I Can Tell You with Complete Responsibility

Li Ye saw Hao Jian, Jin Peng, and Wang Jianqiang off, shut the little storeroom's door, and dragged out a simple wooden blackboard.

Li Ye had told Jin Peng to make it: a wooden frame with two square meters of boards nailed onto it. Crude, but usable.

"Everyone's full, right? Now that you've eaten your fill, listen to me for a moment."

"Full, full. We're practically stuffed to death, hee hee hee."

"Li Ye, what do you want to say? If you regret it and want us to pay more for the meal, we absolutely won't pay, heh heh."

"Ha ha ha ha~"

The girls giggled and laughed. Watching Li Ye's serious expression, they all found it rather amusing.

Li Ye nearly got led astray by the girls, but at a time like this, he had to be serious.

Bang, bang, bang~

Li Ye gripped a small stick and rapped hard against the blackboard.

"First, let me explain something. Today, we clearly weren't in the wrong. Xia Yue and the others were. So why did I lead you out of the school?"

"..."

The girls could no longer laugh. They stared at Li Ye in surprise, their hearts full of confusion.

Wasn't it so they could eat special meals?

Wasn't it because they didn't want to join forces with Xia Yue and her group?

Li Ye waved the little stick and said darkly, "Actually, you should all know that I, Li Ye, am not someone easy to provoke. Xia Yue may have been class monitor for several years and have a few tricks up her sleeve, a bit of cultivation—"

"But I can tell you with complete responsibility that if I used my family's connections, giving Xia Yue a lesson and getting her disciplined would not be difficult at all."

"Or, like Xia Yue, I could play some filthy schemes and force her to drop out and get lost. That wouldn't be impossible either."

"But I didn't. Do you know why?"

Li Ye tapped the blackboard and barked in a low voice, "Get serious."

Whoosh~

Including Wen Leyu, all seven boys and girls sat ramrod straight in unison.

"Because I don't want to stay in that stinking mud pit."

Li Ye asked Li Dayong, Fu Yingjie, and Jiang Xiaoyan, "You used to be in Retake Class One. Back then, what did you think Retake Class One was?

Wasn't it the base camp of top students, the hope of all County Second High School? The cradle of future college students?"

"And didn't the top students in Class One see us in Retake Class Two and Class Three as County Second High School's deadweight, wishing every teacher in the entire school taught Class One?"

Li Dayong only chuckled without speaking, while Fu Yingjie pressed his lips together in an awkward smile.

Jiang Xiaoyan lowered her head and murmured like a mosquito, "I didn't... They were talking nonsense."

But all three of them knew that the students of Retake Class One—especially the top thirty—looked down on Class Two and Class Three.

They were the fast-track class. The fifty students inside came from rural middle schools and county schools throughout the entire county.

Class One students occupied the school's top forty rankings year after year. Even when students from Class Two or Class Three were occasionally transferred in, they would be disdainfully told, "Don't drag down the class average."

Yet even so, the students of Retake Class Two and Class Three still fought until their heads bled to get into Class One.

Because the school's teachers cared most about Class One's students. Seventy to eighty percent of their energy was spent on them.

County Second High School's fast-track class might not compare to County First High School's fast-track class, but it was far, far better than many of the rural schools outside the county seat.

Every high school student in Qingshui County knew that only by entering the retake fast-track classes of County First High School or County Second High School would they have more chances to leap over the Dragon Gate and get into college.

Students from the other rural schools, and even those in Retake Class Two and Class Three, were for the most part merely runners accompanying the race.

"You don't need to deny it," Li Ye said mildly. "Class One's level really is a little higher than Class Two and Class Three's. But compared to this place of ours..."

Li Ye made a feint with the little stick in his hand and swept it around the storeroom, which was only ten or twenty square meters.

"Class One is a stinking mud pit. Step in it once, and you'll only dirty yourself."

"..."

Jiang Xiaoyan and Fu Yingjie were both somewhat stunned. The Li Ye standing there now seemed a little like a charlatan.

Could a charlatan really be this handsome?

But the even greater charlatanism was still to come.

Li Ye tapped the blackboard again, raised his chin, and said, "I can tell you with complete responsibility—"

"This little room of ours is Qingshui County's college preparatory class for 1982."

"As long as you join our little group, you will definitely get into college next year."

"Whoa~"

All six students cried out in shock.

Even Li Dayong thought his brother's mouth had opened far too wide. He might bite off more than he could chew and choke on it.

Brother, do you know how many college students the entire Qingshui County sent off last year?

Even counting technical secondary schools, there weren't seven.

All seven of them getting into college? No, with you, Li Ye, that makes eight.

Even the county education bureau chief wouldn't dare brag like that in his dreams.

But when one had eaten another's food, one's mouth was softened. The fragrance of braised pork ribs and radish had not even faded from their mouths yet. They could hardly stick out their tongues at Li Ye and go, "Nya nya nya," could they?

Besides, Li Ye stood there with such intense confidence and such overwhelming pressure that it felt as though, once he had said something, there was no room for them not to believe it.

Li Ye really was confident.

In his previous life, whenever he had nothing to do, he browsed the Zhihu forums. Discussions about "modern college entrance exams versus the college entrance exams of the seventies and eighties" had always been popular.

There were two mainstream views on the matter, both backed by real-life verification.

The first was that a group of prestigious university graduates from the late seventies and early eighties had gotten competitive with their own high-school-aged children and redone modern college entrance exam questions.

The results were naturally not pretty. They had no idea where to begin with many question types.

Yet those old college students, who now held important positions, were all certain that if they had one year to familiarize themselves with the material, they might not dare claim they could reach a 985 university, but they were confident they could at least touch the threshold of a 211 university.

Why?

Intelligence.

These people had been the one percent who charged into the top four percent in an era with only a four-percent admission rate. No matter how simple the questions had been then, it did not change the fact that they were absolute high-IQ monsters.

But even such highly intelligent people, if they blindly went head-to-head with modern high school students, would still be smashed senseless by a barrage of bricks and clubs, left scrambling in disarray.

The second view was that modern high school students would instead do college entrance exam papers from the late seventies and early eighties.

For example, the final major math problem in 1977 had been to prove the Pythagorean theorem.

Over the following years, up through the early eighties, the college entrance exams grew slightly harder, but overall, they felt roughly equivalent to middle school entrance exam difficulty.

Even at that difficulty, they could stump huge numbers of people. As long as one passed, one could get into college.

So Li Ye believed that his real competitors in the college entrance exam had never been Xia Yue or County First High School's fast-track class, but those high-IQ freaks.

After all, there were always some beasts who made life feel not worth living.

Fortunately, it was already 1981.

A certain old professor from Tsinghua had once said that after teaching students for so many years, the 1977 batch had been the highest quality.

Even though there had been a break in education, those freakish geniuses were like gold amid sand and gravel—impossible to bury.

The 1977 exam papers might have been simple, but after such a long stretch of time, countless freaks had accumulated. It had truly been a wild dance of demons.

After the first two years of college entrance exams, those accumulated high-IQ talents had finally all been admitted in one fell swoop.

Otherwise, with Li Ye's middling ability in his previous life, even with the Biological Hard Drive in his mind helping him cheat, he would not have dared to swagger about and point his sword at Tsinghua-Peking Universities.

But Li Ye had confidence. The others did not.

"Ahem... Li Ye, I don't think what you said is quite right."

Hu Man had been class monitor for a long time, after all. Faced with Li Ye's overflowing presence, she could barely manage a few words of rebuttal.

She said to Li Ye with good intentions, "We should have confidence in the future, but we can't become arrogantly complacent either."

"It doesn't matter how much we brag or talk here among ourselves. But if Xia Yue and the others happened to hear it, who knows what a huge joke it would become..."

"Why would they hear it? Are you going to tell them?"

Li Ye pointed at the storeroom door and said sternly, "I'm warning you: anything that happens in this room, and anything you see, not one word or one sentence is to leave this room."

Li Ye first tossed a stack of hand-cut blank paper to Hu Man and the others, then turned around, picked up a piece of chalk, and began writing questions on the little blackboard.

As he wrote, he said, "Starting today, you will each complete two to three exam papers every day, all the way until the college entrance exam."

"Huh? Two or three papers every day?"

"How is that possible? Li Ye, do you mean you'll be writing the papers for us?"

"No way, right? A teacher might not even be able to produce one paper in a week."

Everyone admitted that Li Ye was an excellent student and highly skilled at explaining problems, but no one believed he could produce three papers every single day.

Writing questions was not copying questions. Schoolteachers racked their brains to produce a new paper clearly different from the previous ones, and no one knew how many brain cells they had to burn to death.

Retake Class One currently held a full-subject test once every two weeks, and the task of producing one set of questions in those two weeks had already forced Teacher Luo and the others to go all out.

It was only because Teacher Ke had helped out recently that Teacher Luo and the others had been able to catch their breath.

And now Li Ye, only eighteen or nineteen, was going to produce three papers a day, all the way until the college entrance exam?

Wouldn't that mean that aside from daytime classes, he would be writing questions for the rest of his time?

Where would you get that many papers? Even the capital did not have that many papers, did it?

But if it really happened... just thinking about it was thrilling!

The students chattered among themselves, doubtful yet faintly excited.

Wen Leyu slowly turned her head. Her cool gaze swept across the flock of "little sparrows," and she rebuked them without a trace of emotion, "Can you be quiet? Those who believe Li Ye can stay. Those who don't can leave."

"..."

No, no, they could not afford to provoke her. Little Mute rarely spoke, but whenever she did, her words were bound to be extraordinary.

If she really blew some wind into Li Ye's ear and had them thrown out, then forget three papers a day—even those ten-cent feasts would be gone!

While everyone's thoughts ran wild, Li Ye had already filled the entire little blackboard. His handwriting was messy, but barely legible.

Li Ye turned around, looked at his stunned classmates, and said with dissatisfaction, "What are you all standing around for? Hurry up and copy the questions. Are you waiting for me to mimeograph them for you?"

"Oh, oh."

The students became a flurry of frantic activity and hurriedly copied down the questions.

After they finally finished copying, Li Ye casually wiped the board clean and began writing the second board of questions.

The students hurried to keep copying.

By the time they reached the third board, seeing that Li Ye had no intention of stopping at all, Hu Man and the others finally began to feel their doubts loosen.

Maybe Li Ye really could do it.