Chapter 9 Library 1 Library
The room was hot and stuffy. You threw off the summer blanket and woke up covered in sweat.
Strange, you feel like you slept very well last night, but when you open your eyes you feel very tired, as if the night has been stretched out and you overslept.
Upon closer inspection, it was only 8 a.m.
You rub your eyes, pull back the blinds, and a blinding white light floods the room.
Overnight, it snowed. A thin layer of snow covered the uneven buildings in the residential area, and black crows hopped around on the eaves, sometimes preening their feathers, sometimes tilting their heads and staring at a certain spot with their beady eyes.
After a while, you finally realize that winter has quietly arrived.
Take out your thick winter clothes from the closet, pack your schoolbag, you have a lot of tasks to do today.
First, we need to resolve the student account issue. If there's still enough time, we should also go to the bank to get the bank card.
Before leaving, you check the heating valves and switches. After thinking for a moment, you find some tape and wrap it around the knobs to make sure the heating in the room won't turn off for any reason.
Done.
The little green book says that schools in Germany are open-style, and the larger the university, the more scattered it is throughout a city.
You can simply search for "student center" on the map; great, it's near where you live.
The student center is also one of the university's libraries.
As usual, you find the entrance and then go through it to enter the library.
You don't need to observe other people's behavior; the library rules are posted directly on the wall.
1. When you arrive at the library, please study.
2. No loud noises, no running, no dozing off, and no eating or drinking.
3. The library has book stacks on the 0th floor, study rooms on the 1st floor, and computer labs on the 2nd floor. If you find that the floor is not the right one for you, please find a booth in the corridor.
4. If the printer jams, please ask the front desk staff for assistance. Please note that the front desk staff are not professors, and professors will not be in the library.
5. The empty chairs are not for you. If you are tired, you can sit on the floor.
6. If you see a middle-aged man wearing a blue Jack Wolfskin coat, please leave immediately!
The translation is complete. As always, the word order is broken. To be on the safe side, you spent a little more time translating word by word to organize the content into normal form.
The first point already made you want to facepalm and smile wryly, but you're only here to see the staff at the front desk today, so you probably don't need to go to the back room to read books.
You walk towards the front desk, where a middle-aged woman wearing glasses stands. She is intently organizing a stack of documents and only looks up when she hears your footsteps.
"Hello," you recited in your newly learned English, "I'm an international student and I'd like to ask about my student account."
She nodded, indicating you should wait a moment, then took a form from the drawer. Before she spoke, you gave an awkward smile, held up your phone, and asked her to speak into the microphone.
She seemed a little surprised, but didn't show much sign of it. "Please fill this out," she said, "and then we'll change your account password."
You take the form and find there are more questions than expected. Besides the basic information, there are some strange questions:
Do you love learning?
Have you heard any strange noises coming from the walls in the past week?
Do you prefer egg noodle dumplings or potato balls with the pork chop?
What are all these?
This really confused you, but you carefully filled it out. Then you handed the form back to the lady at the front desk.
She quickly glanced through it, nodded, and after a few clicks on the computer, tore off a sticky note, wrote something, and handed it to you: "This is your account, and the password is the one you just wrote."
You nodded, said thank you, and were about to leave when you were called back.
“Books. You need books. For class.” She said in simple words and phrases, pointing to the book stacks door diagonally behind her. Through the glass door, you could see the booths filled with students studying.
Well, it seems that once you enter this library, you can't easily leave without experiencing anything.
To make things quick, you put your backpack in the locker, and like every other student, you took at most a tablet, picked up your small basket, and went inside.
You randomly found a corner, somewhat disdainful, but had no choice but to sit down on the floor. You opened your tablet and logged into the student-specific platform you had previously downloaded, using your newly acquired student account and password.
Now you finally know the class schedule.
Don't have a full schedule, don't have a full schedule...
Silently pray in your heart, open your course schedule for this semester, and your anxiety finally subsides.
—Although there aren't many classes, only two days a week, both of those classes are full-day lab sessions.
You wouldn't know how to do any experiments. The last time I did a chemistry experiment was in middle school. And that was a long time ago.
Sigh, looks like I'll be busy these days. I need to learn some lab-related knowledge in advance and prepare for the experiments.
LOL, you've really come here to experience studying abroad.
Several messages flashed across the top of the tablet. When I pulled them down, I found that you had also "unlocked" the student email, Office, and a series of school assignment systems.
This kind of thing, where you have to complete certain prerequisites before you can get more clues and content, really reminds me of that landlord's contact information that popped up automatically the other night.
The difference is that this time you don't feel any malice or traps; it's all neutral content that helps you survive and learn.
The homework system allows you to see the teacher's assignments, making it easier for you to prepare. And once you have an email address, you won't have to go to the school or any other organization that uses that email address to contact you anymore.
You're scrolling through your tablet when a shadow suddenly looms over you.
“Vasmahesdu?” Even though he lowered his voice, the man’s tone was still stern and cold.
Looking up, you see a very tall elderly woman with a mouth that's almost down to her chin, looking down as if she wanted to tear you apart.
You didn't understand what she was saying, but you probably understand what she misunderstood.
Quickly hold the tablet up to her face, tapping on the PowerPoint presentations and assignments posted by the teacher, racking your brains to recall the phrases you'd learned. "Le anen, yixi le anen," you stammered, trying to express your learning.
Adjusting her square-framed glasses, the elderly woman seemed to be staring right through your tablet, and you then realized that her eyes, half-hidden by her eyelids, were mostly white.
She's not blind at all!
Can she really see? Or does she determine whether students are learning through some kind of perception?
The feeling of waiting to be judged is too agonizing. You hope she will give you a quick and easy answer, or you're ready to run away and take a gamble.
Just before you were about to get up and run away, she finally moved.
She still had a pout, looking very disgusted. She whispered to you and emphasized again, "Le 'en'!" You nodded hurriedly, and only then did she leisurely turn around and leave.
I took a deep breath, touching my chest. It seems all teachers are like this: as long as you have the right attitude, they won't care if you're faking it or not.
Hurry up, now that you know what class you're going to have, go find the textbook and then leave.
Thinking this, you get up from the ground, only to be tripped by the leg of another person who was lying quietly reading.
You stumble a few steps and fall onto the soft carpet.
Tsk.
More than the pain, you're disgusted by the dirt. You frantically pat your hands and body, trying to shake off the years-old dust from the carpet.
"I'm sorry," Hua Wen suddenly said in a clear and resonant voice.
You were so busy that you didn't even realize what was happening, and almost blurted out, "It's okay."
You slammed on the brakes so hard you almost bit your tongue, and then you whirled around.
The boy, who was just an ordinary local, had not only changed his appearance to become a typical short-haired, effeminate Chinese man, but also had a "3" appear on his head.
You seem to understand the "time travel" mechanism here; apparently, logging in forcibly changes your appearance. So, will the family and friends relationships that originally belonged to this local also change?
Wait, now is not the time to pursue this issue.
It wasn't outdoors, there weren't many people around, and there wasn't an old lady suddenly appearing in the window. The boy wasn't speaking loudly either, so would he still be killed for not saying anything?
Out of simple sympathy, you quickly shake your head and wave your hands at him, pinching your thumb and forefinger together and making a gesture like zipping up a zipper over your lips.
The boy didn't understand what you meant at all. He just kept moving around, scratching his head and muttering to himself, "Where am I? This is weird. Wasn't I eating at home? Did I play games for too long and damage my brain?"
"Do you know where this is? What's wrong with you? Is your mouth itchy?" The boy kept nagging, even mimicking your gesture of "shut up."
You were speechless. Seeing that it was no use trying to help him, you simply took a few steps back and quietly observed what would happen to him.
"What a weirdo." The boy was still muttering to himself when he noticed he was still holding a book. He turned it over and over, flipping through it. "What kind of gibberish is this? Is this what English looks like?"
He rambled on for so long that you thought you'd discovered a loophole in the rules: was it possible to speak in another language if you were alone or no one was watching? God knows, it's so stifling not being able to speak freely even when you're alone.
Just then, a series of clattering sounds of leather shoes hitting the ground came from somewhere.
The sound was so loud and the echo effect was so good that it created a disorienting sense of time and space distortion.
A person walked over.
Something that could almost be called a ghost, with an indistinct armband pinned to its sleeve, like the people you met on the first day, split open its head to reveal powerfully spinning, slanted swastika-shaped leaves inside, shredding the still-stunned boy into pieces.
You hid the moment it appeared, but even with your eyes closed, you still felt a phantom pain.
The phone rang at an inopportune moment.
You opened it and saw that someone had added you nearby via "shake".
A note from the author:
----------------------
A ghost, the ghost of NZ, drifts across the continent of Germany.
Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! ^_^
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