"Riiing~"
The sudden class bell eased Chen Zhu's embarrassment, and the two teachers from the neighboring classes returned to their classrooms.
Chen Zhu's next class was English, but he didn't take in a word. One moment he wondered why something like "rebirth" had happened to him; the next, he thought about how his parents were more than a decade younger now, and how he really ought to be happy about that.
After class, his deskmate Huang Bohan asked in puzzlement, "You were distracted the whole lesson. You can't just stop listening because you don't like English. It's worth 150 points on the college entrance exam, too."
Chen Zhu didn't know how to explain it. He lowered his head and thought for a while before saying slowly, "Bohan, during the last break, I had a very, very long dream."
"Break only lasts ten minutes. How long could your dream have been?"
Huang Bohan gave a derisive snort, utterly ruining the mood.
"Hmm..."
Chen Zhu glanced at Huang Bohan and said, half-truthfully, "I dreamed that you and your wife got divorced."
"Bullshit!"
Huang Bohan immediately shot back indignantly, "Well, I dreamed you couldn't find anyone to marry!"
Huang Bohan hadn't even dated anyone yet. To him, "marriage" was still something sacred, not something Chen Zhu could joke about.
"You actually got that right."
Chen Zhu sighed wistfully. In his previous life, not only had he never married, but each blind date had been worse than the last.
But Huang Bohan and Chen Zhu were close friends. After being angry for half a minute, he shamelessly leaned over again. "Chen Zhu, was my wife pretty in your dream?"
Chen Zhu gave it some serious thought. "Fairly pretty, I guess. But she was really good at fooling people. She had you completely wrapped around her finger before you even got married."
"Get lost!"
Hearing Chen Zhu bad-mouth his "future wife" again, Huang Bohan turned away, no longer willing to talk to him.
Chen Zhu smiled, silently twirled his pen for a while, then suddenly asked Huang Bohan, "Anything interesting happen in class lately?"
Chen Zhu planned to jog his memories so he could quickly settle back in.
"Anything interesting?"
Huang Bohan habitually started biting his nails again. "Not really. Well, there was today. Song Shiwei got sick this afternoon, and several boys from other classes came to visit her."
"Who's Song Shiwei..."
Just as he was about to ask, Chen Zhu suddenly remembered who she was.
Song Shiwei had been the school beauty in his year, and her grades had been outstanding, too. She had eventually gotten into Sun Yat-sen University, the best university in Yuedong Province.
Back then, boys had lined up in droves to pursue her. One of them, named Li Jianming, had supposedly chased her from high school through university, and then even after graduation, when she started working.
Song Shiwei had never agreed to date him. Li Jianming had even threatened to jump into the Pearl River. Apparently, it had made the papers. In the end, the school beauty's father, unable to stand the harassment anymore, had given Li Jianming some money to get lost and disappear.
All of this was gossip he had heard at class reunions. As Chen Zhu recalled it now, he instinctively searched for the school beauty.
As he remembered it, Song Shiwei had been a cool, aloof beauty.
She sat two rows ahead of him, wearing a blue-and-white school uniform jacket. As she bent over her exercises, her neck and back formed a gentle curve. Her long hair was tied in the low ponytail common among high school girls, every strand neatly gathered into something like a soft, glossy black ribbon.
It was strange, really. School uniforms tended to run slightly larger than normal clothes. On most students, they looked like stage costumes, with cuffs and trouser hems that always hung awkwardly, refusing to sit right.
Yet on good-looking students, they somehow seemed to fit perfectly.
From Chen Zhu's angle, he couldn't see Song Shiwei's face, only the wrist exposed by her rolled-up sleeve, white as snow, like the gleaming barrel of a pen.
Sure enough, you don't even need to see a pretty girl's face. Even her back is captivating.
That was what Chen Zhu was thinking.
Suddenly, a figure hurried into the classroom doorway. Before he had even stopped, he called out impatiently, "Song Shiwei, I heard you caught a cold. I skipped class just now to buy you some cold medicine. Hurry and take a pill."
Chen Zhu looked up. A boy of seventeen or eighteen stood at the door. He wasn't tall, but his features were fairly handsome. His hair was slicked back to an oily shine in a style far too mature for his age, giving him a somewhat slick air.
He held a plastic bag of medicine and looked at Song Shiwei inside the classroom, his head covered in sweat.
"Is that..."
A little uncertain, Chen Zhu asked Huang Bohan, "Li Jianming?"
"Who else would it be?"
Huang Bohan scoffed. "He heard Song Shiwei was sick and has already come over two or three times this afternoon. I didn't expect him to actually go off campus to buy medicine. I bet he wouldn't be this devoted to his own mother."
When Chen Zhu had been a student before, he had rarely paid attention to the romantic gossip surrounding the school's beauties and heartthrobs. In fact, high school had its own particular type of boy:
Their grades were decent-not outstanding, but good enough to place in the top ten or twenty in their class;
They were shy and awkward, blushing even when they stood up to answer a question in class, and unable to make eye contact when talking to girls;
But calling them introverted wasn't entirely accurate, either. Around other boys, they could talk up a storm, covering everything from astronomy and geography to politics and economics. There was nothing they couldn't ramble about.
Chen Zhu and Huang Bohan were both fairly typical examples. Huang Bohan might be mocking Li Jianming now, but that was from the sidelines. Put him in the same position, and he wouldn't dare make a peep in front of so many people.
But the current Chen Zhu had returned through rebirth. After weathering the ups and downs of an official career and seeing plenty of the world, he had long since shed the awkward innocence of adolescence. He quietly studied the boy obsessively pursuing the school beauty as he recalled that "river-jumping incident."
Standing in the doorway, Li Jianming kept wiping sweat from his forehead and taking great, deep breaths, giving the impression that he had "walked all the way around the earth to buy cold medicine."
"Heh~"
Chen Zhu couldn't help chuckling. With his experience and shrewdness, he could naturally tell it was an act.
Seeing that Song Shiwei still wasn't responding, Li Jianming stayed where he was and continued pitifully, "Song Shiwei, I know I'm not good enough for you, but you're sick. Please don't turn me away. Just take the cold medicine first."
His expression was pleading, his tone ingratiating, and his face full of hurt and dejection.
This kid's pretty calculating.
Chen Zhu was a little surprised. Li Jianming was deliberately casting himself as weak and helpless to win sympathy, then using the pressure of public opinion against Song Shiwei.
With another girl, at this innocent, melodramatic, easily moved age, it might actually have worked.
But Song Shiwei seemed rather "hard-hearted." Faced with Li Jianming's attentiveness and pitiful display, she merely sat in her seat and replied calmly and succinctly, "I don't need it!"
Her voice was cool and clear, like jade beads falling onto a plate.
At those words, the girls in the classroom let out soft murmurs of surprise, apparently finding Song Shiwei's response a little cold.
Some "kind-hearted" girls were already trying to persuade her. "Shiwei, just go take the medicine. Li Jianming means well..."
Song Shiwei remained unmoved. The stalemate lasted until the teacher arrived for evening self-study. Only then did Li Jianming leave, looking back every few steps, his forlorn expression as pitiful as could be.
Huang Bohan, who had thoroughly enjoyed the spectacle, couldn't help sighing now. "What is love in this world, that it makes people pledge themselves to each other in life and death~"
Chen Zhu offered no comment. From an adult's perspective, there was nothing wrong with pursuing a girl, but clinging to her like a stubborn plaster and even threatening her with suicide must have been pretty distressing for her.
Still, it had nothing to do with him. After evening self-study began, Chen Zhu pulled a math workbook from among his books and tried working through it.
He had expected it to be incomprehensible. After all, it had been years since he had dealt with symbols like f(x), sin, and log.
Yet when he saw the first question, "M = {-2, -1, 0, 1, 2}, N = {x ∣ x-x-6 ≥ 0}. Find M∩N," a familiar yet unfamiliar approach automatically surfaced in his mind:
"∩" means intersection, right? This question asks for the intersection of sets M and N.
Set M contains five known numbers, so all I need to do is solve the inequality for set N.
"x-x-6 ≥ 0" can be rewritten as (x-3)(x+2) ≥ 0, which gives x ≥ 3 or x ≤ -2.
Looking back at set M, it contains "-2," so that means M∩N = -2.
Chen Zhu flipped to the back of the workbook and checked the answer. "-2" was correct.
What's going on?
Even after successfully solving the problem, Chen Zhu could hardly believe it. After a moment's thought, he worked through several more math problems of different types, then even switched to physics and chemistry. In the end, he found he could solve most of them with ease.
I get it!
Chen Zhu suddenly understood. Rebirth had merely added more than a decade of life experience. The knowledge already in his mind hadn't been lost.
In that case...
Chen Zhu had once been a powerhouse with wildly uneven grades. He was excellent at math, physics, and chemistry. No matter how difficult the exam, his scores generally hovered around 140.
Chinese and English were much worse, only around ninety to a hundred points. His homeroom teacher had earnestly urged him countless times:
"Chen Zhu, if you could just raise your Chinese and English scores by twenty points, getting into Sun Yat-sen University wouldn't be a problem. Otherwise, you'll have to settle for picking a good major at South China University of Technology."
In his previous life, Chen Zhu hadn't listened, and sure enough, he had only gotten into South China University of Technology.
Now that he had returned through rebirth, he hadn't lost his ability to solve math, physics, and chemistry problems. Meanwhile, years of writing official documents in his previous life had greatly improved his feel for language, his store of general knowledge, and his writing skills.
His Chinese score was bound to improve!
So... this is my rebirth cheat?
Chen Zhu's heart suddenly began pounding uncontrollably, because he might actually get into Sun Yat-sen University.
(A little high school math review for everyone. You're welcome! Old Liu is back writing urban fiction. Could you send those votes where they belong → "Who Takes the Civil Service Exam After Being Reborn?")
(End of chapter)
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