This Question Is So Hard, I Can't Do It!

Have you ever had a nightmare like this?

Dreaming that you are in an exam hall, and you don't know how to answer a single question.

Chen Guiliang encountered the real-life version—

After being startled awake, he was actually in an exam hall!

Did I get up too fast?

Chen Guiliang lowered his head to look at the test paper, carefully checking the information within the seal, only to see a line of small print at the top—

"Longdu City General High School 2003-2004 Academic Year (First Semester) Grade 12 Midterm Exam Mathematics (Liberal Arts) Paper."

Grade 12 midterm exam?

Phew!

Thank goodness, thank goodness, it's not the College Entrance Exam.

Chen Guiliang felt much more relaxed in an instant.

Being dragged to the execution ground to be shot immediately is still different from having the sentence commuted.

On the top left and top right corners of the desk, an answer sheet and a pencil case were placed respectively.

Next to the pencil case were sharpened 2B pencils. A plastic ruler was placed there to prevent the pencils from rolling around on the desktop.

In his hand, Chen Guiliang was still holding a gel pen.

The scene was too realistic; it couldn't be a dream.

Chen Guiliang glanced at the test paper; he had finished the multiple-choice questions, but hadn't started the fill-in-the-blank ones yet.

Casting his gaze toward the first fill-in-the-blank question, Chen Guiliang's forehead began to sweat—I don't know how to do this!

"Let P be a moving point on the circle x²+y²=1, then the minimum distance from point P to the line 3x-4y-10=0 is ____"

He definitely knew how to do it back then; after all, he had gotten into a first-tier university.

But 22 years had passed, and his mathematical knowledge had long been returned to his PE teacher.

Chen Guiliang picked up the plastic ruler to draw lines, sketching a Cartesian coordinate system on his scratch paper.

Then, after racking his brains for a long time, he had absolutely no idea what to do next.

Regarding the Cartesian coordinate system, his knowledge was a complete blank. All he remembered were two phrases: "Odd changes, even stays the same; the sign depends on the quadrant."

What the hell quadrant am I supposed to look at!

He continued to scan the questions, reading through several in a row.

As expected, he couldn't understand a single one.

The late autumn breeze blew through the doors and windows with a hint of chill, yet Chen Guiliang felt his whole body heating up.

From anxiety.

He hadn't felt this anxious in many years.

Sigh.

Forget it, let it be.

This rebirth scenario is just too damn embarrassing.

Chen Guiliang looked at the invigilator on the podium, a short, fat middle-aged man. He recognized him instantly as his high school politics teacher, but... what was his name again?

It seemed to be Gao.

This Teacher Gao was sitting with his legs crossed, leisurely smoking and looking at his phone. A few students near the podium were covering their noses with their left hands to block the secondhand smoke, while their right hands held pens, diligently working on their exams.

I remember now, this guy is called Gao Zhan.

His wife is Liu Shuying, Chen Guiliang's English teacher and homeroom teacher.

Gao Zhan put down the Nokia brick phone in his hand and soon noticed Chen Guiliang looking around. He flicked the cigarette butt away, stepped on it, and tapped the podium to warn: "Focus on your test, don't look at other people's papers!"

Chen Guiliang buried his head, put down his gel pen, and rubbed his face with both hands.

What should he do?

Should he hand in a blank paper?

It seemed that wasn't entirely out of the question.

It's just a midterm exam, not the damn College Entrance Exam.

With the mindset of "if it's broken, let it break," Chen Guiliang suddenly felt his whole body relax, and the anxiety of not knowing how to answer the questions vanished.

He even had the leisure to study the desk.

He saw that on the desktop next to the pencil case, someone had drawn a heart pierced by an arrow, with the message underneath: "love Wei Wei." Someone else had written the words "idiot" and used an arrow to point at the previous message.

Right at the top of the desk, a four-line doggerel poem was inscribed: "Body in the exam hall, heart in the internet cafe. Can't answer a single question, screw it all anyway."

The more Chen Guiliang looked, the more interesting he found it, as if he had truly returned to his student days.

He looked up and unscrupulously observed the other students, trying to recover more memories of his youth through those familiar yet strange faces.

The student to his left was someone he didn't recognize at all.

The student to his right was surnamed Gong, who seemed to be the class monitor of the neighboring class.

The female student diagonally in front was named Wu Meng; she had stunned everyone during the College Entrance Exam by becoming the city's Top Liberal Arts Student, and later, it seemed she had immigrated to Singapore.

"Chen Guiliang!"

Gao Zhan suddenly let out an angry shout: "If you don't want to take the exam, just hand in your paper. What are you looking around for?"

"Oh."

Chen Guiliang quickly filled in his multiple-choice answers on the answer sheet, tucked his pen and ruler into his pencil case, and stood up.

This action instantly drew the gaze of every student.

The exam had only been going on for twenty minutes; it was impossible to have finished the questions. Chen Guiliang was definitely just messing around.

"Bring the paper over here," Gao Zhan shouted.

Chen Guiliang picked up his test paper and answer sheet, walked over, and placed them neatly on the podium.

Gao Zhan glanced over the paper: "Why didn't you do the questions at the back?"

"I have a headache, I'm sick," Chen Guiliang blurted out a random excuse.

Gao Zhan didn't believe such nonsense for a second, frowning as he said: "Take it back and finish the paper."

In this situation, normal communication was impossible.

No matter how tactful a person was, they couldn't explain being reborn, nor could they possibly complete the exam paper.

Math—if you don't know it, you don't know it.

Chen Guiliang suddenly bent over and clutched his stomach, his expression pained: "Ouch, my stomach hurts, I need to go to the hospital!"

As he spoke, he took off running toward the door.

Before Gao Zhan could even react, Chen Guiliang had already vanished from the doorway.

After a moment of stunned silence, Gao Zhan muttered angrily to himself: "Getting more and more out of line!"

This student named Chen Guiliang was the one who gave him and his wife the biggest headache.

He carried a whole stack of disciplinary records on his back and was currently even in a state of "probation"!

But to say Chen Guiliang was completely hopeless wasn't quite right; his academic performance was actually decent. Reaching the Tier 2 University cutoff was quite easy for him, and with a little effort, he could even make it into a Tier 1 school.

After exiting the classroom and standing in the hallway, Chen Guiliang felt increasingly lost.

If this were a dream, it wouldn't feel so real.

He seemed to... truly and certainly have returned to 2003.

Things like SARS had no real impact on this small city, only causing the school to cancel the freshman military training.

In a daze, he went downstairs and arrived at the campus square.

The sculpture in the center of the square, as well as the nearby library building, had been completed just last year at great expense to celebrate the school's centennial.

Chen Guiliang felt around in his pants pocket.

In his pocket were a key, a student ID card, a library card, and another 13 yuan and 6 mao.

After wandering around the square, Chen Guiliang didn't know where to go.

Feeling bored, he walked toward the library building a few dozen meters away.

As soon as he entered the first-floor lobby, he saw a row of glass display cases exhibiting the works of famous alumni from past generations.

Two books were singled out and displayed as the school's pride: one was "The Thick Black Theory" and the other was "Ice Fantasy".

That these two authors could be grouped together, and even placed side-by-side, could be considered a form of black humor.

He bypassed the display cases and went to the library reading room, only to find the door locked tight.

Chen Guiliang silently left the library building and paced toward the boys' dormitory.

It was an old, tube-style building, rumored to have been built in the 70s. Fortunately, it was surrounded by camphor trees, which not only kept it cool in the summer but also spared them the annoyance of mosquito bites.

Chen Guiliang had forgotten his room number, but walking into the hallway awakened his memory, and he headed straight for his room, 302.

He pulled out his key, opened the brass lock, and pushed the door open.

A moving scent—a mixture of foot odor, sweat, and mold—rushed to meet him.

There were four bunk beds.

The frames were all made of iron, painted green. The green paint had turned a dark, murky shade, and in many places, the paint had peeled away, revealing the rusted iron pipes underneath.

On the lower bunk near the door, there was a wooden guitar resting on the pillow.

On the desk by the window, there was a copy of "The Irregular Warrior".

Next to "The Irregular Warrior" was a plastic-framed glass mirror, with the back of the mirror lined with paper featuring "Meteor Garden".

Chen Guiliang picked up the mirror.

Looking at himself in the mirror, words failed him.

His appearance back in high school was, how should one put it... rather shabby.

Due to long-term malnutrition, he was as thin as a bamboo pole, with sunken cheeks that were far from aesthetic. Standing at 1.8 meters tall, he weighed a mere 112 pounds.

Fortunately, his features were well-defined; he had the foundation of a handsome man.

A bit more meat in his diet would fix it, and in two or three months, he'd be a fine-looking lad again!

But he didn't have the money to eat meat every meal.

His monthly living allowance was 150 yuan.

Calculating based on 1 yuan for breakfast, 1.5 yuan for lunch, and 1.5 yuan for dinner, his daily food cost was 4 yuan. That meant 120 yuan a month just for meals.

But Chen Guiliang still had to save money to buy books and magazines, as well as daily necessities like toothpaste and soap, and essentials like clothes and shoes. He also had to go home at least once a month, with the round-trip bus fare costing 8 yuan.

All these daily expenses were covered by that same allowance; his parents wouldn't send a cent more.

Therefore, Chen Guiliang often skipped breakfast, and for lunch and dinner, he mostly bought the 1-yuan meal (consisting entirely of vegetables).

When he was most strapped for cash, he would buy instant noodles by the crate.

If bought in bulk, those expired instant noodles cost only 30 cents a bag. Once, after eating them for a month straight, Chen Guiliang felt like vomiting just from the smell of instant noodles!

I must have been reborn, right?

The top priority after being reborn into high school is solving the problem of eating meat.

But where will the money come from?

Chen Guiliang cast his gaze toward his bunk.

Against the wall of his bed, stacks of books and magazines were piled up neatly.

Chen Guiliang took off his shoes, climbed up, and pulled out a magazine at random.

"Yi Lin".

He pulled out another.

"Reader".

He tipped over a stack of books, and from their spines, he could read the titles: "Big Breasts and Wide Hips", "Hometown and Foreign Land", "The Ugly Chinaman", "Bitter Journey of Culture", "Chronicle of Wuni Lake"...

Oh my god, the pretentiousness was overwhelming!

What kind of ghost books was I reading when I was young?

I actually saved money meant for food, tightening my belt and starving myself just to buy these.

Chen Guiliang pulled out all the magazines, then picked out the works of the aforementioned "sages."

After a moment's thought, novels like "To Live" and "White Deer Plain" didn't seem worth keeping either.

Out of several stacks of books and magazines, Chen Guiliang only kept "Hai Zi's Poems", "Dictionary of Classical Chinese", "Anthology of Classical Prose", "General Theory of I Ching", "The Plum in the Golden Vase", "Critique of Pure Reason", "Being and Nothingness", and a few others.

He planned to sell all the rest!

Sell them to trade for meat.

He needed to nourish his weak, emaciated little frame.

Chen Guiliang tore off a few pages from a Zuoyeben and used a roommate's calligraphy brush to write: "Expired magazines, 20 cents each, 50 cents for three, 1 yuan for eight."

Then he wrote: "Classic literature, domestic and foreign, 3 to 5 yuan each."

He blew the ink dry and leaned down to search under the bed.

Soon, he found a battered suitcase under the bed.

He didn't know whose suitcase it was, but he would requisition it for now, pack it with books and magazines, and drag it away.

By selling these things, he would trade for a new way of life in this lifetime!