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"By the way, how does everyone know I run in the morning?"
Akira looked at the freshly bright sky outside the window, a hint of helplessness rising in his heart.
It seemed everyone around him took this habit for granted—Kushida had mentioned it a few days ago, saying Horikita had talked about it with her during swimming class. Just now, Kamuro's message also casually mentioned, "You haven't gone out for your run yet, have you?" Oh, and even the Chairman knew about it.
Counting them up, there were at least four people who explicitly knew.
Haunted by this thought, he felt a bit distracted during his morning run.
Normally, ten kilometers felt quite easy, but today he dragged his feet and took thirty-one minutes to finish, his breathing more ragged than usual.
It wasn't until the daily information update at eight o'clock that his somewhat disturbed mind finally settled down.
He looked at the recorded information, one by one.
[1. Sakayanagi Arisu likes to drink coffee and think in cafes.]
Seeing the first point, he couldn't help but frown: Can someone with heart disease drink coffee?
He wasn't a doctor, but he'd seen related warnings in health education—frequent coffee consumption could accelerate heart rate and put a strain on the heart.
Thinking about it, he'd never really understood how weak Sakayanagi's body actually was.
Just by looking at her always leaning on a cane, could it be that she'd reached a point where she couldn't walk without it?
[2. Advanced Nurturing High School prohibits students from contacting external personnel during school hours.]
The second point was related to school rules.
Prohibiting external contact... it didn't affect him much. Akira was all alone in this world, with no one he needed to contact.
But he could imagine that for classmates with family and friends, this rule was probably quite agonizing.
However, from another perspective, this school rule might secretly be protecting certain people and certain "unspoken rules" within the school.
Take Ryuuen from Class C, first year, for example—if he could contact outside, someone would probably have reported his violent behavior to the outside world a second before he acted.
Then there was Nagumo, the second-year Student Council Vice President. That person had a firm grip on all four classes, practically treating people as tools. If it weren't for this restrictive rule, those wealthy second-generation students he oppressed would have long since had their parents send people to "teach him a lesson."
In a sense, the school authorities also protected them.
[3. Advanced Nurturing High School phones can enable a positioning function after adding friends.]
Upon seeing the third point, Akira was indeed a bit uncertain—he'd never noticed this function before.
He glanced at his phone. Like everyone else's, it was a model uniformly distributed by the school.
The school strictly prohibited students from carrying personal phones, so the phones new students received upon enrollment were almost all identical models.
Of course, if one had enough points, they could also exchange for other phone models at the school store.
But no matter how the appearance and configuration changed, the source of all devices was always the school—from hardware to system, all were firmly within the school's control.
Considering this, the function of "positioning after adding friends" was not impossible.
With that thought, he casually picked up his phone and opened the contacts.
After a slight hesitation, he directly entered Ichinose's chat interface—and sure enough, he saw the "Share Location" option in the menu.
As soon as he tapped it, a mini-map immediately popped up.
The light dot representing her was quietly staying in the center of the screen, showing a distance of less than one hundred meters.
Akira mentally estimated that the location was precisely where the first-year Class B classroom was.
Strangely, this location sharing did not require her confirmation.
Normally, there should have been a step to request permission, but this phone clearly didn't have that setting—as long as you added a friend, you could directly see their real-time location.
'This function is too terrifying, isn't it? It's practically custom-made for stalkers.'
This thought flashed through Akira's mind instantly.
Theoretically, as long as you added a friend, you could continuously monitor their location movement twenty-four hours a day, even knowing which classroom they were in and what they were doing.
To put it harshly, this practically provided convenience for those with deep obsessions—whether it was excessive attention to the opposite sex or other persistent thoughts, this function could achieve "precise tracking."
For example, if a girl's location in the class showed her in a male classmate's dormitory at midnight and she didn't leave for a long time—anyone who saw such a location would probably easily guess that something indescribable had happened between the two.
'What exactly is this school thinking?'
To say it was for convenience of contact, it was more like installing an invisible tracker on everyone.
If this function were utilized by someone with ulterior motives, it could probably cause a lot of trouble.
He imagined someone constantly monitoring his location: leaving the dormitory for a run at 6:30 AM, returning to the dorm at 7:10 AM, entering the classroom at 7:50 AM... even his quick trip to the vending machine for a bottle of water during break would be clearly calculated by someone. Just thinking about it made his back tighten.
The more Akira thought about it, the more he felt it was inappropriate, and he immediately decided to turn off his phone's location.
But he searched through the settings for a long time only to find that the phone simply didn't give users permission to turn off location—there wasn't even an on/off button.
He casually tapped on Chabashira's location interface, and the screen was surprisingly empty—her location did not show up.
It seemed that this location permission couldn't be turned off after all.
Like Chabashira, either she'd bought the permission to turn it off with points, or the school authorities had tacitly allowed the teachers' privacy settings.
Ultimately, as long as one was willing to spend points, anyone should be able to escape being tracked.
He didn't hesitate any longer and directly sent a message to Chabashira.
{Chabashira-sensei, how many points does it cost to turn off the phone's location function?}
The reply came quickly:
{Ten thousand points. After payment, the school authorities will assist in turning off location permissions.}
This price was considerably lower than Akira had expected.
Perhaps other classmates had also noticed the issue with the location function early on, and with more people applying to turn it off, the price naturally dropped.
Since there was nothing to hesitate about, he immediately transferred ten thousand points.
Sure enough, within a few minutes, his phone received a system text message from the school authorities, clearly indicating that the location function had been successfully disabled.
Akira breathed a sigh of relief, tapping his fingertips lightly on the back of his phone—now he could finally get rid of that feeling of being invisibly watched.
He then opened Ichinose's location interface again.
This time, as expected, only her lonely light circle flickered slightly on the mini-map, and his own location indicator had completely disappeared.
'So, if I turn off my location, I can look at other people's locations without any qualms? I can keep watching other classmates?'
This thought had just emerged when he suppressed it.
It was really meaningless.
Prying into others' whereabouts with such a function was, after all, only relying on the fact that they hadn't noticed yet—it was like secretly watching someone else's life from the shadows, and just thinking about it felt awkward.
This kind of one-sided observation, rather than being "convenient," reeked of a pathological voyeuristic desire.
He swiped his fingertips across the screen and simply exited the location interface.