Chapter 16

Asher hung his black military overcoat on the coat rack, and the newly reupholstered sofa in the living room stood out strikingly under the warm glow of the floor lamp.

It looked like a good place for someone to sit. Asher walked over slowly, his long fingers touching the soft, springy sofa for the first time.

He didn't sit. His tall, straight figure stood in silence, his gaze deep and unreadable.

The lights in the living room were on, but it felt no different from the still of the night. Asher suddenly spoke. "Jiujiu, confirm the task Wu Ying gave you again."

Right—he'd just remembered that Wu Ying had told him before how delicate her flowers were, and how she couldn't bear to leave them without checking. There was no one home, so it did need looking after.

Jiujiu immediately played back the task Wu Ying had assigned it, and proactively compiled its observations from the past few days into a video report for Asher's review.

Asher finally sat down. The sofa couldn't accommodate his large frame, so he bent his knees slightly. Jiujiu projected the video and narrated alongside it as it played.

The flower room had gone from bare bones to fully finished with Jiujiu's involvement throughout. If anyone knew the plants in that room better than most, it was Jiujiu.

Asher clearly didn't understand the details, but Jiujiu's report was well written, and it seemed everything was in order.

Jiujiu had filmed beautifully—every segment captured the flowers vying for attention in full glory, a true visual treat. Suddenly, the projection stuttered for a moment, and when it recovered, Wu Ying appeared in the center of the screen.

It seemed to have been recorded before she left—footage of her flower-room care instructions and the key plants to watch.

Wu Ying's fair little face practically glowed in the bright flower room. She first bent down to tell Jiujiu to make sure it filmed her nicely, then flitted around among the blossoms like a little bee, her sky-blue skirt swishing. Her face was bright with relaxed, cheerful laughter as she explained each care tip vividly, praising every single flower to the skies.

Her voice matched her temperament—soft and willful, each sentence twisting through ten tones, half coaxing and half pouting. Sometimes it fell like pearls dropping onto a plate; other times it stretched into a teasing drone more wearisome than a buzzing bee.

"Alright, that's all for Wu Ying's flower-room care lesson. Jiujiu, dear student, you must study hard and put it into practice, okay."

Finally, the projection ended with Jiujiu's reply. After a moment, Asher's voice cut through the silence. "Turn off the lights."

The villa sank back into darkness. As dawn was just beginning to break, Meng Ke drove a hovering car to a stop in front of the villa, and soon Asher was gone.

...

"From today on, training enters a new phase. Mecha are the Federation's most common combat equipment and one of the key components of your military training. In the coming sessions, you must accomplish several goals: one, master the routine operation of a mecha; two, become proficient in mecha combat."

Half a month had passed, and everyone had grown used to the instructors' severity. They no longer reacted to anything the instructors said—obedience and compliance were the only permitted responses.

A batch of students drained of all vitality, facing their overbearing, unreasonable iron-fisted instructors.

Wu Ying looked listless, idly turning the space buckle in her hand. She'd only ever seen mecha online—each one was just the size of a person's arm. What they were supposed to train now was driving it with their own mental power.

Most students in the College of Plant Science just had low mental power, but as long as their mental power was sufficient and stable, they could connect to a mecha through the sensor. But how long you could pilot it, and how much attack power you could generate, depended on the size and nature of your mental power.

The instructor up front rattled off the theory of mecha piloting, and Wu Ying didn't dare blink, afraid she'd miss something. In the end, she only managed to grasp the gist.

Before the official training began, everyone was given a mental power assessment to confirm the training intensity based on professional evaluation.

Then the mecha training kicked off in earnest. The first task: release the mecha from its space buckle. It might sound similar to using a regular space buckle, but clearly, that wasn't the case.

Mecha space buckles are made from completely different materials and construction than ordinary ones—they require mental power to trigger. You have to account for the space you're working in and the mecha's size. In fact, Blue Star's history wasn't without incidents of people crushing themselves to death when releasing a mecha.

The mecha types the instructors brought were all marked, so all you had to do was remember. Wu Ying found a spot and prepared to release the big thing in her hand.

She had always been obedient—she followed every single instruction the instructor gave, though the extent to which she actually accomplished them was anyone's guess.

The instructor responsible for the area spotted her and felt a headache coming on. This student, Wu Ying, was impossible not to remember. Say she wasn't proactive? She was always the first to carry out commands. Say she was proactive? She was also the one slacking off the most!

And when you called her out on it, she showed no shame at all—in fact, she'd look at you with a righteous sort of grievance, wide innocent eyes staring up at you, practically saying she'd done her best.

The instructor closed his eyes. Anyone who'd been in charge of military training for years knew Federal University was a tough nut to crack, with the College of Plant Science being the biggest headache.

This year, unluckily for them, they'd drawn that lot.

He felt like what he was holding wasn't water anymore, but an entire ocean. And then the fish in that ocean kept asking him if he was holding something back.

Frustrating. And they didn't dare train these students at the intensity used at the military academies—otherwise, the ones passing out wouldn't be just this patch. Right, at the moment, only about half the people in the field were still upright; the other half had already collapsed, and the infirmary was packed wall to wall.

"Move faster! Stop dawdling—the sun's about to set. If you don't get moving, are you planning to spend the night here?!"

In the corner, Wu Ying took a deep breath and shoved her mental power into the space buckle in one sudden surge—whoosh—a mecha gleaming with golden light materialized on the open ground.

Caught completely off guard, Wu Ying stumbled back a few steps before she steadied herself. She craned her neck upward, straining until she thought it would snap, and still couldn't see the mecha's head.

Classmates swarmed over. "Wow, you're amazing! You got it out in one try. Teach me how?"

"Can I touch it?" "I want to touch it too!"

Wu Ying nodded. Several people climbed onto the mecha's foot, rubbing and patting it. As for the earlier question, Wu Ying figured she couldn't really explain it—she didn't know why she could do it either, since her mental power was so low.

Well, after the retest, her mental power had been upgraded to D-level, but that was still clearly among the lower tier in class.

"What are you all crowding around for? You've been gawking for ages and can't even get your own out—what's the use of that? Get back and train!"

The instructor chased the onlookers off, gave Wu Ying a serious look, then walked away.

Leaving Wu Ying alone to stare blankly at the mecha. She wondered what came next—the next step was to make the mecha move, to get into the cockpit. But how was she supposed to make it move? She didn't even know where the mecha's switch was.

For that matter, did this thing even have a proper power button?

She had no idea. Mecha were always classified as Federation secrets; apart from the relevant research institutions and the mecha academies of the military schools, you couldn't find any material on them on the Star Net.

So, had any of that been covered in the instructor's rambling earlier?

Wu Ying racked her brain for a long time and found nothing. So, as the students around her all managed to release their mecha, she was still standing there staring blankly at the gleaming gold one.

Inwardly, she seriously questioned the training model of this military exercise. It was like a large-scale absurdist theater wearing the skin of military training—how the instructors' training effectiveness was evaluated was anyone's guess, and the students' training objectives were muddled. Anyone with sense knew you couldn't compare these students to military academy cadets, yet the stated goals of the training brazenly listed standards nearly identical to what military cadets had to meet.

Most students in the College of Plant Science would never come into contact with mecha or militarized weapons in their future careers—not because they didn't want to, but because the rules of mental power had already completely excluded them.

The instructors didn't dare push the students too hard, but the students were already at their limit with the current intensity. And on top of basic physical conditioning, they were now expected to tackle things they'd never had the chance to learn before, which weren't being taught properly now, and would likely never use in the future.

Wu Ying stood there, frozen. Seeing she was making no progress, the instructor didn't come to urge her on or ask what was wrong. She looked around and saw plenty of other students also stuck in place.

But the instructor didn't intervene. It seemed his only duty was to make sure they didn't get hurt.

What was this supposed to be? Back home, even if military training instructors didn't hand you a real gun, they'd still give you a proper introduction and even walk you through the hand signals.

Wu Ying felt dizzy and lightheaded, her mind filled with absurdity and a rising tide of disgust she couldn't hold back.

She hated this kind of training—pointless, aimless. Were they treating students as tools to complete military district tasks?

"Hey, Wu Ying! Instructor, instructor, someone collapsed!"

Cynthia's panicked voice hadn't even finished before the instructor had scooped the person on the ground into his arms. That's one more for the infirmary.

The instructor's face was grim, afraid her mental power had been injured. Wu Ying had toppled over without any warning—up until that point, her mecha hadn't moved an inch. The instructor thought she might be faking it, but then realized that didn't seem to be the case.

The supervising teacher nearby was scared out of his wits. The training ground was too crowded—he hadn't seen what Wu Ying had done to hurt herself, and his heart was pounding with panic.

Teacher Elai rushed frantically to the infirmary and grabbed the doctor's sleeve. "Doctor! Quick, check her mental power. She was just testing the mecha when she collapsed for no reason."

Hearing that, the doctor tensed up too. He quickly pulled out the diagnostic instruments and ran checks from head to toe several times over. The instruments showed no problems, but the student was definitely unconscious.

In the end, it could only be diagnosed as exhaustion—her body had simply given out.

In the medical pod, Wu Ying's thoughts felt like they were sinking into a bog, dragged straight down. The pull gave her a headache. She didn't know that at a certain moment, her mental power had suddenly gone wild—like tangled hair stretching outside her body, only to be pushed back by the cold nutrient fluid, and then it went completely still.