Boom.
With the door shut, the office held only Zhou Chechen and Lan Ling.
Lan Ling, still working the barbell with practiced ease, spoke up: "Chairman, this Zhang Yu is a bit greedy."
Zhou Chechen lounged on the sofa, smiling lightly: "Poor people, you know. A sudden triumph in youth, a bout of arrogance. All perfectly normal."
"If I'd jumped seventy points in a single month like him, I'd be just as cocky."
"Just give him another month to think it over."
Lan Ling's gaze turned cold: "Chairman, you really want to bump his contract terms up even further?"
Zhou Chechen said flatly: "Lan Ling, you've seen too few poor people. You don't understand them."
"Shackled by family upbringing, experience, and standard of living, the poor tend to have very shallow horizons."
"In a situation like just now, nine out of ten would have signed with us on the spot."
"But Zhang Yu kept his composure and said he wanted to think it over at home. For that alone, I have to rate him a little higher."
"If he performs even better on next month's exam, what's the harm in raising him a grade?"
Lan Ling frowned: "I'm just afraid a man like this will never be satisfied."
Zhou Chechen laughed: "Come now, big Lan, be a little magnanimous. Don't squabble with the people below us."
"Zhang Yu isn't walking down the same road as us, and he won't fight us for our positions. Their kind has never competed with ours."
"On the contrary, the better he does, the more we make, the more he's worth investing in..."
As he spoke, Zhou Chechen had already slipped a Spirit Realm mask over his head. "I'll be catching up on classes inside the Spirit Realm all afternoon. If it's not important, don't come looking for me."
...
In the cafeteria.
The moment he left the student council office, Zhang Yu rushed over to Bai Zhenzhen. Watching her calmly working through her meal, he pressed: "Azhen, you'd better give me a damn good reason."
"Do you have any idea how determined I had to be not to sign?"
"You have no idea how much they admire my talent..."
Bai Zhenzhen said calmly: "Let me guess — the moment you walked in, he rushed over, grabbed your hand, and hadn't even put on his shoes?"
Zhang Yu froze. "It's always the same. That's how Zhou Chechen plays host to everyone he's recruiting."
"Ah?" Zhang Yu was caught off guard. *So he throws the 'welcoming-with-bare-feet' routine on every guy, does he?*
He pressed on: "But he also cleared my debts."
Bai Zhenzhen snorted: "Did he really? He just became your creditor instead, didn't he?"
"And I bet he told you no interest, no rush, that you'd pay him back slowly once you graduate."
"You're shocked again — he said the same to you?" said Zhang Yu.
"He says that to everyone he's about to sign," Bai Zhenzhen said. "But don't you go thinking this is some kindness."
"That 'no need to repay' is just talk. If you stop paying and the debt goes into default, all the decision-making power falls into his hands. The moment he applies for enforcement, the money in your account goes straight to paying down the debt. And if there isn't enough, your assets get seized."
"Think about it — what's the most valuable asset you have?"
Zhang Yu's eyes flickered. He truly had no assets to speak of. If it came to enforcement, he'd probably just live as a deadbeat.
But Bai Zhenzhen sneered: "The most valuable thing you carry is your cultivation, your flesh and blood ground down through a thousand refinements, and that dantian you never stop working."
Zhang Yu's eyes hardened: "You mean they would—"
She nodded: "Enforcement. Got money, you pay money. Got no money, they auction off your assets. Once everything outside your body is sold off, it's naturally time to sell your organs, your flesh and blood, your dantian..."
Even though he'd long since stopped holding expectations about the moral floor of Kunxu, her words still sent a weight sinking into his chest.
And Bai Zhenzhen kept going: "And don't think about running — this contract isn't just a paper one. Remember the Law Department among the Eight Great Gods? When this contract is signed, the student council uses talismans to invoke the Great God of the Heaven-Sealed Covenant to bear witness, and enforcement falls to the Eight Great Gods as well."
Good grief. What a man, this Zhou Chechen. The more he heard, the more Zhang Yu's heart clenched. *I bare my guts to you like a brother, and you play mind games with me in return? Are you sending me straight into the work camp?*
Across from him, Bai Zhenzhen went on: "Still, if you follow the contract completely and your grades rise the way they expect, they may not do a thing to you."
"But there's one key catch in another part of the contract — about which university and which major you choose when applying, and the penalties for breaking those clauses. In other words, once you sign, where you go and which major you take are theirs to decide. And every rule carries sky-high penalty fees if you so much as touch them wrong..."
Seeing the blank look on his face, she said, exasperated: "Did you not even read that part of the contract?"
Zhang Yu said, unashamed: "The benefits in the front had me so overwhelmed I couldn't stand to read on — I was afraid if I kept looking I couldn't resist signing. So I turned him down and came running to the cafeteria to find you."
Bai Zhenzhen nodded: "Fair enough. I suppose your willpower is impressive, Yu."
Then she changed the subject: "Yu, have you noticed how those filthy rich students at our school rarely ever clash with us poor wretches?"
"Have they always been courteous and refined, hardly ever throwing their weight around?"
Zhang Yu cast his mind back a moment and nodded: "Seems about right."
"Because the rich and the poor aren't competing on the same track at all. They never treated us as rivals, which is why they can act like decent people."
Zhang Yu frowned. *We're all taking the same college entrance exam — how are we not on the same track? Unless they can get into university on aerobics alone?*
But Bai Zhenzhen went on: "Because poor students aim for ordinary universities, while those filthy rich types aim for the Top Ten Elite Universities."
"For them, with their wealth, ordinary universities are a cinch. They never had the poor in mind as competition. It's only the elite universities where even they have to fight tooth and nail against the other rich."
Zhang Yu couldn't help asking: "So poor students can't get into the elite universities?"
Bai Zhenzhen: "The Top Ten have limited admission slots, and the share allotted to each city is tinier still. Here in Songyang City, the yearly quota across all ten combined... only a few dozen students. Those slots have long since been monopolized by them through every means imaginable."
"A Grade A contract is one such means — signing up talented, high-scoring poor students and dictating outright which university they apply to. Once you sign, you can't aim for the Top Ten anymore, but you become their investment, and they'll still be polite and friendly, your good classmate."
"But refuse to sign, or worse, show a leaning toward the Top Ten — and you truly become their competitor. What awaits you is competition savage beyond belief: the inhuman means they deploy, and the pressure pouring in from every side."
"Those admission slots are something their circle maintains jointly, a thing they would never allow a poor wretch to touch. On this point, all the student councils of the elite high schools stand together, sharing one honor and one ruin."
"And don't expect the school to interfere. When the social energy of parents far outweighs that of the school, even the principal can rarely control the student council."
Listening to this flood of revelation, Zhang Yu understood at once. *The Songyang bigshots banding together to freeze us poor brats out.*
In that moment he felt he could see a vast, invisible net — blotting out the sky and the earth, cast over the heads of every student, pressing down until it was hard to breathe.
Zhang Yu couldn't help marveling: "Is the gap between the Top Ten Elite Universities and ordinary universities really so enormous that they're this afraid?"
Bai Zhenzhen rolled her eyes: "What do you think? The Ten Great Sects are the one thing people can never escape from birth to death, the force that decides which way Kunxu goes. And only by entering the Top Ten Elite Universities do you have any chance of entering the Ten Great Sects."
"As for graduates of ordinary universities? The Ten Great Sects won't take them as disciples; at best they become an employee of some group under them."
Zhang Yu sighed inwardly. *So even after graduation you can't escape diploma discrimination — a graduate of an ordinary university is doomed to a lifetime as an outsourced disciple.*
Bai Zhenzhen went on: "Of course, there's one other crucial point — only the Ten Great Sects... can let you become an immortal."
A flicker of longing surfaced in her tone too. Becoming an immortal, the ultimate pursuit in the hearts of countless cultivators — among all who set foot on the immortal path, who hadn't dreamed of it?
"It comes back to me too," Zhang Yu murmured. "Immortals exist only within the Ten Great Sects."
"Anyway, that's how it is," she said. "To aim for the Top Ten is to face the slaughter that blankets the sky. So, Yu — now that you know all this... what's your plan?"
Under her gaze, Zhang Yu looked profoundly torn.
*Should I sign? If I sign, I study and take exams in safety. With the Feather Book, even if I go to an ordinary university and end up working for a sect's group, I should still do quite well, right?*
*But... the Ten Great Sects...*
He thought of the Immortal Spiritual Roots only great-sect disciples could plant, the Immortal Sect grade arts only they could use, and the fact that only they could become immortals... Between the prospects of the Top Ten and ordinary universities lay countless chasms he knew of, and more he didn't.
Just as hesitation gripped him, a wave of bitter chill surged up from his heart, and as a countdown surfaced, a realization came with it.
"Heh... study hard, get into university, join a great sect, then make money and buy up the antiques in my cart."
"To join a great sect, I have to get into the Top Ten..."
"Damn it... truth is, I never had a choice at all."
Watching Zhang Yu's constipated expression, Bai Zhenzhen patted his shoulder: "Take your time thinking. This really isn't an easy choice. They must have given you a month to decide."
Seeing her rise as if to leave, Zhang Yu suddenly asked: "What about you? Azhen, what are you planning?"
Bai Zhenzhen paused mid-motion, then said, utterly resolute: "I won't sign. I'm aiming for the Top Ten."
And Zhang Yu, feeling the chill slowly recede from his body, seemed to see his own choice plainly before his eyes.
He smiled: "Then we'll do it together."