Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio
Gao Peng entered the room and placed his things inside. Right after he opened his luggage, a dark green figure immediately burst out.
Silly flew two circles around the room and then moved steadily down towards Gao Peng’s head.
However, he wasn’t able to land on Gao Peng’s head this time. Gao Peng used one hand to block Silly from landing on his head while he shook his head slowly and said, “No. We’re outside.”
Silly felt wronged. He tangled all of his tentacles and kept spinning in the air.
Gao Peng didn’t want to bother with this creature. He wanted to clean the room first. No one had lived in this room since it had been built, and most of the electronics were still covered in plastic. They were all new.
After he was finished with everything, Gao Peng went back to the school to fetch his familiars.
Familiars weren’t allowed to go in and out as they pleased. Every familiar that wanted to go into the school had to wear a specialized tracking device that allowed their locations to be seen at all times.
The tracking device could be removed after leaving the school, but the device had to be worn on school grounds. If the device was lost, it had to be reported to the school immediately. Otherwise, it would be treated as a serious offense.
This was to protect the students who had no familiars. It was like placing a group of sheep and wolves together. Some restrictions had to be placed on the wolves.
Along with the registration handbook for new students, there was also an exquisite looking, palm-sized student handbook for new students that wasn’t too thick.
When Gao Peng opened the new student handbook, he saw that it introduced a lot of the school rules in detail.
In the evening, a tall young man in red clothes knocked on Gao Peng’s door.
“Hello, are you Gao Peng?” The young man looked down and glanced at the list of names in his hands.
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m Zhou Ze, your counselor. We’re gathering at classroom 404 at noon tomorrow. Everybody in the class will be there so we can all get to know each other. This is the class messaging group. Remember to add yourself to the group so that you can see any notices.” Zhou Ze handed Gao Peng a business card as he spoke. On the card were the words, “Monster Trainer Class Four,” and beneath that were a bunch of numbers.
Gao Peng was speechless. He took the card from Zhou Ze’s hand. Do we need business cards for group chats now?
After Zhou Ze left, Gao Peng took out his cell phone and searched for the group on social media, soon joining it. The chatroom was very lively. People were posting about everything and anything there.
Gao Peng quietly looked at his screen. After looking at it for a while, he realized that the nature of the discussion in the chatroom was not too different from the chatrooms from high school. He found it to be a bit boring, so he yawned and closed the app.
He shook his head and picked up Silly, who was sleeping on the bed, before he left the dormitory. Grandpa was still waiting for him to go back and have dinner.
…
It had been a week since Gao Peng had started school. Besides the first night, he had stayed overnight at the school every weekday. He only went back home on the weekends.
After a week, Gao Peng had become familiar with his classmates. He was able to call out some of their names, and he could recognize the faces of the rest.
The monster trainers who were able to get into Yuzhou University weren’t weak. They would have to have a level 15 Elite tier familiar at the very least.
Some of them also had familiars that had reached the Commander tier.
Among those who had Commander tier familiars, Gao Peng was able to recognize some people he had seen during the second round examination. However, there were also some that he didn’t recognize. He guessed that they had probably gotten their familiars to the Commander tier during the summer break.
There were four monster trainer classes that year, each class having around 20 people. This meant that there were only around 80 monster trainer students. If the single lonely monster breeder class was included, there would still be less than a hundred monster trainer majors. Of course, this may also have been due to the overall decrease in population.
The textbooks for the monster trainers were finally given out. All of the students received them.
The textbooks were different from what Gao Peng had expected. He had thought that the textbooks would be a formality. However, when he picked them up with his own hands, he could feel how heavy they were, and how in-depth they must have been.
“The Eighth Edition of a Comprehensive Collection of Monsters, Photo Color Edition,” “Monster Psychology,” “A Guide to Survival in the Field,” “Flora Monster Identification Manual,” “Geography of Huaxia District,” “Precision Measurement of Yuzhou’s Monsters…”
Looking at this pile of thick books, all the freshmen who took received them were stunned.
How was it that they were even thicker than their high school textbooks?
Wasn’t the point that they could stop studying once they became monster trainers?
“Did you guys think that you would be able to stop studying once you became monster trainers?” Counselor Zhou Ze shook his head and sighed, “Such a mindset is wrong. We should always strive to learn. Do you want to be an illiterate monster trainer your entire life?
“The most important thing is that these are the facts you should learn. Of course, if you want to be the kind of monster trainer who’s only going to hang around in the forests near the base cities, you won’t have to learn these things. But if you want to improve yourself, you need to master all of this. These things may not be of much use most of the time, but they can save your life in critical times.
“Don’t think that I’m joking. If you meet a monster in the wild and you don’t know its habits, abilities, and weaknesses, you’ve already lost half the battle.”
Gao Peng very much approved of the counselor’s philosophy. Even if the school hadn’t required him to, he would have still read through these books. For example, he had already read through the first to eighth editions of the Comprehensive Collection of Monsters no less than ten times. He could recite the information in the book from memory.
Gao Peng also liked the book “A Guide to Survival in the Field” a lot. There were many nuggets of wisdom from the author of the book, who was a very famous explorer. He had unfortunately passed away half a year ago earlier after being poisoned while on an expedition. Of course, this fact didn’t take anything away from his skill!
That explorer had died because he had encountered a large and strong poison type monster in the wild. It’d had nothing to do with a lack of proficiency in his field of study.
Besides spending time studying these books, the monster trainer students were allowed to take part in other vigorous activities during the rest of the day. They were given quite a bit of autonomy by the department. Gao Peng felt like they were being left to do whatever they wanted.
He sometimes wondered if it was because they didn’t quite know how to teach monster trainers…
“Gao Peng, do you want to join the student association with me? They have tasks that they need done every month. It would be a good training exercise for us,” asked one of Gao Peng’s classmates whom he was somewhat familiar with.
“What tasks do the student association receive?” Gao Peng was slightly distracted for a moment.
“The tasks are good for toughening people up!” the guy said quickly. “The previous task was to go to the Red Bean Botanic Garden to clean the streets. The garden isn’t cleaned regularly, so a lot of low-level flora type monsters have appeared over there. That means that it’s a place where you can train for free by fighting against monsters that aren’t too dangerous. It can be a very good training exercise. How about it? Do you want to join the student association with me?”
Gao Peng was silent after listening to him. Isn’t that just helping people clean stuff for free?
These newbies are too easy to trick.
Gao Peng could sense his passion, so he didn’t want to rain on his parade. After all, joining the student association was a dream shared by many of the newbies. “I don’t have the time to join the student association, but if you really want to, you should go ahead and join.”
…
Three hundred miles from the Yuzhou base city, a small pitch black mountain shaped like a beehive shook violently. A dark fog appeared from the caves located at the foot of the mountain, as if the mountain itself had breathed them out. Low growls that reverberated between the mountains came from the holes and caves spread across the peak of the mountain, not stopping even after a long time..
