Reincarnated as an Energy with a System

Chapter 2051: Upcoming Field Trip

Naysha gave him a slightly odd look, as though it were an obvious piece of knowledge, before remembering that he was a transfer student from another star system.

"It’s the sixth planet in our system. The last one, the farthest out from the sun."

"And what would we be doing there?"

"It’s a field trip," she said. "The whole year goes together. They fly us out there, take us around to look at various locations on the planet’s surface, and then bring us back home."

"When is it?"

"About a month and a half from now. Forty-five days, give or take a few."

Ning raised an eyebrow. "I hadn’t heard anything about it."

"It’s a yearly thing," Naysha said with a small shrug. "Everyone already knows about it, so nobody really bothers talking about it, and it’s still more than a month away. You’d have found out eventually, probably the week before, when they start handing out the travel schedules."

That was reasonable enough, Ning supposed. The System had placed a great deal of information in his mind when it built his identity, but it had focused on the things he needed in order to blend in rather than on every scheduled event in the academy’s calendar.

"Are you excited for it?" he asked.

Naysha considered the question with a surprising lack of interest. "Not really. It’s a lifeless planet. Rock, ice, a few old research outposts that nobody uses anymore. It does have a lot of very impressive views, from what I hear, but we’re mostly visiting to get off-world and see other planets and how we handle such travel. There might be a few drills while we’re up there too."

Ning found himself mildly surprised by how flat her answer was.

A trip to another planet, even one within the same solar system, seemed like exactly the sort of thing most young cadets would be excited about, but it seemed they were used to this, at least.

"I see," he said.

Naysha headed toward the door, and Ning followed her out into the hallway, where they separated, with Naysha going off to find her roommate and Ning making his way down to the cafeteria.

He collected his meal and found Jason already sitting at their usual table, eating slowly. Ning sat down across from him.

"Do you know about the Jalun trip?" Ning asked.

Jason looked up from the screen. "Of course. Everyone does."

"Are you looking forward to it?"

Jason shook his head without needing to think about it, returning his attention to the tablet as he answered.

"Not really. There isn’t anything there for me to gain. It’s just a long flight to look at a dead planet, some tests and drills, and then another long flight to come back."

Ning considered Jason’s words for a moment while he ate and supposed that was fair.

Two people with very different personalities had now given him almost the same answer, which suggested the trip really was as dull as they made it sound.

Perhaps there truly was nothing out there worth seeing after all, and Ning decided to leave the matter there rather than let it occupy any more of his thoughts.

The rest of the day went by without incident.

After their meal, the cadets were sent out for their afternoon field activity, which consisted of several hours of coordinated movement drills in one of the outer training yards.

By the time it was finished, most of the students were tired, sweating, and in no mood for conversation.

Ning and Jason walked back to the dormitory together and climbed the stairs to their room in comfortable silence.

Jason went straight back to his machines the moment they arrived.

He sat cross-legged on his bed with one of the smaller devices opened in front of him and a tablet propped beside it, displaying what looked like an old technical diagram covered in handwritten notes, and within a few minutes, he had become so absorbed that he barely seemed aware anyone else was in the room.

Ning, for his part, lay back on his own bed and spent the time watching recordings of simulation runs that other cadets had shared on the academy network.

He watched them mostly out of idle curiosity about the different ways people attempted the same problems and the many interesting ways they managed to fail at them.

Neither of them spoke much, but the silence between them had become an easy one, and Ning found that he did not mind it at all.

Eventually, the dinner hour arrived.

Ning took off his helmet and placed it inside his desk drawer before they left, as he had begun doing whenever he knew he would not need it for a while, and Jason set his own helmet down on his desk beside the stack of tablets.

The two of them went down to the cafeteria together, ate at their usual table, and talked a little about the engineering lesson from that morning, which Jason seemed to have enjoyed far more than anything else that week.

Then they returned to their room.

The moment Ning stepped through the doorway, he knew that something was wrong.

It was nothing obvious and nothing that would have caught the eye of someone who was not paying attention.

His bed looked almost exactly as he had left it, but the blanket lay at a slightly different angle than before, and the pillow had shifted a few centimeters toward the wall, as though someone had sat on the edge of the mattress and then tried, not quite carefully enough, to put everything back the way it had been.

Jason walked in behind him without noticing anything at all.

He went straight to his side of the room, pulled off his academy uniform, and changed into a plain set of clothes before lying back on his bed with a tired sigh.

He had barely settled into place when he frowned and reached for something beside him.

"That’s weird," he said casually. "My helmet’s on the bed. I could have sworn I left it on the desk."