Surprise after surprise

But she soon broke that plan herself.

The family couldn't manage the river snails without her. Grandpa Lin and Grandma Lin were hardworking and went to the river to gather snails whenever they had time, so she couldn't go a single day without going home.

So after evening study, she still had to make the dreary trip home on her broom, clean the snails, and then come back.

Bed at nine, up at five. Her phone had finally shown its greatest use-as an alarm clock.

She set it to vibrate. Otherwise, setting an alarm for that hour would get her beaten up by the whole dorm sooner or later.

By October, the weather had gradually turned cool, and she had to wear a jacket in the mornings. But standing in stance raised her body temperature; after half an hour, she was not only steaming but sweating too.

She had also come to dislike magical cleaning, always feeling it didn't get her properly clean. After practice, she cast Scourgify, then washed up and went to the classroom with her classmates for morning reading.

Horse stance wasn't something you held forever right from the start. Training was gradual, and the assignment she had been given was to stand for ten minutes, rest for a few, and then continue.

Even that time had been set only after her master examined her bones. At first, he had planned to make it five minutes at a stretch.

Master Li accepted that readily. As Lin Er herself had said, the aim wasn't to train a great hero who could leap across rooftops and scale walls. The first priority was to strengthen her body.

In peacetime, there was no need to make a child worry about urgently learning martial arts for self-defense. Otherwise, wouldn't they have fought their battles for nothing?

Some classmates had originally wanted to practice with her, but they all gave up when they heard they would have to get up at five.

Few of them ever managed to fall asleep before ten. If they got up that early too, they might as well not attend class during the day.

At first, the teacher had admonished her, but after seeing that it didn't interfere with morning reading, the teacher turned a blind eye.

Occasionally, other teachers passing by spotted her and thought Lin Er had been made to stand there as punishment.

She was quite well known in her year now. She made frequent trips to the teachers' office, and her grades were improving rapidly. Though she wasn't the sort of gifted prodigy who left people amazed, she was a good representative of the hardworking students who made up for their shortcomings through diligence, the kind teachers liked best.

For example, once during class, they heard the teacher next door roar in anger, "Can't you learn from Lin Er in the class next door?"

Lin Er looked up in confusion to find the whole class staring at her. After class, curious students from next door gathered to look at her too.

Fortunately, word that she "could fight" and "had backing" had spread early on. Otherwise, she would have gotten far more than a little pointing and whispering.

Shi Meng, on the other hand, was delighted and came over to laugh at her several times.

"How does it feel to be the student in another class and draw everyone's resentment?"

Before this, their little group had borne the brunt of it.

Their homeroom teacher really had drawn well.

When the new students entered the school, the three classes had drawn lots for the top ten. Because their class had taken Xu Duoduo and Lin Er, it had gotten one extra.

As it turned out, of those ten students, two in their class consistently ranked in the top three.

Four in their class consistently ranked in the top ten.

Eight in their class consistently ranked in the top twenty.

Their class average was also the highest every time.

Shi Meng and the others were familiar faces in the other classes too. Class Three was all right, but Class Two's homeroom teacher had certainly drawn plenty of resentment toward them.

The classrooms were right next to each other, too. Sometimes, when their classroom was too quiet, they could hear the voices next door. It was terribly awkward.

"The pressure's enormous. This is all a despicable scheme by the homeroom teacher next door!"

"Ha ha ha!"

The classmates around them who had been eavesdropping out of curiosity all laughed.

They could fight and fool around, but class honor was no joke.

The students in their class had a strong sense of class pride.

When one of them was singled out in another class like this, the rest of the class took pride in it too.

At the very least, even the dean of students gave their class some leeway when making rounds during evening study.

While the students were fooling around and waiting for the midterm exams, their homeroom teacher suddenly announced that their seats were being rearranged.

The whole class erupted. Lin Er raised an eyebrow and glanced at her deskmate, who had jumped to his feet. He sat back down on his stool in embarrassment.

"It's not like you got a limp!"

He had no grounds to argue and knew it, so Lin Er couldn't be bothered with him.

On such a happy day, she wouldn't hit anyone.

Soon, they discovered it wasn't just their class getting new seats. The whole school was buzzing.

Only then did they learn that the education bureau was replacing their school's desks and chairs.

Truck after truck pulled up outside the teaching building.

The boys from every class were called to take the wooden desks to the playground, while the girls cleaned the classrooms and then carried the new desks and stools inside.

The new desks and stools were made of plastic and aluminum alloy and weren't heavy.

Each student got an individual desk, and the chairs had backrests. They were clean and neat, and there was no need to put a book underneath an exam paper to write on it anymore.

The little aisles in the classroom were much roomier too.

As the new desks were brought in, the books and odds and ends were gathered and stacked on the corridor windowsill.

The class lined up by rank, boys in one line and girls in another. Two students went in at a time and chose their own seats.

Lin Er had only ranked thirty-fifth in the monthly exam. By the time she went in, the little groups had claimed most of their spots.

She had planned to pick a random seat somewhere near the middle and a little toward the front, since always sitting at the side could make her squint, but Shi Meng quickly waved her over.

"Here, here! Come on!"

Lin Er was momentarily taken aback before she realized she knew the students around that spot quite well.

It was the third group, fourth row, on the far left.

The classroom had four groups of desks. Group one was by the door, with two desks side by side. Groups two and three were in the middle, with four desks side by side in each, while group four was over by the windows, also with two desks side by side.

Shi Meng was on the inner side of group two's fourth row, only one person away from this seat.

Lin Er looked up at the empty seat on the outer side of group two's fifth row. In the end, she smiled and accepted Shi Meng's kind offer.

Yan Jingting was happy too. Her grades had only picked up in junior high, and she couldn't have been happier to have a deskmate like Lin Er, who dared go to the office to ask questions.

She had always been on her own before, and whenever no one went with her, she had been a little afraid to go to the office.

Now everyone around her was someone she could discuss her studies with, and none of them was afraid of the teachers. She felt it would be best if the seating arrangement never changed.

The three of them gathered around Yan Jingting's desk, chatting and laughing, until Xu Wang rapped on the desk in protest.

"Hey, hey, hey, that's too much! We're in the same row, and you're leaving me out!"

The smile on Lin Er's face didn't change. Her eyelashes lowered as she watched him join in quite naturally.

Soon, the students in the front row turned around and joined the discussion too, talking about why the desks and chairs had suddenly been replaced and the seats rearranged throughout the school.

Lin Er was out of the loop, so she just listened the whole time.

Their group included the top ten students in the class. Lin Er's grades wouldn't originally have been good enough to get her in. She remembered clearly that, when she had come in during her previous life, there had only been one seat in the two middle groups, in the fifth row.

That had been diagonally behind Shi Meng. It wasn't until the second year of junior high, during the final seating rearrangement, that she had sat beside Shi Meng for a month.

In the first row, each of the two middle groups had only two students, seated level with the teacher's desk. All of them were major headaches for the teachers.

The second row got a bit of chalk dust. Even after they switched to a whiteboard, students there were likely to get sprayed with the teacher's spit and were the first to be caught zoning out. Nobody liked it.

The two groups right in the middle of the third and fourth rows, however, were full of students with good grades. They had a good view and a good location, neither too far from the teacher nor too close. They were the golden seats in the class.

She glanced at Xu Pan, who was leaning over a desk to join them, and understood somewhat. She didn't know why, but this seat really had been saved especially for her.

"Lin Er, we're going into the city to have fun after the midterms. Do you want to come?"