Chapter 3:Simpleton who have nothing（三）
Number 13 choked on his words, full of frustration with nowhere to go, and could only give him a hard stare.
Towards the end of the night, Xu Jiu drank a bowl of beetroot soup in the canteen before grabbing a few large pieces of ukleba and chucking cold smoked sausages into them viciously. An adult’s hand was thick and three fingers wide of dry bread, and he gulped down three pieces in one gulp, then followed it up with a big bowl of beetroot soup.
After a few days of bonding, the newcomers could more or less guess that the canteen dishes followed the changing tastes of the doctors above them. If they ate Chinese food today, they would eat steamed buns, dumplings and stir-fried vegetables; if they ate German food tomorrow, they would also get some currywurst, meat patty and baked potatoes.
Xu Jiu wolfed down his food, while the others clearly didn’t have the same appetite as him, a few of them glanced at his food and exchanged looks of disgust.
He didn’t care about this, he finished eating and wiped his mouth, grabbed the time, carried a tooth cup and towel to the public washroom to wash himself up. There was no shortage of water resources in the Polar Regions, but the tap water supply at the research station was limited in time.
In the middle of the night, Xu Jiu lay in bed, still unable to sleep.
His mind was in turmoil, thinking about the events of today, thinking about the pile of corpses pasted into rotten dumpling stuffing, the bones were blackened by some contraption, so dead that he didn’t know where his face was, where his hands were; also thinking about the eyes of those people who looked at him with disdain, and the whispers that came out of their ears when they gathered behind him; and also thinking about that big jellyfish, so beautiful that it was like a dream, and couldn’t be described in words at all.
He moved his wrist uncomfortably, the wound was like a large ulcer growing on the outside, a hundred claws of pain when he touched it.
Before going to sleep, Xu Jiu wrapped gauze, but this wound did not see a single sign of improvement. He even had an indescribable feeling, like this piece of coin-sized trauma, is towards the depths of his flesh and blood, bone marrow, and even soul rot, and he can not do anything about it, not the slightest bit dare to report upwards on his situation.
What exactly was the polar site working on? That big jellyfish?
Xu Jiu avoided the location of his wounds and rolled over on the narrow bed in annoyance.
How long do I have to live? He then thought, when I die, will I be like those people in the daytime, with no one to rely on, not even a place to be buried?
When he was very young, it wasn’t that Xu Jiu didn’t think about going to look for his parents, but since he had already been collected by Mobius’ people in his orphanage, how could they let a small child just run out? Soon, Xu Jiu became a key target of care, reduced to the daily meals with the orphanage’s older children to grab a piece of food, can not grab or starve, grabbed only some scraps of leftover food, at most he could only stuffed teeth. Even filling his stomach was a problem, how could he think about anything else?
After starving for a long time, he could only try his best to perform in the orphanage (welfare agency), to work, to be sweet-talking, to show in front of the carers that he could write and read. He had to use all the tricks of the trade to make sure he didn’t starve to death.
When he was a little older and could finally go to a school funded by Mobius with a recommendation from his examiner, he had no worries about getting three meals a day, but then a new problem arose.
He had no talent for reading.
The laboratory adopted a large number of orphans, funding their schooling, necessarily not to do charity. As soon as Xu Jiu enrolled in school, the first thing the teacher said to them was “I don’t care what you used to be like, in my place, as long as you are smart, you can do whatever you want, and you can even shit on my desk!”
The young students laughed at the teacher’s vulgarity and bluntness, and so did Xu Jiu. It was only with the passage of time that he realized the cruelty of these words.
——To dig up geniuses, to dig up geniuses who engage in research, is the true purpose of Mobius.
Privately, teachers call students with mediocre qualifications scraps /discarded material, and if they can get a student with great talent, even if the “scrap rate” reaches one to one hundred, one to five hundred, it is still a worthwhile deal.
Talented elite students have everything: they call the shots in school, exercise magical powers, enjoy all the privileges, graduate from the headquarters for further study, directly transfer to the various stations, and enter the upper middle class.
Here, the strict hierarchy of academic qualifications replaces all positions of power. Xu Jiu, and the same ordinary students with Xu Jiu. Perhaps the “mayor”, “prime minister”, “prime minister” form of address, knowing one and understanding half (idiom); a smattering of knowledge, they can not understand how the big people in the outside world use their power, but they must be very important. However, they must know very well that a “Class C Researcher” may be their entire life’s struggle, and a “Doctor” is even more powerful, able to mobilise the army and hold the power of life and death over many people.
When he was in junior high school, there was a popular saying among the students, “The world is a huge playground, some people are the protagonists, and some are the NPCs for the protagonists to have fun”.
Xu Jiu thought deeply, he struggled, tried hard, however, talent this thing, if no then no, can not pretend, can not be cultivated more, more than anything is blunt and cruel.
He once learned that high fever, sickness in the school dormitory, but at the end of the year assessment, or someone can smile and take out the full marks of the examination paper, and almost full marks of the experimental class GPA, wrestled the teachers full of applause.
No one saw Xu Jiu and cared about his health or his improving grades, but only strange looks, gossip if any, and ridicule about how self-important he was, accompanied him all the way to high school.
Xu Jiu finally laid down flat and stopped tossing and turning.
He accepted his own mediocrity, just as he accepted his NPC status, as well as a future to be slaughtered. Before he finished high school, Xu Jiu was sent out of school and prematurely entered the research site to work.
Perhaps people are such creatures, small in life and small in death, and they can’t make much noise when they come and go.
He didn’t know how long it took, but Xu Jiu finally fell asleep, but he couldn’t sleep for long, he struggled to wake up again.
His body was hot, and he had a low-grade fever. He rolled off the bed onto the floor in a daze, letting his forehead press against the cold ground for a while before getting up with a heavy head and falling into a chair.
Xu Jiu’s wrist was swollen even worse, the ulceration deeper, numb with pain, and no longer quite able to bend. The edges of the wound were still oozing out fishy, bitter pus and blood, and the person who smelled it would feel dizzy.
Xu Jiu bit the sleeve in his mouth, unravelling the wet and dirty gauze in a circle, throwing it into the bin, and then struggling to unscrew the bottle of iodine vapour, and pouring it onto the wound with a smothered head.
“Ugh!” He had something in his mouth to bite down on to keep from screaming all at once, but even so, the sudden rush of saliva wet the fabric. Xu Jiu’s eyes were glazed over and his breathing was intermittent; the pain was so intense that he was instantly sweating a great deal on his back.
He stifled a groan and shivered as he tended to the wound. The cleaner’s capsule dormitory was so poorly soundproofed that he couldn’t keep the noise down, and the next door to the left and right would immediately report it to the supervisor.
After barely wiping away the horizontal flow of iodine solution, he then took the dental cup containing overnight cold water, haphazardly poured in some antiseptic and anti-inflammatory powder, and rushed over with a vengeance.
After a set down, Xu Jiu’s whole body is wet, as if he was fished out of the water. The alarm clock on the bedside rang incessantly, he gasped for breath, re-taking clean bandages to wrap the wound tightly, trying not to let outsiders see the clue.
He shivered and looked in the mirror before he left the house, and the man inside had messy hair, the ends of which were stuck to his face, a ring of bruises under his eyes, and lips so white they were dry and cracked, like a ghost.
“Hurry up!” Fellow group members urged disgruntledly from outside, “You’re the only one left, you want to implicate us in being late, don’t you?”
Yesterday’s number 13 could see that he was not in the right state, and could not help but ask more, “What’s wrong?”
“I… “Xu Jiu spoke hoarsely, “I didn’t sleep well and had a nightmare all night.”
“Oh,” No.13 smiled knowingly, “Scared, aren’t you? You say you, this is like a normal person’s appearance, yesterday pretend deep, people’s hearts who hear it panic…”
A group of seven people first went to eat breakfast, Xu Jiu rarely can not eat something, compressed crackers only dipped into his lips, desperately put nutritional paste to fill two mouths, then he put down the bowl.
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