Chapter 214: The Hard-Won Private Qingteng High School (Patreon)

This was the first true counterkill since they'd entered this dungeon!

Lin put away his ghost item, which had spent a charge restraining the monster. He didn't mind in the slightest. Yukino was leaning against the wall, catching her breath.

It had all happened so fast. Lin cornered, Shido Makoto's question breaking the deadlock, the three of them killing the thing together. The whole sequence had flowed like water.

Shido Makoto pushed himself up from the floor and flicked the black liquid off his blade. His gaze settled on the center of the black puddle, where a pen floated quietly.

He stepped forward and picked it up. A line of information surfaced in his mind.

[Ghost Item: Bloodstained Red Pen (Single-Use)]

[Effect: A grading pen infused with the endless resentment of the thirteen failing students. It holds a twisted power that can forcibly alter one rule (the change may not exceed ten characters).]

Forcibly alter a rule!

Shido Makoto's pupils contracted slightly. The value of this item was beyond measure. It was a strategic-grade artifact that could change the rules of the game itself.

It was a get-out-of-death-free card. It might even be a trump card to turn the tables on whoever was running this place.

Yukino and Lin came over to join him.

Just then, a bell rang.

"Ding-a-ling-ling…"

Evening self-study was over. The translucent ghost students in the classroom dissolved into wisps of blue smoke with the bell, one after another.

But before the three of them could even breathe a sigh of relief, the loudspeaker in the classroom crackled with static.

"Zzzt… zzzt…"

Then a man's voice drifted out of the broadcast, heavy with the authority of someone used to being obeyed.

"Heh heh heh…"

The laughter made their skin crawl.

"In light of a certain teacher's gross dereliction of duty, it seems a gentle method like self-study no longer suits you."

"So tomorrow's school life will undergo some… interesting adjustments."

"I hope all my dear students will enjoy the new curriculum I've prepared for you."

That voice… the Principal?

They had killed one teacher, and in doing so they'd drawn out someone far higher up the chain.

"Interesting adjustments… a new curriculum…" Lin muttered, his face grim. "That bastard definitely has something nasty planned."

"It's a show of force," Yukino said, her brow tightly knit. "We destroyed one of his pieces, so now he's changing the rules of the whole board to punish us."

"Whatever comes, we'll handle it. A general for every soldier, earth to dam every flood," Shido Makoto said, carefully tucking away the [Bloodstained Red Pen]. "Let's go back to the dorm and rest."

Whatever tomorrow held, keeping their strength and focus up mattered most.

*

The fourth day dawned quietly.

After a night's rest, all three of them were in much better shape. Their bodies were still tired, but having killed an NPC the night before, their morale was higher than ever.

They'd proven that the things in this dungeon weren't invincible.

But before they could even settle on a plan for the day, the dorm's loudspeaker crackled to life again.

"All Students, attention. All Students, attention."

"Breakfast has begun. All Students are to report to the canteen within ten minutes."

"A special reminder: cherishing food is a proud tradition of Green Vine High School. Anyone who wastes food will be executed on the spot."

The three of them exchanged a look and saw the same unease in each other's eyes.

The canteen again.

They didn't dare dawdle. They left the dorm at once and hurried over.

The canteen looked very different from before. The row of serving windows was now completely hidden behind thick red curtains, with only a narrow gap left at the bottom.

Pale hands reached out through the gaps, setting trays heaped with food on the counter outside. A few scattered Students stood in line, trembling, taking their trays from those ghost hands before finding corners to sit in.

Shido Makoto and the others joined the end of the line. When their turn came, a hand pushed out three trays.

The food looked incredibly appetizing. Lin hadn't eaten all day, and the smell made his stomach growl shamelessly. Still, he didn't dare touch it.

The broadcast had been perfectly clear: "Anyone who wastes food will be executed on the spot."

Not eating meant wasting food, which meant death by rule violation. Eating meant mental contamination and becoming a mindless puppet, which was no different from dying.

This was a step beyond yesterday. They needed a new way out.

Shido Makoto's eyes swept the canteen. His gaze passed over the Students eating, passed over the windows hidden behind red cloth, and finally locked onto the sealed cold storage door inside the back kitchen.

The diary in the Student Council room had mentioned it: to cultivate so-called Honor Students, the school provided them with special nutritious meals, while the failing students couldn't get even ordinary food.

That meant the genuinely uncontaminated food was most likely hidden in…

"The real food is over there," Shido Makoto said in a low voice to the other two, pointing toward the back kitchen.

Lin and Yukino followed his gaze and understood.

"But how do we get over there?" Lin frowned. "That Butcher with the knife keeps pacing around the back kitchen door. The moment we make a move, he'll spot us."

Lin was right. The canteen Butcher, over two meters tall, was walking back and forth in front of the back kitchen door with a bone cleaver in hand.

Shido Makoto was working out a plan, wondering whether he could use the [Master Key] to slip in by another route, when the pacing Butcher suddenly stopped.

It whirled around. Its eyes crossed most of the canteen and fixed on their table.

They'd been spotted! It must have noticed that the people at this table still hadn't eaten.

Every muscle in Lin's body went rigid.

"Shit, it's looking this way!"

The Butcher bared its teeth and started toward them, step by step, cleaver in hand.

What now?

A straight fight was hopeless. This Butcher was surely no weaker than last night's Headless Teacher. Run? Where to? The canteen had only one door, and bolting for it would just make them targets.

At that moment, Yukino, seated on the outermost side, reached out and swept the tray from the empty table beside her onto the floor!

Clang!

The tray shattered across the ground. The Butcher, closing in on the three of them, froze mid-stride.

By its rules, knocking over food counted as wasting food too. Its attention snapped toward the noise.

"Nice one!" Lin cheered inwardly.

"Go!" Shido Makoto hissed, seizing the fleeting opening. He led the other two under the tables and straight for the back kitchen.

The Butcher was still inspecting the empty table with the spilled food and never noticed what was happening behind it.

The three of them dashed to the back kitchen door in one breath. It was locked, but that was no problem for Shido Makoto and his [Master Key].

He slid the key into the lock and gave it a gentle twist.

Click.

The lock gave way. He pushed the door open, slipped inside with the other two, and shut it quietly behind them.

Inside the back kitchen, iron hooks hung from the ceiling, heavy with chunks of meat from unidentifiable creatures.

"Quick, find the cold storage!" Shido Makoto whispered.

They threaded their way through the kitchen and soon found the cold storage door. It was locked too, and the Master Key opened it in seconds.

The three of them slipped inside and closed the door behind them.

It looked like a giant slaughterhouse. Row after row of iron racks held dismembered, misshapen carcasses, and a layer of dark red ice covered the floor.

"The diary said they hid hope away…" Shido Makoto murmured, recalling the clues from the ledger in the Student Council room as he searched the cold storage quickly.

He led the other two all the way to the deepest corner. There, behind a shelf, he found an inconspicuous ventilation duct.

"This should be it."

Shido Makoto shoved the heavy shelf aside and revealed an exhaust fan. He pulled off its cover, and sure enough, behind it lay a cramped space just big enough for one person.

Several badly yellowed plastic bags were stacked inside. He took them out and opened one. It held a few pieces of black bread wrapped in wax paper, dried out and hard as stone, along with several bottles of what looked like tap water.

The food looked wretched, but it was definitely uncontaminated. These were the clean rations the thirteen failing students had secretly stashed here years ago to avoid being poisoned by the school.

In another bag, Shido Makoto found a folded slip of paper.

"Even if we have to eat pig slop, we will stay clear-headed and live."

Reading the line, all three of them felt something stir in their chests.

They could almost see it: years ago, in this same hopeless school, thirteen boys and girls who refused to bow down hiding in this corner, gnawing on hard bread and cheering each other on, just to keep hold of their last shred of clarity.

"Salute to them," Lin said sincerely.

"Mm," Yukino nodded.

Shido Makoto handed out the bread and water.

"Eat fast. We don't have much time."

The three of them quickly split the hard-won rations. The bread was dry, rock-hard and hard to swallow, yet at that moment it was the finest food in the world.

Once they'd eaten, their strength returned, and the rule requiring them to "eat in the canteen" was satisfied as well. They hid the remaining rations again and slipped quietly out of the cold storage.

Back in the main hall, the Butcher was still in the same spot, apparently noticing nothing amiss. The three of them returned to their seats without a word.

Then they picked up the "feast" on their trays and walked to a trash can in a corner of the canteen. Shido Makoto had checked it with his Glasses earlier: its base held a hidden waste-food chute leading straight to the underground sewage pipes.

That was probably where the failing students had gotten rid of food they didn't want to eat, too.

The three of them tipped everything from their trays down the chute. Only then did they carry the empty trays back to their seats.

Before long, the Butcher finished its patrol. It stopped at their table and looked down at their clean trays, seeming a little confused.

But it could find no evidence of a rule violation, so in the end it couldn't touch them. It dragged its cleaver back to the back kitchen, unwilling to let it go.

Crisis averted.

*

At the lunch break, the three of them returned to the empty classroom.

They were just about to discuss the afternoon's plans when blood began to flow down the blackboard at the front of the room, starting from the top.

The blood pooled and writhed on the board, finally forming a line of large characters.

"At two this afternoon, the Dean will personally conduct a moral character review."

*