Chapter 81: Mid-Autumn Festival Extra — Things of the Past
[--] often looked back on his short life, especially in the dead of night, when all was quiet. He would rummage through his less-than-eventful experiences and turn over the past, tasting things he hadn't noticed while stumbling through his days.
Ever since childhood, he'd been what people called an "average good student." His grades were better than most of his classmates', but not good enough; he was willing to listen to his teachers, but never completely obedient; and though he was sometimes disciplined, he'd never managed to keep it up for long.
Like most people caught in the middle, he couldn't easily climb any higher. His meager talent made him unwilling to settle for the status quo, and his sporadic efforts wasted time, giving him the occasional illusion that he might escape his awkward position.
Of course, as expected, he'd performed at a mediocre-to-below-average level on the exam that would decide his future, then muddled his way to the crossroads where he had to choose what came next.
Then, inevitably, the unexpected happened. Among the bewildering number of choices he agonized over, there was a medical school with a very official-sounding name. For reasons he couldn't understand, his score was well above the admission cutoff, and the school even promised a job less than five minutes from home after graduation.
His family's blind approval of a medical career, combined with a little yearning born of his own creative imagination, propelled this school he'd never heard of before to the very top of his list.
Even now, [--] couldn't understand why he'd pushed several obviously better long-shot options to the bottom and chosen this one without hesitation.
By the time the question first surfaced from the depths of his mind, he