Time slipped by second by second, and the "new students'" eyes grew more frightening by the moment. His present predicament was exactly like that line from a certain commercial.
Time was running out for Fang Tian.
Bursting into the classroom under the gaze of a pack of ghosts might well burn through his last point of Sanity outright — which would land him flat on the classroom floor before he could ever get the girl out.
He lifted his head and saw the "new students" gradually closing in on her, crimson pupils showing beneath their long bangs, the black aura rising off their backs growing more and more pronounced. Fang Tian knew nothing about ghosts, but he guessed that was a sign of one getting angry.
There was no time to think up a perfect plan.
Besides, coming to a place like this in the dead of night hadn't been a rational decision in the first place.
Just as the black aura was about to swallow the girl whole, Fang Tian gritted his teeth and shoved the back door open.
Forget the plan — just do it first and talk later!
The girl facing the camera seemed startled half to death, her face going white as she froze on the spot. Fang Tian's gaze didn't linger on the ghosts; he scooped up the tripod and DSLR in one arm and grabbed the girl's wrist with his other hand.
"Move!"
Fang Tian stated his purpose in a single terse word. The girl, to her credit, caught on fast and didn't resist — instinctively she bolted out of the classroom alongside him.
Only the scramble of two sets of footsteps echoed in the nighttime corridor. Once clear of the classroom, Fang Tian clamped one eye shut, lest some mind-polluting image come boring into it again out of nowhere.
He ran for all he was worth, sprinting downstairs at full tilt — he hadn't even pushed this hard on the 1,000-meter at his entrance exam.
The moment he'd charged into the classroom, Fang Tian had steeled himself: to break out of this ghost-filled teaching building, he'd have to give it everything!
Except......
After running some distance, his pace slackened, until his speed was barely different from a walk.
Before long Fang Tian finally ran out of steam, set the tripod down on the ground, braced his right hand against the wall at his side, and gasped for breath.
Though his legs felt poured full of lead, his face wore the look of a man who'd survived a brush with death — after that all-out sprint, the ghost-ridden teaching building must surely have been left far, far behind......
He looked up, and the sign for "Classroom 101" stabbed him right in the eyes.
『Flag Beginner skill activated successfully. Skill proficiency 4/15.』
The system mercilessly mocked Fang Tian's naive notion, as if to say, "A measly Stamina-3 weakling, acting like the real deal."
After that all-out sprint, the two of them had finally made it from the third floor down to the first. The total distance couldn't have been even 100 meters.
The one piece of good news was that the monsters in the third-floor classroom hadn't chased them out.
Hearing the commotion outside, the "new students" in the first-floor classroom pressed curiously against the windows to watch these two living people sprinting down the teaching-building corridor in the dead of night instead of going back to their dorms.
Clearly, fantasy and reality had diverged sharply. In Fang Tian's imagination, they should have already run all the way to the dorm gate.
The girl, considerate as could be, pressed a hand to Fang Tian's back to help him catch his breath — though the way she eyed the weakling rather gave away her inner thoughts.
Every adolescent girl yearns to meet a white knight who'll rescue her from peril. Sadly, the "prince" she'd met today had keeled over from exhaustion after running less than 100 meters.
The mood in the corridor turned a touch awkward.
Fang Tian recovered for a good while, straightened up, gave a light cough as if nothing had happened, and said, "Qingkong University regulations, Article 17: students may not linger in the teaching building after twelve midnight. Seeing as it's your first offense, I'll let it slide this time. Hurry back to your dorm."
He trotted out a regulation made up on the spot and gave the girl a verbal warning. With that, he turned smartly on his heel to leave, hiding his merit and his name.
In the moment they'd sprinted down to the first floor, the system had popped up a quest-complete notice.
『"Night on Campus" (Complete). As a member of Qingkong University, you have successfully defended the order of Qingkong University.』
『Quest reward: the Favorability of Ghost-attribute faculty and students toward you is permanently raised by 3.』
『Ghosts' Favorability toward you detected as positive. You can now see their beautiful side.』
Fang Tian soon noticed a camera-like icon had appeared on his character status bar.
He opened this new function the system had thrown in at once.
『A pair of eyes that perceive truth, kindness, and beauty is the first step to building friendships with monsters. Keep up the good work, Appreciator.』
As the function switched on, the scene before Fang Tian's eyes turned upside down.
The "new students" pressed against the rear windows suddenly looked as though a beauty filter had been switched on; even their severed limbs were touched up. Apart from their still-translucent bodies, they looked no different from ordinary students.
The pressure of being watched by ghosts eased greatly. Fang Tian nodded again and again — with this function, going out at night would be far more convenient from now on.
But before he could take more than a few steps, a hand came down on his shoulder.
"Hold on a second."
The girl had stopped him. Holding up her phone, the Qingkong University official website on its screen, she said, "I just looked up the Qingkong regulations. Article 17 says nothing about not being allowed to linger in the teaching building after twelve midnight."
"Then I misremembered. Maybe it was Article 21."
"Article 21 is that non-clinical-medicine students may not enter Building C at night."
The girl didn't look easy to fool — students who could test into Qingkong on their own merit weren't so easily taken in.
As if she'd seen through his slip, she pressed on. "Besides, I just checked: there's no one like you in the student council group photo. Since you're an ordinary student just like me, why would you come do something like this in the dead of night?"
She wasn't about to give Fang Tian time to argue. "This isn't a prank, and there's nothing in it for you. And although your stamina is even worse than a girl's, you really were running just now. The way you kept your eyes shut didn't look like an act. So that leaves only one last possibility —— in that classroom just now, you could see something I couldn't."
At this she put on a "there is only one truth" expression. "And yet even so, you were in such a hurry to drag me out of there, terrified something might come chasing after us...... which means the legends of Qingkong University are real!"
Faced with the girl's machine-gun barrage of deduction, Fang Tian didn't panic in the slightest. He couldn't help feeling the irrepressible curl at the corner of her mouth was mixed with something else.
Rather than say she'd reasoned out the truth of the campus legends from the clues, it was more that she'd fixed the conclusion in advance and worked backward to it.
For some reason, this girl seemed to want the campus legends of Qingkong to be real — and to that end she'd been willing to overlook the most surface-level piece of logic.
"Anything else you'd like to say?"
The girl wore the smile of a victor, the shallow dimples on her cheeks rather lovely.
"Nice deduction. But you overlooked one thing."
Fang Tian may have been a Stamina-3 weakling, but he also carried the formidable setting of Mentality 9.
He hadn't fallen into her logical trap. With perfect composure he countered, "Has it occurred to you that maybe I'm just a shady character who likes to prowl the campus at night, deliberately targeting girls who are on their own?"
This was the thought a normal girl ought to have — dragged downstairs in the dead of night by a strange man of the opposite sex, no explanation given. That was hardly a romance-tinged turn of events.
Fang Tian saw the girl's face stiffen, so he pressed his advantage and produced, right in front of her, the decisive evidence.
It was a piece of campus news. To sell the story's authenticity, the writer had even attached a somewhat blurry, low-resolution photo.
"SHOCKING! The Qingkong University Student Council Vice President's Freshman Boyfriend!"
Reading the headline and the story, the girl's expression shifted from surprise to outright shock — perhaps the first time a clickbait shock-headline had ever genuinely managed to shock someone.
"The guy up there is me."
Fang Tian's smile was warm and innocent as he raised his left hand and pointed a proud thumb at himself. "And they got it wrong — I'm not the vice president's boyfriend at all."
Of course, that smile carried a different meaning in the girl's eyes.
The two had known each other only a few minutes, and Fang Tian had already decided he didn't much want to get tangled up with this girl who'd run off to a classroom in the dead of night to court death and fancied herself clever.
As a veteran wizard, Fang Tian had no idea how to win a girl's heart, but he knew exactly how to make any girl lose interest in him on the spot.
The girl, too, finally seemed to grasp the surface-level logic she'd let slip past her. Her eyes filled with mounting dread. The two of them stared at each other, and after who knew how long, she at last shut her eyes and assumed the posture a normal girl should.
"Kyaa——! Pervert!"