Ren Yifei was speaking very softly, but others with sharp ears couldn't help it.
"Oracle bone script?!" Players were astonished by the game's level of difficulty. Aside from a few majors related to classical Chinese, who would study oracle bone script?!
Although Chinese is a pictographic script that has been simplified step by step, how many times has it been simplified?
Is this some kind of supernatural phenomenon? How can they recognize their great-grandfather (in oracle bone script) through their great-great-grandson (in simplified Chinese characters)? If they had that kind of eyesight, why would they be corporate slaves? They could just visually identify DNA inheritance, right?
"Huo! Huo Yuanjia's Jia... Pshaw, Huo! Look at the rain above and the bird below, isn't it obvious? Don't go out and say you're my student, you can't even recognize this character, it's embarrassing!"
The teacher slammed his hand on the podium, looking as if to say, "Your scolding hurts me more than yours": "Alright, alright, no one answered this question, so it's invalid. Next question."
The players below were making a ruckus, but the teacher above paid no attention. Once the minute was up, the teacher moved on to the next question, skipping over any unanswered questions. In just a short time, three or four questions were skipped.
Finally, one player couldn't hold back any longer. He pulled out an item and charged forward, shouting, "Either you die, or I live!"
Snap!
The teacher was furious: "How can you leave your seat during class?!" He raised his hand and slammed the player against the wall, as if he were swatting a fly.
The player was deeply embedded in the wall and was clearly dead; he had given the players a false demonstration with his own life.
The classroom was unusually quiet at that moment.
"You students are all academic failures, wasting your time and messing around in class. But my time is precious. I have a task to complete, and I must recite forty-five words. Please don't waste my valuable time, okay?"
The teacher NPC adopted a sincere and open tone: "If you don't want to learn, just lie there quietly and sleep. Once the forty-five minutes are up, I'll finish the lesson and leave immediately. I won't waste a single second of your time. Let's respect each other, okay?"
After playing several games, this was the first time Ren Yifei had encountered such a distinctive NPC. It was like a corporate slave eager to leave work, with every look in its eyes saying, "The sooner I die, the sooner I'll be reborn, don't keep me from going home to watch TV."
Of course, he was the only one still in the mood to analyze the NPC; the other players were still immersed in the sudden death of that player.
Staring at the unfortunate soul who had been slammed into the wall and couldn't be pried out, the players swallowed hard: although they were all going to die anyway, they didn't like dying like this.
"What should I do? Am I really going to die this time?" The player was desperate. He couldn't solve the problem, and he couldn't win the fight. This game was probably over.
"It seems my will is finally going to come in handy."
A sense of hopelessness spread among the players. Even though they had played the game for a few days or even more than ten days and were somewhat mentally prepared, they still felt extremely complicated when they realized that there was only one dead end in front of them.
"No," Ren Yifei suddenly raised his head, "there may still be hope."
The people around him were quite surprised: "You understand oracle bone script?"
Ren Yifei shook his head, then opened his phone and did something no one expected. He bought a prop: a red string.
"As a student, leaving your seat is absolutely not an option, and attacking a teacher will also result in retaliation. But what if you stay in your seat and don't initiate an attack?"
Before the others could figure it out, they saw him use the prop: the red rope emitted a glowing red light, one end stretched out with a 'whoosh' and tied the teacher's wrist, while the other end spun around and tied Ren Yifei's wrist.
"A bond of life and death, worth ten points." Within a single instance, one person can be bound together, sharing life and death for the duration of that instance.
The teacher had never done this kind of bondage play in public before, and he felt quite uncomfortable.
"Teacher, if we can't live together, let's just die together?" Ren Yifei looked at the teacher on the stage, who was completely dumbfounded, and tilted his head. "There's no rule against teacher-student relationships, is there?"
This is outrageous! You're practically threatening the teacher!
As the players predicted, Ren Yifei was indeed threatening the teacher. He had discovered in the previous game that the NPCs in this game also had an instinct to avoid danger and seek good fortune. So, would they also be threatened?
Ren Yifei stared coldly at the teacher on the stage, who was stiff with emotion: "I have a deep affection for you, teacher. I don't ask to be born on the same day, month, and year, but I ask to die on the same day, month, and year. Are you moved, teacher?"
I dare not move, I dare not move.
The teacher's face turned pale. He stared at the red string on his wrist: "You want me to help you? Impossible, at least not completely... That's against the rules."
Is that so? It seems there are still some limitations.
Ren Yifei pondered for a moment: "Otherwise, you could draw it more carefully, not so abstractly, preferably something that's easy to understand at a glance?"
The teacher was taken aback and subconsciously asked, "Isn't this specific and vivid enough?"
Looking at the teacher's sincere and questioning eyes, Ren Yifei asked: "...Do you have some special filter on your paintings?"
"Then, could you explain in more detail?" So detailed that you could tell which one it was just by listening.
If it can't be completely... then it can treat players to a certain extent, right? If it can't be drawn more carefully, let's just say it's more detailed; he's not picky.
Ren Yifei didn't want to push the NPCs too far, as there's a saying that things will turn into their opposites if they go to extremes, but he figured the other party wouldn't mind if he tried to get a little benefit out of them.
No, I mind, I mind a lot. The teacher stared straight at Ren Yifei, who remained unfazed, his face as straight as a rock, letting the teacher look at him.
After a long pause, the teacher gave in: "Fine." To avoid death, he decided to go along with it.
The other seven players instantly turned into screamers: "You can do that? How come I didn't think of that? Is it because I'm too proud?"
"This," the teacher pointed to a newly drawn picture of his, which looked like a stick with a ball on top holding another miniature ball-shaped stick, "is a person holding a child. Its original meaning is 'to raise' or 'to nurture'."
And then that was it.
Even so, the teacher was already covered in cold sweat, her eyes filled with rejection: This is the limit, there's no way to push her any further.
Ren Yifei stopped bothering the teacher and began to draw lines on the table with his fingers.
"The person holding the child is a single person, without any other more complex modifiers. It's not a person of any particular gender or zodiac sign. It might be a single-person radical."
He looked at the picture of the child again. It had a round head, a body, and four branches that extended to represent hands and feet. It looked... a bit like the Chinese character for 'dull'.
With only a minute left, he thought to himself that if the NPC didn't want to die, he had to help him; there was still a chance to try and fail. Without hesitation, Ren Yifei blurted out, "Protect! Protect him!"
"Correct!" The teacher on the stage was even more excited than him. Publicly supporting the player despite the pressure from above must have been a huge psychological burden for the teacher.
"Bao originally meant to raise or nurture, and later it was also a variant of the character 'bao' in 'swaddling clothes' and 'bao' in 'castle,' so it came to mean something like protection or guarantee."
If I get the first three points, and there's still one more, then I won't have to die with this unlucky player!
The teacher happily began drawing the next picture.
Meanwhile, the other players' eyes were practically red with envy. If it weren't for the unspoken rule that they couldn't leave their seats, they would have swarmed forward, clinging to the big player's legs and frantically trying to rack up points: "I'm so miserable! I have an eighty-year-old mother to support and a crying toddler to raise. Have pity on me and give me some points!"
"Hey bro," the player in the front row turned around and smiled, "Do you play games? To be honest, I'm a content creator on the gaming platform. There's no game I can't play well. I'll help you rank up, get chicken dinners with you, and do anything you want!"
"How about you carry me this round?"
Before Ren Yifei could speak, the player next to him disagreed. She was a young girl, around twenty-five or twenty-six years old: "Sir, you look like a successful person. You must often need to travel abroad or deal with a lot of multilingual documents."
"Proficient in five languages, especially French, English, and Latin, I'll be your personal translator from now on. You can send me documents anytime, anywhere, and I'll even get up from my sleep to translate them for you."
One after another, they were all enthusiastically promoting themselves and boasting about their abilities. At first, they were content creators and multilingual experts, but later it became a fierce competition among behind-the-scenes entertainment industry bigwigs with resources and executives of top-tier corporations.
It's all so smuggled in... it's almost fake.
Their thoughts were crystal clear: get through this first, and deal with the rest later.
Surrounded by the crowd, Ren Yifei didn't notice a thing; his mind was entirely on the NPC in front of the podium. The surrounding noise even caused him some auditory disturbance.
He already had enhanced hearing, so the seven chattering sounds had the same effect on him as if he were standing in a farm where chickens and ducks were raised together.
Fortunately, he was used to finding the key points in the noise, and with the help of his lip-reading skills, he was able to understand the teacher's explanation.
However, it was of little use.
There was only a basin, and the teacher explained that it was "a basin for washing up," but he really had no clue, so he just waved his hand and said, "Pass."
The teacher NPC was furious and slammed his fist on the blackboard: "It's '也'! It's the '也' in classical Chinese! You can't even recognize something so obvious? This year's students are really... really getting worse with each year, even worse than elementary school students!"
Ren Yifei, who at least got into university: ...
Are the requirements for elementary school students this high? Do they even need to know oracle bone script?
Ren Yifei was still wondering what had happened to the 'washbasin'? How could it have secretly evolved into 'also'? These two don't match up at all; even a caterpillar turning into a butterfly isn't as big a change.
Perhaps out of despair regarding Ren Yifei's intelligence, the teacher NPC drew two flames stacked on top of each other in the next picture, and then said, "This is..."
"Yan, the 'Yan' in 'hot,' with two balls of fire above and below, signifying flames rising continuously and a very large fire." Ren Yifei quickly answered, as he rarely encountered someone familiar.
The teacher NPC scoffed, "Knowing Yan makes you so proud? Then I should be flying to the sky and standing shoulder to shoulder with the sun!"
Ren Yifei remained remarkably calm: "Go ahead and fly, I'm not stopping you."
I wonder where this teacher is from. Did he end up here because he got beaten to death in real life for being a smart aleck? He's like a real-life version of a character from a game who can attract hatred just by his looks.
Meanwhile, the teacher NPC was also thinking to himself: This player has such a sharp tongue. Is he here because he's so disliked in real life?
"Ahem," the teacher NPC squinted, "you've already got a perfect score of six, is that good enough?"
"No way! I spent ten points to buy this item, you have to let me earn some more, right?" Ren Yifei was bargaining with him, and he thought it would end like this? That was impossible.
The teacher NPC, being controlled by others, had no choice but to provide two very simple characters: one was "雪" (snow), depicting clouds and snowflakes; the other was "涯" (cliff), with flowing water on the left and a cliff on the right.
Because it was so easy, other players saw it and tried to answer it, but Ren Yifei beat them all to it.
"Is that enough?" the teacher NPC asked impatiently. 12 points already, you've earned it back, don't push your luck.
"I can, but…" Ren Yifei pointed to the others, "they can't yet."
The players, who had been on the verge of despair, suddenly looked up, their eyes gleaming with hope. Only one person in the entire arena had a face as green as a wetland park: "Don't go too far!"
"It's not too much to ask," Ren Yifei said calmly. "One player has already died. Even if we've met the minimum requirement, we can consider it a compromise."
He specifically brought up this metric to trick the NPCs, because he was curious whether there was a minimum death threshold in these instances.
The teacher NPC was still naive after all, and sure enough, a surprised expression appeared on her face, as if to say, "How did you know?"
It's safe now.
Ren Yifei thought to himself.
It seems the relationship between NPCs and the Infinite Game isn't like that of the Desolate Corner dungeon, where the game creates NPCs. Their relationship is more like that of an employee and a platform for doing so, hence the minimum task requirements.
"I'm a very curious person, and I want to try to solve riddles whenever I see them. If I get a few wrong, my grades will drop to zero again, which wouldn't be good."
After threatening him, Ren Yifei put on a kind face and tried to persuade him: "We are all working people. It's not worth risking our lives for the boss."
The teacher NPC was clearly tempted, but he still had reservations: "That won't do! Why should I help these people? I'd be crazy to do something that only harms me."
Ren Yifei lowered his head and remained silent for a second before looking up again: "Have you heard of 'Friend-Supporting Demon'?"
"..." Help me up, my foot! Did they even make up a new word just for me? You guys are just casual acquaintances, is friendship this cheap these days? You don't even help your friends? You deserve to stay single until the end of the world, you know?
The teacher NPC opened his mouth, but for a moment he couldn't utter a word: He had never seen such a shameless person.
Being exploited by one player is bad enough, but to be indirectly exploited by a whole group of players? This is intolerable!
"A 'friend-supporting demon'?" The teacher NPC gave a forced smile. "I've never heard of that. Don't go too far, or do you believe I'll take you down with me?"
"I don't believe it." Ren Yifei shook his head, his face full of understanding. "I know you were just saying that out of anger."
Teacher NPC: ...