Ning walked out of his room. Walking itself felt very weird to him. He felt like he hadn’t walked in a long while, but they weren’t deformed from not being used either.
‘It’s such a weird experience,’ he thought. Ning didn’t want to attract any attention, so he quickly took off his nearly 10 different gold badges and kept them in his storage.
Ning heard a sound coming from behind him and turned to look. The person coming towards him looked young and was someone Ning had never seen before.
‘A new teacher?’ Ning wondered.
The teacher had a bronze badge on his chest and a look of confusion as well as disgust on his face. He quickly walked around him and went outside.
‘That… was rude,’ Ning thought for a second. ‘Why was he staring at me like that?’ he wondered.
‘Am I dirty?’ he quickly checked his appearance and soon realized just how much his hair and beard had grown in the last many years.
“Oh, I forgot to cut these,” Ning thought and took out a blade. Using his divine sense, he quickly cut all the excess hair and destroyed them.
“Hm… I don’t look that bad,” he thought as he checked himself out. He looked a little older, but not by very much.
He made his way out of the underground and walked up to the open.
“Woah!” he said in surprise to see a very different building on the outside. They were the same building as before but more and more stuff was added around the outside.
“I wonder how long this closed cultivation went on for,” he thought and went around checking the different things.
He saw many students and teachers, but almost all of them were different. He made his way to the staff underground on the other side so he could find the principal.
Nobody stopped him since he was wearing a teacher’s robe, so he quickly reached the room.
He finally found the principal, but… it was a woman he had never seen before.
“Who are you?” the middle-aged woman asked him.
“Oh, uh… I’m a teacher who was gone for a while. I came to check if the principal had changed at all, and turns out you were,” Ning said.
“You were gone? Under whose approval?” she asked.
“Oh, the previous principal,” Ning said.
“I see, then that’s fine,” the woman said. “Still, you were gone for nearly 40 years, that’s not very good. Please try to come back to the academy every few years if you can.”
“Oh, sure,” Ning said. “What’s your name, by the way?”
“It’s Yola,” the girl said.
“Nice to meet you, Principal Yola. I will see you around,” Ning said and walked away.
“Hey wait, what’s your name? I need to look up your information,” Yola said.
“Oh, it’s Ning Ruogong. Goodbye,” Ning said and left. Yola then brought out the previous principal’s documents and looked for Ning in those documents.
However, no matter how much she tried, she couldn’t find his information at all.
Ning walked out of the underground and went to the Alchemy wing’s staff room. He walked in to find it to have completely changed.
There were many teachers here that he didn’t recognize at all. The desks and benches seemed to have been shifted around. The room was redecorated, and the shelves certainly had a lot more books now.
He walked up to them and saw a few books of his own that he had casually wrote out of boredom a few times.
“Are you new here?” an elderly voice came from behind him.
“Oh, sorry. I’m not new, I was just gone—”
Ning turned around and stopped when he saw the gray haired old woman with a gold star on her chest. The woman was mostly unrecognizable, but her eyes were still the same as when she brightly used to look at him with reverance.
The girl saw Ning and felt like she knew him. Slowly, memories started coming back to her and her eyes started tearing up.
“Teacher Ning?” she asked in surprise.
“Hello Reya, how are you?” Ning asked.
“Teacher, yo-you are still alive? Ho-how?” she asked.
“Huh? Why wouldn’t I be alive? I was just in closed cultivation. Didn’t I tell you?” Ning asked.
“Y-Yes you did, but then you didn’t come out for so long. I, we all thought you died in closed cultivation. We thought you failed to—”
Reya stopped speaking and emotions overtook her.
“Hey, hey. It’s alright. I’m fine. I was never in trouble during cultivation,” Ning said.
The other teachers in the room were starting to get drawn to the commotion as they looked around at each other wondering why their teacher, and senior was crying so much.
“Anyway, congratulations on becoming a gold star. It’s… still the same requirements right?” Ning asked.
“Yes, of course,” Reya said as she wiped her tears.
“Anyway, things seem to have changed a lot since I went missing. I will go around and look at the different things. You do what you have to for now,” Ning said.
Reya nodded. “I’m happy to see you doing so good,” Ning said as he patted her head and left.
Ning walked over to the beast master’s wings and saw that things had changed quite a lot with noone he knew still there. He asked around about Gonez and most people didn’t even know who he was.
He then walked over to the artifact wing and looked around. He walked inside and saw the same thing. Different room and different people.
“Sigh, things really did change around here, huh?” he thought. He turned around to walk back out when he bumped into someone at the door.
Ning was pushed a little back, which surprised him given his body cultivation, but the other person was pushed back even more.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see you—”
Ning stopped when he finally saw the person he had bumped into. His mouth opened up as he barely spoke out the word.
“Ely?”