The release of Haidian District's Second Mock Exam results brought joy to some and sorrow to others.
Jida Affiliated High School was one of the happy schools,
because its students had swept the top three places in the district.
The other schools, meanwhile, were left speechless.
One school taking all three top spots in the district
was unprecedented.
Since Yan Xiao's name was well known, some teachers and parents looked him up online.
What they found left them miserable.
They all shared the same thought-
Couldn't you have just stayed in Xicheng District? Why did you have to come wreak havoc in Haidian?
Fortunately, many of their own students and children had read Yan Xiao's earlier interview, tried his methods, and improved their scores.
That left them with little room to complain.
Still, some people thought it was unlikely that Yan Xiao had scored full marks again.
Nothing like this had ever happened before.
It wasn't normal.
Soon, Yan Xiao's essay was uploaded online again.
It had received full marks once more,
but this time, instead of an argumentative essay, he had written a piece of flash fiction.
The prompt had roughly asked students to write about what hope and love meant.
What Yan Xiao had written
was the famous short story by O. Henry-The Last Leaf.
The original
was far longer than eight hundred Chinese characters.
Technically, that put it over the limit for a Gaokao essay.
However,
Yan Xiao's literary abilities had improved tremendously.
Following the meaning of the original,
he had condensed the story into an eight-hundred-character essay.
As though writing a webnovel, he had stripped away much of the descriptive language and conveyed the story's core in very few words.
The moment the essay was posted,
it drew a crowd of curious onlookers.
"This kid's changed