NFM Chapter 45

He took out the blank cards from his backpack and handed one to Lin Huai: “These are cards that can contain Nether Beings…”

Lin Huai quickly took all the cards, counted them, and said with a smile, “You’re so generous, thank you, hehe.”

Xia Xingye: …

Lin Huai tested the cards a few times to confirm that Xia Xingye wasn’t deceiving him, then put all the cards into his suit pocket. Xia Xingye watched his actions and asked, “Do you know someone named Tian Chu?”

Lin Huai pretended, “No, why?”

“When you reach the advanced level, I’d like to introduce you two,” Xia Xingye said with a smile. “I wonder who would be stronger between you two…”

Lin Huai: “Definitely me. Have you been robbed by him too? How much did he take?”

Xia Xingye: …

Xia Xingye was a cunning and deceitful person. Keeping him around might not be a good choice. However, since he dared to be a merchant in the advanced level, he must have abilities beyond ordinary people. And his brother, who knows what kind of person he is. Although Lin Huai’s style was always a bit flamboyant, he was never one to act without careful consideration.

Moreover, although he had screwed over his two teammates in this Game, he hadn’t killed anyone, which was slightly better than those who were completely insane. Lin Huai had no intention of being a hero of justice, so he didn’t bother wasting time fighting him.

“It’s about time to leave here,” Xia Xingye said as he took a pill. “You really hit hard.”

Lin Huai: “You deserved it.”

Xia Xingye wasn’t angry and just smiled softly. Lin Huai thought to himself that this guy was probably smiling on the outside but scheming on the inside, but he didn’t care about his thoughts. He put on a black cloak and left through the corridor. Before leaving, he glanced at Qiu Ran’s sleeping face and then left.

He never looked back.

After Xia Xingye left, Li Fen finally arrived late from downstairs. As soon as he came up, he shouted loudly, “Did we win? Did we pass the Game? Wait… why are you still alive?!”

He was pointing in the direction where Yan Xi was standing. Due to overexerting his power earlier, Yan Xi was still in a state of confusion even though he had obtained the Evil spirit’s core. Faced with Li Fen’s finger, he just looked at him with a “?” expression.

Li Fen: “Ahhh! He really turned into an Evil spirit! Qiu Ran! Qiu Ran, wake up!”

The girl, shaken awake, briefly came back to reality. She looked at the sky outside, then at Yan Xi and Lin Huai, ignoring Li Fen completely, and said, “…He left?”

Lin Huai nodded.

“He didn’t leave! He’s right here!” Li Fen pointed at Yan Xi. “Snap out of it!”

Qiu Ran didn’t listen to him at all. She pursed her lips, her eyes slightly red, but her expression was cold and determined. She picked up her longbow and bowed to Lin Huai.

“I’m very sorry,” she said softly. “I owe you one. I will repay you in the future.”

She carried her longbow, straightened her back, and left.

“Where are you going, Qiu Ran!” Li Fen shouted.

Qiu Ran didn’t stop, her voice calm: “He owes me an arrow. I’m going to find him.”

After saying this, she disappeared into the corridor.

“Sigh…” Lin Huai touched his chin and sighed, “As Aizen said, admiration is the emotion furthest from understanding…”

“Suddenly quoting anime character lines again! Can someone explain what’s going on?!”

Although the portal to leave the dungeon had appeared, Lin Huai wasn’t in a hurry to leave. After throwing the noisy Li Fen out of the portal with the excuse of “you’re too loud,” he returned to the school.

“It’s about time to wrap things up…” he muttered to himself. “But once a teacher, always a father. I need to find them a good place…”

Xu Chi followed behind him. Yan Xi, having exhausted too much energy, had fallen asleep inside a card and was placed in Lin Huai’s pocket. From the conversations between Lin Huai and Li Fen, the Nether Being Xu Chi gradually realized that the world they were in was a Game. After hearing Lin Huai’s words, he said gloomily, “Since this is just a Game, why are you still…”

“Maybe it’s excess energy, maybe I’m too immersed, maybe I don’t want to go back and study ‘Material Mechanics’… Ah, why do college students still have exams? I should have found a body of a corporate slave… Oh, but corporate slaves aren’t good either, they have to work 996, and might even meet bosses like Green ○ Dark…”

“…”

Xu Chi resisted the urge to retort. After extracting his core, he could feel his power waning and his spirit weakening. Lin Huai said, “So the next step is to do some small work for these students who were innocently dragged into the Game… Not like Minghua, as for you…”

He turned around.

“As for you, stay here. After all, Minghua Middle School is your birthplace, and it will help your recovery. Now that you no longer have a core, you have no value, and Xia Xingye won’t come looking for you anymore… I won’t judge you, and I can’t be bothered to help you. In short, whether you dissipate or get some chance to re-form yourself is your own business.” Lin Huai said, “As for Yan Xi…”

“Teacher Lin,” Xu Chi said softly, “As your student, I want to make one last request…”

He looked into Lin Huai’s eyes and said softly, “I want you to take Yan Xi away. You said we should see the outside world, but he never left Yangshui before he died. And if he stays here, he’ll only be coveted by people like Xia Xingye. Now that I can no longer protect him… So I think… This is my last wish.”

After saying this, he lowered his head. The person opposite him didn’t respond for a long time.

His heart began to sink.

After a long while, he heard the person say, “Bend your knees.”

He bent his knees and heard the person’s voice: “…I should have chosen a taller body, and don’t say things that sound like death flags.”

He was tapped on the head. Lin Huai continued, “Then I agree, no take-backs.”

“Thank you,” Xu Chi said softly. “You’re the best teacher I’ve ever met.”

“…What’s with the habit of handing out good person cards so easily?” Lin Huai’s face turned cold.

After the dungeon ended, Lin Huai stayed in Yangshui City for another whole month. He contacted the media and exposed the wrongdoings of the Minghua Middle School faculty, bringing the principal and others to justice. Facing the principal’s gaze of “where did you come from and how do you know these things,” Lin Huai smiled kindly.

The students of Class C went back to their homes. The students of Class F were left in confusion.

Under the influence of the Game’s power, Minghua Middle School was divided into two overlapping spaces. One space was the real Minghua Middle School, which included Class 1, Class 2, Class 3, Class 4, and Class 5 of the third year—Class 5 being the students of Class F. The other space was created by the Nether Being Xu Chi using his own power, which included the classes A, B, D, and E that he had conjured up, as well as the original Class C that he had pulled in, and Class 5, which was pulled in by the Game as a hint of “reality and illusion,” also known as Class F.

This might be hard to understand, but imagine this scene: in reality, the third teaching building housed Class 1, Class 2, Class 3, and Class 4 of the third year, while Class 5 was in the fourth teaching building—a building where, apart from Class 5, there were no other classes, and the other rooms were empty classrooms. As a Nether Being, Xu Chi occupied the fourth teaching building and pulled in the original Class C (the third-year students of his time), throwing them into the fourth teaching building and filling the other classes with ghosts. After that, he confused some of the school’s faculty, making them think the fourth teaching building was the third teaching building, and continued to teach these students who shouldn’t exist.

The space where the players had lived was the twisted space where the Nether Being existed. Now that the Nether Being was gone, everything returned to reality. The students of Class F also returned to their daily studies.

Minghua Middle School got a new faculty team, and during the adjustment period, Lin Huai spent more than a month continuing to teach.

He really didn’t want to add this extra workload to himself, but Xu Chi’s hesitant gaze and Yan Xi, who was still a blank slate, forced him to postpone his return plan again and again.

…After all, in a sense, once he left this dungeon, Yan Xi would be his first subordinate. As a qualified leader, it was his duty to leave some time for his subordinate and his subordinate’s partner… or husband?

And because the days here were so boring, he was forced to do many good deeds. For example, appearing late at night at the home of a reporter who published false reports whitewashing the principal and giving the sleeping man a “loving hug.” Or appearing late at night at the home of a corrupt deputy police chief and making him see the illusion of being dismembered…

In short, with all his tireless efforts, the matter was resolved very satisfactorily.

The portal to exit the dungeon lasted for two months. After settling these matters, he finally decided to return to reality to face a more brutal challenge—

That is, to face the brutal “Material Mechanics” exam.

On Thursday afternoon after the class ended, Fang Cheng saw Lin Huai for the last time in the office.

Many years later, when Fang Cheng was a mathematics professor in Zurich, he would still remember the scene he saw that afternoon. That Substitute Teacher who always did as he pleased, spoke words they couldn’t understand, and acted like a whimsical little madman, stood by the desk, putting his last piece of luggage into his briefcase.

“Why did you suddenly come here? Any problems?” the young man asked when he saw him. “Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron, Carbon, Nitrogen, Oxygen, Fluorine, Neon…”

“…Teacher Lin, isn’t there still a class tomorrow?” he hesitated for a long time before finally saying this. “Why are you leaving now…”

“Food can be eaten randomly, but words can’t be spoken randomly, little Fang,” the young man said. “How did you see that I’m leaving a day early…”

“Teacher.”

“…”

“Teacher.”

“Alright—” the young man complained with a drawn-out tone. “You caught me, so what? Are you going to stop me? I don’t see the need to stay with you guys for another 996 day…”

He said this, but his expression didn’t waver at all. He walked past Fang Cheng with his briefcase: “I just hate tearful farewell parties. Shh, don’t be surprised, I already noticed. Just thinking about the fireworks, balloons, and cake you guys bought makes my scalp tingle… And…”

“You don’t admire the real me,” Lin Huai said seriously. “You just like the Hengshui famous teacher I copied with my Sharingan…”

“Teacher, you…”

“—But,” he changed his tone and smiled slightly, “I don’t dislike taking group photos. But, as I’ve seen in novels, TV shows, and movies…”

He suddenly struck, immobilizing Fang Cheng. Then, he laughed: “Heroes need moving blessings, but tyrants leave without saying goodbye.”

“Goodbye!” He tapped the ground with his toes, twirled with his briefcase, and said, “From today on, we’ll never see each other again. When you all become world-renowned writers and mathematicians, maybe I’ll be in some corner looking at newspapers with your news, drinking cola and smiling with satisfaction!”

After saying this, he laughed heartily, bowed to him and the group of students who had hurried over from afar, and ran down the stairs with ease.

His speed was like a dream, leaving all the shouting and crying voices behind.

If parting must have tears, it’s better to stop at the moment of greatest joy. He thought this as he ran away from the students chasing him, not like a heroic figure, but like a happy, exiled clown.

“Teacher Lin!” Chen Haoyu’s voice stubbornly called out from behind. “See you again!”

“See you again!”

Finally, before reaching the portal, Lin Huai took one last look at the classroom of Class F.

The last row of Class F no longer had the Nether Being resting his chin and looking at the sky. The campus no longer had white-robed ghosts wandering around.

In many autumns, the Nether Being sat in the classroom of Class F, resting his chin and watching countless sunsets outside the window.

But there was no one left to hand him a stack of papers under such a sunset.

It was dusk, and he stood on the rooftop, silently watching the man in a suit walk into the portal that would take him out of the dungeon. Countless clouds and the glow of the sunset reflected on his body. The white card belonging to Yan Xi was in his suit pocket, disappearing into the twilight with him.

He gripped the coin in his hand tightly.

As long as we’re alive, it’s fine. As long as we exist, there will be a future.

In the future, we might not meet again, or we might reunite. But at least, the future exists firmly at this moment.

“We won,” he said softly. “We won, you won, I won, Yan Xi won too.”

He thought, today is really a good day.

A month later, the students of Class F finally received their group photo that had been developing for a month.

Although Lin Huai had unceremoniously run away the day before the farewell party… Well, that was indeed his style of not following conventions, but since they had already booked the photographer, Chen Haoyu and the others braced themselves and took a group photo.

At the photo shoot, with one person missing, the atmosphere was somewhat subdued. Some sensitive girls were even secretly wiping away tears.

“Why didn’t Teacher Lin come to the farewell party?” she asked the classmate next to her. “He…”

“Shh, don’t cry. If Teacher Lin sees you crying, he’ll be sad too,” the boy beside her comforted.

…No, you don’t understand the real Lin Huai. Chen Haoyu thought with a deadpan expression. If he saw us crying, he’d probably be quite pleased…

After all, the day before Lin Huai ran away, when he went to the office to hand in homework, he heard the young man playing with his phone and muttering to himself:

“I don’t want to be a good person… Until the very end, I should get to be a bad guy once.”

The group photo was taken in this subdued atmosphere. A week later, when Chen Haoyu, Fang Cheng, and class monitor Sun Xue went to the photo studio to pick up the photos, they heard the staff’s embarrassed voice: “Uh, we’re really sorry, there was a problem with the photo…”

“Huh?”

As Sun Xue argued with the staff, Fang Cheng pursed his lips and lowered his head.

“…Do you think,” he finally asked hesitantly, “that Teacher Lin and us will really meet again?”

Chen Haoyu patted his shoulder: “You…”

“What joke is this! How could there be an extra person in the photo? I counted several times during the shoot, there were only 39 students… Huh? Wait, this photo…”

Sun Xue’s surprised and delighted voice rang out. Chen Haoyu, hearing her voice, suddenly remembered something. He grabbed Fang Cheng’s hand and ran over to the failed photo.

Then quietly, he picked it up.

“…He really did, be a bad guy one last time…” he said with a wry smile. “Was it that satisfying to make us cry, Teacher Lin?”

Then, he pointed to a corner of the photo and said to Fang Cheng: “Look, this is Teacher Lin’s…”

We’ll meet again.

In the photo, amidst the gloomy faces of the students, only one young man in the corner was smiling happily.

The familiar face, the familiar smile, the familiar mischief and nonconformity…

This was the last prank and surprise he left for them—we’ll meet again.

At the same time, on the other end, Lin Huai retracted his gaze from the sky and stepped into the portal.

‘I wonder if they cried?’ he thought. ‘If they all cried…’

‘Then…’

‘That would be so delightful!’

As he stepped into the portal, Lin Huai heard a mechanical voice.

‘Player detected.’

‘Two tasks completed.’

‘Reminder: You will enter the system space.’

Finally, there was a whisper that Lin Huai didn’t catch.

‘Welcome back, Lin Huai.’

 

Author’s note: The second dungeon is finished, I can’t write anymore, so I’ll stop here.

I have nothing left.

Lin Huai: My exams are dead.