Chapter 304: San Calombo [Part 2]
“Ahem, about that. The topic isn’t decided yet.” Cillin wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. He had prepared for a number of topics he might want to talk about during the day, but he hadn’t actually decided on a topic just yet. Guan Feng told him that he should choose what the audience looked most interested in when he got there, so he was planning to conduct an investigation and draw a conclusion based on the results.
Zhu Ming wasn’t really expecting an answer, but Cillin’s reply caused his eyes to lit up like a light bulb. If Cillin had access to this level of information, then it wouldn’t be surprising if he knew more.
“Which department does the speaker belong to? What kind of expert are they?” Zhu Ming had always admired the people of the RAS. He didn’t believe that he was a knowledgeable person, so he wanted to learn as much as possible and pass down whatever scraps of knowledge he managed to pick up to his children. He didn’t want to be thought of as a brute in pretty clothing by anyone. He couldn’t serve the army because he was injured, so he might as well engross himself in other fields of study. The desire to learn grows the older a person gets. After all, it was a person’s natural desire to minimize the amount of regrets they have in life.
Expert?
Cillin scratched his own head and let out an embarrassed chuckle. Then, he pointed at himself and said, “Thank you for the compliment, but I wouldn’t call myself an expert. I still have a long way to go.”
Tousen and Zhu Ming’s mouths started twitching. Zhu Ming was frozen in mid-posture until a long time later.
He must be joking, right?!
Zhu Ming’s image of a brilliant scholar—an elderly but well cultured person whose very word and action betrayed their enormous wealth of knowledge and achievements—started crumbling away into nothing…
Tousen was almost as surprised as Zhu Ming was. Barring the few exceptional geniuses who entered the RAS immediately after they graduated from AF1 and AF2, the institute was mostly made up of middle-aged men or women. That was why he never considered the possibility that Cillin might represent the RAS until now.
“Wh… when did you join the RAS?” Tousen asked.
“Very recently. In fact, I was sent to replace my mentor as the speaker right after I joined them.”
“If I remember correctly, you haven’t graduated from AF1, have you?”
“Nope.”
Tousen rubbed his hands together and tossed another question. “So, you came here specifically to give a presentation at San Calombo on behalf of your mentor. Am I right?”
It wasn’t until a long time later Zhu Ming recovered himself and smiled embarrassedly at Cillin. His reaction was understandable though. It was one thing to be a student of AF1, and another to be a member of the RAS!
Cillin asked Tousen and Zhu Ming to keep his arrival a secret for now. He didn’t want the public to know that he, the representative of the RAS, had arrived just yet. They slapped their chest and gave him their word.
The conversation went on for a little longer before Cillin bid them goodbye and left the inspection station. His next destination was San Calombo higher education institution.
Zhu Ming and Tousen returned to the office after sending Cillin off. Finally relaxing after Cillin was gone, Zhu Ming grabbed Tousen and began an intense round of questioning. “Who is that young man? He looks like he’s slightly over twenty at most! How on earth did he get the RAS to appoint him as an honorary scholar? And here I thought honorary scholars are all middle-aged people or old people!”
Tousen shook his head. “I’m not too sure myself. All I know is that he’s a student in AF1, a very good fighter, and that he will always have the right to change his surname to ‘Gen’ if he feels like it.”
Zhu Ming sucked in a deep breath to conceal his shock. Tousen was clearly referring to the Fuji Royal Family. He was saying that Cillin could turn himself into a prince anytime he wanted to.
“Fuck!” It took Zhu Ming a long time to spit out the word. How can the gap between people be so big?
“You know what, I made up my mind. I’m going to apply for leave. I need to listen to his presentation myself,” Zhu Ming said. Before this, he had never attended a presentation in person. It never made sense to him to go through all the trouble of applying for leave, squeeze through a crowd and sit with a bunch of sweaty people when he could be listening to the same thing from the comfort of his home or office. The internet exists for a reason.
But just this once, he wanted to attend Cillin’s presentation in person. He wanted to know how the young man made it this far, and if he was deserving of the title and status some people had to strive their whole lives to achieve.
Tousen checked his own schedule and holidays before setting down his bottle of liquor. “No problem. Let’s both see if he’s the real thing!”
The RAS was neither a place someone could enter just because they had good connections, nor a place the nobles could stick a hand in directly. They didn’t answer to anyone beside the emperor and the three kings. The people who lived in the capital star region might be used to this, but to everyone else the RAS was like a well hidden treasure that only a handful of people were allowed to peek at. Their admirers were plenty to say the least.
As mentioned earlier, Cillin flew his spaceplane all the way to San Calombo. He didn’t contact the school authorities because he wanted to check out their academic atmosphere and preferences first.
San Calombo was both the name of the education institution and the planet itself. A long time ago, a minor noble named Calombo had established the institute. He was small and unnoticeable until a series of incidents broke out in the empire, and his steady contributions throughout those incidents helped increased his status to that of a major noble.
Today, the Calombo Family barely counted as upper noble family, although their best days were long behind him. However, the family never stopped supporting the education institution their ancestor founded, and the institute repaid the favor in kind by nurturing plenty of excellent talents for the Calombo Family.
San Calombo Higher Education Institution took up an entire half of the plot of the planet. Major schools tended to be very particular about their building and scenery design, and Sam Calombo was no exception.
There were plenty of garden-style buildings in the institute. There was even a picnic forest. The hostels were surrounded by parks and squares, and the tech of the infrastructures were more or less caught up with the current world. It showed how invested the institute was in educating its students just by looking at their infrastructures.
There were a lot of education institutions who spent a huge amount of money to alter the landscape and built a gorgeous sight to behold be it natural or artificial. However, they skimped on the most important part of it all, the education of the students. Pretty on the outside but rotten on the inside, naturally these institutes almost never nurtured any talent that was worth mentioning.
There were still a couple of days before the presentation, so there weren’t too many foreigners loitering around the planet just yet. However, there were plenty of billboards with slogans such as these already: “Welcome to San Calombo, RAS!”
There was no mention if the presenter was a scholar or an honorary scholar. The advertisers themselves probably didn’t know that the ratio of an academician showing up for a presentation compared to an honorary scholar was 1:50. Even if they did, they would mostly choose to keep quiet about it.
Cillin checked the advertisements being played in the campus for a bit. They were mostly about the research results, achievements and awards won by the students of San Calombo, probably because the school authorities wanted to impress the RAS representative.
Cillin took a walk near a forest where the path was shaded. The atmosphere was pretty good overall. Some students were chatting to each other on wooden benches. Some were watching recorded lectures on a tablet. There were also people fishing next to a lake.
Splash—
The second a fish burst out of the lake’s surface, Wheeze’s attention was drawn away like a magnet.
“Let’s go fishing, Cillin!!”
There were a lot of fishes inside the lake, and a couple of fishing equipment rental shops were set up around the lake. The renters were expected to return a portion of their catch after they were done fishing.
Most people fished for the process, not the result. So there weren’t many people who complained about the odd requirement.
Cillin submitted to the gray cat’s whims and rented a set of fishing equipment. Then, he started looking for a fishing spot.
It was early afternoon, and lunch time wasn’t far away. Since Cillin was a bit late to the party, most of the good fishing spots were occupied already. He had no choice but to walk farther to find a suitable fishing spot.
There were a couple of boats floating above the lake. They were meant to add some variety to the recreational activities a student could enjoy on the campus. For example, some couples might find it a good idea to go on a romantic date on the lake. There were lifeguards and robots on standby in case someone fell into the water and they needed to take action, so no one looked particularly worried.
There were also people who rented boats to fish in the middle of the lake. As for whether their haul was better than fishing by the lakeside, Cillin had no idea.
Wheeze stared at the fishes other people caught as they continued searching for a good fishing spot. The size of the catch didn’t matter, what was important was that the people caught something and gained a sense of accomplishment from it.
A quick scan told Wheeze that all the fishes nearby were too small to wet its appetite. The bigger ones were mostly gathered at the center. So, it suggested. “Cillin, these little fishes aren’t even big enough to fit the gap between my teeth! Why don’t we rent a boat and fish at the center of the lake? The ones over there are bigger!”
“Sure.” Cillin was here to relax anyway, and it didn’t matter to him where his recreation took place. He might as well indulge Wheeze and head to the center of the lake.
He rented a small boat at the rental boat shop. The boat looked more like a door panel than a boat when it was first presented to him. It needed to be unfolded before it could be used properly.
A robot helped place the boat on the surface of the lake. After paying it the service fee it deserved, Cillin and Wheeze hopped on the boat, turned on the navigational system and adjusted the motor speed. He also activated the automatic parasol and placed two folded chairs beneath it. Finally, the young man and the cat took a seat and took in the beautiful sight of the lake.
Fishing takes patience, but Wheeze was clearly not a patient angler. Besides that, it couldn’t be bothered to use a fishing tool when it could do the same thing much more efficiently with fang and claw. So, it jumped off the boat and dove into the lake after fooling around for a bit. It even scared the school of fishes living at the bottom of the lake and herded them to the surface. As a result, countless people wised up and started using nets to catch the fishes instead of their fishing rods.
The students on nearby boats let out exclamations of joy. Cillin had set the boat to move on auto pilot, and the preset course happened to be close to the students’ boat. The students called out to him in a friendly greeting, and Cillin smiled and returned the gesture in kind.
They probably thought that he was a student of the campus.