Today was his first day at school. Walking in between his parents while gripping their hands, he was being guided to his first ever school of this world.
Gastou had expected nothing special but upon showing up, it seemed he had underestimated how large a school for elementary kids could be.
Perhaps this was the influence of being a son of a rich family, but he couldn't really believe the sight before him, a building larger than his old high school.
This was extravagance if anything. The idea that children had more movement space goes to show how much authority children have in this world.
They're practically gems in this world while high schoolers in his old world were built to be efficiently compacted into a restrictive setting for society.
Mental note indeed, children are treated better than high schoolers.
Being led inside, he was guided towards a classroom where just like him, other children with their parents showed up. It seems they had been given name tags on top of tables to and had parents sit in to see the first class of the year.
The education curriculum was quite interesting in this world.
In his old world's language, an entire school was sectioned into four parts.
The idea of breaks was essentially not a thing here as the current year or established time period was much younger than where he had lived. Essentially, the only celebratory thing in this world was the founding date of this country, or province of whatever it was.
Students would show up at around 5 AM, and leave school at 6 PM. For children, that much time was really long. For him though, this was basically high school level of torture, nothing new.
Maybe it's the fact that all the children here were inheritors of wealth beyond what normal people possessed, resulting in a stricter and more thorough education process.
Imprinting a working man's hours into a child and calling it normal was definitely one way to go about learning, truly the saying, "age doesn't matter".
Similar to the old world, they had weekdays and weekends. Though the names were just numbers like day one to day seven. Quite lazy but definitely removes the hassle of needing to remember a spelling of a dedicated name for a day of the week.
But anyways, it seems like this first class was nearly ending as I was elaborating to myself the education of this world.
Oh? it seems like it's time for parents to meet with the instructors while they left me, and a bunch of children to sit in the classroom.
Sitting there with my arms crossed, I felt like an out of place child, looking thoughtful but not exactly looking mature for my age.
Well, what can I say? Being someone who was almost an adult had left me thinking like one.
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Children crawled and played with one another, scattered about. But there was a particular movement from a child as she slowly crawled towards Gastou.
Initially, Gastou hadn't noticed such movements. But as time crawled by, the child slowly but surely reached Gastou.
Caught by surprise, Gastou made a noise that left the girl laughing. The girl soon crawled over closer and ran him over.
Gastou, now knocked over thanks to the random girl had toppled on his side and being body-pressed into the ground.
Feeling the weighty child on his back and the pressure of having to be careful because she was a child, he had no idea what to do or think.
He thought being four years old, people communicated but no, they just give body languages and subtle signs. If that communication failed, talking with strangers was simply beyond them since every single one of these pampered children weren't education on how to talk to their peers.
They simply only knew to talk with arrogance from their parents, respect those who are superior and be neutral towards those who reflect obedient behavior.
Essentially, Gastou was now being bullied by a four year old girl and he had no idea.
Thinking that the girl had simply wanted to play, Gastou followed along and obeyed this kind of behavior, not even realizing that he was essentially being behavioral watched by the girl into submission, treated as an inferior person and falling into subordination by her.
Though the thoughts of Gastrou was the girl was bored, crawled over to him and decided that he was funny enough to hang around.
Never would he have thought that for the rest of his life, this decision and this girl had both changed the course of his life.