The principal's trust was exhilarating. As soon as Chen Zhao returned to the classroom, he immediately started reading his textbooks.
He had already memorized them once yesterday, but he still felt a little uneasy. He'd go over them one more time!
Reviewing material he had already memorized took far less time. So in just one morning, he went through all his textbooks again.
Without a hint of modesty, Chen Zhao felt that he had stored every word of every high school textbook in his brain. All he had to do was close his eyes, and he could even flip through the pages in his mind!
But simply memorizing the textbooks until he knew them forwards and backwards wasn't nearly enough.
Anyone who had gone to school knew there was a rather bizarre pattern to the difficulty of questions:
Difficulty of textbook examples: 1 + 1 = 2
Difficulty of regular homework: 1024 × 2046 = 2095104
Difficulty of exam papers: 128888 × 65¼ + 2.66³ ÷ ln 88 + 0.15% = ???
So the next step was to tackle mountains of questions, solving them like mad. He needed to work through several meters' worth of exercise books, find every question he couldn't do, and solve them one by one!
When school let out for lunch, Chen Zhao didn't go home. He bought a hand-grabbed pancake, two grilled sausages, and a skewer of teppanyaki squid from a roadside stall. He wolfed it all down, then headed straight for the Xinhua Bookstore by the school gate.
The Xinhua Bookstore was a magical place. It never stopped customers from reading to their hearts' content. Every time Chen Zhao went there, he found a crowd of people reading, leaning against bookshelves or sitting on the floor, so absorbed they looked like statues.
Most of them were freeloaders who read but never bought anything. Chen Zhao always figured that with so many people reading for free and no one buying books, the bookstore would probably go out of business in a few days. Yet all these years later, the Xinhua Bookstore was still going strong. It even had enough money to renovate twice and add seats for the freeloaders...
Today, Chen Zhao was going to enjoy some free reading too!
He went inside, took the elevator straight to the third floor, and got off in the study-aid section. Everything from preschool literacy books to university exam guides could be found there. High school exercise books and study guides made up a particularly large section. Chen Zhao had come to read the senior-year exercise books for free.
As soon as he reached the third floor, Chen Zhao spotted three familiar figures.
Ma Jianjun! Zhao Xiaobai! Zhang Fan!
The top three students in the whole school!
The three top students seemed to have just arrived too. They were weaving between the bookshelves, probably looking for exercise books. Top students always liked hanging out with other top students. The three of them seemed to get along very well.
But Chen Zhao didn't know them well, so he didn't go over to say hello. Instead, he looked for study guides on his own.
Chen Zhao wanted to look at Five Years of Gaokao, Three Years of Simulation, a famous exercise book series. All the top students in his class had a set, so the questions were probably pretty good.
But after searching for a while, he couldn't find Five Years of Gaokao, Three Years of Simulation. Instead, he found... Six Years of Gaokao, Three Years of Simulation. The cover looked exactly as he remembered, except for the name.
It was probably another result of the system changing the world. Ever since the World Reset, a lot of things had changed. It wasn't surprising that the name of a study guide had changed too.
Chen Zhao browsed the shelf, took down a math book from the Five-Three series—no, the Six-Three series—and sat in a corner to read.
It was full of questions. Each one was labeled with the year and location of a gaokao, which meant most of them were actual exam questions. The editors had sorted past gaokao questions and mock exam questions by chapter. They were packed with real exam questions, just right for review.
He looked at the first question.
He glanced at it, and the answer was already clear in his mind.
The second question.
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Still... he had the answer at a glance!
The third question... He still had the answer at a glance!
Being smart felt so good. Every question seemed much easier, and he didn't even need to work anything out on scratch paper!
Chen Zhao read through the questions one by one. About 99% of them were ridiculously easy; he could calculate the answer in his head as soon as he finished reading. He flew through the book, turning a page every few dozen seconds.
A few minutes later, he suddenly heard voices from farther away.
The voices sounded familiar. They belonged to the three top students!
They weren't speaking loudly, but Chen Zhao had always had sharp ears. He could just about make out what they were saying.
Ma Jianjun said, "I'll probably finish memorizing the CET-4 vocabulary the day after tomorrow. I bought a CET-6 vocabulary book, so I'll take a quick look through it."
Zhang Fan said, "I just bought a book of physics Olympiad problems. I'll be taking part in a physics competition before long, so I need to cram."
Zhao Xiaobai said, "I bought a collection of full-mark essays. I'll memorize them when I get back."
As expected, top students were always top students. They had all come to buy new study materials. Chen Zhao secretly admired them.
But as he listened, the conversation suddenly turned to him.
"What's the deal with that Chen Zhao who met the principal with us this morning? I asked around, and apparently he's never done well since starting high school. He's been near the bottom of the grade all through senior year!" Zhang Fan's voice was full of scorn. "In the office this morning, he said he was third from last. I didn't believe him—I thought he was joking. After all, who'd let someone third from last into the principal's office? But it turned out to be true!"
Chen Zhao shrugged. What did my grades have to do with you?
If you put that energy into studying, you wouldn't be stuck in third place forever!
Then Zhao Xiaobai spoke, her voice gentle and soft. "I asked the teacher about it. The teacher said Chen Zhao solved two incredibly difficult questions in front of the grade director, and the director picked them at random and had him solve them on the spot. He said he'd been hiding his abilities and deliberately getting bad grades. So maybe he's like the Shaolin Temple monk who sweeps the floor—a seemingly ordinary person who's actually a hidden master."
Chen Zhao nodded to himself, and his favorable impression of Zhao Xiaobai shot up.
What a beautiful girl—beautiful inside and out!
"Bullshit!" Ma Jianjun scoffed. "I've deliberately lost points too, to compete for the scholarship for the Most Improved Student Award. But I only lost fifty points. Chen Zhao lost several hundred! And he kept it up for three whole years! Why would anyone hide their abilities to that extent? He probably just got lucky and stumbled onto the answers to the director's questions. It had nothing to do with hiding his abilities."
Zhao Xiaobai said, "Not necessarily, right?"
Zhang Fan said, "There's no 'not necessarily' about it. Jianjun's right. That guy was definitely just lucky."
Chen Zhao listened, frowning. He was getting annoyed.
Was it really okay to talk about someone behind his back?
What had he ever done to them?
Whether he was hiding his abilities or just lucky, what the hell did they care?
Chen Zhao sat in the corner, hidden behind rows of bookshelves. The three top students didn't see him. They kept chatting as they rounded a corner, took the elevator, and left.
For a moment, Chen Zhao wanted to rush out and argue with Ma Jianjun and Zhang Fan. But he stayed seated. For one thing, arguing like that was pointless. For another, there were two guys, and if things got heated, he couldn't beat them anyway...
The best way to deal with doubts was to prove yourself with facts!
The weekly exam was in two days. That would be the perfect chance to prove it! As long as he shot past Ma Jianjun and Zhang Fan in the rankings, that would say everything!
Chen Zhao felt a surge of motivation. He lowered his head and began carefully studying the questions in the Six-Three book. Before the weekly exam, he had to go through every subject's Six-Three questions. Only then would he be sure he could surpass Ma Jianjun and Zhang Fan!
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