Projection

Night fell on the third day at the Nine-Foot Daoist Temple.

Zhang Xuezhou swallowed the Qi and Blood Pill in one gulp.

He had no interest in feeling the Qi and Blood surge through his body, and he wanted to feel any pain even less.

As soon as he swallowed the Qi and Blood Pill, his vision went black. Then his eyes opened, and he was back in his bed in the real world.

"What a thrilling night!"

Zhang Xuezhou shook his head, still a little dazed from dreaming so much, and went over the dream again before updating his patient diary.

"Supreme Purity True Technique. Interesting!"

Zhang Xuezhou glanced at the other made-up Cultivation Method: "The way of heaven is to diminish what has excess and supplement what is lacking. Thus, emptiness overcomes fullness, and what is lacking overcomes what has excess..."

Zhang Xuezhou made a special note of the Cultivation Practice Method Zhang Weimeng had made up. The particular reason was simply the line, "What is lacking overcomes what has excess."

It meant the weak could defeat the strong, which suited Zhang Xuezhou's current physical condition perfectly.

If he wanted to break out of the encirclement, all he had to comfort himself with was that line: what is lacking overcomes what has excess.

He glanced at the Cultivation Method called the Nine Yin True Scripture and also recorded the contents of the Supreme Purity True Technique in his diary.

Once he had finished his daily routine, Zhang Xuezhou collected the breakfast he had ordered and strolled toward Yucai Middle School.

Whether they were first-, second-, or third-year students, every one of them was fighting for a way forward.

After round upon round of selection, they had reached the final watershed. They had no choice but to fight through these last few months.

Zhang Xuezhou found it hard to judge the merits and drawbacks of this education system, but it was indeed a relatively fair method of selection at present. He held the same view even though he had become a student who failed to make the cut.

He wandered into Class 156 and found his seat.

On Zhang Xuezhou's desk stood a stack of books and test papers nearly a meter high.

For third-year students, there were few alternatives to the sea-of-questions tactic. Ninety-nine percent came from ordinary families, leaving them with the examination as their only path.

Zhang Xuezhou was no exception. At school, he studied by reading or grinding through questions, and when he encountered something difficult to understand, he asked a teacher.

They had already learned everything they needed in their first and second years. What remained mostly depended on the students' own performance; the teachers chiefly kept order in class and answered questions, or explained key examination problems they had found on a given day.

"Brother Zhou, want to go take a crack at the challenge together?"

Zhang Xuezhou had just sat down when his deskmate Mei Renteng quietly invited him.

The challenge Mei Renteng meant was the school ranking exam, which students could choose to take on their own. They had three chances each month, and their highest score counted.

The display device on the desk could connect to the question bank, drawing a different set of questions for each self-administered test.

As long as a student felt reasonably confident, he could take the challenge at any time.

Mei Renteng was clearly itching to try, hoping to make a push up the rankings while he was at his sharpest.

"Looks like Brother Teng is going for the top two hundred this time!" Zhang Xuezhou said with a smile.

"You bet!"

Mei Renteng raised his right fist.

As fellow sufferers, he was not much better off than Zhang Xuezhou. His school ranking was middling, and getting into a good university would be difficult; he could only choose among ordinary universities and colleges.

Still, Mei Renteng felt a measure of superiority.

Compared with him, Zhang Xuezhou was poor at grinding through questions continuously. After two hours of the sea-of-questions tactic, he could no longer hold out and easily grew sleepy, causing him to hand in his paper early.

As a result, Mei Renteng's grades had always been a notch above Zhang Xuezhou's.

As the saying went, dragons beget dragons and phoenixes beget phoenixes, but in Zhang Xuezhou's condition, he had almost no chance of repeating the glory of his academic-star sister.

Quite a few third-year students felt Zhang Manqian's younger brother should not be doing so poorly, while others thought it was impossible for everyone in a family to get good grades.

Some teachers held a little hope and often gave Zhang Xuezhou thoughtful answers when he asked questions, while others watched coldly, waiting for a laugh at his expense.

But to most people, who Zhang Manqian was, who her younger brother was, and whether he did well or poorly had nothing to do with them.

Mei Renteng's feelings were more complicated.

Naturally, that was because he spent more time with Zhang Xuezhou. He held some hope of seeing whether Zhang Xuezhou could carry on that glory, but he also felt conflicted, thinking Zhang Xuezhou ought to belong among ordinary people like himself.

If one said he and Zhang Xuezhou were not close, the two sat together every day, and the friendship between deskmates was the strongest kind in high school.

But if one said he and Zhang Xuezhou were close, Mei Renteng felt that did not seem quite right either.

Zhang Xuezhou arrived and left on time every day. Apart from their eight class periods, they had very little contact, exchanging only a few words while grinding through questions.

In the end, Mei Renteng swept all those little thoughts aside and plunged into the sea of questions with Zhang Xuezhou's support.

"Ranking updated to 218th!"

After the test, Zhang Xuezhou looked at his instantly updated ranking and closed the exam interface, thoroughly satisfied.

He was quite pleased with how quickly his results were improving.

A mere few days could not have produced an explosive leap in his grades.

If his estimate was correct, his final ranking for the month should be around 180th, a rise of seventy places from his previous school ranking of 256th.

Part of the reason was that he had focused on complex number theory problems to pull ahead in points, but more of it was that he could spend longer working on the exam.

As long as he stayed awake through the exam, his score would obviously rise. That was inevitable.

"I'm actually one place behind you!"

Beside Zhang Xuezhou, Mei Renteng glanced at Zhang Xuezhou's ranking, then at his own ranking of 219th, grinding his teeth.

Everyone else studied desperately at school, practically day and night, while Zhang Xuezhou took advantage of living next to the school and simply showed up on time every day.

Mei Renteng felt a little miserable. He studied hard for more than ten hours every day, yet somehow he could not beat Zhang Xuezhou's easygoing way of studying.

Although Zhang Xuezhou could not match Zhang Manqian's dominance, the comparison still hurt.

"Maybe the questions I got were easier." Zhang Xuezhou shrugged. "You know, there are always a few lucky test-takers each time!"

"Putting it that way makes me feel much better!"

Mei Renteng muttered.

The question bank contained countless problems, and every test-taker received different ones, but there was no guarantee that the difficulty would be exactly the same.

The question bank could only ensure that a test-taker would not receive questions he had previously answered on a test. If he had done similar problems outside class, that was something the machine's program could not judge.

That was the luck Zhang Xuezhou had mentioned.

But when the unified adult examination came, everyone would have the same paper.

As for who had done similar problems before, that was probably the kind of lucky test-taker everyone hoped to be.

A brief stroke of luck on a school ranking practice exam could not decide much.

Only if Zhang Xuezhou broke into the school's top ten could he claim a ranking prize from Yucai Middle School.

But a result somewhere over two hundredth would clearly earn him nothing.

Mei Renteng gestured for Zhang Xuezhou to keep it up. Zhang Xuezhou smiled and nodded.

He was neither especially popular nor unpopular in class.

One reason was his "school district housing": Zhang Xuezhou was a day student who lived near the school. He did not spend mornings and evenings with everyone else, nor had he shared a dormitory room with them.

The other was that Zhang Xuezhou tried to avoid close friendships, lest he reveal that he had schizophrenia.

His relationships with everyone in class could not be called good, but neither were they bad.

For the most part, there was little chance of making enemies, but not quite enough affection to become best friends.

Sometimes Zhang Xuezhou thought his social life was rather pathetic, but he could not expect a mentally ill person to be gifted at socializing.

And once they graduated from high school, everyone would be scattered to the four corners of the world and rarely cross paths. Whether they had been close or distant would make no difference.

Thinking of that, Zhang Xuezhou felt at ease again.

The tense days of studying in the third year of high school continued to pass.

Zhang Xuezhou worked out how to spend his time.

If nothing unexpected happened, he would spend one month on number theory, one month on biological genetics, one month on language theory, and half a month on subjects such as foreign languages.

His grades would rise by dozens of places each month until he joined the academic stars competing at the top of the school rankings.

As for what rank he could reach and how well he would perform on the adult examination, Zhang Xuezhou could not predict that.

He smiled at Mei Renteng.

For him, the day's intensely focused studying was already over. The remaining time belonged to a horseback glance at the flowers: in his absent-minded state, he could hardly make much progress, so it was purely a way to pass the time.

Zhang Xuezhou lazily passed the time, glancing at his textbook now and then.

As his thoughts wandered, he suddenly remembered the Supreme Purity True Technique.

Things from a dream could not be taken as real, just like the Nine Yin True Scripture in Zhang Weimeng's novel.

Although Zhang Weimeng had made up a set of Nine Yin True Scripture martial arts that sounded somewhat plausible, no one could master such peerless skills.

The same was true of the Supreme Purity True Technique Zhang Xuezhou had brought back from his dream.

If he believed in the cultivation technique he had constructed in his dream, people would laugh their teeth out if he told them.

But trapped as he was in a dream, the Supreme Purity True Technique was bound to be what the person in the dream practiced. When Zhang Xuezhou had trouble paying attention in class, he could not help pondering it, to make sure he could master his first Technique as quickly as possible after falling asleep.

His body drifted through class, while his mind had already flown to those mysterious things that were hard to bring into being.

Grinding through questions left Zhang Xuezhou mentally exhausted, but pondering the Supreme Purity True Technique relaxed him.

Sure enough, a mentally ill person can only be normal in his own mental world!

Zhang Xuezhou recited the thought silently.

He felt that only when he thought about things related to the dream world did his head stop tightening as though it were about to split.

I'm here thinking about a Technique from my dream. I wonder if I could spend a little effort studying while I'm dreaming, so I can get into a more useful school!

Zhang Weimeng's plans to make a fortune had suffered setback after setback. Everything he tried failed, and even Mom, Song Fengying, had neglected proper work to run off and deceive people through livestreaming. The Zhang family's finances had taken a direct and devastating blow.

Both Zhang Xuezhou and Zhang Manqian had suffered the pain of not having enough money.

Neither Zhang Xuezhou nor Zhang Manqian had any particularly special ambition. They just wanted to get into a good school and make a dash for money.

If one had never possessed something, losing it was not frightening.

But once one had possessed it and then been knocked back down, the sense of that difference in standing was hard to accept.

Zhang Xuezhou longed for the spacious house he had lived in since childhood, even though it was only in a corner of the suburbs.

Zhang Xuezhou also liked fresh, homegrown vegetables, rather than having to eat artificially synthesized food every day as he did now.

He had once possessed so many good things, only to have them stripped away one by one.

Zhang Xuezhou only wanted to take back everything he had once had.

Maybe I can achieve that three years after finishing my studies and entering society... no, five years... forget it, I should be able to do it in ten!

His thoughts turned over as he repeatedly formed the hand gestures of the Supreme Purity True Technique.

When he unconsciously raised the white seed inside his body with his mind, Zhang Xuezhou saw a faint white light rise from the fingertips of his right hand, followed by a surge of heat.

"Hm?"

Zhang Xuezhou froze for a moment.

The cultivation technique Zhang Weimeng had made up could not be practiced, yet the cultivation technique he had obtained in a dream seemed to have been successfully cultivated.

Although the power of the Supreme Purity True Technique was very faint, Zhang Xuezhou was certain this was the initial mastery of the technique that Li Jiao had mentioned.

"How is that possible?"

Zhang Xuezhou thought it perfectly normal for abilities he had mastered in the real world to be projected into his dream.

For example, he could play tennis in reality, and he had the same ability in his dream. As long as he got a tennis racket and a ball in the dream, Zhang Xuezhou thought he could hit the ball against a wall three hundred times in a row without mishitting it once.

For another example, he had certain crafting and repair skills, and his grasp of number theory was quite good, allowing him to easily take charge of distributing meat in the village.

But for something to be projected from a dream into reality felt fantastical to Zhang Xuezhou, hard to explain with ordinary theories.

He suddenly remembered the white seed inside his body.

In the past, Zhang Xuezhou had thought it was a hallucination caused by his schizophrenia, an aftereffect of the Essential Instruction for Recuperation treatment. Thinking it over again now, he felt it was very likely something he had gained from dreaming.

Eating the venomous python meat had given him the seed for entering the realm, which had caused a white seed to form in his body in reality as well.

The Supreme Purity True Technique could also be projected into reality and cultivated.

I also swallowed a Qi and Blood Pill...

At the thought that he might become a strong man in reality, Zhang Xuezhou could hardly contain himself.