Chapter #5

"... Is Lin Fang here?" The teacher drawled.

"No…" the girls answered back tiredly.

That same exchange repeated through most of the list, same as it did almost every day.

"... Is Nergal here?"

"Unfortunately…" Nergal replied, raising a hand.

Mr Zhou looked up in surprise. "I can barely believe it. This is your first time in class in…"

"Two weeks."

"Yes, yes… I suppose even you have to come in eventually. Glad to have you here, Nergal."

Nergal scoffed. He hated class, hated being back in the real world. "If I wasn't legally obligated to show up this often I wouldn't be here. The only upside to being here is all the pretty girls."

Despite being a cultivation reject, Nergal was still popular in his class. The blushing cheeks and glances of many of the girls in his class showed they liked his attention.

Yep. He was definitely super handsome.

"Who cares if the cripple decided to visit class for once?"

"Leave him alone, Chen Mo." One of the girls, Yuhnou, interrupted.

Chen Mo was the son of a wealthy merchant and a rather talented cultivator on top of it. He must have thought that it would be enough to make him the most popular guy in school. Or to have the girls pining after him… But things didn't quite go to plan. Besides the two or three friends who worshipped the ground he stood on, the rest of the class didn't think much of him. The girls thought he was rude and arrogant, the guys generally thought of him as a jackass.

Nergal sighed sympathetically. "Poor Chen Mo. If only you were as handsome as I am, you'd be able to get away with being rude and arrogant like I do. Instead the heavens shamed you with a big forehead and teacup ears."

"What did you say?!"

Oh. Chen must have overheard that, somehow.

"Guess those big ears aren't for show." Nergal nodded, then rested his head on a fist.

Chen almost leapt from his seat, knocking his book bag to the floor. "You useless cripple, you dare to-!"

"Now, now, students. Let's all get along. Your first teacher should be coming along any minute and I still need to go through role-call." Mr Zhou calmed.

"There's no-one else here, Mr Zhou…" A boy near the front, Li Xie said.

Mr Zhou coughed "Well… It's a policy to run through the whole class…"

Li Xie groaned.

Their teacher glanced at his wrist watch. "Well… I suppose I could leave a few minutes early for once, grab a cup of coffee in the teacher's lounge. Ms. Tahou should be here in ten minutes for your history class…"

"Please do…"

Mr Zhou nodded. "All right, all right. But you'd all better behave. I'm speaking to both of you especially- Chen Mo, Nergal."

Nergal gave the teacher a thumbs up whilst the almost growling Chen Mo nodded shakily, fists clenched.

"Alright then. You're free to chat or go through your books– just keep the noise down. Alright?"

The class replied in the affirmative.

As soon as the door was shut and Mr Zhou's footsteps could no longer be heard, Chen Mo walked right up to Nergal's desk.

"So… You think you're funny, do you?"

Nergal yawned. "... Hilarious."

"I bet you won't say any of that without Mr Zhou here to save you…"

Then, demonstrating the reason for his rank in class, Chen transformed his hand. It stretched and grew fur, fingernails sharpened to claws. Proving his status as one of the 'Five Saints' of Chongqing High School, Chen Mo was well into the Partial Aspect Realm of cultivation. Many of their teachers speculated that he could reach Full Aspect in his first year at University. A feat that would put him in the rankings as one of China's young geniuses. He had discovered his monster form, that of an eight-foot tall werewolf, and could now transform parts of his body to it.

A reasonable person would probably choose that moment to back off, lest they be subject to a super-powered beatdown. But this was the same man who'd rushed headlong into a murder ritual to face a Transcended Aspect cultivator. He didn't exactly have a healthy sense of fear for his well-being.

Nergal, still not looking at the angry teen, asked idly. "... Which part? The big forehead part, or the teacups for ears part?"

Chen Mo slammed his wolf hand on the desk. Despite barely putting any effort into the blow, fracture lines now ran through the wood. Another hit like that and his desk would break. "How about you and I have a little spar in the Martial Hall after class?"

"Back off, Chen." A girl with hair reaching to the small of her back and brilliant blue eyes positioned herself infront of Chen Mo. Her cute face glared.

She was Li Bai, the class wrangler and his daily alarm clock. Despite threatening him from the other side of his bedroom door each morning when he actually showed up to class she never gave him a second look.

So why she was now defending him was a mystery.

Chen frowned. "What, Li Bai? You like him too?"

She looked at Nergal. "... No, I don't. I'm the class president, I'm not going to let you go around bullying our classmates."

"All I was going to do was invite him to participate in a friendly spar. That's not bullying, is it?"

"You're the highest ranked cultivator of the boys in our class, and Nergal has yet to find his dao. It wouldn't be fair."

A few of the girls muttered agreements.

Chen Mo scoffed. "He's a man, isn't he? Let him handle his own battles. What do you say, Nergal? Are you too scared to-?"

The two glanced back to look at Nergal and frowned. The window beside Nergal's desk was wide open, his seat empty and bag gone.

"... He disappeared, again…" Bai sighed.