There was a saying about the college entrance exam: one extra point put you ahead of a thousand people.
In Class Five, the top science class, everyone had already assumed their Chinese scores were all much the same. Even if a gap opened up, it would not amount to much.
Who could have imagined that the highest Chinese score in this Monthly Exam would come not from Class Eleven, but from Class Five-and that it would be a full 145 points!
Chen Shi'an's 145-point paper truly was a rarity, a rarity among rarities!
Ever since loudmouth Zou Xiaokun had shouted out the Daoist Master's score, Chen Shi'an's paper had never made it back into his hands. His astonished classmates had swarmed over to examine it.
The difficulty of raising a Chinese score from the 120s to the 130s was nothing compared to raising one from the 130s to the 140s.
After all, scores in the 130s were common, but scores in the 140s were genuinely few and far between. Even in Class Five, only six or seven students regularly scored in the 130s in Chinese. Most students' Chinese scores had not changed much in this Monthly Exam. Only the Daoist Master had made such a large improvement, and in the most difficult score bracket at that.
"It was the essay! The essay made a huge difference!"
"59 points! And he wrote it in classical Chinese! Daoist Master, are you even human?!"
"Zhuangzi once said, 'Listen not with your ears, but with your heart; listen not with your heart, but with your qi.' These words unveiled the secrets of heaven and earth and illuminated the bewilderment of the human world. To listen with the ears was to pursue the surface of sound; to listen with the heart was to discern the