Chapter 4: Inside Lady Academy

On the first two days of the new term, Song Mozhu truly had no way to personally take her daughter to Lady Academy. To carve out even half a day to stay with her daughter, she had already had Ziying arrange everything at Four Seasons Heavy Industries a month in advance, so no visitors or meetings would interrupt the family’s private time.

In fact, as early as about ten years ago, Song Mozhu had already handed most of Four Seasons Heavy Industries' decision-making power over to He Ziying, Ai Beihai, and a few board members who had chosen the right side more than a decade earlier. But weapons were too complicated a business, and dealing with officials from governments around the world still required her, the nominal owner, to show her face.

And for a whole series of historical reasons, Song Mozhu was surrounded by a squad of mechanical wardens she could never shake off, women trained by the past's devilish discipline. The truth was that she had very little time to spend with her daughter.

Although those prison-guard-like female synthetic wardens never left Song Mozhu's side, fortunately both Ziying and Song Xuan had long since grown used to treating that crew of humanlike female synthetics as air.

That day, starting at two in the afternoon, Song Mozhu, Song Xuan, and He Ziying all began working in the kitchen on dinner.

It could be said that on the last day of every summer and winter break, the three women cooking together had become a family tradition. The mechanical maids merely prepared the ingredients; the three women then showed off their skills in the kitchen.

"Xuanxuan, once you get to the academy, take care of yourself." The next day, after the synthetic female guards tightened the fine chains between her wrists and ankles, Song Mozhu walked all the way to the gate outside the garden fountain. Watching Ziying's car gradually disappear around the bend in the tree-lined avenue, she wanted to wave goodbye, but both hands were locked behind her at the waist strap of the latex bodysuit, so she couldn't lift them. In the end she let out a nasal sigh, and the synthetics escorted her back inside the restricted area.

The moment Song Xuan stepped through the gates of Lady Academy under her aunt's gaze, the glossy black latex of her Lady suit changed in an instant, and the high heels, raised from four centimeters to five, made her feel a touch unaccustomed.

Turning the Lady suit into the version required by the academy's rules was only the first step in enrollment. In the changing room, after stripping off every piece of clothing until even the bra and panties were removed, the glossy black Lady suit was fully revealed on Song Xuan's body.

The gleaming surface of the latex bodysuit pulled taut over the young woman's body, tracing a sexy silhouette, and the already fine features of her face were given an alluring mystery by the black latex mask covering them.

By the time she was fully grown, her height had reached 159 cm, and with the five-centimeter heels on, her already long frame looked even more upright.

Looking in the mirror, Song Xuan ran her hands over her face, then sighed through her nose. Even the exposed patches of pale skin that weren't covered by the mask still seemed to squeak under her fingers, still carrying that latex texture.

Nine years earlier, when she first entered Lady Academy, she had already been a grown student, and the Lady suit she wore sealed her body off from the air completely, from head to toe.

The knowledge she had just gained after finishing her lower-division studies was nowhere near enough to explain how her hair could grow out through the suit's hood without breaking its perfect seal, nor how the flakes of dead skin and skin oil produced by metabolism could be automatically expelled from inside it so they could be washed away in the bath, nor why the suit could grow with her body as she developed, as if she might never need to take it off in her entire life.

As for the Lady suit, Song Xuan had never exactly liked it. When she first wore the milky-white suit in first year, she kept unconsciously feeling around her body with her hands, as if searching for a nonexistent zipper to free herself. She no longer remembered what it had felt like back then, but Aunt Ziying had once told her about those younger days.

Back then, the Lady suit, as a uniform, did not yet have a punishment function, because for first-, second-, and third-year students, punishment was still too cruel.

So the suit's built-in punishment programs were still dormant, and only after a student advanced to fourth year would they automatically activate.

The homeroom teacher in first year always patiently told her to learn to adapt to the latex suit on her body and to treat it as her new skin.

She was a beautiful young teacher in a full cyan latex suit, standing on slim cyan heels, her face masked in the same cyan as Song Xuan's, and her lovely eyes made Song Xuan feel close to her right away.

Even now, Song Xuan still remembered that pretty teacher, and she was still teaching the lower years at Lady Academy.

Song Xuan often ran into her at Lady Academy. She had been the first class the teacher ever homeroomed, and the two of them had spent the same number of years living at Lady Academy. As a mark of a Lady Academy teacher, that cyan Lady suit had not been taken off for nine years either. Of course, a teacher's Lady suit could be removed freely after leaving Lady Academy, but in order to pay for her young husband's treatment, after giving birth she signed a sixteen-year continuous overtime contract and kept working at Lady Academy without interruption, weekends and summer and winter breaks alike. Because she had never left Lady Academy, her husband, who suffered from a chronic illness, was now showing signs of recovery under the treatment made possible by her overtime wages. Every week she would wait for him in the visitor hall of the security checkpoint so he could come see her. Year after year, Lady Academy had actually taken such situations into account when it drew up its rules, and had set up two-person living rooms and a children's room in the visitor area.

Later, in the junior division, when her first year there began, Song Xuan's rebellious streak became especially strong for a while, and she tried every possible means to take the Lady suit off or destroy it.

Applying to drop out first did not work. Her mother not only made an unanswerable case that her daughter had to complete the academy's twelve straight years of study from the lower division through the upper division, she had also made it clear more than once that in the future Song Xuan would be expected to apply to one of the universities with partner ties to Lady Academy. There were only nine such universities in the whole world, and every one of them was a world-class 9A institution.

Together with the House of Ladies and the Norton Union, those universities had founded Lady Academy as a brand-new college within the university system, specifically to train women for the House of Ladies and the Norton Union.

Given that she might not be able to break free from Lady Academy for the next ten years, the young Song Xuan next thought of picking the lock. But although the Lady suit looked like nothing more than an outrageously form-fitting latex bodysuit, it hid a complete set of restraint devices inside it. The collar, chastity bra, arm rings, bracelets, chastity belt, thigh rings, and anklets all hidden beneath the smooth latex had no visible keyholes. That second plan was quickly abandoned too.

Finally Song Xuan tried every kind of brute-force attack on the Lady suit: cutting with scissors, slicing with a pocketknife, scraping with a fruit knife, burning it, stabbing it with needles... Aside from leaving herself covered in bruises and triggering the suit's protective punishments, the Lady suit still came out glossy and pristine, unharmed in the slightest. Even now, after she had worn it into its tenth year, it was still as new as the one she remembered from nine years earlier.

It was not until an accident during a chemistry experiment in science class, when a large bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid was accidentally tipped all over her, that she discovered she was fine apart from her hair being badly corroded and having to wear it short for a year. Only then did she finally realize that the Lady suit was not only a seal but also protection, and that even if she herself tried to kill herself, the suit on her body would not suffer the slightest damage. She also understood that some things in this world were like fate and could not be overcome by human effort, the Lady suit among them, and in the end, after advancing to the third year of the junior division, she calmed down and accepted this helpless arrangement.

In truth, Song Xuan had never hated this uniform. Her attempts to get rid of the Lady suit had more to do with the rebellious urge to rip it off just for the sake of ripping it off, to go against Lady Academy's rules, and to rebel against her mother Song Mozhu's iron-fisted, one-word-is-law style of education.

What's more, only a month earlier she had learned that there was a boy named Ye Wuyou in this world who liked her, and even more liked the way she looked in the Lady suit. Her acceptance of the Lady suit had already increased quite a bit.

She folded the clothes she had worn back to school neatly and locked them in a storage cabinet. She would only be able to get them back the next time it was a weekend or a vacation and Aunt Ziying or Uncle Beihai came to take her out of Lady Academy. In the meantime, Lady Academy would disinfect and clean each item carefully.

Among the items she brought back with her there was one special piece of jewelry, a slender silver bracelet. Ye Wuyou had insisted on giving it to her; she couldn't refuse and ended up accepting it. When her aunt asked about it, Song Xuan could only explain that it was a gift from a friend. She wasn't lying. Ye Wuyou really was her friend now. The Lady Academy uniform had lie-detection capabilities: every time she lied, the suit on her body would expose it on the spot with a lie-detection alarm, and she would also be shocked immediately by the suit and have the incident recorded in Lady Academy's files. When she returned to Lady Academy, the academy would then make her pay a severe price for the offense on record. Song Xuan had been locked into the Lady suit since before she even knew how to lie, so she had never learned that skill in the first place. Fortunately Ziying did not ask any further questions, or Song Xuan would have had no choice but to refuse to answer; that was also one of the reasons she had repeatedly refused the gift in her letters before.

The moment she got back to school, her thoughts of Ye Wuyou quietly rose in Song Xuan's heart. Two days before the start of term, she had invited Ye Wuyou to meet beneath the ginkgo tree by Heart Lake, though the two of them met from across a path, separated by several dozen meters. That was the danger threshold in the eyes of the synthetic maids when dealing with strangers, a distance that made them sit on opposite ends of the bench, exchanging only the occasional smile over the course of half an hour.

That night, after eating dinner alone, Song Xuan had her mother Song Mozhu use the guardian bracelet to set her Lady suit into the third-year junior-division school-uniform mode: all-over pink, with five-centimeter heels. She then went to the lakeside to wait for the boy.

Pulling her thoughts back, Song Xuan locked the identity seal on her personal storage space, brought her legs and feet together, pressed her hands against her sides, and stood up straight. As long as she held that posture for more than ten seconds after entering Lady Academy, the academy's Lady suit would automatically identify her and activate the suit's basic restraint system.

This was an essential step in the academy's return-to-campus procedure. Only after the campus network detected that the student's Lady suit had activated its basic restraint system would it open the way out of the security facility and allow her into the academy proper. By then there were already plenty of Lady Academy students reporting in along the corridor, most of them recognizing Song Xuan. After all, some of the young women had even lived together for more than ten years, and with only five hundred students across all twelve grades of Lady Academy, many of them might not know each other well but still looked familiar. After exchanging warm, silent waves, no one spoke, because the security corridor forbade sound. Every student's mask had been locked by the academy's firewall, the mouth-sealing function on the masks activated, so they could only greet each other with body language.

The basic restraint system was made up of three one-millimeter-thick restraint lines and a concealed neck-and-waist clamp formed by increasing the stiffness of the Lady suit at the neck and waist under the latex. The three restraint lines linked the arm rings to the side straps of the chastity bra and linked the two thigh rings to each other. The lines were made of the same material as the suit's surface. What Song Xuan did not know was that a line only one millimeter thick was enough to lift a load of three thousand tons; otherwise, she would have realized how laughable all the things she had tried in her first and second years had been. The parts of the suit at the waist and neck formed the same effect as a waist clamp and neck clamp.

The basic restraint system built from those three restraint lines mainly served to limit how far a student in a Lady suit could spread her arms, how wide she could open her legs, and how much her waist and neck could twist.

As a woman, whether her arm movements were too exaggerated, whether she spread her legs too far apart, or whether her waist or neck twisted in an ill-timed way, it was obvious all of that was a world away from the word lady in Lady Academy.

During school hours, the basic restraint system was always locked. In its default state, the restraint lines between the arm rings and the side straps of the chastity bra ensured that a female student could not raise her arms higher than her shoulders, while the lines between the thigh rings kept the angle between her legs from exceeding 30 degrees. Because different students had different heights and builds, the restraint-line lengths of the basic system varied slightly from person to person.

When relaxed, those restraint lines were retracted by the arm rings and thigh rings hidden under the suit, like a safety belt, to prevent them from dangling and tangling.

Although the waist clamp and neck clamp did not harden into something completely rigid, they still left the student some room to move, while the bent-over, slouched posture could be fully prohibited and corrected.

In special circumstances such as physical education class, or when a student had applied in advance and the homeroom teacher and counselor had approved it together, the Lady Academy uniform's basic restraint system would loosen its grip on her. The degree of loosening varied according to the situation. If strenuous exercise was required, the basic system would not actually disconnect the restraint lines between the arm rings and the chastity bra or between the thigh rings, but it would remove the maximum length that could be drawn out from the arm and thigh rings. In effect, that was the same as releasing the basic restraints, and the waist clamp and neck clamp would soften completely, allowing the waist and neck to twist freely.

If the activity was less strenuous and only needed the student's arms to be raised above her shoulders or her legs opened wider than 30 degrees, the basic restraint system would, depending on the circumstances, appropriately extend the maximum release length of the restraint lines, while the waist clamp and neck clamp would simply relax somewhat.

After leaving the changing room, she still had to pass through an infrared corridor, a low-intensity X-ray corridor, and a high-intensity visible-light corridor. Only after the triple scan confirmed that she was not carrying anything would she leave the security facility and formally complete the return-to-school process.

Song Xuan had always thought Lady Academy made the return-to-school procedure a little ridiculous. First of all, leaving aside the fact that the students were wearing nothing but latex bodysuits, they had not even a pocket on them, let alone a fold or seam. The term seamless fit could hardly be more suitable for a Lady suit. What could women wearing such a perfectly sealed outfit possibly use to hide contraband?

What's more, the academy only needed to ask the students one question about whether they were hiding any items. No woman could lie while wearing a Lady suit. Before they even left the security facility, however, they were required to sign a declaration stating that they had no concealed items on them.

Under the automatic sensing of the chip built into the Lady suit, Song Xuan opened the door to her new dorm room and went in first. In the academy's dormitory apartments, all the furniture was fixed to the floor or the walls, and the floor, walls, and furniture were all the same pure white, like a computer-generated scene model that had not yet been given any texture.

The room contained only a sleeping pod with a human-shaped recess in the middle and a full-length mirror. The study had two desks fixed to the floor and two chairs fixed to the floor. The living room held only a long sofa and a coffee table, also fixed to the floor. The bathroom's shower unit, automatic waste-disposal unit, air-drying unit, blow-drying unit, and heating unit were all mounted on the wall. There was not a single movable piece of furniture anywhere in the entire apartment, nor anything or any ornament that could be taken off a wall or lifted from the floor.

Because the dorm did not produce trash, there was no trash can; because they air-dried after bathing, there were no towels; because the waste system was automatic, there were no tissues; because all learning materials were virtually generated by the Lady suit's AR contact lenses, there were no pens, paper, or books; because someone came every week to clean the dust that settled in the room, there was no need for cleaning tools either... Apart from the two women wrapped in black Lady suits, there was nothing at all that could be moved out of the dorm. The entire apartment was one indivisible object. Besides the women living inside and their Lady suits, there was nothing else that could be taken down from the walls, floors, or beds.

After calling her mother, aunt, and uncle one by one to let them know she was safe, Song Xuan had finally completed the entire return-to-school procedure.

Twenty years earlier, before Song Xuan was even born, House of Ladies had successfully integrated the functions of a phone and a computer into the Lady suit. Through the invisible lenses and earplugs built into the suit, a student wearing it could use virtual images on a tabletop or in the air to carry out precise finger controls and complete every computer and phone operation without the slightest awkwardness. So the female students of Lady Academy did not need separate phones or computers. Convenient as that was, the biggest drawback was that it was not good for selfies. Although the suit's contact lenses could capture whatever they looked at, they could never see themselves, and Lady Academy would not provide them with any private electronic devices on campus.

The solution for selfie-loving students was simple: first, stand in front of a mirror; second, ask a classmate for help.

Song Xuan had plenty of people in her Lady suit phonebook. From primary school all the way through junior high, besides classmates, there were many fellow Lady Academy students she had met in the student council, clubs, interest groups, and salons. There were juniors, seniors, and teachers too. Lady Academy teachers were allowed to participate in student organizations, and some clubs were even organized by teachers themselves.

Since childhood, Song Xuan had been widely liked for her striking looks and her gentle, considerate, almost girlish temperament. And because she had always been outgoing and happy to take part in collaborative activities, she had maintained good relationships with plenty of people both three grades above and three grades below her at Lady Academy.

Beyond that, among her contacts outside Lady Academy there were only three numbers at all: her mother, her aunt, and her uncle. Those were also the only three she could directly dial. Any other number had to be approved by her mother, aunt, or uncle before the call could go through. Ridiculous as that was, even Ziying and Beihai thought so, but in the end the three of them were still stared down by Song Mozhu's especially fierce glare and forced to back off.

After finishing the task of reporting in safe to the three of them, she thought about it and then posted another update on LetsTalk: [I made it back to school today~]. Attached were a few selfies she had taken with delayed blinking in front of the mirror.

Song Xuan had created a LetsTalk account long ago. Although she did not update it often, almost every post got more than a hundred likes, all from teachers and classmates at Lady Academy.

But this post was written especially for him. She hadn't added him as a friend, but she knew he'd secretly followed her, so as long as she posted, he would definitely see it. She couldn't follow him back, though. Her mother might investigate her LetsTalk account, and if she found something and kept digging, it would turn into a disaster.

After that, the young woman browsed the latest updates from her friends through her Lady Academy uniform on the LetsTalk social network. Most of them were about the start of the school year, though there were also posts from a few older seniors who had already graduated from high school. By now, they had all gone on to study at the world's top universities.

It sounded exaggerated, but when you thought about it, the girls who could afford Lady Academy came from families that couldn't be described as merely well-off.

Zhuzhou alone had a population of three hundred million, yet there was only one Lady Academy. A quarter of the city's top elite families sent their female descendants here, and another quarter sent their daughters to other Lady Academies in different cities or countries.

Lady Academy was a classic elite education system, pouring unlimited resources into the girls. Setting aside everything else, just the uniform alone, a single outfit that had to be worn from first grade through twelfth grade, was more than most families could afford.

With that kind of capital behind it, even a sow could be hyped into one of those A-list schools like Harvard, Oxford, National First University, Imperial University, or Moscow State University.

After graduation, there would be a flood of officials, oligarchs, warlords, super-rich tycoons, and the like coming to propose. Some seniors' families were open-minded enough to allow free love, even cross-class free love. Some would ultimately become victims of political marriage. Some were simply too formidable for fate to hold down and would carve out a path of their own...

In the photos, some of them had already taken off the Lady Academy uniform that had accompanied them for years and started a brand-new life, while others had applied to universities partnered with Lady Academy and were still wearing the academy's signature latex bodysuit.

The universities that cooperated with Lady Academy were all top hundred schools in the world. Most of them had histories stretching back hundreds of years and fifty or sixty famous colleges. Lady Academy was just one branch among those universities' many colleges, but it still played a decisive role.

After browsing the updates, Song Xuan finally took a look around her new dorm. In truth, there was no need to look; every apartment at Lady Academy was laid out exactly the same. In primary school, each apartment had two bedrooms and one living room, with two girls in each room. In middle school, there were four bedrooms and one living room, with one girl per room. In high school, there were three bedrooms and two living rooms, with two girls each in separate bedrooms and the remaining room used as a study.

It wasn't that Lady Academy couldn't provide every student with a one-bedroom, one-living-room setup. Rather, because human beings are social animals, everyone had to be assigned a companion to live with day and night.

Song Xuan had reported early, so this floor still had no roommates moved in yet. Sitting alone on the living room sofa, back straight, she lightly tapped the air in front of her and opened an old web drama she'd never finished over the summer, then started watching it through the invisible lenses built into her uniform.

That was when she started missing life at home during the holiday. Back at Lady Academy, the uniform's waist and neck sections had been set by the base restraint system to be so tough and rigid that she couldn't sprawl on the sofa the way she did at home.

Every grade had new students transferring into Lady Academy from other schools. Especially in years like first year of middle school and first year of high school, when the old year gives way to the new, the classmates in a given homeroom might not change all that much, but there were still plenty of new faces. And because the dorms originally prepared for middle schoolers couldn't really satisfy high school students, moving dorms after sixth grade and ninth grade was mandatory.

After one more episode, Song Xuan still had nothing to do. Song Mozhu had set a rule that she could only watch two episodes of TV dramas a day. Once she hit the limit, the firewall her mother had added to her uniform would automatically isolate every video source. Song Xuan felt a little restless and didn't really want to read the e-books cached in her uniform either, so she decided to go check the other apartments to see whether any classmates had already moved in. She had come far too early.

By the time Song Xuan came back, her new roommate still hadn't arrived. Ye Wuyou had already looked it up on Lady Academy's server and told her the new roommate's name, but since this was a freshman transferred in from another school, Song Xuan found herself genuinely curious about the newcomer.

But when she returned from outside, she found that the bedroom door in her roommate's suite was already closed. It looked as if the new roommate had arrived while she was out visiting other dorms. Song Xuan had wanted to say hello, but when she knocked, there was no response, so she had no choice but to let it go. Maybe the new roommate wasn't the easiest person to talk to.

Sighing, Song Xuan went into the study, planning to find a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance inside her uniform to kill some time.