When Cheng Che woke up, it was still dark outside.
He reached for his phone and checked the time: 6:03. Almost half an hour before his alarm was set to ring at six thirty.
His mind was clear, and his body had no intention of lingering in bed.
With his early nights and early mornings lately, along with his improved attributes, he clearly needed less sleep.
Of course, the most fundamental reason was that he was a little excited.
To raise his intelligence, he had to put in a full five hours of studying. There was no rushing it.
To raise his charm, he had to wait until his evening skincare routine and sleep. There was no rushing that either.
But stamina was different. Running five kilometers earned him one point, available whenever he wanted.
Last night, he had been stuck at 59.
After today's run, it would be 60.
Unable to suppress his youthful eagerness, he slipped quietly out of bed, pulled on sweatpants and an old T-shirt, stepped into his shoes, and headed out.
In Spring City in early March, the sky was still gray-blue after six, and the air held a hint of chill, cool and refreshing as it entered his lungs.
He jogged all the way to the nearby People's Park.
There were already people in the park. A few old men swung their legs on the horizontal bars, while several older women stood in a row practicing tai chi sword, their movements slow and leisurely. A radio beside them played "Shepherd's Song."
Cheng Che started running along the path around the park's outer edge.
One lap, two laps, three laps.
Near the end of his third lap, a figure coming the other way brushed past him.
It was a girl in a baseball cap and fitted workout clothes, the morning light tracing a beautiful outline of her curves.
Her running form was textbook, her breathing rhythmic. One look told him she exercised regularly.
Cheng Che took only one look before withdrawing his gaze and continuing to watch the panel before his eyes.
However beautiful a girl might be, she wasn't his.
But his attributes and talents would belong to him forever!
He sped up.
The fourth lap, the fifth lap.
His lungs began to burn and his legs began to ache, but only a few hundred meters remained before the threshold he had in mind.
For the final hundred meters, he gritted his teeth and sprinted.
[Ding! Mission "Run, Incubus!" completed. Stamina +1, endurance +1.] [Stamina attribute has reached 60. Specialized trait draw triggered!]
The familiar pale-purple wheel appeared before his eyes, spinning without a breeze.
Cheng Che stood beneath a camphor tree in the park, panting, his eyes fixed unblinkingly on the wheel.
The pointer slowed down.
[Congratulations! You have obtained the passive talent "Ever-Full Power Reserves."] [Ever-Full Power Reserves: Your power is concentrated and solid when exerted. Even repeated explosive movements will not cause it to flag, allowing you to maintain peak output at all times.]
Cheng Che stared at those words for five full seconds, then abruptly clenched his fists.
A new talent!
A stamina-type passive talent!
Unlike a talent such as "Total Concentration," which required manual activation and consumed stamina.
This was a passive skill. It meant that whether he ran a hundred meters, a thousand meters, or even jumped repeatedly on the basketball court, he wouldn't grow weaker and weaker as he had before.
"This is great!" Cheng Che couldn't help shouting.
That feeling of starting with nothing and watching it blossom and bear fruit, little by little, was so fucking good.
He stood in the morning breeze, grinning from ear to ear like an elementary school kid who had just won a fight.
Back home, Cheng Che showered, ate the congee and eggs on the table, then went out to catch the bus to school.
Morning self-study proceeded as usual. As always, Guo Xin stood his English textbook upright as cover and secretly ate buns behind it.
The first lesson was math.
Old Xu entered carrying his large teacup, with a stack of test papers tucked in his hand.
The classroom instantly fell quiet. Some students shrank their heads down as though someone had flipped a switch.
Old Xu set his teacup on the lectern, patted his already precariously sparse hair, then said with a chuckle:
"You did pretty well on this test."
The atmosphere instantly relaxed.
"However..." Old Xu changed tack. "Some did well, and some didn't. Think it over afterward. Were you nervous during the exam, or had you simply not reviewed thoroughly enough? All right, let's hand out the papers."
The classroom grew tense again.
Old Xu picked up the stack and began reading scores from lowest to highest.
"Wang Hai, 78."
"Li Tingting, 84."
"Zhou Qiang, 87."
The further he read, the more nervous everyone became.
Nobody wanted their name to leave Old Xu's mouth too early. That would be a public execution.
The later their name appeared, the higher their score. Everyone understood that.
"Guo Xin, 110."
Guo Xin froze, then his face lit up with delight.
A hundred and ten was definitely an exceptional performance for him. He scampered up eagerly to collect his paper.
"Zhao Lei, 112."
Zhao Lei rose from his seat, his chin slightly raised.
As he passed Guo Xin, he gave him a sidelong look that said, undisguisedly: That's it? You're still beneath me.
Guo Xin returned to his seat without looking particularly dejected. Instead, he muttered, "Only two points higher than me, and look how smug you are."
He sat down and instinctively turned to glance at Cheng Che, then suddenly froze.
"Why haven't you gone up to get your paper yet?"
Cheng Che still had no test paper. He was holding a pen, scribbling on scratch paper.
Guo Xin's eyes widened. Instantly forgetting that he had just been outscored, he slowly broke into a grin, then winked in Zhao Lei's direction.
Zhao Lei was admiring the "112" on his paper when he suddenly felt a chill at the back of his head.
He turned around and met Guo Xin's face, which practically had "heh heh heh" written all over it.
He frowned.
Is there something wrong with him? He scored lower than me and he's still smiling like a blooming flower. Has the shock gotten to him?
Zhao Lei snorted inwardly in disdain. Just as he was about to turn back, his gaze swept over Cheng Che beside Guo Xin.
His hand suddenly paused.
There was no test paper on Cheng Che's desk.
How is that possible?
Why hasn't he gotten his yet?
Zhao Lei's first reaction was confusion. Then a "reasonable" explanation surfaced in his mind: He did badly, obviously. Old Xu always saves the papers of those who do terribly for last, to critique them in front of everyone.
Yes, that has to be it.
The more Zhao Lei thought about it, the more sense it made.
That guy put on such a show flipping through his paper during the exam, but he was actually just guessing blindly.
When he goes up to collect his paper, let's see how Old Xu deals with him.
A contemptuous curve lifted the corner of his mouth. He turned back around, sitting even straighter.
Watching Zhao Lei's expression shift from confusion to nervousness and then back to arrogance, Guo Xin was speechless.
What kind of mental gymnastics is he doing now?
"Tenth place, Chen Ming, 119."
Guo Xin snapped back to attention. Only then did he realize they had reached the top ten, and Cheng Che still hadn't been called.
His heart began to race.
He knew Cheng Che had done well, but he hadn't expected him to do this well.
"Fifth place, Cheng Che, 128."
The entire classroom went silent for a second.
Then a buzz erupted, as though something had exploded.
"Who?"
"Cheng Che?"
"A hundred and twenty-eight? Seriously?"
Pair after pair of eyes turned toward him in unison.
Cheng Che rose from his seat, his face largely expressionless, though his legs felt a little weak.
After all, he wasn't quite used to the feeling of being the focus of everyone's attention.
He walked to the lectern and took his paper from Old Xu.
Old Xu looked at him with a smile. "Good work. Keep it up."
"Thank you, sir." With that, Cheng Che turned and headed back to his seat.
As he passed class monitor Su Qingyue, she happened to look up.
Her gaze swept over Cheng Che's face, then slid to the paper in his hand, and a strange thought suddenly arose:
He seems... pretty good-looking.
She froze for a moment, then hurriedly lowered her head, inwardly berating herself: What do you mean, good-looking? What are you thinking?
Zhou Mingxuan sat in his seat with a calm expression. It was only an improvement, perfectly normal.
Zhao Lei, meanwhile, sat frozen in his seat.
It felt as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water down his back, chilling him from his spine all the way to the crown of his head.
A hundred and twenty-eight?
How was that possible?
How could that guy who had flipped randomly through his paper during the exam score a hundred and twenty-eight?
A full sixteen points higher than him!
So he hadn't been without his paper because he'd done so badly that it was saved for last, but because he'd done so well that he ranked in the top five.
Then what did that make all the analysis he had been so certain of just now?
Zhao Lei's face went pale for a moment, then flushed red.
He lowered his head, pretending to read his paper, but his fingers gripped its corner so tightly that his knuckles turned white.
"Cheng Che has improved tremendously this time." Old Xu's voice came from the lectern, and Zhao Lei felt every word stab his eardrums like a needle. "His math score alone jumped from the low eighties to a hundred and twenty-eight. And I looked over his paper. His working on the long-answer questions was exceptionally clean, even more rigorous than that of several students ahead of him."
Zhao Lei lowered his head even further.
"And Zhou Mingxuan, Su Qingyue, and Lin Xiao all maintained their standards..." Zhao Lei could no longer make out what Old Xu said afterward. His head was buzzing.
The final three papers were handed out: Lin Xiao came third, Su Qingyue second, and Zhou Mingxuan first.
But by now, everyone's attention had long since left the "iron triangle." Who didn't know those three always monopolized the top three spots?
The real novelty was Cheng Che.
"All right, let's go over the questions."
Old Xu tapped the desk to get everyone's attention, then began explaining the multiple-choice questions.
Cheng Che activated [Total Concentration] and earnestly absorbed the knowledge.
When they reached the final question, Old Xu put down his chalk, surveyed the class, and suddenly said:
"Can anyone solve this problem using a different method? There should be someone in our class who used a method different from mine."
Nobody raised a hand.
Old Xu's gaze landed on Cheng Che. "Cheng Che, what method did you use? Come up and explain it to everyone."
Cheng Che froze for a moment.
The entire class's eyes instantly converged on him again.
He quickly recovered, stood up, took a blank sheet of scratch paper, and walked to the blackboard.
Picking up the chalk, he first drew a coordinate system, then marked three points on the curve.
"Old Xu's method was to differentiate directly and consider each interval separately," Cheng Che said. "My method was a little different. First, I split the original function into two parts. The left side is an even function, and the right side is a periodic function. Then I used symmetry to halve the interval..."
Zhou Mingxuan had been working on his own problems. When he heard "used symmetry to halve the interval," his pen paused for half a second, and he looked up at the blackboard.
His gaze followed the movement of Cheng Che's chalk, watching intently.
Cheng Che wrote as he spoke, the chalk tapping against the blackboard.
At first, the students below were still whispering, but gradually, the noise died away.
Because Cheng Che's working was so clear.
Even several students who were good at math couldn't help sitting straighter and beginning to copy his steps.
"Holy shit, this method is even simpler than Old Xu's..."
"Someone who didn't understand this couldn't even reproduce it."
The suspicions many had initially held that he had cheated vanished as well.
After all, people who had made it to high school and could take the university entrance exam couldn't be too stupid to understand that much.
"Finally, substitute back into the original expression and check the endpoint values, and you have the answer."
Having finished, Cheng Che put the chalk in its box and dusted off his hands.
He turned around and discovered that the whole class was watching him.
Cheng Che looked nervously toward Old Xu, who stood to one side with his arms folded, an irrepressible smile on his face.
"Very well explained," Old Xu said. "Even more concise than my method. Did everyone understand? If you didn't, ask Cheng Che after class, or come and ask me."
Cheng Che returned to his seat, and Guo Xin gave his thigh a hard slap under the desk, lowering his voice. "Bro, you're seriously fucking awesome now."
Cheng Che pushed his hand away and said quietly, "Don't talk. My legs are jelly."
Guo Xin held back his laughter, his shoulders shaking. "Keep pretending. You looked like Old Xu had possessed you up at the blackboard, and now your legs are jelly?"
Cheng Che ignored him, sat up straight, and turned his test paper back to the page they had just gone over.
His palms really were a little sweaty, but he couldn't stop the corners of his mouth from lifting. Right now, his whole being was basking in dopamine.
Just then, the bell rang for the end of class.
Old Xu picked up his teacup and casually added:
"Oh, right, the overall results for this mock exam have been posted on the hallway bulletin board. Go have a look after class. Don't take it too seriously. It's only one mock exam. Finding your problems matters more than your score."
With that, he left, teacup in hand.
But who had any attention to spare for his talk of "not taking it too seriously"? The teacher had barely stepped out of the classroom before someone went charging out with a whoosh.
Within seconds, a crowd had gathered around the bulletin board.
Lin Xiao stood in the middle of the crowd, tracing a finger down the ranking list. Upon finding her name, she let out a breath of relief. "612, fiftieth in the grade. Not bad. I haven't slipped."
"Holy shit!" Guo Xin's booming voice suddenly rang out from the crowd. "Cheng Che! You got fucking 508! Two hundredth in the grade! You jumped more than two hundred places!"
"What the hell?"
"Cheng Che? The Cheng Che in our class?"
"Five hundred and eight?!"
Hearing this, Lin Xiao looked over too, her eyes curving as she smiled happily.
Guo Xin pointed at the bulletin board, his face flushed bright red, as though he had won the lottery:
"It's right here! Cheng Che, 508, two hundredth in the grade! He only got four hundred and something last time. He's improved by over a hundred points!"
"Holy fuck, never mind the 128 in math, his English and combined science scores went up that much too?"
"He's using cheats, right..."
"His approach to that last big math problem was so good. It's all the result of studying hard..."
Zhao Lei stood at the very edge of the crowd, listening to the exclamations rising one after another from within. His face had turned the color of pig liver.
He found his own name: 470 points, 380th in the grade.
Cheng Che had overtaken him by a full 38 points.
No, it wasn't just being overtaken.
Someone he had always looked down on the most had ground him mercilessly beneath his feet.
Just the day before yesterday, he had said in front of his mom that no matter how someone like Cheng Che struggled, it would be useless.
Yet today, the grade rankings were posted right there, in black and white.
Zhao Lei turned and left, his steps hurried and uneven, as though he were fleeing.
Guo Xin happened to catch sight of his retreating figure and laughed even louder. "Hahaha, someone's getting worked up! Someone couldn't beat him on the exam, so now he's running away!"
He hadn't named anyone, but everyone knew who he meant.
A few stifled laughs came from the crowd.