Chapter Text
[Hoverfly]
When I stood at the doorway of the Flying Insects Class with my schoolbag in hand, I had absolutely no idea this place would become my Eden.
The word *Eden* was one I only learned later, after I became the breakout bug star of Cool Bug School and found a way to describe those days. By then, I had already stood on the flag platform in the schoolyard and heard the applause of the whole school. Even the cafeteria cook—whose meat soup always looked like hotpot rinse water—started tossing in two extra handfuls of scallions just because I once said, “This soup has a lot of character.” But I have to admit: on my first day here, I was deeply dissatisfied with this school—almost disgusted.
Back then, I had my heart set on getting into First Insect School.
That was the elite insect academy, a place built specifically for the children of the powerful. They had real laboratories, ceilings that didn’t leak, and a cafeteria that served fresh pollen and pure honey every day. A row of wisteria grew at the school gate, the fragrance calibrated with exquisite precision—neither too strong nor too faint, just enough to cover the dust outside the gate, and the poverty outside the gate too. That scent was like a pheromone: released lightly, and every bug knew who belonged there and who ought to walk around.
Everything inside looked *proper*. The nursery rooms never failed at temperature and humidity control; no matter how hard the wind and rain raged outside, inside there was only stable warmth. The glass cases in the specimen hall were spotless, wing veins lit so clearly they looked as if they had been born to be admired. The rearing racks stood in neat rows, and even the shed skins of larvae were cleared away in time—so clean it made you suspect the world might truly exist without rot or mildew. The cafeteria served fresh pollen and pure honey every day, sweet in a gentle way, like comfort that had been carefully mixed. The students there didn’t even think of it as luxury; to them it was simply normal, proper: the hive should get the best feed, and the better the hive, the more so.
I stood outside the gate, only one step away, yet it felt as though an invisible river lay between us.
First Insect School never lacked hardworking bugs. What it lacked was *eligibility*—and my background, unfortunately, didn’t come with that pass.
Yes. That damned background.
“A good background has a positive impact on a bug’s future.” I had heard that sentence since childhood. It was like a nail driven into my brain; pull it out, and flesh and blood would come with it.
And very unfortunately, I was born into a family with a terrible reputation.
The hoverfly clan. It sounds like a graceful lineage, one that flits lightly among flowers. But in the eyes of many bugs, we were nothing more than “frauds who live by disguise and freeloading.” We grew up never able to shake that stigma, just as you cannot escape your shadow when you stand in the sun.
My family lived crammed inside a ruined museum—more precisely, in a crack in the wall of the museum archive room. The crack had originally been left for ventilation, but later it was blocked up with wooden boards and strips of old cloth, and became our barely weatherproof “home.” In one corner stood a clock that had long stopped running, its face split with spiderweb-like cracks and buried beneath years of dust. In the morning, faint light slanted through a broken window, illuminating dust motes drifting in the air. They looked like a swarm of tiny homeless ghosts, dancing in the backlight—strange and dazzling, yet unable to escape the fate that had already stained them.
Sometimes the ceiling leaked.
When it rained, water crept down the wall and soaked the plaster into gray watermarks. Over time, they looked like grime smudged onto an insect wing—stains you could never fully wipe away. When the plaster peeled, it made a faint brittle sound. I remember that, when I was little, my mother would always stop whatever she was doing at that exact moment and look up. Then she would move the basin a little faster, as if by shifting it she could shift every broken thing in our lives out of the way.
The war my father’s generation lived through affected three generations—perhaps it will reach further still.
That war years ago was a great reshuffling. Insect order was reestablished. Bugs were terrified, living from one uncertain day to the next, each forced to choose a camp just to survive. Very unfortunately, our family chose the wrong one. After the defeat, reckoning blew through like a cold wind, stripping away not only property and status, but even the right to hold one’s head up and breathe.
When I was young, I once asked my father, “Who was wrong?”
He was silent for a long time. Then he gave me only one sentence:
“We were wrong to think we could survive without bowing our heads.”
That night, he hovered with his back to me beside the old clock, his shoulders draped in mimetic stripes—clearly a fly, yet forcing himself into the dignity of a bee. That shell glinted in the dark, as if compelled to stand upright. Beneath it, his membranous wings did not dare spread; they could only vibrate at high frequency, making a fine buzzing sound, as if shame itself had been ground into noise.
He didn’t cry.
But I heard the brokenness in his breathing.
I was still little then, but I already understood: family pride is a sharp thing that can cut its owner.
I admit it—I have almost nothing now.
If you made a list of everything that counts as “something that can win”: strong mandibles, spikes, venomous stingers, armor… we have none of it. We live in the cracks of the food chain, like a speck of dust that could be flicked away at any time. And yet I still have one thing no one can take from me—not because it is sturdy, but because it isn’t on the outside at all. It grows in our heads:
Pride.
But this pride is not dignified. If anything, it resembles self-comfort at the end of the road. Yet for hoverflies, it is not an ornament for showing off. It is the bottom line that keeps our backs straight. Because the thing our clan is proudest of—and almost the only asset we can really present—is this:
An outstanding intelligence that even diving beetles cannot help but respect.
Strangely, no bug can explain why I am this smart.
I can’t explain it either.
It doesn’t feel like a skill trained into me. It feels more like an inborn nature: as if cleverness is not something I *have*, but something I *am*. Some bugs are born with armor, or spikes, or venom. We are born knowing how to think, how to calculate, how to see danger’s shadow before danger itself lands. Intelligence, for us, needs no proof. It is as natural as breathing—you don’t ask me why I breathe, and I need not answer why I’m smart.
This intelligence has given me two things:
First, clarity—I know I am weak.
Second, methods—I know how to keep that weakness from being seen, at least for a while; how to squeeze a path to survival out of a crack.
Speaking of that diving beetle classmate, my feelings are complicated.
I admire him. Those swimming legs of his are so beautiful they look like a badge by birthright. The moment he enters water, it is as if he changes personality: fierce, cleanly decisive, exactly what a predator ought to be. He is smart too—smarter than many bugs when it comes to thinking up plans in a crisis. Whenever the class runs into serious trouble, he can always come up with a solution, as if he sees the world as a chessboard.
But I am also afraid of him.
Because his intelligence has a sharp, nasty edge. Some of his ideas are effective—but some drag us into even bigger trouble. He does not always consider the cost. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say: he is bolder and darker-hearted. Bugs like us, with no armor, often cannot afford the side effects of that kind of victory.
So I trust my own way more:
Don’t clash head-on. Don’t show off strength.
Use your brain to route around conflict.
Use disguise to buy time.
Use intelligence to bargain for room to survive.
I know that doesn’t sound heroic.
But if you were as bare-handed as I am, you would understand: pride does not mean “I am strong.” It means “I am weak, but I can still survive.”
We have nothing, only pride.
Then let us sharpen that pride into the brightest knife in our minds—
not to cut others,
but to cut away the hand that fate reaches out toward us.
We have no weapons, so we learned to turn *ourselves* into weapons.
The mind commands the body; the body executes the disguise: mimic a fiercer insect, mimic a venomous insect, mimic something that ought not to be provoked. Mimicry is not a performance trick. It is survival. Every time I successfully turn myself into “another bug,” it feels like stealing one more breath back from the blade-tip of fate. You think I’m performing? No. I’m trying to stay alive.
*Mimicry.* What a respectable word.
But in the street-corner insect crowds, they never say it that way. They lower their voices and spit out words like “disguise,” “fraud,” “dirty trick,” the way one spits out something foul. I heard it too many times. Those words left deep marks across my childhood, like scars of humiliation. Touch them and they no longer hurt—but whenever you most want to lift your head, they remind you: you are not worthy.
The war’s aftereffects reached me too.
Even if my abilities outmatched ten students from First Insect School put together, I could only attend Cool Bug School.
Cool Bug School—sounds cool, but in truth it was an old shell with new wrapping. It used to be called Rotten Wood Bug School, a place that mostly took in bugs just there to coast through a diploma. Later, after reforms, it moved and was renamed Cool Bug School. The headmaster was an elderly locust who had studied in the East and was said to care about “enlightenment,” “equality,” and “order.”
At the opening ceremony, twitching his mustache, he declared:
“Students, all bugs are equal; what matters is that each finds their proper place. All things in the world have their order; in the unseen, arrangements are already made. I hope you will correct your attitude, recognize your position, and do your duty to the utmost. Learn what should be learned solidly, practice what should be practiced thoroughly. So long as you are willing to endure hardship, take responsibility, and keep the rules, the place that belongs to you will naturally, at the right time, seat the one who is prepared where they ought to be.”
Sparse applause rose from the audience. Some bugs clapped very hard, as if trying to clap the dust off themselves.
Cool Bug School’s campus wasn’t large.
On the west side stood a big poplar tree, bark rough and scarred with the names of past students and swear words carved into the trunk. When the wind blew, the leaves rustled loudly, as if the tree itself were speaking the words carved into it. On the east side was a large vegetable patch—cabbages, radishes, bean sprouts. Dew often sat on the leaves, glittering under sunlight with a beauty that felt almost out of place.
The dirt on the athletic field was loose. After two laps, your shoes came away caked in mud. The PE teacher, a centipede, would look at his brand-new shoes, now stomped mottled and filthy again, and mutter while wiping them. As for the cafeteria—it was the common enemy of all students. The food was awful. The “honey” was wet white sugar mixed with water, sweet in a chalky way that left your throat feeling coated. The meat soup was even worse, basically hotpot rinse water, the oil slick so thin you could see your increasingly gaunt face reflected in it.
I reported first to the administration office.
The counter there was even taller than I expected. Behind it sat a teacher who was some kind of scarab, his shell gleaming like a slab of cold iron. He tapped the forms with the tip of his pen, his eyes sweeping across my surname—and pausing for a moment.
It was only a moment, but it felt like a needle in my fingertip.
I understood immediately: he recognized the name Hoverfly.
“So you are… hmm, Hoverfly.” He pronounced my name slowly, as if chewing on something hard to swallow. “Flying Insects Class. Paperwork is complete. Dormitory… your family isn’t boarding, right?”
“No,” I answered steadily, doing my best not to let even the slightest tremor into my voice.
The scarab teacher asked no more questions. He pushed a stack of papers toward me. As I took them, I saw a smudge of ink along the edge of his nail. Strangely, that made me feel calmer: at least he was a bug who made mistakes too.
Then I took my younger brother to the kindergarten class.
He had only hatched a few days earlier and wriggled with a body still a little frail. He looked up at me, his eyes bright as two drops of clear water.
“Brother, is the Flying Insects Class really amazing?”
“Of course.” I patted his head, smiling as if I believed it myself. “You be amazing in kindergarten too. Don’t let them bully you.”
He nodded hard, like making a solemn oath.
I watched his wobbly little back as the teacher led him through the small kindergarten door, and suddenly felt something press lightly against my chest. It wasn’t sadness. It was something more complicated—part responsibility, part pride, part fear.
Before I finally got to push open the door to the Flying Insects Class, I stopped to look at myself in the glass at the end of the corridor.
The glass wasn’t clean, and my reflection came out blurry, but I could still see enough. I had forced my messy hair down with water. It still refused to lie flat, but at least it no longer stuck up in every direction like a public nuisance. My expression looked reasonably natural and polite—not too arrogant, not too obsequious. I took a deep breath.
I had once overheard in someone’s home that a good first impression can create miracles.
I needed a miracle. I needed one badly.
I knocked, then turned the handle and stepped inside.
With a creak, the door hinge seemed to mock my nerves and made my heart jump.
Just as I expected, every eye in the room locked onto me.
In those eyes were curiosity, scrutiny, disdain—and another look I had known since childhood to the point of exhaustion: they already knew who I was. They had already decided how they were going to see me.
I saw some classmates’ mouths moving slightly, as if silently reciting words. I knew what those words were, because they had been branded into my childhood like scars of humiliation.
“Fraud.”
“Disguise.”
“Hoverfly.”
Our homeroom teacher was a cricket so hot-blooded it almost bordered on excess.
He stood at the podium, not especially tall, but with his chest thrust forward as though he meant to prop up the whole classroom. His two antennae always picked up movement a beat before anyone else’s, like signal flags standing ready. Some said he was “a cricket, a species famous in the insect world for being combative.” He agreed with that description himself—and did so proudly, as though it were a vow.
But vows, sometimes, bite back.
He tilted his chin, signaling me to begin my self-introduction. His expression was so focused that it seemed as if, the next second, he would map “new student” into a tactical diagram. There was no world-weary indifference, no numbness before fate. His eyes shone like a match just struck, filled with the refusal to accept that things couldn’t get better. To him, every new student was never “just another one.” It was “one more that must be saved.”
And he truly did act that way.
They said that last term an ant student missed two days in a row. The class assumed it was an ordinary absence, but he reacted as if pricked by a needle and couldn’t sit still: first the cafeteria, then the dorms, and finally he went straight out on a home visit. He pushed through bushes, crawled through drainage ditches, and was even nearly pinned to the ground by a night patrol mantis who mistook him for an intruder. When he finally found the ant—half-dead beside a collapsed leaf shed—he himself had practically spent his life doing it. He came back with his wing membranes covered in cuts and one hind leg limping, yet he dumped the student into the infirmary and immediately turned around to write the incident report, his handwriting carved hard as knife marks.
He was that kind of teacher:
The kind who would rather go down himself than fail to drag a student back out of the dark.
And yet, a teacher like that was almost shattered by reality on his very first day.
That day, someone arranged a duel on the field, and the crowd of onlooking bugs surged toward it like a tide. The moment he heard the word “duel,” his eyes lit up—after all, he called himself combative, and after all, he thought he was going there to stop it, or at least to “end the conflict in a just way.”
But when he shoved his way to the front and saw the stances both sides had taken, heard the friction in the air tinged with killing intent, his face instantly drained to a sickly pale green. His antennae froze, and his whole body seemed to lose its bones. He dropped with a thud and fainted on the spot.
Later, when he woke up, his first sentence was not an excuse, nor shame. He gritted his teeth and said:
“I’ll learn.”
He was an idealist—idealistic to the point of stubbornness.
His ultimate goal was to cultivate excellent students—not “excellent” in grades, but students “who could make themselves into light.” He believed education could change fate, that rules could protect the weak, that every talk, every graded assignment, every evening spent standing in the corridor waiting for students after study hall, could pull some soul back from the edge before it slid into the abyss.
But his students soon used their actions to pinch that ideal to death, inch by inch.
Some treated his home visits as a joke. Some took his seriousness for weakness. Some, when his hot blood burned brightest, dumped cold water on it. Some even deliberately staged “disappearances” just to see whether he would rush out again.
Once. Twice. Three times. He still rushed out.
Until one day he stood at the podium, voice hoarse like a worn-out string, still trying to make it sound strong:
“If you treat yourselves like chess pieces, don’t blame the world for treating you like discarded ones.”
After he said that, he paused—as if waiting for some response.
The classroom answered only with whispers of laughter and the rustle of pages turning.
He did not smile. He did not frown.
He only pressed that fire back into the depths of his chest, and looked at me with an almost stubborn calm—not with the numbness of someone who has seen through fate, but with the persistence of someone who has seen fate and still wants to fight it head-on.
As if he still believed that, even if his ideals had been strangled countless times, so long as one new student was willing to give a serious self-introduction, he still had one more chance to save it.
At that moment, I heard that familiar sentence sound in my ears again—*A good background has a positive impact on a bug’s future.* That old, hoarse voice echoed like a ghost, threading through every sound of my previous life as a bug, growing fainter and fainter, like the weak sigh of a memory already dead.
I bit my lip and told myself:
Don’t be nervous. Stay calm.
You are not here to beg for acceptance.
You are here to prove something.
“I am a hoverfly.” I raised my voice slightly so it would not tremble. “Being born into a fly family with no defensive abilities is my fate.”
I saw a few bugs’ antennae twitch, like hunters catching the scent of blood.
I kept going, not giving silence any chance to swallow me.
“But I also have a clever mind. Our hoverfly way of survival is called mimicry—we can use makeup, posture, and voice to disguise ourselves as wasps or bees, and scare off predators. Many bugs hate this, because they call it deception. But to me, it is simply survival.”
I paused, lifted my head, and let my gaze sweep the classroom.
“Welcome New Students” was written on the blackboard in chalk, the letters slightly crooked. Outside the window, the poplar leaves flipped in the wind, light and shadow spilling across every face. In that moment, I suddenly realized: this place was not a clean and radiant sanctuary like First Insect School. It was more like a mixed, crowded nest—full of fatigue, wariness, ambition, and maybe… maybe some kind of tenderness I had not seen yet.
“I came here to learn,” I said. “And also to let you see that background cannot decide everything about a bug.”
“Good.”
When the cricket teacher spoke, his voice was not gentle, but it carried a heat that pressed forward.
“Hoverfly.”
He did not say, “Don’t be nervous,” and he did not say, “Everyone, give him a hand.” He had never been good at warm, soft scene-managing words. What he was good at was speaking a sentence like it was a banner—not necessarily pretty, but able to stand in the wind.
“I heard your ‘mimicry.’” He tapped the blackboard with a piece of chalk; the tip gave a faint squeak. “Some bugs call it deception. Some treat it like a trick. But in my classroom—” He paused, his eyes sweeping over the raised antennae in the room. “In my classroom, it is called ability. Ability has no original sin. It only has how it is used.”
The room went quiet for a heartbeat.
Then applause broke out—polite and distant, like clapping through winter gloves. Not warm, but at least it did not shove me back out the door.
The homeroom teacher nodded and pointed toward the back row.
“Empty seat behind the ant classmate.”
I walked toward it with my schoolbag on my back, trying to keep my steps steady. As I passed down the center aisle, I heard someone whisper, “He’s got guts, saying that.” Someone else let out a cold laugh: “What’s the use of being smart? A disguise is still a disguise.” I did not turn around.
Because I knew if I did, they would see the weakness on my back.
I sat down and set my schoolbag beside the desk.
There was a deep gouge in the wooden desktop, like an old wound. Light from the window fell across the back of my hand. My shadow stretched long across the floor, looking like a child who had finally admitted he could be afraid too.
At the time, I had no idea that this shabby classroom, these not-very-friendly classmates, this school whose food was bad enough to make you despair, would become the most unbelievable starting point of my life.
I knew even less that, before long, I would meet a bug here—or rather, a kind of force—that would turn my intelligence into a blade and my pride into armor.
And all of it began with that *creak* when I pushed open the door to the Flying Insects Class.
My classmates’ applause still echoed in my ears, polite and distant, but it did at least accept me as a member of this class.
This was the beginning of my story.