Chapter 4: The Perfect Answer Sheet
"Is there anything I need to... prepare?"
Ye Sheng was stunned by the boy's warm and friendly smile, muttering to himself.
Strange. Why would this guy wearing a knockoff LoroPiana ask if *he* was prepared? Who on earth was the interviewer and who was the applicant here, for crying out loud?
Meanwhile, Chen Wenwen watched Lu Mingfei's retreating back with a somewhat dazed expression. She realized that despite having met him so many times and having stolen so many glances in his direction, she had never truly stepped into this tall boy's inner world.
Countless intentional or accidental encounters, yet countless times they had merely brushed past each other. Sometimes there was a simple "Hey, what a coincidence" as a greeting, while other times he would simply keep his head down reading or gaze into the distance.
It seemed he never truly saw her.
Lu Mingfei...
What kind of answers were you searching for in those heavily philosophical books? Why did you draw your sword for ten thousand strikes in the kendo dojo every day? And when you often looked off into the distance, for whom was the curve of your lips traced?
Chen Wenwen never managed to find out any of it. So she could only silently gaze at Lu Mingfei's back until he vanished entirely through that door, at which point she turned and left with a heavy heart.
...
The spacious conference room currently held only three people: Lu Mingfei, Ye Sheng, and a girl wearing the same uniform as Ye Sheng on her upper body and a dark green skirt on her lower body.
The girl had white hair and scarlet eyes, her legs beneath the skirt slender and fair. She wore a sweet smile that formed two adorable dimples in her cheeks, blooming quietly like a little flower.
"Hello, I'm Shitoku Aki, one of the examiners this time. I'm mainly responsible for asking questions and taking notes." The girl stood up and gave Lu Mingfei a slight bow, a very typical Japanese etiquette.
"Ohayou, Aki-senpai." Lu Mingfei returned the bow.
"Your Japanese is so standard!" Shitoku Aki covered her mouth, her eyes wide with pleasant surprise. If she hadn't seen Lu Mingfei's resume, she would have assumed he had previously studied abroad in Japan.
"Actually, I just taught myself the basic fifty characters and a few everyday phrases, figuring I'd probably need them someday," Lu Mingfei said with a modest smile, though in his heart, the word "probably" was replaced with "definitely."
"Do you have any plans to go to Japan in the future?" Shitoku Aki asked.
"I've longed to go for a long time." Lu Mingfei nodded.
Shitoku Aki's sense of affinity for the boy instantly and invisibly increased by a few notches. She smiled and opened her notebook.
"Well, small talk time is over. Shall we officially begin the interview?" Shitoku Aki put away the warm, girl-next-door smile she had been wearing and replaced it with a serious and formal expression.
"Do you believe there are aliens in this world?" Shitoku Aki asked softly.
As expected, it was the kind of question that no carbon-based lifeform could possibly come up with! Lu Mingfei sneered inwardly.
Cassel College just loved pulling this kind of stunt—savage to the core!
If it were the old him facing this question, he probably would have panicked, his brain would have short-circuited, and he would have rambled some Martian gibberish even he didn't understand! Totally unaware that even if he and Shitoku Aki stared blankly at each other and played mute, Professor Guderian would most likely have covered for him to get him into the school with something like, "Really? He didn't say a word? How perfect! Silence is the highest realm of loneliness!"
Because this interview was fundamentally a smoke screen set up by Cassel College to rope him into enrolling!
However, the current Lu Mingfei was no longer who he used to be. Well-read in popular literature and philosophy, he actually had a "tiny bit" of unique insight into this question, and he didn't mind discussing it in depth with the two examiners.
"Before answering this question, I'd like to ask Aki-senpai another question first." Lu Mingfei's expression was incomparably earnest.
"Huh?" Shitoku Aki didn't react for a second. Who was interviewing whom here?
"Senpai, do you believe in light?"
What kind of angle was this?
Shitoku Aki froze instantly. Just like the interviewee who had just heard her question about aliens, a deep sense of absurdity welled up in her mind when faced with Lu Mingfei's question.
It was like a river god finding an axe and asking a passing woodcutter, "Is the one you dropped a golden axe or a silver axe?" Expecting the woodcutter to honestly answer "I dropped an iron axe," the woodcutter instead turned the tables and asked, "You don't even know which axe I dropped, what kind of river god are you anyway?"—leaving the river god frozen on the spot, choking on his words and wondering why this guy wasn't playing by the rules at all!
Shitoku Aki cast a somewhat helpless glance at Ye Sheng, only to find the latter wearing an expression that was clearly just as thunderstruck by the question.
"Are you toying with the examiners?" Ye Sheng frowned and asked uncertainly.
"I swear I have no such intention whatsoever. I am asking a very serious question." Lu Mingfei shook his head.
"I don't know if you two have noticed, but the essence of these two questions actually coincides to a certain extent."
"'Do you believe in light?' originally stems from Tiga Ultraman, where he turned into light because of the children's faith and came back from the dead. So asking 'Do you believe in light?' is actually asking, 'Do you believe there is an Ultraman in this world?'"
"If you ask an adult this question, of course they'll think you're joking or messing with them, just like the senior and senpai here. But if you ask a child, they will most likely say with absolute certainty and excitement: I believe in light, and I believe in Ultraman!"
"Why believe? Because children naturally feel that if there were no light, wouldn't the world be pitch black? If there were no Ultraman, then who would defeat the monsters?"
"To a child, what is a monster? They are bad guys, evil, the fellows who snatched the lollipop from your hand in childhood, the embodiment of all evil in the world."
"Then where there is evil, there must be justice; where there is a monster, there must be an Ultraman; where there is darkness, there must be light!"
"So I think changing the question 'Do you believe there are aliens?' to 'Are you willing to believe there are aliens?' is much more appropriate."
"Is there a difference?" Shitoku Aki asked in a daze.
"Of course there is!" Lu Mingfei hit the nail on the head, as if he had been waiting precisely for this question.
"Because objectively speaking, it's very likely that aliens exist. If humans can develop civilization to this height, there must be lifeforms capable of pushing civilization to an even higher level."
"I don't know if the two of you have read *The Three-Body Problem*. In it, there is a blocker called the 'Sophon,' a high-tech artificial intelligence used by the Trisolarans to restrict human civilization. If the Trisolarans had used Sophons on Earth's civilization before exposing themselves, humans might remain completely in the dark until the day they perished, unable to discover them."
"What's even more likely is that aliens have long surpassed the constraints of three-dimensional space. Just like us humans are to ants—ants are two-dimensional creatures, and when we stand before them, they only think we're a tall wall rather than realizing we are lifeforms of a higher order than them."
"Could aliens, then, be lifeforms existing in higher dimensions than humans, which humans simply cannot probe at this stage?"
"And subjectively speaking, I am naturally willing to believe in the existence of aliens, just like children believe in Ultraman."
"Aliens fill out my imagination of the vast world beyond human civilization. Because of aliens, human interstellar exploration takes on an extra layer of crucial meaning. The universe is vast and mysterious, and it's because of aliens that we don't seem quite so alone."
The two chief examiners, Ye Sheng and Shitoku Aki, exchanged glances, staring at each other in utter bewilderment and complete confusion.