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

Have you ever had a nightmare like this?

You dreamed that you were in an exam room, and you couldn't answer a single question.

Chen Guiliang had run into the real-life version—

After being scared awake, he actually found himself in an exam room!

Did I get up too violently or something?

Chen Guiliang lowered his head and looked over the test paper, carefully checking the information inside the sealed line. A row of small print was written at the top—

"Longdu City General High School, 2003–2004 Academic Year, First Semester, Senior Year Midterm Mathematics Exam (Liberal Arts)."

A senior-year first-semester midterm?

Whew!

Thank God, thank God. It wasn't the College Entrance Exam.

Chen Guiliang instantly felt much more relaxed.

Being dragged straight to the execution ground was still different from receiving a suspended sentence.

An answer sheet and a pencil case sat at the upper left and upper right corners of his desk.

Beside the pencil case were sharpened 2B pencils. A plastic ruler had been placed there to stop them from rolling all over the desk.

Chen Guiliang was also holding a gel pen.

The scene was too real. It couldn't possibly be a dream.

Chen Guiliang glanced over the test paper. He had already finished the multiple-choice questions, but he hadn't started the fill-in-the-blank section.

When he looked at the first fill-in-the-blank question, sweat began forming on his forehead—I can't do this damn problem!

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

He definitely would have known how to solve it back then. After all, he had gotten into a first-tier university.

But twenty-two years had passed, and he had long since returned all his math knowledge to his PE teacher.

Chen Guiliang picked up the plastic ruler and used it to draw a Cartesian coordinate system on his scratch paper.

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

As for the coordinate plane and its related knowledge, his mind was completely blank. He only remembered two phrases: odd changes, even stays the same; signs depend on the quadrant.

What damn quadrant am I supposed to look at?

He kept reading through the paper, going over several questions in a row.

Just as expected, he couldn't understand a single one.

The late-autumn breeze carried a faint chill through the doors and windows, but Chen Guiliang felt hot all over.

From anxiety.

He hadn't felt this anxious in years.

Sigh.

Forget it. To hell with it.

This reincarnation scenario was fucking awkward.

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

It seemed like his surname was Gao.

Teacher Gao was sitting with one leg crossed over the other, leisurely smoking and looking at his phone. Several students near the podium covered their noses with their left hands to block the secondhand smoke while diligently working through the questions with pens in their right hands.

He remembered now. This guy was called Gao Zhan.

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

Gao Zhan put down his brick-like Nokia phone and soon noticed Chen Guiliang looking around. He tossed away his cigarette butt, crushed it underfoot, and tapped the desk as he warned, "Focus on your test. Don't look at other people's papers!"

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

What should he do?

Hand in a blank paper?

That didn't seem impossible.

It was only a midterm, not the fucking College Entrance Exam.

Once he adopted a give-up-and-let-it-burn mentality, Chen Guiliang immediately felt relaxed. His anxiety over not knowing how to solve the questions vanished.

He even had the leisure to study the desk.

On the desktop beside the pencil case, someone had drawn a heart pierced through by an arrow. Beneath it was the message, "love Wei Wei." Someone else had written "idiot" and drawn an arrow pointing at that message.

At the very top of the desk was a four-line doggerel: In the exam room my body stays, in the internet café my heart strays. I can't solve a single question, so fuck this place.

The more Chen Guiliang looked, the more amusing it became, as though he had truly returned to his student days.

He raised his head and brazenly observed the other students, trying to recover more memories of his youth through those familiar yet unfamiliar faces.

He didn't recognize the student on his left at all.

The student on his right was surnamed Gong and seemed to be the class monitor from next door.

The female student diagonally ahead of him was called Wu Meng. She had stunned everyone in the College Entrance Exam, becoming the city's top liberal arts student, and later seemed to have emigrated to Singapore.

"Chen Guiliang!"

Gao Zhan suddenly barked, "If you don't want to take the test, hand it in! What are you looking around for?"

"Okay."

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

That action instantly drew every student's attention.

The exam had only begun a little over twenty minutes ago. There was no way he could have finished the paper, so Chen Guiliang had to be screwing around.

"Bring the paper here," Gao Zhan called.

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

Gao Zhan glanced at the paper. "Why haven't you done the questions at the back?"

"My head hurts. I'm sick," Chen Guiliang casually made up.

Gao Zhan didn't believe that nonsense at all. Frowning, he said, "Take it back and finish the paper."

There was no way to communicate normally in this situation.

No matter how smooth-talking he was, he couldn't explain reincarnation, much less finish the test paper.

Math was math. If he couldn't do it, he couldn't do it.

Chen Guiliang suddenly bent over and clutched his stomach, grimacing in pain. "Ow, my stomach hurts! I need to go to the hospital!"

As he spoke, he bolted for the door.

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

After standing there blankly for a moment, Gao Zhan muttered angrily, "He's getting more and more outrageous!"

This student named Chen Guiliang was the biggest headache for both him and his wife.

He had a whole stack of disciplinary actions against him and was even currently on probation!

But if one said Chen Guiliang was unreliable, his grades were actually decent. Getting into a Tier 2 University would be easy for him, and with a little more effort, he could even get into a first-tier university.

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

If this was a dream, it couldn't possibly be so real.

It seemed that he really had returned to 2003.

SARS hadn't had much impact on this small city. It had only caused the school to cancel military training for new students.

Still dazed, Chen Guiliang went downstairs and arrived at the campus square.

The sculpture in the center of the square and the nearby library building had both been completed only last year at enormous expense for the school's centennial celebration.

Chen Guiliang felt around in his pants pocket.

Inside were a key, a student ID card, a library card, and 13.6 yuan.

He wandered around the square for a while, not knowing where to go.

With nothing better to do, he walked toward the library building several dozen meters away.

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

Two books had been set apart as the school's showcase pieces: one was called The Thick Black Theory, and the other Ice Fantasy.

The fact that these two authors could be put together, even treated as equals, was a kind of black humor in itself.

He walked around the display cases and headed for the library lending room, only to find its door tightly locked.

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

It was an old corridor-style building, supposedly built in the seventies. Fortunately, the area around it was full of camphor trees, so summers were not only cool but also free of mosquito bites.

Chen Guiliang had forgotten his dorm number, but the moment he entered the building, his memories returned. He headed straight for Room 302.

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

A moving bouquet of foot odor, sweat, and mildew hit him in the face.

There were four bunk beds.

Their frames were all made of iron and painted green. The paint had faded into dark green, and in many places it had peeled away, exposing the rusted iron pipes underneath.

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

On the desk by the window sat a copy of The Irregular Warrior.

Beside The Irregular Warrior was a glass mirror with a plastic frame, its backing made from a Meteor Garden cover.

Chen Guiliang casually picked up the mirror.

Looking at himself in it, he found the sight hard to describe.

What did he look like in high school? Well... rather shabby.

Due to long-term malnutrition, he was as thin as a bamboo pole, with sunken cheeks that looked anything but appealing. He was 1.8 meters tall but weighed only 56 kilograms.

Fortunately, his features were regular. He had the foundation of a handsome guy.

As long as he ate more meat, he could make up for it. In two or three months, he'd be a handsome young man again!

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

His monthly living expenses were 150 yuan.

At one yuan for breakfast, 1.5 yuan for lunch, and 1.5 yuan for dinner, his daily food expenses came to four yuan. One month of meals cost 120 yuan.

But Chen Guiliang also needed to save money for books, magazines, toothpaste, soap, and other daily necessities, as well as clothes, shoes, and other essentials. He went home at least once a month, and the round-trip fare alone was eight yuan.

All those everyday expenses came out of his living allowance. His parents wouldn't send any additional money.

So Chen Guiliang often skipped breakfast, and for lunch and dinner, he usually bought the one-yuan meal, which was entirely vegetables.

When he was especially short on money, he bought instant noodles by the case.

Those expired instant noodles cost only thirty cents a packet if bought in bulk. Once, after eating them continuously for a month, Chen Guiliang wanted to throw up whenever he smelled instant noodles!

"I really did reincarnate, didn't I?"

"The first priority after reincarnating back to high school is figuring out how to eat meat."

"But where am I supposed to get the money?"

Chen Guiliang turned his gaze toward his bed.

Neatly stacked against the wall beside the bedding were piles of books and magazines.

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

Yi Lin.

He pulled out another magazine.

Reader.

Then he tipped over a stack of books. Their spines revealed the titles: Big Breasts and Wide Hips, Hometown and Foreign Land, The Ugly Chinaman, Bitter Journey of Culture, Chronicle of Wuni Lake...

Good lord, that was some strong stuff!

What the hell kind of books had I been reading when I was young?

I had actually saved money on food, tightened my belt, and gone hungry just to buy these books.

Chen Guiliang gathered up all the magazines, then picked out the works by the illustrious figures mentioned above.

After thinking about it, novels like To Live and White Deer Plain didn't seem necessary to keep either.

Of several stacks of books and magazines, Chen Guiliang kept only 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 the like.

He planned to sell everything else!

Sell them and buy meat.

Give his frail, skinny body some nourishment.

Chen Guiliang tore out several sheets from Zuoyeben and used his roommate's calligraphy brush to write: "Expired magazines, 0.2 yuan each, 0.5 yuan for three, 1 yuan for eight."

Then he wrote: "Chinese and foreign classics, 3 to 5 yuan each."

He blew the ink dry, then bent down to search beneath the bed.

Soon, he found an old suitcase under the bed.

He had no idea whose suitcase it was, but he would borrow it for now, fill it with books and magazines, and drag it away.

He would sell this stuff and live differently in this life!