Chen Shi'an's score of 125 on the Chinese Weekly Test caused an uproar in Class Five.
Wait, Daoist Master-
Weren't you supposed to be a Nine-Leak Fish!
How had you scored 125 in Chinese right off the bat?!
Then what did all those years we'd spent studying amount to? Just years of suffering? As the most unusual member of the class, everyone knew Chen Shi'an was a Taoist, and everyone knew he had never attended school.
Aside from finding his identity as a Taoist novel, they really hadn't paid much attention to his grades.
Anyone who had been to school knew how important foundations and established methods were. Someone with a weak foundation could bend down to pick up a pen in math class, then look up and have no idea what the teacher was talking about. Chinese might be a little better; it was their native language, after all, so they had at least some foundation. But a Chinese exam wasn't a contest to see who spoke Chinese more fluently. It required specific answer formats and systematic knowledge!
If he'd scored sixty or ninety, they could have understood it. But he'd only been in the classroom a few days, and he'd gone straight to 125
points?!
"Daoist Master! Teach me Chinese! No matter what I do, I only get a little over 110. Please show me the way!"
"Daoist Master! Lend me thy paper for my perusal!"
And so, only when their fourth-period Chinese lesson began did Chen Shi'an's weekly test paper finally make its way back into his hands.
It was probably even more sought-after than a perfect-score Chinese paper. His classmates had also borrowed his very first Chinese placement test to look at.
"Holy shit! The Daoist Master actually wrote his placement test essay in classical Chinese!