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Join the ServerJiang Xiaoyu stumbled into a ghost academy by mistake.
Simply because his glasses had shattered, leading him down the wrong path.
The story begins with his failure in the college entrance examination.
It was late July, and the blistering sun baked the asphalt road until it shimmered.
A dilapidated minibus swayed along the winding mountain road, most of its passengers drowsing off, but Jiang Xiaoyu sat with a deep frown, repeatedly checking the text message from his cousin.
[Brother, get off at the Huangshan Town station. I’ll pick you up at the academy gates. I’m wearing a white dress.]
He silently read it over again, then clicked on his cousin’s profile picture—a blurry side profile, likely taken on a whim.
He had some impression of this cousin, but not much; she was a distant relative on his mother’s side.
Yet this very cousin was to become his “guardian” for all the academic years to come. No, according to his mother, she was to “look after” him.
It all started the night the exam results were released; Jiang Xiaoyu refreshed the portal over twenty times, and the final number that popped up left his father in silence and his mother wiping away tears.
Three hundred and twelve points.
A bachelor’s degree was completely out of the question, and even a vocational college was a long shot.
The atmosphere at home was as cold as an icehouse, and he hid in his room, too afraid to step out.
The turning point came on the morning of the fourth day when his mother received a call from their hometown. She chatted for nearly an hour, and after hanging up, her expression was visibly relieved.
“Xiaoyu, your Third Great-Aunt’s niece, Xiaoqi, goes to Huangshan Vocational Institute back in our hometown. I heard the school guarantees job placement upon graduation. Your dad and I discussed it, and you’re going there to study for three years and learn a trade.”
Just as he was about to refuse, his father stormed out of the study. “Either go to school or find a job. Take your pick.”
Jiang Xiaoyu opened his mouth, then swallowed his words. What kind of job could a high school graduate with a failed exam score and no special skills possibly find?
“Fine, I’ll go.”
“Xiaoqi has good grades and gets a scholarship every year,” his mother said, striking while the iron was hot. “Once you’re there, she can look after you.”
‘I’m a guy, how is a girl supposed to take care of me?’ Jiang Xiaoyu thought to himself, though he didn’t dare say it out loud.
And so led to this very scene—a six-hour bus ride from the city’s towering high-rises to the desolate wilderness. The scenery outside the window transitioned from overpasses to rice paddies, then into endless mountain ranges, finally entering an area where his phone signal dropped to a single bar.
“Huangshan Town! Hurry up and get off if this is your stop!” the conductor yelled at the top of her lungs.
Jiang Xiaoyu grabbed his backpack and headed toward the door.
The bus’s AC was practically nonexistent, leaving him drenched in sweat and his glasses fogged over.
Just as he was about to take them off for a wipe, his foot stepped squarely onto a plastic water bottle.
“Holy shit!”
He pitched forward entirely, his shoulder slamming into the doorframe.
His glasses flew off his face and were firmly stomped on by an older man behind him.
Crunch.
He crouched down to pick them up, his heart sinking into his stomach.
The left lens was fractured into a spiderweb, and the right side had snapped off completely.
He had 1,500-degree myopia; without his glasses, he couldn’t tell a human from an animal at five meters, couldn’t distinguish men from women at ten meters, and everything beyond twenty meters was a pixelated blur.
“What am I supposed to do now!”
With a heavy sigh, he pulled out his phone to make a call, only for the screen to flicker twice before going pitch black.
“Just my damn luck, my phone’s dead!”
He grabbed a random passerby. “Excuse me, could you tell me how to get to Huangshan Vocational Institute?”
“Go east.”
He offered his thanks and turned to walk in what he assumed was “east.”
Twenty minutes later, the asphalt road turned into concrete. Forty minutes later, the concrete turned into a dirt path.
The sun began to set in the west, and the light in the woods dimmed. The air grew damp, carrying the scent of earth and a chilling breeze.
Jiang Xiaoyu squinted to make out the road ahead, cursing every foul word he knew in his head.
“What kind of trash school is this!”
“Do they even know how to run a business?”
“Building it in a godforsaken place like this? What kind of sucker would actually come here to study?”
Suddenly, he stumbled, tripping over a tree root.
He steadied himself against the trunk and looked up. There, at the end of the dirt road beneath a massive tree, stood a figure.
“White top, white dress.”
“Cousin!”
The six-hour bus ride, the broken glasses, the dead phone, an hour of trekking through the mountains—all his pent-up grievances surged into his chest at once now that he had finally found a relative.
His eyes stung with tears, and he stumbled blindly forward.
“Xiaoqi, cousin!”
He threw himself at her, pulling the frail, white-clad figure into a tight embrace.
The person in his arms stiffened.
“My glasses broke, and I walked an hour through the mountains in the dark. I genuinely thought I was going to die out here in this primeval forest.”
He reached out to grab his cousin’s hand, only to find it freezing cold.
“Oh man, your hand is like ice.”
He frowned, sandwiching the hand between his palms to rub some warmth into it. “Are you anemic, cousin? It’s summer, yet there’s not an ounce of warmth in you. I’ll have my mom mail over some jujubes and ejiao later; we can’t just let a girl suffer from a cold constitution.”
He babbled on without pausing, but the other party gave no response.
Jiang Xiaoyu squinted at the blurry face. The girl in the white dress stood rooted to the spot, utterly motionless. The wind blew through the woods, lifting a few strands of her hair. In his eyes, her face was nothing more than a hazy white silhouette, devoid of discernible features.
Yet, Jiang Xiaoyu felt as though she was looking at him with a highly complex gaze—not frightened, nor disgusted, but rather as if she were trying her hardest to figure out what she was looking at.
After a long while, so long that he began to doubt whether he had grabbed the wrong person, she finally spoke.
“…Cousin?”
Her voice was incredibly faint, sounding like a tentative probe, yet also seeking confirmation.
“Yeah, it’s me, Jiang Xiaoyu.”
Jiang Xiaoyu breathed a sigh of relief and grinned.
“My mom sent me here to crash with you. From now on, we’re classmates, so you’ll have to look after your older cousin.”
The girl fell silent for another few seconds.
“…Look after you?”
“Yeah,” he said, patting her on the shoulder. “You’ve got great grades, so I’ll ask you whatever I don’t understand. But… don’t worry. Even though your cousin’s grades are trash, I don’t stir up trouble. I won’t be a burden to you.”
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