38: Chapter 38 Not on the Same Track

Walking out of the bedroom and arriving at the living room doorway, Zhang Xiufen happened to poke her head out from the kitchen, still holding a peeler in her hand.

"Yaoyao, stay for lunch at Aunty's house. Aunty cut some fruit, have some first."

"No need, no need, Aunty. My mom is still waiting for me upstairs to go back, so I'll head back first."

"Alright then, if you encounter any problems you don't know next time, come over again. Make sure not to stand on ceremony with Jiang Lin."

Zhang Xiufen smiled from ear to ear.

"Okay, thank you, Aunty."

Watching Jiang Yao's retreating figure as she walked upstairs disappear around the corner of the staircase, Zhang Xiufen closed the door and turned to glance at Jiang Lin walking out of the bedroom.

"How is it? Are you done explaining?"

"Mhm."

"Did that girl Yaoyao understand? City-level key school problems definitely aren't simple, right?"

Jiang Lin's mind flashed back to Jiang Yao's final expression of sudden realization, and after thinking for a moment, he gave a rather fair evaluation.

"The problem itself, she definitely understood it."

Zhang Xiufen clearly didn't catch the weight contained in her son's emphasis on the word 'problem' in this sentence.

She only felt that since he had taught her, it was a massive contribution.

She nodded with great satisfaction. "That's good, that's good. It's not easy for the little girl to run down to ask questions during the New Year. We should help out wherever we can."

...

Jiang Yao returned home.

Jiang's mother, Zhou Qin, was sitting on the sofa watching TV and cracking melon seeds. Hearing the door click, she immediately raised her head, her gaze sweeping over like a searchlight.

Half an hour ago, when her daughter left the house holding the test paper, her brows had been tightly knitted together, and her whole person radiated a reluctance born of being stuck on a difficult problem for an entire night, filled with extreme anxiety.

But now that she was back, Zhou Qin acutely noticed that her daughter's footsteps entering the door were much lighter.

Her whole body exuded a sense of relief after the heavy stone weighing on her heart finally dropped to the ground.

But at the same time, her daughter's expression also revealed a certain indescribable trance, her eyes out of focus, as if pondering something extremely profound, or perhaps some matter that completely subverted her existing cognition.

To be honest, when her daughter suddenly said at eight o'clock in the morning that she was going to the third floor to ask the boy named Jiang Lin for help with math problems, Zhou Qin's mood had been extremely complex and resistant.

In her worldview where social class was judged by grades, the son of the old Jiang family downstairs had failed the high school entrance examination and went to No. 7 High School, an ordinary high school where even the admission rate for Tier 2 universities was devastatingly dismal.

He was already in his third year of high school, and she heard that child was still painfully struggling on the edge of the Tier 2 cutoff line.

Although Zhou Qin always maintained the reserve of a municipal key school student's parent whenever she ran into Zhang Xiufen and her son in the stairwell going up and down, smilingly greeting them and praising how the child Jiang Lin had grown taller and looked truly spirited,

in the deepest recesses of her heart, she had never placed Jiang Lin and her own daughter on the same scale for comparison.

Saying he was rotten wood incapable of being carved sounded a bit harsh, and since everyone was a respectable person, such words wouldn't be spoken aloud.

But in Zhou Qin's eyes, the upper limit of Jiang Lin's life had already been locked down—he would probably just end up as a laborer selling physical strength like his father.

In the future, they were destined to be people from different worlds.

Until a few days ago, when her daughter told her with a tone as if she had seen a ghost that the first place in this city-wide mock exam was Jiang Lin, and his total score even exceeded the perennial top-ranking Tsinghua-Peking University seed student from Jiangcheng Middle School by quite a few points.

Zhou Qin's very first reaction at that time was absurdity.

She even suspected whether the Education Bureau's statistical system had caught a virus.

How could a student from No. 7 High School surpass Jiangcheng Middle School to take first place in the entire city?

Plagiarism?

But his score was the highest in the entire city; he didn't even have anyone to copy from.

Or did he get the real test paper in advance?

That was even more impossible.

Just relying on his mom who worked as a cashier at the small supermarket at the entrance of the residential complex and his dad who moved and unloaded goods at the seafood market, where would they get such heaven-reaching energy to procure top-secret test papers for the city-wide uniform exam?

Because of this counterintuitive matter, Zhou Qin felt as upset as if she had swallowed a fly for several days, and to this day found it hard to believe, always feeling that this score had a lot of moisture in it and would perhaps reveal its true colors by the second mock exam.

But now, her own precious daughter, a solid 985-university seed student, had actually gone to ask questions of that boy she once secretly looked down upon, and looking at her daughter's current enlightened appearance, she had clearly received genuine guidance.

"Are you done asking the question?" Zhou Qin tossed the remaining half-handful of melon seeds in her hand into the trash can, patted the crumbs off her hands, stared at her daughter's face, and asked tentatively.

"Mhm, I'm done asking." Jiang Yao nodded, changing her shoes.

Zhou Qin stood up, her tone carrying undisguised inquiry: "Big problems like that are difficult even for the teachers at your school to explain. What did he say to you? Did he happen to memorize the ready-made answer to this problem from some obscure tutoring book beforehand?"

Hearing her mother's words full of suspicion and subjective conjecture, Jiang Yao stopped the action of hanging her clothes, turned her head, and quietly looked at her mother.

She knew what her mother was thinking in her heart.

Because in her own subconscious, hadn't she also gone with a probing mindset: whether he just got lucky and mastered some magical shortcut for grinding problems?

People always find it hard to accept that others are stronger than themselves, especially someone who used to be inferior to them.

Acknowledging someone else as a genius is equivalent to acknowledging one's own mediocrity.

But at this very moment, Jiang Lin's calm to the point of being cold words, "What is this problem actually asking?", along with that draft paper with only a simple U-shaped curve drawn on it and a few sparse lines of derivation, were still roaring in her mind.

"He didn't memorize the answer." Jiang Yao shook her head, her voice very soft, but her tone extremely firm, as if refuting her mother, and even more as if speaking to herself, "He didn't even take a close look at the half-section of the analysis I copied onto the test paper."

"If he didn't look at the answer, how did he explain it clearly to you?" Zhou Qin's brows knitted even deeper, and her tone even carried a sense of instinctual defensiveness and unresignation. "No matter what, we are also from Jiangcheng Middle School; our teaching faculty is the best in the entire city, and we usually have many more confidential mock exams and difficult problems than their No. 7 High School. Even if he suddenly had a breakthrough now, surely he can't be more formidable than the methods taught by the head of your teaching and research group, right?"

Jiang Yao took a deep breath, feeling somewhat powerless.

She desperately wanted to tell her mother that the key to the problem was not whether Jiang Lin was more formidable than the teachers or not, but rather that Jiang Lin and people like them were simply not on the same runway from start to finish.

What the teachers at school taught was how to run forward along the road paved by the exam creator, how to jump over potholes when encountered, and how to apply Template Number Three upon seeing this kind of problem type.

This set of assembly-line operations cultivated high-scoring skilled laborers.

And what Jiang Lin did just now in the room was to directly tear down that smooth road, dig up all the underlying reinforced concrete and soil, and clearly point out to her why this brick had to be laid right here and why this road was initially built in this direction.

This was the perspective of a creator.

But these words were far too abstract; for a mother accustomed to using each monthly exam's score and the school's reputation to measure all values, it was simply impossible to explain it clearly.

So she just looked at her mother and said very earnestly, "Mom, he explained it clearly. And it was clearer than the analysis in any reference book I've ever seen, clearer than any routine the teachers have ever explained on the blackboard."

Zhou Qin opened her mouth; usually eloquent, she unexpectedly didn't know what to reply for a moment.

That sense of superiority built for a long time on the halo of being a 985-university seed student from Jiangcheng Middle School, in front of her daughter's unreserved praise, rapidly deflated like a balloon pricked by a needle.

Looking into her daughter's somewhat unfamiliar, firm eyes, Zhou Qin suddenly realized with some panic that the honest and submissive Jiang family downstairs, whom she had always looked down upon, might truly have had a golden phoenix fly out of it.

"As long as he explained it clearly, as long as you understand it." Zhou Qin dryly laughed twice, trying to conceal the trace of complex loss and shock deep within her eyes. "Since you've figured it out, hurry back to your room and strike while the iron is hot. Find a few more problems of the same type to consolidate it. Learning is like sailing against the current; you cannot slack off."

Jiang Yao nodded, didn't say anything more, turned around to walk into her own room, and gently closed the door.

Along with the sound of the lock clicking, her mother's slight sigh in the living room was shut outside.

Jiang Yao walked over to the desk and sat down, not opening the next page immediately to continue mechanically grinding problems with excitement upon solving a difficult problem like she usually did.

She took out a brand-new, blank white sticky note from the drawer, picked up a thick marker usually used for highlighting key points, and forcefully wrote down a line of characters.

Then, with great solemnity, she used glue to paste it onto the wall.

Right beside it happened to be the Tsinghua-Peking University glory roll from Jiangcheng Middle School's Gaokao last year.

White paper and black ink, clear and striking.

"What is this problem actually asking?"