No Survival Without Madness

"Xuezhou, you came first in foreign languages! First! Another perfect score!"

Mei Renteng seemed to have said it so many times that he was clearly growing numb to it.

But he had never seen a learning prodigy like Zhang Xuezhou.

Zhang Xuezhou caught up one subject at a time. If he had advanced gradually, the occasional rise in his scores would have shown steady improvement, and many people could have accepted that he was diligent.

But Zhang Xuezhou was different. Whenever he caught up in a subject, he went straight to the top, without giving anyone a chance to come to terms with it.

He had started with number theory, the most difficult course, then moved on to biological genetics, which required extensive memorization, and then to foreign languages.

With perfect scores in three subjects in a row, Zhang Xuezhou had climbed into the school's top fifty.

If the top students had previously thought Zhang Xuezhou was merely lucky for a while, or that he had excelled in a single subject, clearly no one thought so now.

Once Zhang Xuezhou brought his scores up in a subject, they never came back down. After getting a perfect score, he kept getting perfect scores.

If a test paper hadn't been worth only so many points, no one doubted that Zhang Xuezhou could have earned an even higher perfect score.

He didn't grind through problems nonstop. What Zhang Xuezhou always held in his hands were his textbooks.

Although thousands of types of exam questions came from textbooks, no one would agree that anyone who learned the material in them could get a perfect score.

That involved mastering the material and applying it as a whole, as well as a great deal of memorization and recitation, not to mention personal habits.

"Why don't you