Chapter 246: Guan Feng’s Treat [Part 1]
Yes, it was just an interview. Yes, it was an activity where all that was required of the examinees was to move their mouths. However, there were many times the examinees thought they would rather go through another one of those physically taxing tests than one that was as mind boggling as this.
The examinee who was interviewed before Cillin was made to leave through another door so that he and the rest of the examinees who were still waiting for their turns couldn’t interact with him. But Cillin could already guess what kind of face the poor guy and everyone else who went ahead of him were making even without any interaction.
Cillin stared at the kind smiling teachers in the interview hall that somehow made him feel like throwing a brick at their faces and sighed in his head: what the hell are these questions?!
Two questions later, another teacher finally took over. He was an old, seemingly virtuous and reputable scholar with a Royal Academy of Sciences badge around his chest sitting next to the lead teacher. After looking through his papers for a bit, he looked at Cillin. “I’ve read through your written test paper, and it seems that you know a little zoology as well. In that case, let me ask you this question: suppose that you’re a type of coelenterate, say, a sea anemone, yes. Suppose that you’re a sea anemone, what kind of partner do you think you would find?”
“...”
Why must you compare me to a primitive, simple and brainless animal who feeds and shits through the same mouth?! And what kind of partner… what?!
When in doubt, the best way to answer a question you don’t have an answer for was to throw in your own question.
“May I know if the sea anemone in question is hermaphroditic or dioecious?” Cillin looked at the old scholar.
“Does it need to find a partner if it’s hermaphroditic?” The old scholar’s smile was very kind.
“Can a sea anemone consciously seek out a partner?”
“It can’t?”
“Have you researched it before?”
…
Five minutes later, the old scholar finally let Cillin go. He put down his papers smilingly, held up his cup and slowly sipped his tea.
The next person to ask him a question was a refined-looking middle-aged man, but his appearance was absolutely not a reason for Cillin to take him off the “crazy teacher” list.
“Don’t worry, my questions won’t be as intolerable as theirs,” the refined-looking middle-aged man said.
Cillin thought in his head: like hell I’ll believe you!
The middle-aged man tapped a button and brought up a light screen. A long passage was written on it.
“This is passage from AF1’s student rulebook. It’s only about a thousand words or so, and the content is pretty simple. So, my request is: please recite this passage in two different languages.”
Cillin looked at the passage on the light screen and thought: I knew that these teachers were all trouble. Sure, the passage on the screen wasn’t long, but the problem was that it was displayed in reverse order! It was very hard to read something in the reverse order, and the simpler the words and language used the easier it was to make a mistake. It was because the brain was conditioned to think inertially, so by the time you figured out a word’s meaning you would reflexively try to read out the word in the correct order, and not the other way around as instructed.
He wanted him to read this in two different languages no less! He was totally making things difficult for him!
Cillin read through the entire passage and thought carefully for a moment. Then, he read out the passage using the dialect he learned from Old Chang’s planet before repeating it again using the empire’s lingua franca. Overall, Cillin thought that his performance was rather satisfactory. He didn’t get anything wrong, and his pauses weren’t too obvious.
“Mm. Very good!” The middle-aged man nodded before turning off the screen. Then, he said harmlessly, “Now, please recite the passage again in the correct order. Don’t worry, just say as much as you are able.”
Thankfully, Cillin had a good memory and he had practiced a bit of reverse thinking when he was assembling parts in the past. So, the middle-aged man’s question didn’t trouble him too much.
After Cillin had recited the passage in a fluent manner, the middle-aged man nodded and motioned for the next teacher to take over. He himself had gone back to his notes and wrote something.
The next teacher to take over the middle-aged man was a fashionably dressed and intelligent-looking woman. She didn’t look like a woman in her menopause, but since she was sitting in this hall Cillin was certain that she would be harder to deal with than the women who were actually in their menopause out there.
The female teacher was all business and no smiles. Seeing that it was her turn to fire off a question, she asked immediately, “Have you heard of the Beatrice Family, the one who was on the news not long ago?”
“A little, yes.” Cillin had learned some news from the media.
The Beatrice Family was a medium level noble family. However, they had secretly broken many rules of the empire in the past due to a near complete lack of restraint. Not long ago, they even caused the heavy pollution of an entire planet while they were manufacturing medicinal drugs, and the slowness of their countermeasures even caused some nearby habitable planets to become polluted as well. As a result, several billions of people had become ill, whereas the dead numbered over tens of millions. It was this incident that triggered the destruction of the Beatrice Family. After the pollution incident had happened, the families who disliked the Beatrice Family’s conduct or were their enemies made an appeal to the royal families of Mist Bodhisattva Empire and worked very hard to earn the favor of the three kings. In the end, the royal families declared the revocation of the Beatrice Family’s noble title and title of nobility and executed them in the name of the empire’s law. Most of the populace were overjoyed to hear this.
“Alright. Please tell me about your opinion in this matter.”
Cillin let out a sigh of relief when he heard the female teacher’s question. This question was comparably easier than the others because a lot of medias had reported about it. Cillin briefly spoke about what he learned from the media, but he didn’t reveal too much of his personal opinion. It was because he had heard this from the media only, and the media were the ones who shaped the populace’s thoughts. No one except those who were actually involved would know about the truth of the matter.
“... Seeing is not necessarily believing. If I have to give a subjective opinion on this matter, I will say that nothing can be determined unless one has investigated it thoroughly on their own. Therefore, this is just my limited…”
Cillin kept his answer brief. He didn’t think the female teacher would be interested to hear a tirade or a criticism on the ugliness of nobles.
The female teacher looked pretty satisfied after Cillin had briefly answered her question, but that wasn’t all that she asked. She followed up with another question:
“More than ten days ago, a humanoid revolt had happened on a planet of the Empire’s twenty second star region. However, a rare, large scale natural disaster had occurred not long after that. Some people said that God had acted to punish those humanoids for their rebellion. What do you think?”
What a sensitive topic. She was trying to draw out Cillin’s opinion on the humanoids.
Her questions - even the questions by the questioners before her - was a test on his knowledge in regards to certain matters and his character as well.
AF1’s tests focused on testing a examinee’s physical deficiency, mental deficiency and physiological deficiency. The examinees had already been tested on their physical deficiency and physiological deficiency during the previous few tests. Just the same, their mental deficiency had been observed and logged as well. The purpose of the final interview was to confirm if their observation of the examinee’s mental deficiency was correct and check out for signs of extremism, racism and madness. After all, as the saying goes, there was a fine line between a genius and a madman.
After the female teacher was done, the teachers after her fired off some questions of their own. Every single one of them was as crazy as the last.
This test was seriously the strangest and most, most, most, most unbearable interview Cillin had ever gone through in his life. They had even framed some 18+ questions in an academic way and tossed them at him.
If these were the teachers of AF1 and AF2, he couldn’t see many students who remained normal under their tutelage. No wonder Bel said that AF1 and AF2 were run by a bunch of abnormal people; even a normal person would come out abnormal by the time they graduated.
Cillin had a feeling that his interview was much longer than the rest, at least compared to the examinees before him. What he didn’t know was that the reason these teachers were so proactive was because he was recommended by both Griffin and Guan Feng. Even the Gen Family had been pulling some strings behind the back. That was why his interview time was the longest out of everyone.
In fact, the guy after Cillin was even wondering if the teachers had gone away for a lunch break of something. Why else had they taken so long? The irritation and anxiety gnawing at him would last for a very long time before it was finally his turn to enter.
By the time Cillin finished his interview and walked out, he felt like a convict who was just released from prison. As he turned back and looked at the closed door of the interview hall, Cillin thought to himself: did he make the right choice when he chose to come to AF1?