The group wasn't particularly gossipy by nature, nor would they pry too deeply into others' private affairs. After all, everyone has their own choices, and even friends have no right to interfere excessively.
However, Jiang Hui had seemed somewhat unusual lately, which was why her friends had noticed.
Although Xierman spoke lightly of it, he had actually been observing for several days and only came looking for her after discovering there was indeed something abnormal.
Since enrollment, Jiang Hui's life had been very regular—either in the classroom, the library, or the dormitory, living a completely three-point routine.
Xierman shared the same major with her, and their classrooms were just on adjacent floors, making him the most likely among the group to encounter Jiang Hui.
Though they were good friends, they didn't constantly hang out together, being students from different classes with different course schedules.
He would often bump into Jiang Hui on the road, and might even encounter situations where their two classes used the same classroom in succession. In such cases, they would typically just nod in acknowledgment as a greeting.
But for some unknown reason, recently these encounters between Xierman and Jiang Hui had declined dramatically. For almost a week, he could hardly see her around. Later, when Zhou Xiuwen came looking twice in a row but couldn't arrange to meet up, they began to feel suspicious.
So today, as soon as class ended, Xierman rushed downstairs with all his might, wanting to intercept Jiang Hui at the first opportunity to see what was going on.
His intuition proved correct—she appeared to be in an extremely busy state, with her brow showing some anxiety, clearly indicating something was up. Xierman had worried that she might have encountered some problem she was too embarrassed to share with friends... but it turned out he had misunderstood. Jiang Hui hadn't encountered any problems; she was genuinely busy.
"...You're saying a senior instructor asked you to help him organize and screen the library's collection?" Xierman's expression was somewhat bewildered. Although he believed Jiang Hui wouldn't lie, somehow this matter sounded rather bizarre and completely unrelated.
Regarding the school's senior instructors, Xierman naturally knew something about them. His family had recently joined the board of directors of Beska Intermediate Academy. Although management duties didn't fall to him as someone not yet fully awakened, he had still accompanied them to learn about some of the school's regulations and management systems.
As mentioned before, Beska Intermediate Academy was supported and managed by the Eighth Legion behind the scenes, naturally different from those fully funded academies. Their teachers were mainly divided into two major categories: externally hired teachers and active-duty military personnel.
The former were teachers with regular appointments, while the latter were generally active military personnel who came here on short-term assignments or to fulfill military tasks and quotas, returning to the battlefield once their brief assignments ended.
Most of these were naturally from the Eighth Legion, with only a small portion being personnel from other military forces temporarily transferred here for transitional teaching tasks. These instructors mostly served in military-related majors, forming their own system.
The externally hired teachers came in many varieties and were difficult to categorize, so we won't elaborate on them all. However, they ultimately had a relatively unified standard: the hired instructor grade level.
Senior instructor was the highest level of externally hired teacher at Beska Intermediate Academy. Above that, special-grade instructors weren't school-evaluated but referred specifically to educational personnel with special status. For instance, Principal Jason was one of only two special-grade instructors at Beska Intermediate Academy, with the other still wielding power in the board of directors and rarely coming to the school anymore.
Therefore, senior instructors were virtually the highest-ranking teachers on campus, enjoying the highest treatment.
At the beginning of this semester, Beska Intermediate Academy had seven senior instructors in total. It was said they had recently signed one more, making it eight senior instructors now. Among them, five were mecha masters, all specially hired by the school for mecha department students. For example, the intermediate mecha master who had designed the orienteering battle for second-year students was also one of the school's senior instructors.
There was also third-year Teacher Jiang Fei, command department's Teacher Wu Tuya, second-year logistics department's Joaquin Congo... They all belonged to Beska Intermediate Academy's senior instructors, generally only seen during large lectures. Students from other majors had little chance to see them, and even if they did, there would hardly be opportunities for communication or interaction.
Anyway, Xierman had never seen any of the school's senior instructors, though he had encountered the principal several times.
How exactly had Jiang Hui encountered one in the library and been selected by them to participate in such a major project? It was truly difficult to imagine that person would ask a student like Jiang Hui for help...
Yes, the school had been taking this matter quite seriously recently. Principal Jason hadn't been at this school for too long or too short a time, but the school itself had existed for a long time. When he arrived, all aspects of management were already systematized and didn't require Jason's excessive intervention.
Therefore, after Jason took over Beska Intermediate Academy, he hadn't paid attention to this aspect of the problem, so the library's management continued as before, with no one managing it. Although the librarian had submitted related suggestions twice, for some unknown reason, it still failed to attract the board of directors' attention. It wasn't until this year when several new investors provided substantial funding for the school's operations, alleviating their financial constraints, that they began addressing some chronic problems.
This led them to discover the library issue, but they struggled to find suitable people to handle it.
This Mr. Carlo truly lived up to his reputation. Having just signed the employment contract before the school had even arranged courses for him, he immediately identified their recent concern. He didn't want mecha department students to continue absorbing these erroneous books, and the school also wanted to find trustworthy and reliable people to do this work—it was a perfect match.
Xierman vaguely knew some of this, having heard just a few days ago that the school had found strong reinforcement to help audit books in the mecha section. At the time, he had just listened without paying much attention, never expecting his own friend to be involved in this matter.
Xierman's first reaction was actually: "Do you get prize money for this?"
Auditing the book collection was a major project, mentally and physically exhausting, requiring participants to have an extremely broad knowledge base—not something just anyone could do.
Some schools, for convenience, directly hired professional expert teams to handle the auditing and screening. Beska Intermediate Academy, due to certain issues, didn't quite trust such teams and preferred to have their own people or trusted individuals do this work. Barring any accidents, the school should arrange for internal teachers to form teams to complete this project within this semester.
For this purpose, the school had prepared a substantial fund as compensation.
Since Jiang Hui was going to help, whether as an assistant or in some other capacity, she would count as a contributing member. Naturally, Xierman's first concern was whether his friend would receive her due compensation.