Chapter 383 - 333: Outstanding Contribution Medal

Chapter 383: Chapter 333: Outstanding Contribution Medal

Lloyd watched with a wry expression as his classmates chatted idly, expressing all sorts of fantasies and admiration for the Space System. He decided to post a message of his own to tell everyone what the Space System was really like.

"The Space System isn’t as crazy as you all are describing. All this talk about getting assigned cute underclasswomen... How come no one assigned one to me? In reality, I’ve barely seen any girls, just a ton of seniors with receding hairlines;

And as for the coursework, it’s incredibly abstruse and difficult. Studying it puts me under immense pressure; it’s not something you can just understand in a flash;

And we really don’t get a new underclasswoman every three days, much less sleep with two of them every night. I haven’t even met a single one yet...

We don’t step on the backs of E-rank students when we go out, we don’t bully D-rank students, and we certainly don’t secretly infiltrate the girls’ dorms;

We’re all human, not monsters. We also need to eat, sleep, rest, and use the bathroom."

He didn’t go into too much detail, just a simple statement to clarify a few of the more outrageously ridiculous rumors.

And those weren’t even the most ridiculous ones. There were others claiming the Space System was secretly controlling the academy, oppressing and enslaving other departments, and even grabbing an underperforming student each day for live experiments and whatnot.

’Why not just say we eat children every day?’

But these rumors were so absurd that nobody was foolish enough to believe them, so Lloyd didn’t need to specifically debunk them.

Still, Lloyd had no idea how the Space System’s reputation had gotten this way. He could understand the initial high benefits and special treatment inspiring admiration and longing, but how did it gradually become so demonized? They were making it sound like a den of ten thousand demons...

If it hadn’t been for that, he wouldn’t have even bothered speaking up to clarify things.

After he posted his clarification, his student handbook immediately buzzed with a series of vibrations, alerting him to new messages.

First, a few people replied to his rumor-busting post:

"I didn’t believe you at first, but then I took a look at your profile. You’re really in the Space System? And you’re really a new student? So you’re that special new student everyone was talking about earlier?"

"Whoa! Everyone, come look at the new Space System student! Hmm... Lloyd? I’ll remember you!"

"Could you please share how you managed to join the Space System as a new student? I’m very confused about that."

"Yeah, seriously! If you were some incredible High-ranking Powerhouse, I’d get it, but don’t you only have a Tier Three [Veto]? That’s not even as good as me..."

Seeing these replies, Lloyd finally remembered that the student handbook’s message board wasn’t some anonymous forum or a free-for-all zone; everyone was ’posting with their real names’.

You just had to tap on a poster’s name, and all sorts of information—including but not limited to their name, gender, grade, rank, department, Tier, project history, disciplinary records, post history, and so on—was all laid out at a glance.

It even recorded their home city in the real world, the length of time they’d spent at the academy, and whether they were currently on campus. It made one-click doxxing completely effortless.

Lloyd, thinking with his characteristic Rationality and objectivity, could understand such a design. It was normal, and even necessary.

After all, Mizkatoke was enormous, with countless departments and students. It often held multi-departmental collaborative projects and encouraged communication and mutual assistance between students, so this kind of information lookup function was actually essential.

Students could more easily gauge each other’s caliber, professors and instructors could get a clearer picture of their students’ standards, and most importantly, it could effectively eliminate the various anthropomorphic creatures spawned by anonymity, like ’contrarians,’ ’flamers,’ and ’mindless haters.’

At the end of the day, the student handbook’s message board was for communication and sharing, not a lawless wasteland like the internet back on Earth.

However, Lloyd still had some lingering habits from his time browsing forums back on Earth. In his rush to debunk the rumors, he’d been careless and was now suffering the consequences of a ’doxxing attack’...

Getting ’ganged up on’ by so many people at once, he started to panic. He hastily tried to type out a reply to defend himself, but others’ responses came even faster and in greater numbers:

"Huh? Wait! Everybody look! This student Lloyd’s profile just updated. A medal I’ve never seen before just appeared?"

"I see it too! ’Mizkatoke Medal for Outstanding Contribution’? What... what is that? I’ve been hanging around here for years, and this is the first time I’ve ever heard of it."

"That’s because you didn’t look closely. There’s a line of small text next to the medal: ’Awarded in recognition of student Lloyd’s exceptional contribution during the Spatial Storm incident.’"

"Huh? What does that mean? My brain can’t keep up..."

"Let me explain. This ’Mizkatoke Medal for Outstanding Contribution’ is currently the highest honor the academy can bestow. All those ranks and credits you guys are always talking about are worthless in front of this medal...

The honor it represents, the merit it records and bears witness to, surpasses even the ’Lifetime Achievement Award’ and the ’Excellence in Academia Award’ that many of you have heard of.

Just as the name implies, only those who have truly made an extraordinary and outstanding contribution to Mizkatoke are qualified to receive this medal.

And I just went and checked the award records for this medal. In the 1800-plus years since the beginning of the New Era, the academy has only ever awarded ten of them. And the vast majority of those were given out during the special time period known as the ’Post-Apocalyptic Reconstruction Era’.

This isn’t to disrespect the previous recipients of the medal. The situation back then was special and the conditions were harsh, and those seniors certainly made enormous contributions to the academy and naturally deserved such a commendation. However, acquiring one during that period was obviously quite a bit easier than it is now.