Chapter 38
“Are you ready?”
“Yes, Professor. But that camera...?”
“Haha, you mean this? It’s the day our Name is officially entering the academy, so I thought we ought to commemorate it!”
“The first-years are the stars of the entrance ceremony anyway.”
“But today, I want Name to be the protagonist of the most wonderful story. Now, why don’t you stand over there by the main gate?”
“Okaaay.”
It had been a long time since I’d had my picture taken.
I’d never particularly liked the act of someone recording me in the first place, but in this life, I didn’t feel nearly as reluctant about it.
Being unable to get a word out when meeting strangers was a thing of the past now.
Perhaps this body was naturally outgoing; despite having nothing but memories of feeling exhausted whenever I met people, loneliness was the first emotion I felt when I thought I’d been left alone.
Personality was truly something you thought you understood until you realized you didn’t.
The cherry blossoms of March were in full bloom.
Several female students giggled as they plucked fallen cherry blossom petals from their hair, while groups of male students were likewise immersed in the beautiful sight, at least for today.
“I can’t tell which one is the flower. Here, take a look?”
“If you keep using lines like that, people will say you look old.”
Professor Cheon handed me the photograph.
It was just me in a neat school uniform, the main gate of Sephiron Academy, and a cherry tree. There was nothing particularly special about it.
It was just a photograph, after all.
But Professor Cheon laughed heartily as he repeatedly pressed the camera shutter.
‘Then perhaps I’ll humor him for a little while.’
Above all, I didn’t dislike the faint scent of cherry blossoms drifting through the air.
Personally, I had thought the news that I’d been accepted as a transfer student to Sephiron Academy was truly unexpected.
Professor Cheon hadn’t looked particularly surprised when he heard the news, but I was certain that at least a majority of the admissions officers had been hostile toward me.
Since I was the only transfer student entering Sephiron Academy this year, perhaps they had thought it unnecessary to make an announcement for just one person. Professor Cheon had called the academic administration office himself and written down the things I needed to do before enrolling.
We went to get my uniform fitted, and bought me a new bag as well.
The professor begged and pleaded that sneakers would make me look too shabby, so in the end, we compromised on a pair of ordinary black shoes.
If you asked whether I had streamed over the past two weeks, I hadn’t stopped entirely.
I had, however, taken a temporary leave from League.
Not only had I never found any goal or motivation in League to begin with, but after playing it to death for seven years, I couldn’t deny wanting to keep my distance for a while.
Without a game to play, my streams naturally turned into chatting streams.
But I still found communicating with viewers difficult, or at least alienating, so I simply talked about various things without paying attention to the chat.
Mostly magic circles.
I would usually bring up things I wanted to teach Laura on stream first, to test where people generally had trouble understanding them.
Most of it drew a flood of confused reactions, but surely there had been some viewers who understood it, too.
Laura was extremely interested in magic.
However, her knowledge was so lacking that there had been times when I was at a loss as to where to begin teaching her.
Still, she showed remarkable concentration when it came to magic, which I explained little by little in the form of stories.
I had planned to start teaching her about magic in earnest while playing World of Arseria, but she still hadn’t properly mastered basic arithmetic or the runic language, so I put that plan off until later.
After two busy weeks, March 6, the opening ceremony, had arrived before I knew it.
Taking the picture had made me feel like a child again, but listening to the elderly principal’s speech brought me sharply back to reality.
‘I have to spend my time with babies like these?’
I looked around the auditorium.
They were young.
Much younger than I’d expected.
There was a saying about this, wasn’t there?
When you were in elementary school, middle- and high-school students seemed incredibly mature, but as you advanced to middle school and then high school, all the children younger than you began to look like babies...
It hadn’t been this bad in my previous life.
For one thing, the average age of admission to the Kaizen Empire’s academies was around eighteen, and I had been in my early twenties when I died back then...
So I suppose the psychological resistance had been smaller.
But when I actually came face-to-face with these seven- and eight-year-old babies, I felt terribly pathetic myself.
I even had to look up at them!
“Hi! Are you a new student too?”
“No, I’m a second-year.”
“You’re a second-year?”
I suppose mix-ups like this happened sometimes... No, this was happening right now.
I’d recently been secretly proud of finally passing 110 centimeters, but the early-developing babies had already surpassed 120 and were now aiming to surpass 130 centimeters.
Was that a third-year? Surely a second-year?
I’d never been told I was short wherever I went in the past, so I couldn’t help feeling indignant.
Maybe I was the one who had lost sight of society.
Since so many of my relationships had been formed through capsules, I had secretly grown accustomed to being treated as an adult by everyone.
Yet in reality, even a runny-nosed child like this was looking down on me.
“New students, we once again congratulate you on your admission to our school. Sephiron Academy will support every aspect of your school life with care and affection. Thank you all for listening. With that, I’ll conclude my opening address.”
The new students were now leaving their parents for real and heading to their respective classes. It was only a temporary farewell, but some of the children looked ready to burst into tears.
Since the parents of returning students had no reason to attend the entrance ceremony, most academy students were busy chattering noisily with their friends.
“Name, you can find your way home, right?”
“Don’t embarrass me and just go already.”
“Haha. Then make lots of good friends! I’m rooting for you!”
It seemed the second-years’ eyes had been drawn this way, and it wasn’t just my imagination.
A few of them were whispering as they looked at my face.
Embarrassed, I sent Professor Cheon home and waited for the second-year class assignments to be announced.
[Your student IDs should have been updated. Please check your class assignments and proceed to your respective classrooms without confusion.]
All the academy students took out their student IDs from their pockets, wallets, or bags.
The children who had been placed in the same class as last year cheered, while those who seemed to have been separated from everyone else looked visibly dejected.
There seemed to be only four classes, and students in the same year would all be together anyway, yet the class assignments seemed quite important to the children.
One by one, the students left the auditorium and headed to the main building, where the classrooms were.
But even after everyone else had gone, I had no choice but to remain firmly in place.
‘I don’t have a student ID...?’
Administrative procedures in 2051 were still lacking in many ways.
* * *
“Are you in Class A?”
A voice called out to the boy.
Had he still not left? Sihoo reluctantly turned around.
Sihoo’s parents had been waiting in front of the auditorium all this time, until he came out.
“Yes.”
“Of course you are. From now on, you’ll have to work even harder than you did over the past year. It’s not as though the other children will be playing around forever, either.”
“Yes, I understand... Mother.”
“You’re a smart boy, just like me—smarter than anyone else. You can do well in your second year too, can’t you?”
“Yes... Father.”
As he watched their backs recede after those words, Sihoo thought once again that he found it difficult to deal with his parents.
He knew everything they said was for his sake, but he still couldn’t shake the bitter feeling.
Unlike first-year class assignments, which were random, from the second year onward, the ten top-performing students and the ten highest achievers from the previous year were placed together in Class A.
Of course, there was no chance of Sihoo, the top student, failing to make Class A, but he couldn’t help yearning for praise from his parents.
It was 9:45.
Students only had to be in their classrooms by ten, so he wandered around the auditorium, planning to get some fresh air and clear his head for about ten minutes.
‘Huh, who’s that?’
Rarely, a child with hair grown past her waist all the way to her knees came hopping down the stairs.
She seemed to have just come out of the auditorium.
The girl had such a slender body that, if she hadn’t been wearing a school uniform, Sihoo wouldn’t have guessed she was an elementary school student like him. She also looked deeply troubled.
“You haven’t gone to your class yet? It’s almost ten, so there isn’t much time left.”
Of course, no teacher would deduct points on the very first day of school, but he still urged her to hurry, concerned for her.
“I’m Yoon Sihoo, a second-year at Sephiron Academy.”
“Oh, okay. I’m Noname.”
Come to think of it, hadn’t the teachers already led the first-years away before announcing the class assignments?
How was that child still in the auditorium?
“Then can you help me find my class?”
Ah, so she had simply gotten lost.
Sihoo decided that, although he was a little short on time, he had enough to escort her to her classroom.
“Sephiron Academy has a complicated layout, so you need to learn your way around. The lower-year classrooms are especially hard to find at first.”
“This is the sparring arena. Apparently, they hold classes here starting in the fourth year, but so far we’ve only used it for sports festivals.”
“There are three school shops in total, but when you’re a first-year, the northern building is the closest.”
“The dining hall is on the second floor in the center of the academy. Go straight from here and you’ll come right to it.”
“That way is the middle-school dormitory. It’s right next to the elementary school, so you might get scolded if you make too much noise during exam season.”
He introduced her to the academy’s various facilities so the walk wouldn’t be boring, but when the girl showed little reaction, Sihoo felt awkward for no reason.
So this time, he changed the subject to the entrance ceremony.
“How was the entrance ceremony? The principal was pretty boring, right?”
The elementary division’s entrance ceremony was a fairly large event in its own right, though it couldn’t compare to those of the middle and high school divisions.
Famous figures invited by the Sephiron Foundation had attended as well.
The principal’s closing address had been the hardest part, though.
“It was good. It looked strong, too.”
“Huh?”
What did she mean looked strong?
Sihoo could only vaguely guess that the girl was expressing, in a roundabout way, the impression Sephiron Academy gave off.
Yeah, she couldn’t mean the principal.