American comic: From Beijing with Love, starting with a mutant.

Pretend to faint!

Ideally, it should be an epileptic seizure.

By simply reversing the flow of qi and blood, creating two minutes of full-body spasms, and expelling half a mouthful of white foam, a perfect emergency epileptic seizure can legitimately get him into the ambulance.

But he quickly remembered Director Wang's face before he left.

"Ah Qi, if the injury is caused by your own underlying medical condition while you are on a mission overseas, the bureau will not recognize it as a work-related injury, and you will have to pay for your own medical expenses."

Fine, I'll just have to tough it out...

He slowly straightened up, his face filled with sorrow.

A slight scraping sound came from the side.

Hisako Ichiki remained upright, staring straight ahead, but her left hand quietly pushed her textbook to the right.

The pen tip stopped right on the third paragraph of the textbook.

Night on the Galactic Railroad

Good girl!

May you live a peaceful life!

After hesitating for a moment, Zhou Xingxing opened his mouth and, in front of all the delinquents in Class 3D, delivered a reading that could only be described as disastrous.

What is clearly a delicate description of the confusion and friendship of teenagers during adolescence is given a chilling sense of a yakuza negotiation by his broken Japanese mixed with Cantonese roast duck accent.

"High high↘No——Long giao↘Die——Aru——"

"Minasan, kole oo o ki na kawa da toi wu hei tomo a le ba..."

"Pfft!"

Someone, oblivious to the danger, let out a pig-like squeal, and the entire classroom erupted in laughter.

Even the usually quiet Ichiki Hisako's shoulders were trembling slightly.

Teacher Xiaomei took off her glasses, revealing prominent veins on the back of her hand.

She took a deep breath and swallowed back the curse word that belonged to the Oedo family.

Stephen Chow glanced around expressionlessly.

The blond-haired man shuddered and quickly turned his laughter into a cough.

Several other students nearby also realized what was happening and started coughing frantically, turning the entire classroom into a tuberculosis ward.

"Alright! Sit down!"

Kumiko Yamaguchi interrupted the commotion below with a cold expression, glaring at Stephen Chow, "If you dare to daydream in class again, you'll have to copy this text by hand one hundred times!"

Stephen Chow felt like he'd been granted a pardon and plopped back down in his chair.

The bell rang, signaling the end of get out of class.

To Lao Zhou, the noise was even more pleasant than the welcoming music at a foot massage parlor.

"get out of class dismissed!"

Stephen Chow spread his hands out in front of him and slumped onto the desk.

Just as he was about to close his eyes, Hisako Ichiki pushed a thin piece of paper in front of him.

Course schedule for Class D, Grade 3.

The agonizing forty-five minutes we just endured were only the first lesson.

Below, there are three squares separating the lunch break area.

Stephen Chow closed his eyes in despair.

Destroy it, hurry up.

...

The second period was math class.

A balding old man slowly wrote a word problem on the blackboard.

The general idea is that a factory purchases raw materials, takes into account transportation distance, losses during transit, and basic costs, and calculates the final profit margin.

When Stephen Chow saw this question, his professional instincts kicked in on the spot.

Isn't this just business trip expense reimbursement and accounting?

Transportation distance?

That definitely needs to include the transportation allowance for people traveling from other places and the road and bridge tolls!

Losses during transit?

That's material depreciation and force majeure losses, which require a special approval process!

He became more and more engrossed in his calculations, completely immersed in the hypothetical battle of wits and courage against Anton.

Less than two minutes.

He not only calculated the final profit, but also casually listed three lines of detailed financial explanation below.

I was really into writing it.

The balding old man strolled up to him with his hands behind his back, seemingly out of nowhere.

The old man glanced down at Stephen Chow's draft paper and praised him repeatedly for his novel approach of adding background setting to the problem.

By the third English class, the teacher was a young woman.

She opened the textbook and had the students read aloud a dialogue about asking for directions on the streets of New York.

"Hoshino-kun, please read this passage."

Stephen Chow's spirits lifted.

My buddy has survived so many near-death experiences in the US, and this is just plain stupid.

He cleared his throat and read it aloud without thinking.

He opened his mouth with a string of incredibly smooth Brooklyn street slang, and the casualness and relaxed tone were also very well captured.

The female teacher's mouth gaped slightly in surprise, her brows furrowing: "Hoshino-kun, your accent..."

"Ah, I learned it from watching movies!" Stephen Chow scratched the back of his head and grinned sheepishly.

"I see..." The female teacher nodded with some doubt and waved for him to sit down.

After a morning of this ordeal, Stephen Chow felt it was even more grueling than fighting a mutant one-on-one.

The only solace was the quiet classmate sitting next to me.

Whenever the class changed or a page was turned, Hisako Ichiki would always move the book a little closer to him or highlight the important points with the tip of her pen.

Stephen Chow really wanted to find out about the girl's background.

In this delinquent class full of monsters and freaks, this girl's normalcy was almost eerily strange.

But he held back.

Fieldwork Rule #2: Never show any intention of conducting a background check in front of an ordinary person.

He's just a new transfer student; asking too many questions could arouse suspicion.

I might as well just consider myself an idiot who can't adapt to a new environment.

When the lunch break bell rang, Zhou Xingxing unzipped his backpack and took out the lunchbox that Liu Jianyi had given him that morning.

When the lid was lifted, his back teeth were almost crushed.

Three thin, translucent slices of cheap sausage lay pitifully atop a bowl of white rice, with a wrinkled, shrunken sour plum embedded in the center.

This must be because Liu Jianyi, that stingy guy, cut back on the food expenses!

He could even picture the shameless face of Fatty Wang as he approved the "bitter memories and sweet tastes" meal plan.

Zhou Xingxing, carrying that meager lunchbox, sighed and sauntered out of the classroom, climbing the stairs all the way to the rooftop platform.

He placed the lunchbox on the steps and leaned on the rusty iron railing, looking down at the entire campus.

The afternoon sun is lovely.

The light shone on the bustling playground, on the distant clubhouse, and on the gloomy roof of the old school building locked with iron chains.

On the surface, it is just an ordinary Japanese high school.

But in Stephen Chow's eyes, that old building was a black hole with its mouth wide open.

Sixty-three people were forcibly brought here and given cold, impersonal numbers.

Those innocent people who were drained of blood, dissected, and treated as expendable resources may be buried under that pile of rotting bricks and tiles.

"Mitsuhashi, you bastard! You just tried to trade my bento for meat again!"

"Tch, it's just a piece of fried chicken! Look at how stingy you are."

Stephen Chow looked in the direction of the sound and saw a man with a sea urchin-like haircut and a golden retriever carrying lunchboxes and cursing as they came out of the stairwell.

It was Shinji Ito and Takashi Mitsuhashi.