Chapter 89: Orientation Day
What little time remained before Su Yao’s academic incarceration was spent with methodical precision. She relaxed by engaging in targeted stress-relief operations, which, to any observer, looked like a series of bizarre and brutal vigilante acts.
Su Yao donned the pristine hanfu of the Jade Purity Maiden and took to the streets of Duwang.
Her first target was a pickpocket ring preying on the elderly near the city’s parks. She appeared beside them as they reached for a wallet. Her fingers closed around their wrists with the finality of a vault door slamming shut.
“The dexterity in your fingers is a gift,” she informed one wide-eyed thief. Her voice was calm. “It’s currently being applied with the strategic foresight of a bacterium. The city’s sanitation department is hiring for delicate waste-sorting operations. Report there tomorrow at eight. Your skills will be reallocated.”
She released him. He fled, the address for the sanitation department burned into his mind as if branded there.
Her second target was a corrupt city inspector shaking down small business owners. She found him in a narrow alley, accepting an envelope of cash from a weeping noodle shop owner.
“Your authority is a tool for maintaining order,” Su Yao stated, plucking the envelope from his hand and returning it to the shop owner. “You’ve used it to create disorder. This is wasteful.” She then produced a stack of the inspector’s own meticulously kept, hidden ledgers detailing his extortion racket.
“You will now use your knowledge of bureaucratic loopholes to process these business permits,” she said, handing him a new stack of legitimate forms taller than his head. “You will not sleep until they are approved. This is your penance. And your new full-time occupation.”
Her preferred targets, however, were the newly empowered who had slipped through her Macau recruitment net. She found a young man using a minor geokinesis gift to create potholes in the road. Then he charged exorbitant fees to ‘fix’ them with a wave of his hand.
“Your understanding of structural engineering is non-existent,” she critiqued, after using the Tide-Cutter to neatly slice the asphalt he had just mended, revealing the shoddy, spiritually-fused patch job beneath.
“You’re creating long-term liabilities. The city’s civil engineering corps needs individuals who can perform rapid, stable repairs during emergencies. You will report for duty at dawn. They will pay you a fair a fair wage. You will learn to build things that last.”
Within days, the crime rate in several districts plummeted. The public saw a righteous, if terrifying, saint delivering swift, strange justice while the underworld saw a force of nature that reassigned people’s life.
On her final night of freedom, she stood on a rooftop. The Jade Purity Maiden robes were spotless. Below, the city was quieter and more orderly. The bridge, her masterpiece of metaphysical and economic engineering, glowed in the distance.
It had been a productive week. Su Yao had stabilized the city, secured her assets, and vented her considerable irritation on an entire ecosystem of low-level malfeasance.
She phased back to her apartment. Nohime had perfected a new ice cream flavor, ‘Plum Blossom Frost,’ and had the financial projections ready for her review.
Su Yao sat down. The robes dissolved back into her modern clothes. She picked up the business plan.
University was set to begin tomorrow. Her phone buzzed nonstop as messages poured into the fox support group. Somewhere on campus, black robes were being spotted, theories were flying, and the search for the hidden fox was still underway.
For this single, quiet moment, the most pressing issue in her world was the cost-benefit analysis of real fruit puree versus artificial flavoring in a frozen dairy product.
It was, she decided, a perfectly productive form of leisure.
Bland, cloudless skies had always irritated Su Yao, and today’s was no exception. By the time she stepped onto Duwang University’s campus on the orientation day, the weather already felt like an omen. The identification badge hanging from her neck felt less like a credential and more like a tag for a captured specimen.
Around her, the main quad swarmed with nervous freshmen and excited parents. Su Yao stood at its periphery, a still point in the chaotic current. Her senses were assaulted by the sheer, overwhelming banality of it all.
A student representative with a painfully bright smile was shouting through a megaphone about “school spirit.” Club recruiters waved poorly designed flyers for the Anime Appreciation Society and the Strategic Gaming League.
This, Su Yao thought, her expression utterly deadpan, is the carefully constructed environment meant to pacify me. It’s less a cage and more a sensory deprivation tank of mediocrity.
Her phone buzzed with messages from the FFF group chat.
Kayo: ORIENTATION DAY! ? Send pics! I want to see you in one of those stupid beanies!
Baoqing: Do try to avoid getting any professors fired in the first week, dear. The paperwork for replacing them is dreadful.
Su Yao observed the herd dynamics as they unfolded around her. Students gathered according to perceived social rank. Fashion choices drew clear lines, and even the brands of their electronic devices seemed to dictate where they belonged. It was a primitive, unrefined form of tribalism.
Her gaze fell upon Li Xiu, who was dutifully standing near the Business and Economics faculty banner. A ‘Senior Mentor’ pin was on her collar. She looked deeply uncomfortable. Her eyes scanned the crowd until they locked with Su Yao’s and she gave her a tiny, helpless shrug.
A boy with a lanyard even newer than hers stumbled into her personal space. Panic filled his face. “Hey, do you know where the Student Life Center is? For the mandatory community-building workshop?”
Su Yao looked at him. “Your question contains two unnecessary filler words and references an institution whose name is a tautology. All life centers around the student here. That’s the problem.”
She pointed a single, precise finger toward a generic-looking building. “There. May your community be sufficiently built.”
He scurried away, more confused than before.
The orientation leader’s voice crackled through the cheap megaphone, detailing the importance of the Student Code of Conduct. Su Yao stood at the back of the gathered freshmen. Her posture was so still it seemed to defy the very concept of movement.
Su Yao performed a real-time structural analysis of the code’s legal and logical inconsistencies. It was, she concluded, a document designed by committee to be both comprehensive and utterly unenforceable.
Her phone buzzed again, a more insistent vibration.
Kayo: HELLO? EARTH TO SU YAO! We need deets! Is the campus food as bad as they say? Have you started a cult yet? A small one? Maybe just a study group with questionable intentions?
Su Yao’s fingers moved under the cover of her bag.
Su Yao: The nutritional value of the cafeteria offerings is approximately equivalent to flavored cardboard.
A new message, from an unknown number, popped up.
Unknown: Welcome to DSBU, Ms. Xiao Ling. Your assigned faculty advisor is Professor Yuan. His office is in the Business Faculty building, room 301. Please schedule a meeting at your earliest convenience.
Her eyes narrowed. Professor Yuan was the man who had already forgotten the name she’d given her. This was either a staggering coincidence or an ironic assignment. She leaned towards the latter.
The orientation leader finally finished his droning recitation. “And now,” he announced with forced cheer, “we’ll break into small groups for a ‘Get to Know Your Peers’ icebreaker!”
A wave of communal dread washed over the freshmen. Su Yao felt it like a shift in atmospheric pressure. This was the true gauntlet.
A girl with brightly dyed hair and a clipboard approached her, smiling widely. “Hi! I’m your group facilitator! Let’s start by sharing our name, our hometown, and a fun fact!”
Su Yao watched as the first student stammered through an introduction about coming from a nearby town and liking, volleyball.
When it was her turn, the facilitator’s smile fixed on her. “And how about you?”
“Xiao Ling,” Su Yao stated. “From Duwang. A fun fact.”
She paused. Her gaze swept over the group. “A human body contains enough latent chemical energy to explode with the force of several hand grenades. The only thing preventing this is a series of delicate, biological fail-safes that are constantly on the verge of catastrophic failure. Enjoy your orientation.”
The group stared in utter, horrified silence and the facilitator’s smile shattered.
Su Yao gave a slight, polite nod. “It’s now the next person’s turn.”
As the shell-shocked group moved on, Su Yao extracted herself, melting back into the fringe of the crowd. The ice had been flash-frozen into a permafrost of existential terror. A job adequately done.
She looked toward the Business Faculty building to look for Professor Yuan’s office, Room 301.
Su Yao moved through the crowds with an unnerving efficiency. Her path was a straight line that others instinctively diverted around. To her, the design felt cold and impersonal, offering nothing to hold onto. Outside room 301, the hallway lay quiet, insulated from the chaos of orientation.
She noticed the door standing slightly ajar and pushed it open without knocking.
Professor Yuan’s office was cluttered but functional. Stacks of books and journals were piled against the walls, and a mug of tea sat on his desk. He looked up from a large book, his glasses resting low on his nose.
“Ah! Come in, come in!” he said. His voice was warm, but his eyes were slightly unfocused, as if he were pulling himself from another century. He squinted at her. “Now, let me see, you’re one of my new advisees, it’s on the list here somewhere.” He began shuffling through a precarious stack of papers on his desk.
“Xiao Ling,” Su Yao provided. Her voice was flat.
“Xiao Ling! Yes, of course!” he said, though his tone suggested no such thing. He found a printed schedule and peered at it. “Right, right. Business and Economics. A solid choice, very practical.”
He looked up at her. His gaze sharpened for a moment with that same strange intensity. “You know, you really do look just like her.”
“Your former student,” Su Yao stated.
“Su Ning Ning,” Professor Yuan said. The name emerged from the fog of his memory with sudden, crisp clarity. He looked momentarily surprised at his own recall. “That was her name, Su Ning Ning. Brilliant, but haunted. She left just before her final year.”
He shook his head. Genuine sadness was in his eyes. “I heard about the accident not long after. Such a tragedy.”
He took off his glasses, polishing them on his tweed jacket. “She and her husband, they were so proud of this university. They’d both attended, you see. They set up a small trust, a long time ago. Part of it was for a scholarship. The other part.” He trailed off, replacing his spectacles and looking directly at Su Yao. His gaze was now unnervingly sharp.
“The other part was a conditional enrollment fund for their daughter, Xiao Ling. They specified that if anything ever happened to them and their daughter finished high school in Duwang, the fund would automatically trigger her application and enrollment here. A safety net, I suppose. To make sure she had a path.”
He gestured vaguely at the paperwork on his desk. “The administration processed it last week. It’s all quite automatic. You’re the beneficiary, Xiao Ling. Your parents wanted you here.”
Su Yao stood perfectly still. The mystery of her enrollment was solved by the posthumous wishes of two mortals, by Xiao Ling’s parents.
Su Ning Ning, the name of Xiao Ling’s mother. She was a woman whose memories were fragmented echoes in the soul she now shared. What the professor saw as a resemblance was a spiritual echo, the ghost of a lineage.
The intent was to protect the daughter they had lost. It was a gesture of love, rendered in the only currency they understood: institutional security. A guaranteed place in the system.
It was the most mundane and human explanation possible. There was only the bittersweet machinery of a dead couple’s final wish, grinding forward with bureaucratic inevitability.
A cold, complex emotion settled in her chest, something between respect for the strategy and a weary acceptance of its futility. They had built a cage of good intentions, and she had willingly walked into it.
“I see,” Su Yao said. Her voice was softer than usual, though no less composed.
Professor Yuan smiled, a gentle, paternal expression. “They were good people. I’m glad you’re here, Xiao Ling. It’s what they would have wanted.”
“Thank you, Professor,” she said. The words tasted unfamiliar. “I will make sure their investment was not in vain.”
She turned and left the office. The door clicked shut behind her.
Lost in the unprecedented calculus of parental posthumous planning, Su Yao turned a corner in the hallway with her usual preternatural grace. Another student, however, was rushing in the opposite direction. Head buried in a campus map, the collision was inevitable.
There was a soft thump, a gasp, and a flutter of loose papers as the girl landed on the floor. Her books scattered around her.
Su Yao looked down. Her expression was one of mild annoyance at the interruption to her chain of thought. The girl on the floor was slight, with wide, startled eyes. Hair fell in a messy curtain around her face. She wore a simple, slightly faded hoodie and jeans.
“Your situational awareness is deficient,” Su Yao stated. “Moving through a shared space while visually consuming a static guide is an inefficient and hazardous methodology.”
The girl blinked up at her, more shocked than hurt. “I’m sorry! I was just trying to find the library and I got turned around.” She scrambled to her knees, hastily gathering her papers.
Su Yao’s eyes locked on the girl’s spiritual signature. It was muted like a brilliant light shoved under a thick, coarse blanket. There was power there, a lot of it, but it was being suppressed, hidden behind layers of what felt like, wool and mundane anxiety.
“You’re concealing your nature,” Su Yao said. Her voice dropped, becoming flat and accusatory.
The girl froze. A sheet of paper was half-lifted from the floor. Her eyes, wide with a different kind of fear now, darted up to meet Su Yao’s. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The dissonance is obvious. Your aura is constrained artificially. Why?”
“I’m just a student,” the girl whispered. Her knuckles were white as she clutched her papers. “Please, I just want to be left alone.”
Su Yao considered her. This was someone who knew what they were and was actively, desperately hiding it.
“Very well,” Su Yao said, taking a step back, granting space. “Your obfuscation is your own business. However, the library is down this corridor, to the left. Don’t collide with me again.”
The girl stared. Then she quickly gathered the rest of her things, muttering a hurried “Thank you,” before scurrying away in the indicated direction, her head down.
She looks familiar. Have we met before? Su Yao watched her go. A hidden one, in a university now saturated with more spiritual energy. Is she hiding from the black robes? From the government? Or from something else entirely?
It was another piece on the board and another mystery but this one felt different. This one was hiding in plain sight, just like she was.
Su Yao had only taken less than ten steps before the distinct sound of another collision echoed from the same corridor, followed by a sharp, angry male voice.
“Watch where you’re going, you clumsy freak!”
She rounded the corner to see the same slight girl from moments before sprawled on the floor once more. Her papers scattered again. Looming over her was a broad-shouldered older student. His face was contorted with irritation. He was jabbing a finger at her.
“Do you have any idea how much this laptop cost? Data centers are skyrocketing the price of RAM.” he snarled, gesturing to a sleek, expensive-looking machine he’d barely managed to keep from dropping. “You’re going to pay for my reparation fee. Now.”
The girl was trembling, pulling her knees to her chest, trying to make herself smaller. “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.”
“Not good enough.”
Before he could continue his tirade, Su Yao spoke. Her voice sliced through the tension like a guillotine.
“Get in line.”
The male student spun around. His anger was redirected. “What did you say?”
Su Yao stood with her arms crossed. Her expression was one of boredom. “You wish to punish her for her spatial incompetence. I’ve prior claim. She collided with me first. Your grievance is secondary. You will wait your turn.”
He stared at her. His brain visibly short-circuited from the sheer absurdity of the statement. “Are you insane? I don’t care who she bumped into first! She messed with my property!”
“The hierarchy of offenses is clear. I’m first.” She took a step forward. Her gaze locked onto his with the look of a scientist examining a mildly interesting insect. “Now, you will cease your unproductive vocalizations and proceed to your destination. This matter is no longer your concern.”
The sheer, unshakable certainty in her voice and the complete lack of fear or aggression was more disarming than any threat. He sputtered, looking from the cowering girl on the floor to the unnervingly calm woman in front of him.
“This isn’t over,” he muttered, though the heat had gone out of his voice. He shot one last glare at the girl before shoving his laptop back into his bag and stomping away.
Su Yao watched him go, then looked down at the girl, who was staring up at her with a mixture of terror and utter confusion.
“You said you were going to punish me,” the girl whispered.
“I’m,” Su Yao stated. “My punishment is that you will learn to move through this environment without repeatedly colliding with its inhabitants. It’s a simple matter of trajectory and awareness. Your current method is a liability. Correct it.”