22: Chapter 22 A Stunning Success

On a late January morning in Jiangcheng, the wind whipped against the face, stinging like a knife.

In the teaching research office of the Grade 3 year group at Jiangcheng No. 7 High School, the old radiators made a clanking sound of flowing water.

Old Liu pulled down the zipper of his black down jacket, which he had worn for three years, a fraction, picked up his freshly brewed goji berry tea, and sat down in front of the computer.

Today was the day the scores for the city-wide first mock exams were entered into the school's internal system.

In recent years, the Education Bureau had cracked down strictly, forbidding schools from posting public scoreboards of any kind, and each student's score was notified individually.

It wasn't even permitted to post ranking lists in the class chat groups.

But that was only for the students; as a head teacher, Old Liu's backend permissions allowed him to see the master grade-level spreadsheet.

The webpage spun twice, loading the total score data for the Grade 3 year group.

Old Liu habitually prepared to drag the scroll bar down to the second page to look for those few promising students in his class who could at least show some decent results.

However, the moment his index finger brushed against the scroll wheel, his entire body froze.

His gaze lingered at the very top of the screen, on the row of data ranked first in the grade.

Name: Jiang Lin. Class: Grade 3 Class 4.

Chinese: 138; Mathematics: 150; English: 142; Physics: 100; Chemistry: 98; Biology: 98.

Total Score: 726.

Old Liu's Adam's apple bobbed laboriously up and down, and the mouse in his hand slammed onto the mousepad with a click.

He took off his reading glasses, which had a thin layer of fog on them, wiped them haphazardly with the sleeve of his down jacket, put them back on, and thrust his face within ten centimeters of the screen, his eyes wide like copper bells.

Chinese 138?

Mathematics 150?

He got a perfect score in the most monstrous Physics test, and only lost a total of 4 points combined in Chemistry and Biology?

"Old Liu, why are you watching a horror movie so early in the morning? Your face is so pale." English teacher Li Ping, sitting across from him, walked over with her water cup and glanced at the computer screen following Old Liu's gaze.

"Clang—"

Li Ping's stainless steel water cup slammed directly against the desk, and she didn't even notice that the splashing hot water burned her hand.

"Is this... is there a bug in the system?" Li Ping's voice was trembling as she pointed at the 150 and 142. "Jiang Lin, that Jiang Lin who always liked to prop up his chin and daydream in class, he scored 142 in English?"

Old Liu snapped back to his senses. Without saying a word, he grabbed the landline on his desk and dialed a string of numbers.

That was the phone number of his old classmate Wang Weiguo, who was the head of the Grade 3 year group at Jiangcheng Middle School.

"Hello, Lao Wang, let me ask you just one question: what was the highest score at your Jiangcheng Middle School this time?"

"Oh, Zhou Hao, 708 points. The kid has a solid foundation, and he scored 95 in Physics, which wasn't easy. The municipal teaching research office has leaked some hints; this should be the highest in the city. What, did you guys at No. 7 High School perform hideously this time?"

On the other end of the line, Wang Weiguo's voice carried the unique sense of superiority of a provincial key high school.

"708!"

Looking at the 726 on the screen, Old Liu suddenly let out a laugh, a laugh carrying an absurdity that even he couldn't quite believe.

"Lao Wang, you leaked that hint too early. The highest score this time came from our Grade 3 Class 4. 726 points, go check the municipal bureau's teaching research backend yourself."

After saying this, Old Liu hung up the phone with slightly trembling hands.

At 2:00 PM, the lunch break at Jiangcheng No. 7 High School had just ended.

Old Liu walked up to the podium holding a lesson plan book, pinching a stack of paper strips cut into thin, long slips in his hand.

The school strictly forbade bringing mobile phones. To balance privacy and ensure the notifications reached everyone, the head teachers used the most primitive method: cutting the master score sheet into individual score slips with scissors and handing them out one by one.

As the score slips landed one by one on the desks, the atmosphere in the classroom was so oppressive it felt as if water could be wrung out of it, sighs and the sound of flipping pages intertwining.

"It's over, I only scored 392, barely enough even for a junior college." Sun Ming looked at the narrow slip of paper in his hand, buried his face in his arms, and wailed in agony, "Lao Jiang, when I go home tonight, my dad's belt is going to skin me alive."

He turned his head, hoping to find some commiserating comfort from his deskmate.

Jiang Lin leaned back in his chair, with a book titled "Cultivation Techniques for Drought-Resistant Crops in Northern China"—which he had picked up from some old bookstore—spread out on his desk, reading it with great relish.

As for the score slip Old Liu had just given him, he had casually tucked it between the pages as a bookmark, leaving only a tiny edge of white paper showing.

"Lao Jiang, what did you score?" Sun Ming leaned over, his curiosity overpowering his sorrow.

"Didn't look closely." Jiang Lin didn't even raise his head, turning over a page of the yellowed paper.

"Didn't look closely? You wouldn't have failed to break 400 as well, right?" Seeing Jiang Lin's indifferent attitude, thinking he had bombed the exam and given up, Sun Ming directly reached out and pulled out the score slip being used as a bookmark.

Unfolding the slip, a line of small print was printed on it.

Sun Ming's gaze fell on the total score column.

A 1-prefix? That's not right.

A 4-prefix? That's not right either.

Those were three numbers marked in bold: 726.

Immediately following below were the scores for each subject: Mathematics 150, Physics 100...

Sun Ming rubbed his eyes, then rubbed them again. He even extended his stubby fingers and wiped hard across those three numbers, thinking it was just an illusion caused by smudged ink from Old Liu's printer.

"Holy shit!"

A distorted swear word suddenly exploded in the quiet classroom.

Sun Ming's voice cracked from excessive shock, sounding like a duck whose neck had been stepped on.

Several surrounding classmates turned their heads one after another, looking at him with frowning brows.

"Fatty Sun, what are you howling about like a ghost?" the sports committee member in the back row muttered discontentedly.

Sun Ming pointed at the score slip in his hand, his fingers shaking wildly like someone with Parkinson's, unable to even speak a complete sentence properly: "Lao... Lao Jiang... Seven hun... seven hundred and twenty-six!"

As soon as those three words came out, the expression of the sports committee member in the front row instantly froze.

Following closely, the study committee member sitting on the other side of the aisle abruptly stood up, making a movement so violent that it even knocked over the chair.

In mere seconds, half the class's heads crowded over.

When that score slip with black text on a white background was simultaneously confirmed by several pairs of eyes, the sound of people sucking in cold air merged into a continuous wave across the classroom.

The spread speed of Grade 3 gossip was always faster than the speed of light.

Although the school hadn't published a public scoreboard, in the span of just a single break, the news spreading from Class 4 grew wings and flew across the entire year group.

On the way to the restroom, at the entrance of the canteen, in the corner of the hot water room, everyone was whispering to one another.

"Did you hear? Someone in Class 4 scored 726!"

"Cut the crap, the news coming from Jiangzhong is that the highest score is only 708. Can we at No. 7 High School score 726? Even novels wouldn't dare write it like that!"

"If I'm lying, I'm a dog. People from Class 4 saw Old Liu hand out the score slip with their own eyes: Mathematics 150, Physics a perfect score."

The rumors were fermenting, and the shock was spreading.

In this tacit understanding of no public rankings, that outrageous score became an open secret throughout the school and even the city's educational circles.

Inside the classroom.

Dozens of pairs of eyes were staring in unison at the boy sitting by the window in the second-to-last row.

Facing the jaw-dropping gazes surrounding him, Jiang Lin shifted his gaze away from the drought-resistant gene screening paragraph on the page and turned to look at his deskmate.

"Lao Jiang, tell me honestly, did you steal the Education Bureau's safe? A perfect score in math is one thing, but you got 100 in Physics?" Sun Ming's voice was a bit dry.

"I didn't steal any safe." Jiang Lin took back the score slip and tucked it back into the book. "If I really have to say, it's probably because I've done a lot of practice papers. This time's questions happened to all be ones I've done before."

Meanwhile, several streets away at Jiangcheng Middle School.

In the classroom of Grade 3 Experimental Class 1, the air pressure was low enough to suffocate a person.

The head teacher and Physics teacher stood on the podium, his face ashen.

Although Jiangzhong also hadn't posted a red honor roll, as a teacher, he had long since seen that runaway leading score on the internal teaching research network.

"Proud, are you? Think that getting into Jiangzhong's experimental class means you've got half a foot in a 985 university, right?" The head teacher slapped the podium, making loud smacking noises. "People over at No. 7 High School usually keep a low profile, but this time they smashed out a 726-point score with perfect scores in math and Physics! Go and inquire about how that Jiang Lin does his problems!"

Zhou Hao, sitting in the front row, had a face as gloomy as water.

Jiang Yao, sitting in the back row, turned her head to look at the tree branches swaying in the wind outside the window, a tumultuous storm raging in her heart.

Toward evening.

Jiang Jianguo had just woken up from his daytime make-up sleep. Sitting on the edge of his bedroom bed, he was hunched over, wrapping thick knee pads layer by layer around his aching knees. At 8:00 PM, he still had to go to the seafood wholesale market for the night shift. In Jiangcheng during the twelfth lunar month, sorting seafood continuously in freezing water for ten hours through the night was practically like torture for his arthritis.

The old mobile phone placed on the nightstand suddenly vibrated.

He pressed the answer button, his voice still carrying the hoarseness of just waking up: "Hello, who is this?"

"Is this Jiang Lin's father? I am Jiang Lin's head teacher. Congratulations, Mr. Jiang! In this city-wide joint examination, your family's Jiang Lin scored first place in the school, and practically first place in the entire city as well. 726 points! He even crushed the highest score at Jiangcheng Middle School by nearly twenty points!"

On the other end of the phone, Old Liu's jubilant announcement, cracking slightly from excitement, hammered word by word against Jiang Jianguo's heart.

Jiang Jianguo stood frozen in place, and the knee pad in his hand with its straps still untied dropped onto the floor with a clatter.

After hanging up the phone, he still sat on that somewhat sagging old bed, covering his face with hands that had been soaked in icy water year-round, with coarse joints and full of cracks, his shoulders shaking uncontrollably.

To support his child's education in this lifetime, he had turned day and night upside down. At this moment, it was all worth it.

Tonight, no matter how cold the water at the seafood stall was, his heart was scalding hot.

That evening, the Jiang family's dining table was filled with hearty dishes.

Braised pork ribs, steamed sea bass, and even a plate of large prawns that they usually couldn't bear to buy.

Zhang Xiufen picked up the largest piece of sparerib and placed it in Jiang Lin's bowl, her eye rims red.

They were just an ordinary worker's family, and toward such a massive surprise dropping from the sky, they behaved almost at a loss for what to do.

"Mom, I can do it myself."

Jiang Lin picked up that piece of sparerib, savoring in detail the mixed aroma of fat and soy sauce in his mouth.

Looking at his parents' cautious yet proud gazes, his heart was actually filled with warmth.

Outside the window, Jiangcheng was still bustling, and rumors about him were fermenting in the group chats of various schools.

But he didn't care to pay attention to the hustle and bustle outside.

Rankings, flowers, and praises in the Real World—these were all mere bonuses.

He was very clear about his own foundation; he wasn't any sort of genius.

In the upper right corner of his vision was a red countdown that only he could see.

Time was still ticking away.

The time for his fourth journey to the Wasteland was almost here.