Chapter 157: An Entirely Normal Debriefing

Teacher Chen’s office was a spacious, sun-drenched room on the third floor of the Tianquan Building, facing south to catch the morning light.

On the way there, Selene gave her sister a subtle nudge with her elbow. She leaned in, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “Sister, when the teacher asks us what happened… what are we going to say? Are we telling the truth?”

“What else?” Celeste replied, matching her hushed tone. “You want me to make something up? Spin a tale about how we overcame countless hardships, faced down death itself, and finally redeemed the final boss with the power of love and justice to clear the Domain?”

“…That’s not entirely out of the question,” Selene mused, seriously weighing the proposal’s merits. “It sounds more like a standard hero’s script. The teacher would probably find it easier to accept.”

Beside them, Su Wan overheard the sisters’ whispering, and the corner of her mouth twitched in a barely suppressed spasm. She silently took half a step away, using her body language to broadcast a clear message: I do not know these people.

Xia Lian, nervously twisting the hem of her shirt, whispered a timid reminder, “We should just tell the truth… If we lie and the teacher finds out, the consequences will be severe.”

“Xia Lian’s right,” Celeste agreed readily. “Besides, it’s not like we did anything shameful. The truth is fine.”

‘As for whether the teacher believes us,’Celeste added silently to herself,’that’s her problem.’A wicked grin bloomed in her thoughts.’Besides, an experience this fun? If I can’t share it and watch someone’s worldview crumble, it’s like getting a five-star drop and not showing it off. What a complete waste! I can’t wait to see Teacher Chen’s face when she hears about our ‘Royal Elven City Gourmet Vacation Tour’.’

Selene immediately grasped her sister’s sinister intentions. Her eyes lit up, and she nodded emphatically. “Makes sense! Let’s do that!”

Inside Teacher Chen’s office, the cool, conditioned air was a welcome relief from the stuffy heat of the corridor. She poured each of the four girls a glass of water, gestured for them to take a seat on the sofa, and settled in behind her own desk.

Her face, usually a mask of calm professionalism, was now lit with a bright, irrepressible smile that smoothed out the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. It was a rare achievement for a group of new students to successfully purify and restore a Domain. She was already mentally drafting the glowing section about her mentorship for the year-end performance review.

“Alright, you can begin,” Teacher Chen said, turning on the recording function of her personal terminal. She leaned forward slightly, adopting a posture of rapt attention. “Report your experiences within the Domain. In detail.”

“Remember, don’t leave out any part of it,” she stressed. “That includes your initial landing point, the environment you encountered, and… how you completed the mission, step by step.”

Her gaze fell primarily on Celeste. As the team leader and its obvious core, her report was the most crucial.

“Okay, Teacher.”

Celeste cleared her throat, the corners of her mouth lifting into a perfectly well-behaved curve as she began her tale. She didn’t embellish or conceal a thing, simply recounting their experiences in a flat, matter-of-fact tone, as if she were giving a report on her summer vacation.

When she mentioned they had joined the front lines through the human kingdom’s conscription channels, Teacher Chen nodded, a look of gratification on her face. Teachable students, the expression said. It was the best way to get first-hand intelligence; their thinking was clear and logical. Not bad at all.

“On the way, we were ambushed by a group of undead, which we purified,” Celeste continued blandly. “Then we met an elven knight captain. She was a Death Knight, but she was also a living person.”

Teacher Chen’s hand, poised to take notes, froze with the pen tip hovering just above her screen. The smile on her face flickered for a moment.

A living Death Knight? That didn’t align with any known class system or common knowledge.

She frowned, but just as quickly relaxed her expression. It was a Domain, after all—a fragment of another world. Some unique, localized rules were to be expected. She calmly gestured for Celeste to continue.

“From her, we learned that the conflict started because the human prince and princess had sticky fingers and stole a forbidden book from the elves. She advised us not to get involved.”

“So we followed her to the elven side. She promised to help us meet the Elf Queen.”

“Later, they were ambushed by an undead Death Knight legion. Considering we still needed her to lead the way, we helped them fight off the attack.”

“Working with their trainee Death Knights, we wiped out about a hundred Level 35 undead Death Knights.”

“We also collaborated with that knight captain to force the three enemy leaders into a retreat.”

Clatter.

The pen in Teacher Chen’s hand slipped from her grasp and fell onto the desk, the sound sharp and loud in the quiet office. The smile on her face froze solid, then shattered into a million invisible pieces.

“Wait… wait a minute…” Her voice came out thin and airy. “You said you… wiped out over a hundred… Level 35 Death Knights?”

Those were Death Knights! Not a row of cabbages lining the road, waiting to be harvested!

A team of new students, all under Level 30, had participated in a battle that could level a city… and actually won?!

Celeste blinked, her expression a mask of pure, sincere innocence. “Yes, Teacher. After that, we traveled with the main elven force and went to see the Elf Queen to ask about the Domain’s core. Then we went to the human kingdom’s side and punished the prince who stole the book. Finally, we went to a place called the Frost Trail to intercept the main undead army, and incidentally linked up with the Elf Queen’s reinforcements.”

Teacher Chen was no longer listening. She sat there, utterly blank, her eyes unfocused. The words “met the Queen,” “punished the prince,” and “intercepted the main force” ricocheted inside her skull like stray bullets. Each phrase was a heavy hammer, smashing the professional understanding she had painstakingly built over two decades.

Celeste paused, picked up her glass to take a sip of water, and moistened her throat. Then, in a tone one might use to comment on the pleasant weather, she dropped the final straw.

“After that, we found the Domain’s core—a goblin who called himself an artist. I figured he’d be a menace if we left him alive, so I just used a skill to wipe him out, and the Domain purification was completed.”

“But it didn’t teleport us out, so we deduced there were still unresolved issues. We guessed it had to do with restoring the Shattered Covenant, so we followed the Elf Queen back to Silvermoon City. The Queen treated us to a huge feast, and we witnessed the humans returning the ancient texts, which restored the covenant between the two races. Then the Domain was completely restored.”

The office plunged into absolute, suffocating silence.

Teacher Chen had completely crashed.

She opened her mouth, but no words came out. The light in her eyes had scattered, and the rigid expression on her face cracked, finally dissolving into a blank void. Her entire being seemed to have had its soul extracted, leaving behind only an empty shell.

Her gaze drifted to Celeste, who wore an expression that screamed, “I’m just telling the truth.”

She looked at Selene, who was pressing a hand tightly over her mouth, her shoulders shaking as if her phone was set to vibrate.

Finally, her gaze swept over Su Wan, who was now intently studying the geometric patterns on the ceiling lamp, and Xia Lian, who was staring down at her shoes, apparently conducting a serious investigation into whether they had collected any dust.

After a full thirty seconds, Teacher Chen finally found her voice. It was a dry, hoarse rasp, saturated with a deep doubt in the very nature of the world.

“Wait… wait a minute! Let me… process this!”

She pressed both hands to her forehead, feeling her entire worldview being pinned to the ground by an invisible force, then repeatedly scoured, crushed, and polished with steel wool dipped in industrial-grade cleaner.

“According to all the intelligence you provided about the ‘Shattered Covenant’ Domain, the correct strategic process…” she began, her voice trembling, “shouldn’t it be to first restore the covenant between the humans and elves, which would significantly weaken the power of the Domain’s core, and then have the joint armies march together to crusade against the weakened core?”

She suddenly looked up, her eyes wide with the frantic look of someone who had just seen a fish walk upright for the first time. She stared fixedly at Celeste, her tone distorting and rising in pitch from the extreme shock.

“How did you… how did you just follow an elite squad, skip every single prerequisite mission, bypass all the weakening mechanics, charge directly into the face of the final boss, and forcibly purify it at its absolute full strength?!”

After she finished her tirade, a delayed realization hit her. Analyzing the correct strategic process based on intelligence was a specialized course taught only at the university level.

These four girls in front of her were new students who hadn’t even attended their own opening ceremony!

This wasn’t just “not playing by the rules.”

This was “not even seeing the card table” before flipping the entire damn thing over!

Celeste blinked her large, innocent eyes, a perfectly appropriate look of confusion and bewilderment gracing her features.

“Ah? Teacher, there was a method like that?”

In reality, her mind was screaming.

‘So that’s how you were supposed to do it?! I knew the Domain core wasn’t something a bunch of Level 20-somethings could normally handle! Even for a cheater like me, it would have been a tough fight without dropping a Starfall! I remember now! The system prompted me that I completed the purification on Hard Mode!’

[Elysian’s Note: Having a good time with the story? Every single bit helps immensely: