June passed quickly. Along with July came not only the Summer Koshien Regional Preliminaries, which began in the middle to late part of the month, but also the first final exams of the first-years' high school lives.
But this was not a problem for the Kōshū brothers. As the saying went, one minute on stage took ten years of practice offstage. That applied perfectly to baseball, and it applied just as well to studying.
Kōshū adjusted his daily schedule according to the class timetable. For Japanese and English, he could sleep through the entire lesson as long as he did his homework properly.
For math and physics, he recommended listening attentively from start to finish. Once you lost the thread in those classes, it was hard to understand on your own afterward. For World History and Japanese History, he listened in a half-awake state and drew a timeline now and then. He could sleep through the examples teachers used to liven up the class.
As for music, art, home economics, and health, they were rare breaks in high school life and a perfect chance to rest. Simply put, when dealing with high school subjects, one had to "pick on the weak and fear the strong." Limited energy had to go toward the subjects where it was easiest to lose points—or where the greatest gap could be opened against others.
On that basis, he would then determine which subjects he truly had no talent for and devote even more effort to studying them.
Kōshū had planned all of this from the very start of the semester, and he had forcibly made his younger brother keep up as well. By the time finals approached, Lang Zhi's resentment over being forced to study had already vanished.
Of course, Kōshū was not happy, because