Finished in Half an Hour

Chen Zhao felt a surge of nerves. This was his first real exam since gaining his high intelligence. Would his brain actually come through for him?

In theory, there shouldn't be a problem. But anyone who'd gone to school knew that a lot of things you thought you'd learned could suddenly vanish from your mind once you sat down for an exam!

The test papers were handed out soon, and Chen Zhao wrote his name.

Time to look at the questions.

Chen Zhao didn't start writing right away. Instead, he quickly scanned the entire paper to get a feel for the question types and difficulty.

In just over twenty seconds, he'd looked through the whole thing.

Chen Zhao grinned.

This paper... was ridiculously easy!

It was all kid's stuff!

A perfect score was in the bag!

Chen Zhao lowered his head and got to work. He set his scratch paper aside—he didn't need it. Mental arithmetic was all he needed!

The first multiple-choice question took one second.

The first five multiple-choice questions took fifteen seconds.

All twelve multiple-choice questions were done in a minute and a half!

Since everyone in this exam room was a bottom-ranked student, many of them had no interest in working on the paper after it was handed out. A few who did want to try their best were straining to calculate on their scratch paper. At that moment, they'd just finished the first multiple-choice question and were wondering if they'd gotten it right.

Meanwhile, Chen Zhao had already finished all the multiple-choice questions and moved on to the fill-in-the-blanks!

The difference! A chasm of a speed difference!

The next four fill-in-the-blank questions were fairly difficult, and Chen Zhao spent a full three minutes solving them.

Four minutes and thirty seconds into the exam, he'd finished all the multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions!

Chen Zhao's heart pounded, and his face flushed. This felt amazing! It felt so good! While everyone else was still struggling over the first few questions, he'd already reached the word problems!

There was only one word problem on the first page. Chen Zhao glanced at it, and his heart leaped with joy!

He'd seen this one before. It was in the bottom-right corner of page 101 in the 63 Exercise Collection, a mock exam question from Ganzhou!

Chen Zhao still remembered every step and the answer, so he didn't even need to think or work it out. His pen flew across the page, pouring out line after line of calculations. In just three minutes, he'd finished the whole problem, and his solution matched the official answer in the 63 Exercise Collection exactly! Chen Zhao was sure that even a god couldn't find a single point to take off!

Less than eight minutes into the exam, he'd finished the entire first page!

Chen Zhao was trembling with excitement. For all his years as a student, every exam had left him scratching his head and on the verge of panic, doing his best to calculate as quickly as possible—only to run out of time before he could finish. It was utterly despairing. But now, with the extraordinary intelligence the system had given him, taking an exam was actually this easy!

Could you believe he'd finished half the paper in eight minutes?

These questions were as easy as drinking water!

The second page was all long-form questions, so it would obviously take longer.

The teacher who'd written the paper seemed pretty lazy, having simply grabbed questions from elsewhere. The first three long-form questions were all ones Chen Zhao had seen in the 63 Exercise Collection. They were mock exam questions from various cities or past college entrance exam questions from different provinces. Chen Zhao had already worked through the entire collection, and he'd read the solutions to all the long-form questions too. With his incredible memory, he never forgot anything he'd seen, so he wrote out the solutions to those first three questions without hesitation. Each one took just a few minutes, depending entirely on how many steps it required.

The next few long-form questions started to get interesting. They weren't ones he'd seen before; the teacher had probably adapted them from other problems.

Chen Zhao had no choice but to put his brain to work and solve them himself.

At first, Chen Zhao felt the slightest bit nervous. The teachers who wrote the school's exams were old hands with ten or twenty years of teaching experience. They knew every kind of question inside out, and might come up with some bizarre curveball. There was no guarantee he could solve one quickly.

But just fifteen minutes later, Chen Zhao had finished writing out the final long-form answer.

The curveballs and weird questions he'd expected never showed up. They were all simple problems. One glance and a brief four or five seconds of thought gave him a crystal-clear approach. Then, as he wrote out the steps, his mind worked out the answer at the same time. Each long-form question took only a few minutes. The whole process was incredibly smooth.

He'd finished the entire paper!!

Chen Zhao looked up at the clock on the classroom wall. The exam had started at eight, and it was now eight thirty-one. In other words, he'd finished a two-hour math exam in just half an hour!

And he hadn't just filled in every answer—he was sure they were all correct! Several of his solutions to the long-form questions even matched the official answers exactly!

Chen Zhao spent another ten minutes checking the whole paper to make sure he hadn't made any mistakes.

He hadn't forgotten his agreement with Ding Xiaoqiao and Zhong Feng before the exam. He tore his scratch paper in half and began copying down his answers.

Once he'd copied out both sets, Chen Zhao furtively peeked toward the proctor at the front of the classroom.

Would you look at that—the proctor was dozing with his head on the desk!

After all, this was the last exam room, and the students' grades were abysmal. The teacher didn't feel like keeping a close eye on them.

If you wanted to copy off each other, go ahead. Even if you all put your scores together, you'd be lucky to scrape a passing grade. A bunch of useless students copying off one another would still end up with terrible scores. There was no need to intervene.

So Chen Zhao openly handed out the two sets of answers, one to Ding Xiaoqiao and one to Zhong Feng.

Ding Xiaoqiao and Zhong Feng were both surprised when they received the answer sheets. They'd thought Chen Zhao was joking, but he'd actually gone and brought them the answers?

What's more, the answer sheets were densely covered in writing, including the steps for a lot of the long-form questions?

What was going on?

Could Chen Zhao really solve all of these?

Impossible! Solving one or two questions would make sense, but if he could do the entire math paper, he wouldn't have ended up in the last exam room!!

Ding Xiaoqiao and Zhong Feng hesitated for a moment, then gritted their teeth and started copying Chen Zhao's answers. They wouldn't get many questions right on their own, so they might as well copy his. Maybe Chen Zhao really knew how to do a few of them.

After handing out the answers, Chen Zhao soon got bored. The exam wouldn't end for another hour and a half. What could he do? He couldn't just sit there for an hour and a half, could he? At this rate, he'd probably fall asleep before they collected the papers.

Why not hand in his paper early and go have some fun!

Chen Zhao raised his hand and called out, "Teacher? Teacher?"

The proctor, who'd been dozing with his head on the desk, slowly looked up and frowned sleepily. "Do you have a question, student?"

"Can I hand in my paper and leave now?" Chen Zhao asked cautiously.

The students throughout the classroom all froze and turned to look at Chen Zhao, as if he were some kind of alien.

"If you've finished everything, you can hand in your paper and leave," the proctor said kindly.