Chapter 515: Chapter 307: Who is the Real Best Actor?

The tense point-based matches continued the next morning.

In the stands.

"Hahaha, so that’s what happened..."

After listening to Su Zhi’s account of what he’d seen at the Shanda University Affiliated School dorms last night, Zhou Shengfa wasn’t angry at all. Instead, he just laughed with a sigh.

"Wait, how can you still be laughing?" Su Zhi pouted, confused.

He knew his old teacher. Though Zhou Shengfa was usually laid-back, he wasn’t the type to just grin and bear it when someone walked all over him.

Back when Su Zhi had been blocked from the city league, his teacher had even summoned his Pet Beast to confront the former principal right in a school leadership meeting!

But Zhou Shengfa said slowly, "Lei Ji is indeed a bit harsh and inflexible. But, how should I put it... his intentions are good. As for you saying he doesn’t respect me... that’s true, but I actually think that’s for the best."

"Huh?" Su Zhi was completely lost.

Zhou Shengfa suddenly looked at Su Zhi. "What kind of person do you think I am, as your teacher?"

Su Zhi replied instantly, "A new-era teacher who supports the leadership of the Common Defense Alliance, adheres to professional ethics, loves his students, and actively spreads the knowledge of Beast Taming..."

"Let me rephrase. Do you think I was an obedient student back in my school days?"

"Not at all."

"..."

The corner of Zhou Shengfa’s mouth twitched. He had expected that answer, but not for it to be so blunt... ’Is this the resonance between rebellious brats?’

The two looked at each other and smiled.

"Fair enough. I might be strict with you all, but my performance as a student was far worse than yours. I didn’t even get into the First Middle School back then; I ended up at the Third Middle School, and in the worst experimental class at that."

"Our class was a motley crew. Smoking, drinking, and dyeing your hair were the basics. We had all sorts of heavyweights popping up... and I was one of them back then. Can you picture me with red hair, riding a souped-up scooter?"

Yu Bao’s jaw dropped to the floor. Wu Bao’s eyes went wide, and it then pulled out a tablet and started jotting something down.

Su Zhi scratched his head. "That’s hard..."

Zhou Shengfa smiled wistfully.

...only to hear Su Zhi continue, "Because I can’t imagine you having that much hair..."

Zhou Shengfa’s face stiffened.

"Ahem, please, continue."

"Ahem. Anyway, my youth was a degenerate one. But there was an odd one out among us... Lei Ji. While the rest of us were wasting our time, he was the only one in the entire experimental class who seriously trained his Pet Beast."

As Zhou Shengfa spoke, he glanced toward a certain spot in the stands.

The team from Shanda University Affiliated School was sitting there. Lei Ji was lecturing them, seemingly going over some tactical matters.

Zhou Shengfa continued, "At the time, no one understood him. Everyone treated him like an outcast and rejected him. But because he was so serious about training his Pet Beast, not many in the class dared to provoke him. So they just resorted to some cold-shoulder tactics, like isolating Lei Ji, not talking to him, not hanging out with him... But looking at it from another perspective, wasn’t it also Lei Ji who was isolating us?"

Su Zhi seemed to understand something. "But under his influence, you settled down?"

"Yes, but for a rather bizarre reason."

Zhou Shengfa rubbed his head in embarrassment. "It was because I thought what he was doing was cool, so I started to imitate him and work hard at Beast Taming too."

"At first, we got along great, of course. It wasn’t exactly easy to find a kindred spirit in a class like that, you know? But as our studies deepened, we gradually started to have disagreements."

"Lei Ji is a follower of the Boya Alliance School. He believes that the modern Beast Taming system is already perfectly mature, and that a Beast Tamer only needs to follow the textbook step-by-step to raise a Pet Beast to its most perfect state. But I, with my simple sentiment, felt that view was too one-sided. There are huge differences between people, let alone between Pet Beasts, right?"

"We argued more than once. I still remember the most heated one: Lei Ji furiously berated me, calling me a lost cause. He said I wasn’t taking Beast Taming seriously at all, that I was just a pretentious opportunist who saw him succeeding and tried to blindly copy him without ever considering the price."

"How could he say that?" Shao Ya, who was petting her cat nearby, couldn’t listen anymore. "So if you don’t do things his way, you’re an opportunist and you’re wrong?"

Su Zhi folded his arms. "That’s pretty much the logic of flame wars on internet forums."

"No, he was actually pretty right, because that really was my mindset when I started Beast Taming. And when it came to effort, I truly couldn’t compare to him. That argument left a deep impression on me..."

Zhou Shengfa said with emotion, "The year of the college entrance exams, we were the top two performers from the Third Middle School, but the gap between us was actually quite large. Lei Ji got into Boya Normal University, which is directly under the Boya Alliance, while I only managed to get into a slightly better first-tier university here in Shanyou province."

"After that, we barely communicated. The next time we got in touch was at a school reunion after we were adults. I had come back to Huai City to teach, becoming a teacher at Huai First Middle School, while he was teaching at Shanda University Affiliated School and had even become a senior Alliance Member of the Boya Alliance."

"When I saw him, I was reminded of that argument from all those years ago. Back then, we were classmates; now, the gap between us was worlds apart. He asked me if I regretted it. I couldn’t say a word at the time. For a while, I even suspected I was wrong, that perhaps the path Lei Ji insisted on was the most perfect Beast Taming Dao..."

Zhou Shengfa’s voice grew lower, becoming almost a murmur.

Suddenly, he looked up at Su Zhi. Or more precisely, at Su Zhi and the others in his squad.

"But your appearance was a complete epiphany for me. My youth was a muddled mess, and I only managed to redeem myself with a borrowed ideal. If I’m being honest with myself, what persuasive power do I really have on my own?"

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