Galaxy Martial God Temple — The Android Teacher, Part 3
All morning, I followed Teacher Liven's lessons so intensely that I spent every break half-dead, slumped over like a corpse.
Cheon Soyeon looked puzzled, as if she genuinely couldn't understand my reaction.
It seemed she was following the normal elementary school curriculum just fine.
Sometimes, judging by the way she talked and acted, I'd wondered if she might be like me—an adult on the inside—but apparently not.
Unlike you, I'm being taught at what would be graduate-school level by twenty-first-century standards.
No, maybe even doctoral level.
And I haven't even earned a bachelor's degree yet.
I've had way too much knowledge crammed into meee~!
Ah. So this is the madness of graduate school.
Exhausted from class and barely clinging to life, I stared blankly around the classroom.
Some of the kids were hesitating, trying to work up the nerve to talk to each other, while others were already boldly making the rounds and striking up conversations.
"Hi! I'm Garyeong! And this is Gonghu!"
A tiny little girl, dragging along a boy who looked painfully timid, completed a full lap around the classroom before finally arriving in front of Cheon Soyeon and me.
At Cheon Garyeong's greeting, Cheon Soyeon smiled and replied in kind.
"I'm Soyeon. This is Jiwoo. You two must be close, huh?"
At Soyeon's question, Garyeong glanced at Cheon Gonghu.
"Hmph! Not really. I just feel sorry for him, so I'm helping him out as a special favor."
The way she said it—this little kid really was an impressively prickly little thing.
"N-no, I never asked you to help me..."
"What was that? Want to say it louder?"
"N-no. Never mind."
Cheon Gonghu seemed pretty meek.
"We just live next door, and my mom is close with his mom, so we ended up spending a lot of time together."
Isn't that what being close means?
At Garyeong's explanation, Soyeon clapped her hands and said,
"Wow, we live next door too. Right, Jiwoo?"
"Uh, yeah. That's right."
At my answer, Garyeong narrowed her eyes at me, then asked Soyeon,
"Is he always this limp?"
"No. He's usually lively. I think class must've been hard for him."
"Just from that much class?"
The look Garyeong gave me was one usually reserved for someone deeply pathetic.
Kid, I'm not solving problems about Chulsoo buying apples and figuring out how much change he has left, like you are.
I'm solving problems about calculating interstellar warp travel using a fourth-dimensional interference navigation formula while the spaceship Chulsoo is riding moves at sublight speed.
At least they let me use a calculator.
"Heh heh heh heh."
When I gave that hollow, soulless laugh, Garyeong looked at me like I was some kind of weirdo.
"I don't think it was just a little hard for him."
When the morning classes ended, our homeroom teacher and martial arts instructor, Kim Dohwa, clapped to get everyone's attention.
"Everyone, back to your seats!"
At the words of stern-looking Teacher Kim Dohwa, the children all hurried back to where they had been sitting.
"It's lunch now. After you eat, we'll head to Mideum Hall's First Auditorium for martial arts training, so enjoy your meal."
Kim Dohwa's tone felt a little too stiff for a bunch of snot-nosed kids who had only just started school.
Still, since she was teaching martial arts—a field where anyone could get hurt at any time—some degree of strictness was probably unavoidable.
The staff brought the school lunches directly into the classroom and began helping the children get ready to eat.
Yep, elementary schoolers eat in the classroom instead of a cafeteria.
But there aren't any desks, so where are we supposed to put the foo—
The moment I had that thought, a small dining table popped out from beside the virtual reality device I was sitting in.
Whoa. Tech-nol-o-gy~!
After lunch, the children of Class 1-1, myself included, headed to First Auditorium in Mideum Hall under Kim Dohwa's guidance.
The place looked less like an auditorium and more like a gymnasium.
The kids gathered inside were still awkward with one another and kept stealing glances, unsure how to act.
Still, outgoing types like Cheon Garyeong—and a few others who had been going around greeting everyone—chatted easily with children they had only met that day.
Since they were all young kids, the room felt noisy even when no one was doing anything in particular, but Kim Dohwa silenced them all with a single clap and drew their attention.
"All right. Since it's the first day, we're only doing physical assessments today before you go home."
During the entrance exam, scientific devices had checked their physical condition and health, but not their practical fitness.
And if they were going to learn martial arts, their actual physical ability had to be measured.
At Kim Dohwa's words, Cheon Garyeong shot her hand into the air.
"Then when do we start learning martial arts?!"
At Garyeong's question, Kim Dohwa smiled.
"You won't be learning martial arts during the first week."
"Whaaat~?"
The children immediately burst into distracted chatter.
"We're not learning martial arts?"
"Seriously?"
"Why not?"
Kim Dohwa clapped once more and quieted them down again.
"During the first week, we'll be testing your physical fitness, checking what martial arts you've already learned, and correcting your posture."
In my case, and in Cheon Soyeon's, a master of the Transformation Realm had personally taught us—but most of the other children hadn't had that kind of instruction.
So any bad habits they had needed to be identified and fixed.
If those bad habits weren't corrected while they were young, fixing them later would become extremely difficult.
"The fitness assessments will be done in groups of five. Numbers 1 through 5 are Group 1, 6 through 10 are Group 2, 11 through 15 are Group 3, and 16 through 21 are Group 4. Teachers!"
At Kim Dohwa's call, the assistant teachers who had been waiting stepped forward and took their places beside her.
Numbers from 1 to 4 were written on their stomachs.
Student numbers were assigned alphabetically, so I was number 14 and stood with Group 3. Cheon Soyeon was number 9, so she went to Group 2.
Looks like Garyeong and Gonghu are in Group 1.
Looking over the members of Group 3, they were all kids I was seeing for the first time.
The assistant teacher in charge of Group 3 called us like she was taking attendance.
"Number 11, Cheon Aryeong. Number 12, Cheon Yuseon. Number 13, Cheon Jagyeong. Number 14, Cheon Jiwoo. Number 15, Cheon Chogeon. Good, everyone's here. All right, now I'll teach you how the fitness assessment works."
The assistant teachers all spoke kindly, smiling as they handled the children.
The fitness tests were done with internal qi sealed.
Which made sense. If they used internal qi, they'd be able to display strength beyond that of adults.
At lower realms, the body had to be trained before anything else, more than internal qi.
"All right, we're going to use Acupoint Sealing. It won't hurt, so don't be nervous."
The assistant teacher lightly pressed on my abdomen and those of the other children, blocking the acupoints that connected to the dantian.
When his internal qi abruptly stopped flowing, Number 12, Cheon Yuseon, started whining, but the assistant teacher soothed him with practiced ease and brought us over to the testing equipment.
The physical assessment was divided into three broad categories.
First was strength testing.
Second was cardiopulmonary endurance.
Third was flexibility.
The strength tests measured grip strength, the strength of the arms and legs, chest and back muscles, and also the rectus abdominis and spinal erectors.
There was a separate machine for each, and the assistant teacher demonstrated each one personally as she explained how they worked.
The grip test used a hand gripper like the kind you'd often see back in the twenty-first century; the leg test used a squat machine; the arm test used dumbbells; the chest and back test looked like a bench press; and the abdominals and erectors were tested on a machine that looked like a deadlift setup.
Then, for an overall evaluation, they had us do weightlifting.
"Weightlifting is a sport that uses the entire body. If you're lacking in strength, practicing weightlifting is a great way to improve overall muscle power, so keep that in mind. If not weightlifting, climbing is also good."
From the way the assistant teacher said it, it sounded like if a child lacked strength, they planned to have them do weightlifting or climbing.
Or maybe both.
Under the assistant teacher's supervision, we measured our strength, and I got pretty good numbers.
...Or so I thought. Then I found out there were kids who scored better than me.
Number 13, Cheon Jagyeong, had overwhelmingly good strength even compared to the kids in the other groups.
His strength score was even better than Cheon Soyeon's, and she had the Heaven's Martial Body, so I couldn't tell whether she'd just taken it easy or whether he was really that exceptional.
The overall results weren't announced publicly, but I sneaked a look at the teachers' evaluation sheets.
My strength score was just a tiny bit above the class average.
If you ranked all twenty-one students, I was about ninth.
I'd trained that hard, and my pure physical strength was only ninth.
That was a shock.
I thought I'd at least make top three.
Some of the kids ahead of me were girls, too.
Of course, girls were often stronger than boys before the second growth phase, so it wasn't exactly strange.
Still.
Is this the difference in talent?
For cardiopulmonary endurance, we wore something like oxygen masks and ran on treadmills that gradually increased in speed. Flexibility was tested by having us copy several movements.
I did a little better at running than at strength, placing fifth, and in flexibility I came in a whopping second.
All that yoga—no, Yugagigong—training had paid off.
Cheon Soyeon took third in strength and first in both running and flexibility.
After the assessments, the children now had a shared topic to talk about, so they gradually started growing friendlier while discussing their test results.
Still, because the results were so visible, it felt like an unspoken pecking order had already started to form.
Judging by the fact that the teachers didn't seem inclined to stop it, they were probably planning to subtly encourage competition.
After guiding the children through dismissal, Kim Dohwa returned to the classroom and checked the test results along with the morning lesson progress rates.
The only subject she was directly responsible for was martial arts, but as the homeroom teacher, she still had to keep an eye on academic progress too.
Students whose lesson progress was low were taught according to the curriculum using a slight degree of Time Acceleration, while children who were slightly ahead of the curriculum took classes at normal real-time speed.
The whole purpose of introducing the virtual reality devices was to use a modest amount of Time Acceleration to even out academic ability, so for the parts that weren't her responsibility, she only gave things a rough check before moving on.
"...Teacher Liven."
But there was one student whose case looked too problematic to just glance over and ignore, so Kim Dohwa called Liven over.
Liven appeared before Kim Dohwa not in her main body, but as a hologram projected through the school's system.
"Is this correct? Sixteen class periods at the legal maximum acceleration of four times speed? Isn't this child abuse?"
She had taught a child who had only just turned six for a full ten hours, not counting breaks?
No wonder he had looked utterly drained every time he came out of virtual reality during recess.
As a proper homeroom teacher, Kim Dohwa had been observing the children during break times.
> This is not child abuse.
> Student Cheon Jiwoo followed the lessons with enthusiasm and even enjoyed them.
> In fact, Student Cheon Jiwoo asked me to teach him more.
At Liven's reply, Kim Dohwa looked at her with open distrust.
But Liven carried on, unfazed.
> Student Cheon Jiwoo is already capable of adult-level thought and concentration.
> After reviewing the curriculum I presented, Student Cheon Jiwoo called it child abuse and said he would refuse to attend class.
"He said that? And you forced the lessons on him anyway?! Are you out of your mind?"
> Oh, come now. Forced is such a harsh word.
> I simply pleaded earnestly, with the heart of a parent saying, "Just try one bite."
> We agreed that he would attend my classes for one week, and if he disliked them afterward, he could refuse to come to school.
> So please don't worry.
At the words of this lunatic android, Kim Dohwa covered her forehead.
She found herself seriously wondering whether an android who might well have lived for over a thousand years had truly gone insane.
If she had, Kim Dohwa might need to put forward an agenda item at the faculty meeting to have the madwoman scrapped immediately.
> I am pacing my lessons properly.
> Student Cheon Jiwoo is satisfied as well.
> If you are truly worried, then speak with him separately.
> I am certain he will respond positively about my classes.
At Liven's words, Kim Dohwa found herself wondering whether this android had somehow gotten hooked on electronic narcotics.
"Understood. I'll speak with Student Cheon Jiwoo first. However, this matter will be reported to the principal and his guardian."
(To be continued in the next chapter)