All he could do now was offer Wang Yan some comforting words. He couldn’t help with anything else, whether it was Chen Na’s whereabouts or Wang Yan’s terminal cancer.
Wang Yan replied shortly after: "Thank you, Guan. I also believe Nana will be okay. I have to hold on. I will definitely find her!"
Guan Tong sighed and stopped dwelling on the matter. After breakfast, he called Shi Jingyi, who answered quickly.
"Hello, Guan Tong. Is there something you don’t understand that you need to ask me?"
Shi Jingyi got straight to the point. She probably knew that Guan Tong wasn’t the type to call her for a casual chat.
"Yes." Guan Tong explained the questions he had about energy circulation from the previous night, and Shi Jingyi was quite surprised to hear them.
"You’ve already started practicing energy circulation? Your progress is that fast? You’ve memorized all the acupoints?"
"I’ve memorized them."
Shi Jingyi tested him with a few tricky questions, and Guan Tong answered them all correctly.
"I didn’t expect your memory to be so good! You truly are... hmm." Shi Jingyi almost blurted out, ’You truly are the world’s number one Shadow.’
"Your progress is so fast that the online course can’t really keep up. How about this, I’ll send you some of the subsequent course materials on energy circulation in a bit. You can study them on your own first."
"Okay, thank you."
"Oh, right." Shi Jingyi suddenly remembered something. "Even if you hadn’t called me, I was planning to call you in the next few days anyway."
Hearing this, Guan Tong asked curiously, "Is something the matter?"
"The whole country is entering a state of war on the 10th. You should know about that, right?"
"I know."
"At that time, everyone will have to register and be assigned to a shelter. When I heard about it, I figured you probably wouldn’t go to a shelter."
Shi Jingyi knew about Guan Tong’s identity as Shadow, and she also knew he had been hiding it and hadn’t registered. But once the state of war began, hiding wouldn’t be so easy.
"...Actually, I’ve already left the city," Guan Tong said.
"Haha, I knew it." Shi Jingyi seemed to have guessed. She laughed a few times before saying seriously, "The reason I was going to call you was to extend an invitation."
"An invitation?"
"That’s right! When we spoke on the phone before, I noticed you were learning my course material very quickly. This time confirms it. You’re a whole step ahead of the other students in my class. So, if you’re willing, you can come to the academy and be my teaching assistant."
’A teaching assistant...’
Guan Tong hadn’t expected Shi Jingyi to have this in mind and was quite surprised.
"If you come, once the state of war begins, I can register you under the identity of a special guest teaching assistant. Then, aside from spending some time each day helping the other students, you’ll be free to arrange your time as you wish. Plus, you won’t have to live in a collective shelter. You can stay in the academy’s faculty dorms. They’re all single rooms, so privacy won’t be an issue."
Guan Tong listened to Shi Jingyi’s words and thought it over carefully.
’If I register as a teaching assistant, I’ll have a legitimate identity to move around the city. Otherwise, if I remain unregistered, living in the wild is one thing, but entering a city would cause a lot of trouble.’
’And Shi Jingyi specifically mentioned that as a teaching assistant, I could live in a single faculty dorm instead of a collective shelter... That also meets my need for privacy.’
’The price for all this would be setting aside some time each day to fulfill the responsibilities of a teaching assistant—helping Lecturer Shi Jingyi organize her course materials, assisting students with their studies, and so on.’
"You don’t have to decide right away," Shi Jingyi said. "My invitation is a standing offer. Whenever you want to come, just give me a call—but it would be best to decide before the 10th. After the state of war begins, it might be a bit troublesome for an unregistered person to enter the academy."