Chapter 743 – Three Thousand Mirror Ruins 10

Chapter 743 – Three Thousand Mirror Ruins 10

Mo Lan had barely sat down when the classroom door was pushed open again.

A girl with twin ponytails bounced in, swept her gaze across the desks, and walked straight toward the seat to Mo Lan’s right.

That seat belonged to Lin Yue, who had placed second overall in this year’s aptitude test.

“You must be Mo Lan, right?” Lin Yue sat down, propped her chin on one hand, and tilted her head to study her. “I saw your name in the 《Deer Cry Daily》 this morning. Perfect scores in both aptitudes—that’s really impressive!”

Her tone was lively, but a trace of scrutiny lurked in her eyes.

As the young lady of Deer Cry Real Estate, Lin Yue had also been among the first group to step onto the testing platform yesterday.

When her results came in—85 in innate psychic power, 98 in Mirror Explorer aptitude, a total score of 183—she had been quite pleased. It was already the highest score Deer Cry Mirror had seen in several years.

Many classmates had congratulated her, all saying she had the top spot locked down for sure. Then out of nowhere, some “nobody” orphan had surpassed her, and she couldn’t help feeling a bit unbalanced about it.

Mo Lan gave a faint nod. “Thank you. You’re quite excellent yourself.”

Lin Yue was about to say something more when the classroom door opened again.

A boy wearing thin-framed glasses walked in with a composed demeanor, his calm gaze sweeping across the room. When his eyes passed over Mo Lan and Lin Yue, there wasn’t the slightest pause.

“Chen Xingye, your seat’s over there!” Lin Yue called out with a grin, pointing to the seat on Mo Lan’s left. Her tone was familiar, clearly someone who’d dealt with him plenty of times.

Chen Xingye spared her a brief glance without responding. When his gaze swept past Mo Lan, there was no flicker of reaction whatsoever, as if she were nothing more than a piece of furniture in the classroom.

He walked straight to his seat, pulled a thick notebook from his storage compact mirror, and began reading it, immersed in his own world, completely ignoring everyone around him.

Lin Yue pursed her lips and muttered under her breath, “Same as always. Hasn’t changed one bit.”

Mo Lan didn’t respond, simply withdrawing her gaze.

She was no stranger to this person.

Over the past three years, Chen Xingye’s name had monopolized the top spot in virtually every subject exam at Deer Cry Middle School, falling behind only slightly in physical training.

In the first three years of middle school, where theory courses dominated, his overall scores had always been far ahead of everyone else. He was a true academic prodigy in every sense of the word.

At yesterday’s aptitude test, his results were equally dazzling—100 in innate psychic power and 80 in Mirror Explorer aptitude, placing him third overall in the entire mirror domain.

Like the original Mo Lan, he was antisocial and a loner. His greatest hobby was burying himself in the library, poring over dense and obscure texts.

As a collateral descendant of the Chen family—the Eastern China Alliance’s foremost Mirror Explorer clan—Chen Xingye’s background was enough to make anyone in the school regard him highly.

Add to that his cold yet handsome face, and even though he was even more aloof than the original Mo Lan, he still had a massive following of admirers.

Seeing Chen Xingye slip straight into his “hermetically sealed” reading mode, Mo Lan suddenly remembered—her current persona was supposed to be a “reclusive bookworm”!

So she put on an expressionless face, pulled a book from her storage compact mirror, and lowered her head to read.

If only she’d known, she would have saved the last half of a book from last night to read now!

After class today, she absolutely had to go to the library and borrow some books she hadn’t read yet.

Lin Yue: “???”

She stared wide-eyed. Chen Xingye was deeply absorbed in studying some unknown notebook, not sparing so much as a glance at anyone around him. Mo Lan was holding a copy of 《Skill Systems and Skill Combinations》, reading with an utterly serious expression.

What was wrong with these two?!

Lin Yue’s mouth twitched, and she couldn’t help complaining in a low voice, “Hey, do you two have to be this in sync? It’s the first day of school—can’t you at least make some conversation?”

What answered her was the sound of leisurely footsteps from the doorway.

A thin, gloomy-looking boy sauntered in. “Yo, here so early?” He cracked a grin, his gaze circling from Mo Lan to Chen Xingye before settling on Lin Yue’s face. “How come the young lady didn’t bring her entourage today?”

Lin Yue rolled her eyes. “What’s it to you?”

Zhao Wuchen shrugged and ambled over to the fifth-ranked seat.

At the same time, what looked like a moving mountain squeezed through the door frame.

He was nearly two meters tall, his muscles knotted and bulging, his school uniform stretched taut over his frame. In one hand he carried a dumbbell roughly the size of a person’s head.

Following behind him was Wang Jingnan.

“Jingnan, over here,” Zhou Ming said in a low rumble, his voice as deep and resonant as a war drum.

Wang Jingnan patted him on the shoulder with a beaming smile. “Thanks for the hard work, Brother Zhou.”

He didn’t forget to call out to the one girl and three boys behind him either: “Come on in, our seats are all together!”

Hearing Wang Jingnan’s voice, Mo Lan couldn’t resist her curiosity and looked up.

This morning when she’d been reading the newspaper, she learned that she hadn’t been the last person to enter the Wang Family’s VIP room yesterday.

Wang Jingnan himself had placed seventh overall, but the sixth-ranked Zhou Ming, eighth-ranked Bai Wei, tenth-ranked Ren Miao, eleventh-ranked Zhu Rao, and twelfth-ranked Ding Yan had all been sponsored by the Wang Family.

Only the ninth-ranked Xiang Yufan, who was the son of the Lin family’s driver, had been sponsored by the Lin family. For some reason, though, he hadn’t come in with Lin Yue.

Mo Lan took one glance and matched every name to a face.

Zhao Wuchen lounged lazily against the back of his chair, a mocking smile hanging at the corner of his lips.

“Young Master Wang is quite the sight! Of the top twelve, more than half of the lower ranks are your people!”

His voice wasn’t loud, but it cut like a knife, slicing precisely into the seemingly harmonious atmosphere around Wang Jingnan and his group.

Wang Jingnan’s smile froze for just an instant before that courteous and well-mannered expression returned.

“What do you mean ‘my people’? They’re all my friends!”

He raised a hand to gesture at Zhou Ming and the other students who’d come in with him, his tone the very picture of sincerity.

Zhao Wuchen let out a derisive snort and turned his gaze to Lin Yue.

“Oh? Miss Lin, do the people your family sponsors also get to be your friends?”

Lin Yue immediately denied it. “How could they? Our family provides resources, and once they’ve grown, they repay our family. It’s purely a transactional relationship.”

She swept an arrogant glance over the people beside Wang Jingnan, as well as Xiang Yufan, who had just arrived at the classroom door. “Not just anyone is qualified to be my friend.”

The atmosphere in the classroom grew so tense that even Mo Lan, with her head buried in her book, could feel it.

Just then, a tall girl wearing a black training outfit with a dagger at her waist and a thin sheen of sweat still on her face walked through the group of students. Without so much as a sideways glance, she headed straight to the fourth-ranked seat and sat down.

Instantly, everyone’s eyes turned toward her.

She was the only student in the class besides Mo Lan who came from a modest family background and had, to this day, not accepted sponsorship from any faction—Su Yu.

Her physical abilities were exceptional, and she was skilled with a dagger. Agile and quick on her feet, she’d been able to venture solo into low-risk mirror spaces to support herself even before the aptitude test unlocked her cultivation.

For the past three years, she had consistently been the strongest performer in Deer Cry Middle School’s physical education courses.

Just as the tension in the classroom reached its peak, there was a soft click as the classroom door lock engaged automatically.