Chapter 4

Chapter 5: Slaying demons and vanquishing monsters

His mother, occasionally passing through the kitchen passage outside Su Can's bedroom window, was astonished to find him bent over his desk, reviewing his schoolwork under a dim yellow light.

The Su Can she remembered never reviewed his lessons with such care and concentration. Before exams large and small, he always found all sorts of "ways" to relax. With an exam like the high school entrance exam coming up, he could have used the excuse of giving his brain a break to watch television with a clear conscience.

Yet as night fell, her son had not indulged in play. Instead, he had shut himself in his room to study exercises and review, which gave his mother some comforting reassurance.

Returning to the living room, his mother, Zeng Ke, whispered to his father, Su Licheng, "Our son knows he needs to work hard now. He's in there studying and reading properly. We've never seen him work this hard before. He knows he needs to make an effort!"

His expression easing slightly, Su Licheng glanced toward Su Can's bedroom door. The same relief first passed through his eyes, followed by a little worry. He hesitated, then finally sighed. "There are only three days left. If only this boy had started working this hard sooner..."

Su Can's desk was covered with every textbook from his three years of middle school that he could find. Spread out on the desk beside him, they made quite an imposing sight: Chinese, English, mathematics, history, politics, chemistry, and physics. Fortunately, geography and biology had already been completed and would not be included in the entrance exam, sparing him two subjects. Even so, the textbooks before him instinctively made his head ache.

It was rather funny when he thought about it. In 2009, novels about time travel and rebirth were too numerous to count, whether online fiction or traditionally published novels. But they all had something in common: their protagonists either returned to prestigious official families with positions of their own, or seized business opportunities, made advances ahead of their time, and earned their first pot of gold on the tide of the era. Otherwise, they simply went farther back, to another dynasty, to wreak havoc on foreign peoples and conquer the land.

Yet he had somehow returned eleven years into the past, only to find himself back at a desk, staring at thick textbooks, all for the purpose of enduring once again the exam-oriented education in which he had failed so miserably eleven years earlier!

Su Can felt that no one would believe his experience if he told them. Even in 2009, people would probably say he had read too many novels or call him crazy.

Life had to go on, however. If God really existed, then presumably he had not arbitrarily sent Su Can through life again simply to deepen his impression of its suffering. Otherwise, the old fellow had far too much time on his hands.

His parents' dejection after his failure in the entrance exam, and even the faces of the people around him, remained vivid before his eyes. These memories, once shut away, were now so clear that they seared Su Can's heart. He never wanted to repeat those mistakes or live through them again. In this short span of time, he would change the sorrowful experience of eleven years ago and alter his own fate!

Su Can skimmed through Chinese and English, and many once-familiar things immediately came back to him. The Chinese passages required for memorization felt familiar and welcoming, and he could grasp them at a glance. But he figured reciting them word for word would be impossible. He therefore chose to abandon the memorization portion. Word choice and sentence construction, however, along with filling in missing words in short quotations from Lu Xun, analyzing passages, and identifying subjects, predicates, objects, attributives, adverbials, complements, and the like, had always been his strengths. Those came easily.

By 2009, English was no longer an obstacle for him. After all, his company was a joint venture with foreign investment, and Su Can could understand and speak English without trouble. Middle school English in 1998 primarily involved building vocabulary and mastering some simple grammar, so fortunately, none of it posed much difficulty for him. Of course, he still needed to go through the entire vocabulary list to reinforce his knowledge.

That was still a time-consuming task. Apart from a small number of words he needed to look at before recognizing them, even words with relatively complicated structures for middle school students, such as "gratulation" and "delicious," already felt as natural to Su Can as everyday language.

Opening his English textbook and finding one old middle school test paper after another tucked inside, Su Can looked at the total possible score of 150 and his own miserable struggle around eighty or ninety, hovering near the passing mark. He actually cursed inwardly at how stupid he had been in middle school! Looking at those wrong answers now, they were clearly mistakes he should never have made.

Then again, many of his mistakes back then had come from an inadequate understanding of the sentences. He had not even recognized some of the words. That was a problem with his basic vocabulary memorization.

In fact, over the eleven years spanning high school, university, and work, Su Can's accumulated vocabulary had long since far exceeded the 1,500 words required for middle school English. That was why, looking at those old papers now, he found his mistakes childish.

Still, assuming he could handle the entrance exam after only a cursory review would have been taking it far too lightly. At least, Su Can thought that if he simply went into the exam like this, he might not fail to get into Third Middle School, but City First High School, the Provincial Key High School, would be beyond his reach.

Few people ever had much chance to start over. Since he had been given that chance, he could not simply muddle through and face things blindly. Since exam-oriented education had already become a means of gilding oneself in this social environment, and would only become more so in the future-and since he had fallen so badly over it before-why couldn't he use his later knowledge to turn it to his advantage and trample it underfoot?!

For the entrance exam after his rebirth, he was aiming for the city's top high school!

Of course, this was no time to indulge in fantasies and leave it at that. What mattered most was taking action.

His weak foundation had been a huge problem for his former self. Now that he had come back to life, all the experiences of the first part of his life had become his foundation. It was time to grow a vibrant, flourishing tree upon that solid base.

Spreading out the mathematics exercise papers photocopied from Dong Qingyun's set, Su Can understood that his most important task now was to gain a systematic grasp and familiarity with the three years of middle school knowledge that had long since blurred in his memory. Since these hundred mathematics problems were a collection of the hardest problems currently available at the middle school level, if he could work through and get a feel for every one of them, wouldn't even the entrance exam become effortless?

Su Can laid the six mathematics textbooks to one side, spread out the exercises, and started with the first question. Sure enough, these problems lived up to their reputation as the hardest of the middle school years: the very first one stopped him cold. The main issue was how hazy his memory of mathematical concepts had become after so long. Wherever he had more or less forgotten a formula, he opened the mathematics textbooks and searched through them one by one.

The night gradually deepened. His parents each passed the window several times, and whenever they saw Su Can absorbed in his calculations, they smiled knowingly.

By eleven o'clock, Su Can had reached the thirty-fifth problem.

His parents urged him several times to go to bed, but Su Can kept telling them to sleep first. In the end, unable to persuade him, Zeng Ke and Su Licheng worried that pressing him too hard would dampen his enthusiasm for working through the problems. They returned to their room, both feeling a little sorry for him.

As a student, Su Can had almost never stayed up late. In his later working life, however, late-night overtime had been common, particularly amid that dull, tedious life and its maddening repetition. Now he was merely solving problems, which was nothing compared with the future. Besides, with every problem he solved, he grew more and more fluent.

The review material ranged from "Monotonicity of Functions" and "Multiplication of Powers with the Same Base" to "quadratic functions" and "tangent and cotangent."

To be honest, middle school exercises from that period were somewhat harder than those of later years, while high school exercises took the difficulty up another notch. As for the advanced mathematics taught at university, even professors at Su Can's third-rate university would probably have struggled to solve some of the problems. Now that he had come back and was gradually mastering the formulas again as he worked, Su Can, accustomed to the jumble of marketing and other sales work, found his thoughts orderly when facing elementary mathematics. His mind had never been clearer.

The first ten problems took Su Can half an hour. The next twenty also took him only half an hour, an astonishing pace.

For the following twenty, building on that speed, Su Can needed only twenty minutes.

This was already an incredible speed. Top middle school students might have managed it on ordinary test questions, but achieving it on a compiled set of internal exercises like these was simply astonishing.

Su Can tore through the next fifty problems as quickly as gnawing kernels off a corncob, breaking them down and conquering them with everything he had.

He let out a breath. After looking up material, consolidating his systematic knowledge, and finally solving all the problems, it was already one in the morning.

Rising from his chair, he stretched luxuriously and exclaimed inwardly, That felt good.

The exhilaration of solving problems was very much like playing online games after work in 2009, slaying demons and vanquishing monsters, laboriously grinding away until he finally leveled up. Only this exhilaration was even stronger!

The exercises before him, conquered and covered densely with his answers, could be said to encompass every mathematics topic from all three years of middle school. He had taken them all down in a mere three hours. It was like all the homebody men and women playing World of Warcraft were still hovering at level seventy while he was already strolling around at level eighty in a full set of top-tier equipment. This was what it meant to stand above the rest.

Still, that did not mean he had answered every question correctly. Yesterday, Su Can had photocopied only the exercises and forgotten to copy the answer key as well, so he could not guarantee that his solutions contained no oversights or errors. After all, sometimes even when he felt good about something, things ended up going against his wishes. The harsh realities Su Can had experienced before his time travel and rebirth had already taught him never to trust his feelings again.

He had no confidence.

Fortunately, there was still one more day of school tomorrow. He could borrow the answer key then and check how he had done.

He also had to borrow similarly difficult internal exercises for the other subjects that would allow him to review them systematically.

Time was pressing now. He hoped the next three days would still be enough.