Rule number one of the Qingkong University nighttime survival guide: do not lock eyes with a ghostly figure for too long.
Before they left the dorm, Hao Xue had made a point of reminding Fang Tian.
He'd been a little puzzled at first, but the moment he stepped into the elevator he understood Senior's meaning at once —— as the doors slid shut, the cramped space was already packed with "people." Not only that: as the elevator descended, a head would now and then poke in from outside the tightly-closed doors.
It was the first time in Fang Tian's life he'd been thronged by a crowd of ghosts.
Hair as withered as dead straw, eyes brimming with venomous resentment — these were standard issue for a ghostly figure. Even though they made no aggressive moves, Fang Tian felt his Sanity drop by no small amount.
The university life he'd dreamed of was absolutely not this. What he loved was Qingkong City's azure sky, its golden sands, and the lovely girls strolling along those sands — not these hideous, terrifying ghosts.
Ever since this system calling itself 《Monster Appreciation Expert》 had popped up, the world he saw had turned into this. No matter how he turned it over, he was sure the system was behind it, because before coming to Qingkong City he hadn't run into a single ghost.
What galled him more was that on this ghost-infested campus, he had no choice but to lean on this very system to get through the night.
He remembered Senior Hao saying the daytime at Qingkong belonged to them; later, when she'd asked for his help, she'd mentioned midnight as a turning point. From this Fang Tian gathered that every day at twelve, Qingkong's "nightlife" began.
00:17.
To avoid accidentally locking eyes too long with the ghosts in the elevator, Fang Tian poured all his attention into this system that had cropped up out of nowhere. Mercifully it wasn't complicated to operate; he soon called up his own character panel.
『Fang Tian (Beginner). Compendium collected: 0』
『Sanity: 1/5 (to safeguard the player's physical and mental health, enforced protective measures will be taken when Sanity runs too low)』
『Charisma: 10 (high chance of encountering monsters)』
『Mentality: 9 (you have a pretty good head on your shoulders)』
『Stamina: 3 (weakling)』
Fang Tian was deeply unhappy about having a Stamina of only 3. He'd grant he hadn't bothered to exercise in high school — on the 1,000-meter test he'd downed three cans of Red Bull just to scrape a pass — but what was this "weakling" business supposed to mean?
And his Sanity maxed out at only 5, which meant it would take just five frights a day to trip the system's enforced protective measures.
Timid, weak-stomached, lousy stamina — and on top of all that, especially prone to running into the supernatural.
Fang Tian filled in the implied character sheet for himself. On a cute girl these traits could rack up quite a few moe points, but for someone with ambitions of becoming Qingkong's love master, they were a touch awkward.
With a soft "ding," the elevator doors slid slowly open.
Just past midnight, and Qingkong was livelier than in broad daylight. The ghosts in the elevator brushed past him, went down the stairs, and quickly melted into the "crowd" outside the dorm building.
To Fang Tian, the area outside the dorm was still an unfamiliar campus, and now he faced two choices.
One: throw everything that had happened today to the back of his mind and pretend none of it had occurred. Two: keep his promise, and along the way clear the first rookie quest the system had handed him.
The men's dorm was right across the way; the two buildings weren't far apart. Going back to his own dorm to sleep was without question the safest, surest choice.
Fang Tian stood rooted to the spot, lost in thought for a good few minutes. Only when the ghosts outside the dorm began to thin did he draw a deep breath, drag his luggage, and stride briskly to join the line of "new students" registering.
He kept his head down and walked near the tail of the line. Luckily the other ghosts were all hurrying to register at their own classrooms and paid no mind to the one living person among them.
He still had to live at Qingkong for at least four years; the ghost problem would have to be solved sooner or later.
The first quest didn't look hard — just get the rule-breaking student to leave the classroom.
As the saying goes: take a gamble, and your bicycle might just turn into a motorcycle.
Fang Tian made up his mind. If this system happened to offer a stat-allocation function, maybe he could soon shake off being timid and feeble.
First, set a small goal: dump a thousand points into Stamina. Once he became a One-Punch Man, he ought to be able to live safely in Qingkong City.
Once this job was done, he'd head back to the dorm to sleep, then figure out a fitness regimen.
Maybe because classes hadn't officially started, there was hardly a living soul on the Qingkong campus in the small hours. After tailing the ghosts a while, Fang Tian picked up the knack of quickly telling the living from the dead.
Every ghost looked different depending on how they'd died, their builds wildly varied; the one thing they shared was a semi-transparent body, glaringly obvious the moment you got close.
The ghosts rushing to register served as his guides, and Fang Tian found the teaching building easily, without so much as a map.
The pre-dawn teaching building was steeped in darkness. Fang Tian peered into one classroom after another. From the first floor up, every room was packed with students. He didn't dare let his gaze linger on the ghosts, and played the part of an ordinary student who just happened to be passing through.
Even so, Fang Tian still drew plenty of looks from his ghostly classmates. Being stared at head-on by all those bloodshot eyes was an enormous test of his nerve.
That last single point of Sanity held up remarkably well, leaving him to feel he'd shown early promise in the art of clinging to his final sliver of HP.
When Fang Tian's search reached the third floor, he finally found the "rule-breaking student."
In the entire corridor, only one classroom gave off any light.
Fang Tian pressed himself to the classroom's back door. The light inside came from a phone's built-in flashlight, serving as a makeshift LED lamp. A lively, short-haired girl beamed radiantly into a DSLR camera mounted on a tripod.
"Today, I'm going to take you all into one of the Seven Wonders of Qingkong University —— 'Welcome Day.' Legend has it that Qingkong holds registration twice each year: the first time at dawn, and the second in the dead of night."
The girl's voice carried clearly even through the back door. Fang Tian guessed she was most likely recording footage.
Urban-legend content had always been popular. The biggest problem now, though, was that what the girl described was no baseless urban legend.
To get the phone's light onto herself, the girl had propped her chair up on the desk — which left her ghostly classmate, now short a chair, with nowhere to go but standing at the desk.
At this very moment, every ghost in the class, the teacher included, had their eyes fixed on this girl who wouldn't stop talking — eyes furious enough to eat her alive.
The girl was utterly oblivious, still recording her footage in rapt concentration.
A suffocating atmosphere. This was probably the very picture of hatred maxed out.
Fang Tian's right hand, resting on the back door, hesitated. He felt that bursting into the classroom now would likely get him instantly mistaken for the girl's accomplice — a poor sod hauled in to share the hate.
To go in, or not to go in.
That was the question.