290: Fortunately, it was just us being stupid.

Zhong Huai felt his face burning.

A rush of heat surged from the base of his neck straight to the crown of his head; he felt like he was about to spontaneously combust.

Slowly, very slowly, he raised his hand and covered his face.

He was too ashamed to face anyone.

"Sigh..."

A long sigh broke the suffocating silence.

From between his fingers, Zhong Huai squeezed out a dry sentence.

"Even the best can stumble, and even a horse can trip, Brother Zhan."

Qin Zhan didn't speak.

He just slowly turned around and looked at Zhong Huai with an unprecedented gaze that was terrifyingly calm.

Zhong Huai felt his skin crawl under that gaze and quickly tried to defend himself.

"Boss, this... this really can't be entirely my fault, right?"

"I..."

Zhong Huai opened his mouth, wanting to struggle a bit more, but under Qin Zhan's rippleless gaze, all his excuses got stuck in his throat.

What kind of gaze was that?

There was no anger, no blame, not even disappointment.

It was just calm.

Pure, stagnant-water-like calm.

Yet it was precisely this calm that made Zhong Huai feel worse than being hung up and beaten by the Commander-in-Chief in the training room.

He would have preferred Qin Zhan to just kick him right now.

"Sigh..."

Qin Zhan finally looked away. He turned around, his back to Zhong Huai, and let out a sigh even longer than Zhong Huai's.

This sigh seemed to drain the iron-hard temperament from his body.

"I can't blame you."

Qin Zhan's voice was low, carrying a trace of fatigue he hadn't even noticed himself.

"From the start, I was the one who overthought it."

He admitted it.

This Commander-in-Chief of the Fangs, this man known in the military for being iron-faced and ruthless, frankly admitted his mistake.

He was the one who started this.

If he hadn't been so prejudiced, imagining a world-shaking drama and then proactively seeking out the 'professional' Zhong Huai for advice...

Zhong Huai's imagination wouldn't have flown as far as the Abyss Domain.

Hearing this, Zhong Huai didn't feel relieved; instead, his face burned even hotter.

The Commander-in-Chief had taken the initiative to shoulder the blame; what could he, the one who gave the bad advice, say?

With one man's back turned and the other's head lowered, the training room once again fell into that maddeningly awkward silence.

They were the Fangs.

The military's top special operations squad.

The blades that walked in the darkness, handling the thorniest and most dangerous missions.

And yet, here were two core members, on the verge of disintegrating from embarrassment because of a self-directed mental brainstorm.

If word of this got out... Zhong Huai shuddered, not daring to think further.

"But there's still one problem."

Qin Zhan's voice rang out again, interrupting Zhong Huai's wild thoughts.

He was still facing away, looking at the flickering virtual tactical board.

"Why is it 288-star?"

Qin Zhan's thoughts had already shifted from the question of 'is this embarrassing' to the root of the incident.

"I remember that in our year, the maximum difficulty for the College Entrance Examination was nine stars."

"Have the values inflated this much over the years?"

"It's not value inflation."

Zhong Huai spoke rapidly as if grasping at a life-saving straw, trying to use his professional expertise to reclaim some of the dignity he just lost.

He swiped a few times in the air, pulling up a document.

Regulations for the Implementation of the College Entrance Examination, Supplementary Rules, Volume III, Article 19.

"Boss, look at this!"

Zhong Huai pointed to one of the rules he had highlighted with a red box.

"Regarding difficulty correction for Delayed Examinees... To prevent examinees from using delays to avoid normal assessments and accumulate out-of-spec resources, a punitive correction is applied to their subjective difficulty choice."

Qin Zhan turned around and looked at the text.

Zhong Huai's voice sounded in his ear, filled with the excitement of finally finding the truth.

"Delay for one year, the final difficulty coefficient is multiplied by two."

"Delay for two years, multiplied by four."

"Three years, eight times."

"Four years, sixteen times."

"That kid Lin Yu delayed for a full five years!"

Zhong Huai held up five fingers and then clenched them hard in the air.

"Thirty-two times!"

"He chose nine-star difficulty. Nine times thirty-two... equals 288!"

The formula was clear.

The logic was plain.

Qin Zhan looked at that 'thirty-two times' correction coefficient, speechless for a long time.

So... so, the root of everything.

That blood-red '288' that made them both imagine 'conversations across space' and a 'staggering fraud'.

Was it just because of a stubborn unlucky guy who delayed for five years and then got pinned to the ground by the rules and forcibly flipped by a punitive clause?

"Pfft..."

Qin Zhan couldn't hold it in.

He turned his head and let out a short sound, like air leaking out.

Zhong Huai was stunned.

He saw the Commander-in-Chief's shoulders shaking slightly and uncontrollably.

A blunder.

A complete, utter, massive blunder.

From that 288-star difficulty.

To Teacher Gao's phone call for help.

And then to the 'transaction scene' they happened to encounter.

Everything was just a coincidence.

A series of coincidences were forcibly twisted together by these two 'smart people' with overactive imaginations, weaving a web of a massive lie.

And Lin Yu.

The youth they had defined as a 'Dragon King', a 'Big Shot', and the 'Chosen One'.

From beginning to end, he was just a clean and innocent ordinary examinee who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and got caught up in an incident he might not even understand himself...

Oh no, he was an unlucky examinee who had delayed for five years.

The two looked at each other, seeing identical expressions of absurdity, helplessness, and extreme embarrassment on each other's faces.

Embarrassing.

Truly, it was embarrassing beyond belief.

But... after the endless embarrassment, a sense of relief quietly surged in their hearts.

Qin Zhan let out a long breath, as if that breath took away all the tension and speculation of the past few days.

Zhong Huai also slumped back into the nearby chair, his whole body relaxing.

"Fortunately, fortunately..." he muttered to himself, "Fortunately, it's just us being stupid, not the enemy being too cunning."

Although this conclusion made them both look very stupid.

A simple assessment task was ten thousand times easier than being caught in a political game involving unknown big figures.

They no longer had to worry about saying or doing the wrong thing and bringing trouble to their teacher.

They also didn't have to speculate about any subtext regarding 'gilding' or think about how to make the act look good.

The task returned to its most basic form.

"Alright."

Qin Zhan straightened up again, the steady aura belonging to the Fangs' Commander-in-Chief returning to him.

He patted Zhong Huai's shoulder.

"Since it's a simple assessment, we'll go by the assessment rules."

"Yes!"

Zhong Huai immediately sat up straight, his entire mental outlook refreshed.

As long as he wasn't dealing with those convoluted social intricacies, he was still that top technical expert.

"Boss, don't worry! It's just an assessment, right? Simple!"

Zhong Huai patted his chest, taking full responsibility.

"Forget one Lin Yu, even if there were ten, I could arrange everything for them perfectly!"

Qin Zhan looked at him expressionlessly.

"Simple?"

He asked back.

"A 288-star assessment—you're going to set the questions?"