Chapter 4
“Add me on WeChat.” Yun Xiao didn’t give Yan He a chance to refuse before hanging up.
A noble young master would never deign to add someone else’s contact information himself.
Yan He wasn’t sure if Yun Xiao’s urgency meant he knew the original owner had been gathering his figurines to sell them and was about to hold him accountable. What would he do if it came to blows?
Yan He took the initiative and added Yun Xiao on WeChat. The other party immediately sent him a location.
Beasts are very protective of their lairs. For safety and privacy, the location of the F4’s private villas was a complete mystery. The location Yun Xiao sent was the F4’s exclusive public lounge area, several kilometers in a straight line from Yan He’s dormitory.
Yan He did a rough time calculation, contentedly put his phone away, and decided he had enough time to go back to sleep for a bit. Every qualified corporate slave is an expert at timing their arrival down to the last second.
A knock sounded at the door. Bai Yuzhou put down his broom and opened it. A student in a crisp academy uniform stood outside, the pale gold nameplate on his chest gleaming in the dim light.
Bai Yuzhou looked closer and recognized Senior Chen, who had helped with their registration at the academic affairs office. Two other male students were with him.
Senior Chen peeked inside. “Junior Yan, I’m here to drop off your textbooks, nameplates, and custom uniforms.”
Yan He’s throat tickled. He coughed, propped himself up, put his mask back on, and climbed down from his bed. “Thank you, Senior.”
It was a simple word of thanks, not laced with the cloying sweetness of other specially-enrolled students trying to curry favor, yet it seemed to possess a special magic that easily suppressed the restless beastly instincts.
The two students who came along stared, impressed. Smooth moves!
Too bad he was still wearing a mask; they couldn’t tell if his face was as nice as his voice.
“Do you want to try on the uniforms to see if they fit? You’ll need to wear them to the welcome party in a couple of days,” Senior Chen asked.
Bestia Academy had many sets of uniformsâtwo for each of the four seasons, plus specific attire for different occasions. Yan He glanced at the color scheme; it fit his impression of a noble academy’s uniform.
Meeting the rich students’ ambiguous gazes, Bai Yuzhou spoke up. “No need, we’ll try them on later.”
One of the students with Senior Chen immediately raised an eyebrow.
For them, esteemed seniors from wealthy families, to condescend to deliver things to specially-enrolled students was a great honor. And now these guys were refusing their kindness?
One of them poked Bai Yuzhou’s shoulder with his index finger, a meaningful smirk on his face. “You’re quite the troublemaker, kid.”
Of course, he is, Yan He thought. The protagonist shou has the same personality as Chu Yuxun from Meteor Shower; he’s destined to stand up to the F4.
Bai Yuzhouâs face was tense, but he remained silent. Yan He, staring at the two nameplates in Senior Chen’s hand, tried to smooth things over. “Senior, do we have to wear the nameplates at all times? Can we get a replacement if we lose it?”
Senior Chen looked away from Bai Yuzhou and handed the box with the nameplates to Yan He, smiling. “You can, but you’ll have to pay for a replacement, and it takes at least three days. I heard Pan Ze already applied for a new one.”
The last sentence seemed like a casual reminder to Bai Yuzhou that he had already offended a rich kidâand an F4 lackey, no lessâon his very first day.
His vomit had not only caused Pan Ze to throw away his uniform, but because a beast’s sense of smell was so sensitive, Pan Ze found the nameplate on his chest to be tainted with the stench of a lowly specially-enrolled student’s puke and had gotten rid of it as well.
Bai Yuzhou said nothing.
The nameplate in his hand was reddish-bronze, inscribed with Yan He’s name, and wasn’t particularly heavy.
Yan He’s eyes darted between the bronze nameplate in his hand and the pale gold one on Senior Chen’s chest. He suddenly remembered that the academy’s four types of nameplates were categorized like medals: gold, silver, and bronze!
As the lowest-ranking specially-enrolled students, they wore nameplates made of red bronze, which wasn’t worth much. But a nameplate made of gold was a different story…
Both the pale gold and black gold nameplates contained real gold; the pale gold ones just had a lower purity. In this world, the price of gold had already soared past 800 a gram. The pale gold nameplate was probably a dozen grams or so. Even at 75% purity, it would be a small fortune! It was nothing to the rich kids, but for a specially-enrolled student, it was a huge sum.
If he went to pick up the nameplate Pan Ze had thrown away, he could use the academy’s lab to extract the gold later. That was free money right there.
Senior Chen noticed Yan He sizing up his nameplate. In this academy, where the cruel, beastly law of the jungle reigned, it was only natural for a specially-enrolled student to envy his pale gold nameplate.
Senior Chen said meaningfully, “Juniors, if the opportunity arises, we can help you get high-level nameplates too.”
It was a hint, an olive branch.
Yan He’s DNA stirred instantly. The moment Senior Chen and the others left, Yan He stopped lounging around and immediately started putting on his shoes.
Bai Yuzhou seemed to want to say something, but in the end, he just watched Yan He briskly leave the dorm without a word.
The last campus bus had already stopped running for the day, and there were no shared bikes. After much pleading, Yan He managed to borrow an electric scooter from the dorm manager, hopped on, twisted the throttle, and sped toward the academy gate.
If he was late and someone else picked it up, his heart would break.
Ask him to go be a dog for the F4, and Yan He would drag his feet; ask him to go pick up gold, and he’d crawl there even with a forty-degree fever!
Riding against the gentle evening breeze, Yan He finally reached the academy gate after nearly an hour. The towering iron gate was like a colossal wall to the heavens, splitting the world inside and outside the academy in two.
Yan He searched in the grass and found a sour-smelling uniform with a pale gold nameplate still pinned to it, inscribed with the name “Pan Ze.”
He immediately unpinned it and weighed it in his hand. No problem making a clean profit of seven or eight thousand after refining it.
Thank you, Pan Ze, God of Wealth!
Yan He wiped the nameplate with a wet tissue, slipped it into his pocket, and then heard the heavy toll of the stone clock tower.
Oh, right. He’d almost forgotten about Young Master Yun.
Yan He turned on his phone’s navigation and rode the little scooter toward the location Yun Xiao had sent.
The amount of greenery inside Bestia Academy was astounding. Following the navigation, he rode through dense woods, occasionally spotting monkeys swinging from the branches.
“Which way now?” Yan He stopped, one leg resting on the scooter’s footboard, his long, slender fingers swiping at his phone screen.
The navigation was unclear, and there were no signs to guide him. Yan He really wanted to ask someone for directions.
“Ah… ohhh, you’re so good, brother…”
A man’s groans, sounding of both pleasure and pain, drifted from the woods, accompanied by the roars of some unknown ferocious beast. Yan He’s hand, holding the phone, froze. The face under his mask twisted in agony.
Damn gays!
Yan He yanked the handlebars, randomly picked a path, and rode off. Luckily, his gamble paid off, and he found the right road.
In the twilight, a small, two-story European-style villa appeared before him. A magnificent, dark red Persian rug lay at the entrance, and the low walls were covered in pale pink and white climbing roses, their scent scattered by the night breeze, filling the air with a rich fragrance.
He’d arrived!
Yan He could vaguely see a figure pacing back and forth in front of the arched French window, looking extremely agitated.
He checked the time. There were still ten minutes left before Yun Xiao’s three-hour deadline. Hmm, he could still drag it out a little longer.
The scooter was almost out of battery. Yan He wanted to find a place to charge it first.
It seemed Yun Xiao had pre-registered his face. Yan He pushed the scooter into the lounge’s small garden without any trouble. The garden was filled with all sorts of seasonal flowers, their fragrance so strong it was almost cloying. Behind the garden was a large, lush bamboo forest, and the occasional unknown animal track could be seen on the dirt path.
What was strange, however, was that this F4 public lounge was hidden deep within the academy grounds, yet there were no macaques swinging in the trees, nor any other creatures. It was as if a more powerful beast had marked this as its territory, and ordinary animals didn’t dare to trespass. Yan He couldn’t quite figure it out and just chalked it up to the power of money.
To his disappointment, he didn’t find any charging outlets, but he did see something that shocked him.
It was a huge iron cage, the bars as thick as two adult fingers. Curled up inside was a big tiger with a sleek, glossy coat! It had a large, round face, and its fur was a mix of brownish-yellow, white, and black stripes. If not for its immense size, it would look like a giant Golden Shaded British Shorthair.
Yan He didn’t know much about animals, so he wasn’t sure of the exact species of tiger.
It lay quietly in the cage with its eyes closed, the soft fur on its belly rising and falling with each breath, as if it were asleep.
A strange sense of danger washed over him from all directions. Yan He was a little scared, but not that scared.
He was mostly just shocked.
In his past life working for his boss, he knew that rich people liked to keep fierce beasts to show off their status, but he never thought Yun Xiao would keep a tiger! In a noble academy novel like this, the power of capital was absolute, so Yan He didn’t even bother to wonder how Yun Xiao had legally managed to own a tiger.
In his previous life, Yan He had followed a tiger owner on social media. The guy had a white Bengal tiger, whose clear eyes made it look like a big kitty, so useless it almost checked out after choking on boneless beef. But no matter how useless, it was still a tiger. Owning one was definitely cool and a major status symbol.
Why couldn’t he be the star of a drama like that for a couple of episodes?
Being on the other side of the cage made Yan He much bolder. Even the fiercest beast was no match for the power of technology.
Yan He had been to a zoo as a child. Back then, for twenty yuan, kids could get their picture taken with a baby tiger, but his parents had refused, to save money. The tiger before him had fur as smooth as the finest satin. It was the king of kings, a true mountain god returned, a world apart from the listless, scrawny tigers in the zoo.
Yan He stared at the tiger inside, and though he didn’t dare to touch it, he decisively pulled out his phone, opened the camera app, and prepared to take a few selfies with the tiger through the bars.
A beast’s hearing is many times sharper than a human’s. He Ting had just been brought back from the Discipline Room and was resting weakly in the cage when his ears were filled with the faint, frantic clicking of a camera shutter.
Annoying.
So annoying.
Suddenly, Yan He saw a pair of sharp, golden eyes filled with infinite killing intent appear in his camera’s frame. They were like a pair of the finest amber, their gaze a mix of threat and intimidation.
Yan He’s heart skipped a beat, and his whole body went rigid.
He Ting stared coldly at the back of Yan He’s head. In the animal world, a small, fragile creature would instinctively freeze or flee immediately upon being targeted by a predator.
But Yan He didn’t. Not only did he not move, but he also started snapping pictures with even more enthusiasm.
“Yeah, open your eyes a little wider. Strike a cooler pose. I’ve gotta go be a dog in a minute, so let me get a couple more shots.”
The camera’s clicks continued incessantly as the masked youth urged the caged He Ting to switch poses.
Yan He: It’s in a cage, what’s there to be afraid of?
He Ting: “…”
Where did the academy find someone so noisy?
The Siberian tiger’s massive paw pressed some button inside the cage, and with a creak, the iron bars swung open.
A heavy paw, armed with sharp claws, emerged from within and landed squarely on Yan He’s shoulder, feeling like a heavy boulder from a landslide.
The sound of the camera shutter stopped instantly. Even the talking ceased.
Yan He’s pupils shrank: …Who the hell puts the cage’s switch on the INSIDE?!!
A giant tiger head, marked with the character for “king,” slowly emerged from the open cage and pressed against Yan He’s trembling arm.
He Ting stared at Yan He’s phone, still on the selfie screen, and at the youth in the frame.
How’s this pose? You like it?
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