earth. It was more like the two had been eerily stitched together.