Chapter 400: Mid-Autumn Special: Matters of the Past

Mid-Autumn Special: Matters of the Past

【——】 often reflected on his brief life, especially in the dead of night when all was silent, pulling past events from his rather uneventful experiences to chew over, tasting flavors he had missed while carelessly passing the days.

Since childhood, he had been that kind of "mediocre good student." His grades were better than most classmates, but not good enough; he was willing to listen to teachers, yet not entirely obedient; sometimes self-disciplined, but rarely for long.

Like most people drifting in the middle, he couldn't quite reach the top, yet his meager talent made him unwilling to accept the status quo; intermittent efforts wasted time, creating the occasional illusion of escaping his awkward situation.

Naturally, as expected, he performed at a mediocre-to-below-average level in the exam that would decide his life, and stumbled blindly toward the crossroads of choosing his future.

Then, as inevitably as not, an accident occurred: amidst a vast sea of tangled choices, a medical school with a very formal name appeared, inexplicably matching his score line with even some margin to spare, its graduation placement clearly stating direct employment at a unit less than five minutes from home.

Driven by his family's blind approval of the medical profession, plus a bit of his own yearning born from literary creation, this school he had never heard of before shot straight to the top of his priority list.

Looking back, 【——】 still couldn't figure out why he had ranked several obviously better options based on luck lower, and chosen this one without hesitation.

By the time this question first surfaced from the depths of his mind, he was already sitting in the back seat of a bus heading to registration, leaning against rolled-up bedding, with the admission notice sent two months earlier inside his document folder.

To be honest, his first impression of this school came from the ivy covering the walls; from outside the gate, one could see the entire facade of the square building in green. Interlaced broad leaves hid the exterior wall, making it impossible to judge the building's era.

It looked like an old-style teaching building popular at the end of the last century, yet on the side facing the flower-and-tree-filled plaza, it featured bold geometric modern structures and rows of large glass sliding doors.

【——】 walked around the massive stone inscribed with the school motto in running script, enjoying the shadows cast by the buildings along the plaza's edge; perhaps because of the abundant plants, even during the unbearably hot months, a refreshing coolness could be felt.

The stone steps before the building had undergone visible repairs, leveled and polished with cement. Later, during long-term use, they cracked and shattered again, and fresh cement was promptly applied, appearing slightly jarring and eyesore-like due to the color difference from the original.

Only after staying in the school for quite some time did he see in the official materials, which lacked any presence, that the verifiable school history was nearly a century long, and tracing further back was impossible to know.

Black-and-white photos, simply colored, showed people with indistinct faces and varied clothing standing before the school gate as the plaques changed; the background revealed no view inside the campus. No one could tell him whether these buildings had been demolished and rebuilt over the long passage of time, or whether their original appearance had been obscured by repeatedly applied cement and dense climbing plants.

In terms of first impressions, this place gave 【——】 a very good feeling.

Ivy was his favorite plant, especially vast patches of it; lush vines climbing to the eaves' ends and hanging down, sprouting many fine new leaves, looked as full as green stalactites growing on the buildings.

"Fantastic," he thought, "this is exactly where I want to be." 【——】 was so captivated by these green plants and buildings that he missed the fountain in the plaza, which opened only half a day each year during orientation, and never had the chance to see it again for several years.

Perhaps out of some "love the house, love the crow" mentality, he erupted with astonishing enthusiasm for his major courses, rushing day and night between different building floors to attend elective classes.

Even later, when he heard these courses were utterly useless except for accumulating credits, he still filled notebook after notebook with content that made one drowsy.

Busy days made him quickly familiar with this school, and this familiarity naturally included those buildings whose era was impossible to judge.

They were actually a square "mouth" shape, hollowed out in the middle to form an open-air small garden where wooden benches covered in moss and fungi went unnoticed. The four sides were fully and effectively utilized; offices, teaching, and experiments all ran concurrently in the externally identical buildings.

Among them, two adjacent buildings were named after the word "Truth," each taking one character, and were conveniently referred to as Building A and Building B for daily use. Compared to Building B, which had no scheduled courses, Building A, where electives were held, was more familiar.

Building A was also the location of teaching group offices for anatomy, pathology, internal medicine, surgery, and others; the rest was reserved for large classrooms and teaching laboratories. As a freshman, his few experimental classes and weekly evening lectures were all held here.

After every evening lecture, his soaring enthusiasm for learning made him never miss an opportunity to communicate with the teacher, and that young teacher was happy to answer him. The highly inspiring teaching benefited him greatly; sometimes he forgot the time, unaware that other students had all left, leaving the empty second-floor large classroom.

Thanks to this action, one time when he stayed behind alone to organize his lecture notes, he unknowingly reached past nine o'clock; the alarm reminding him that the library was about to close rang, yet the lights in the large classroom were still on.

"Oh?" 【——】 raised his wrist and glanced at his watch. This place was too remote; even the closing bell that could echo across the entire plaza couldn't reach here, and the students and teachers attending class had left long ago; he had spent a rare quiet time.

No need to fight for tables with pairs of "self-study" people in the library, nor return to the dorm to discuss volume issues with roommates who loved speakers more than headphones; it was more comfortable than squeezing into a room with rats at the animal facility. It remained open past nine.

He realized he might have discovered a school bug: a perfect self-study classroom that didn't have its lights switched off at night, known only to one person.

This thought excited 【——】; over the next few days, his nighttime study base was completely transferred here, and the alarm was pushed back by at least two hours.

Every night after everyone left, he turned off the extra lights in the large classroom, leaving only one on. He enjoyed this paradise alone in the empty building.

Under the last lamp in the classroom, sometimes he felt as if he were on a lonely island in the sea, far from the entire world, with no one able to disturb his immersion in the professional knowledge he was willing to devote his life to.

The coolness of the night endowed him with a clear mind; thinking in tranquility greatly improved his efficiency. He turned page after page of "Systematic Anatomy," those obscure and awkward terms and positional relationships described in the text engraved in his mind, as firmly as proverbs carved on the motto stone.

He experienced the joy of answering tricky, consecutive questions without hesitation, the joy of achieving top grades. But more than that, a joy he had never felt before: the joy of absorbing knowledge itself.

Under the solitary lamp, the time he stayed increased day by day, and so did the accumulated pages. At times, his gaze would lift from long passages of text, his mind running on inertia, still silently reading something.

Overall, everything was very good, except for a slight trouble caused by a small problem that had recently appeared.

This pure land was actually not as quiet as he imagined. When all was silent, if he put down his pen, closed his eyes, and took a short rest, even his breath barely audible, that "noise" covered by the daytime clamor became obvious.

Although it was small enough to be drowned out by the sound of a pen scratching across a notebook, its intermittent appearance was still noticed by people, and in the quiet night, it sounded grating.

At first, he thought it was tinnitus or auditory hallucination caused by being in a silent environment for too long, and tried to eliminate it by reciting softly.

However, once it drew attention, the noise could no longer be ignored; 【——】 would subconsciously search for its existence and locate its source. After a few days like this, he had become quite sensitive to it, vaguely feeling it was the sound of hard objects rubbing together coming from downstairs.

This position on the first floor was not a large classroom, but a room with a large iron door; he should have heard someone say it belonged to some teacher. There were too many teachers in this building, and in the end, he truly couldn't remember which course it was for.

He often saw animals brought from the animal facility on the playground side delivered to the first floor; besides being used for students to practice in teaching laboratories, it was not impossible they were supplied for teachers' research projects.

Anyone who has been to the animal facility knows how noisy small white rats can be; those noises could be cute little creatures gnawing on small cylindrical feed. Considering they didn't have much time left to make noise, it would be ridiculous to quarrel with some rodents nearing the end of their lives; it certainly wasn't because he himself was the "illegal occupant" here and felt a bit guilty.

After getting used to it, it was no big deal; that noise actually became his companion during self-study. During pauses in writing each night, he imagined a group of small animals keeping him company while he stayed up late.

A relatively irritable white rat, versus a relatively docile large rat. Just knowing other creatures existed alleviated the loneliness, so much so that every night when he returned, he would listen for that sound.

After realizing its existence, the large room on the first floor, which previously had little presence, gradually entered his field of view. He deliberately took a detour, exiting from the corridor on the other side to observe along the way.

Unlike other classrooms or laboratories, this room lacked windows but had several sets of exhaust fans. The room's design seemed intended to be independent from the building, forming its own system.

Recalling the month or so he had spent entering and leaving this building, he seemed never to have seen that large iron door opened, nor anyone entering or exiting.

This question remained in his heart; 【——】 continued to enjoy his evening self-study with very little noise, occasionally wondering why it was intermittent; did experimental animals also make noise intermittently?

By the time the final exams ended, he still hadn't figured these things out, nor had he seen the teacher managing that room.

On the day before the holiday, 【——】 went to find his familiar advisor to fill out the application to stay on campus; a printer malfunction forced both of them to go downstairs together to the print shop, passing right by the first floor. He remembered this matter, raised the question that had troubled him for most of the semester, and mentioned the faint noises at night.

"So, which teacher's room is this?"

That advisor looked at the room with an expression even more puzzled than his own. "It could also be said to be a teacher's..."

In the end, 【——】 neither got the stay-on-campus application form approved nor received an answer. After a five-minute phone call, the advisor warned him not to do such wasteful-of-electricity things in the future and to go home immediately.

As for learning who the teacher in the room was, that happened later during the "Regional Anatomy" experimental class.

He would rather willfully believe it was the intermittent, hoarse noise produced by malfunctioning exhaust fan blades, which, after passing through multiple layers of walls, sounded like teeth grinding on hard objects.