BTO CH27

At this moment, Meng Guowei had not yet realized it. He thought he would be witnessing his students’ outstanding progress over the past month, completely oblivious to what he was actually about to see.

The dismissal bell for self-study rang— King of Hell Gu’s voice crackled through the PA system, preceded by two heavy coughs: “The monthly exams are about to begin. All examinees, please proceed quietly and in an orderly fashion to your respective testing rooms. Double-check that you have all your exam supplies, read the questions carefully, pay attention to the instructions, and make sure you fill in your scantrons correctly.”

“The first subject is Chinese. The exam duration is 150 minutes. Please manage your time wisely…”

Inside Class 7, Hou Jun had just led everyone in separating their desks, arranging them into single-seat rows.

Students grabbed their pencil cases and filed out one after another. The flow of people in the corridor splintered into several directions. A student whispered out in the hallway: “I heard you’re in Testing Room 1 this time. Doesn’t that mean you get to take the exam with the Study God?”

“Yeah! Ever since the baseline exam rankings came out, I’ve been looking forward to the next test.” Another classmate couldn’t contain their excitement. If Xu Sheng had heard this, he probably would have shut down on the spot: “I’ve been waiting for this monthly exam for so long.”

“Which testing room are you in?” “Me? Third. I made way too many mistakes last time, don’t even bring it up.” “…”

The voices in the corridor gradually faded away.

Xu Sheng and Shao Zhan prepared to exchange a few final pointers. Xu Sheng’s exam routine was incredibly simple: “If you don’t know what to do, just sleep.”

Shao Zhan recalled the baseline exam, where the teenager sitting to his right had spent the entire time presenting the back of his head to the invigilators. Shao Zhan remained silent.

Leaning against his desk, Xu Sheng rapped his knuckles twice against the surface. “You don’t have anything to say?”

Shao Zhan stood up, gripping his prepared pen. “I harbor zero expectations for you.”

“Behave.” Passing by Xu Sheng, Shao Zhan paused. A shift of just a few degrees would have brought his lips brushing against the other’s earlobe. He had somehow managed to infuse Xu Sheng’s natural voice with an icy chill as he murmured right by his ear: “Don’t cause any more trouble.”

“Right.” Reaching the doorway, Shao Zhan stopped again, having genuinely remembered one crucial caveat: “Don’t write anything about Hamlet.”

Xu Sheng: “…”

Testing Room 1 and the dead-last testing room gazed at each other from afar, separated by the entire length of a long corridor.

Xu Sheng gathered his nerves and headed toward Testing Room 1. Though he was panicking internally, as someone who was hauled up to the flag-raising platform to read self-reflections on a weekly basis, he at least possessed the ability to manage his outward expressions.

Thus, all the examinees in Testing Room 1 watched the Study God pass the back window with an incredibly cool and collected swagger. Even though it was his first time walking this path, his strides made it look as though he had taken a thousand exams in this very room. The collar of his school uniform was left slightly open; stepping through the door, a smile graced his features before he even spoke, his lips curving as he casually greeted the classroom.

Shao Zhan’s face was already striking to begin with. Stripped of its usual arctic chill, it now radiated an indescribably magnetic aura.

“!” “Ah, Study God,” whispered a student whose seat number was close to Xu Sheng’s, eyes practically bubbling with stars.

For a moment, the entire room’s attention zeroed in on the Study God.

After greeting the examinees in Testing Room 1, Xu Sheng immediately spotted the “No. 1” label pasted on the first desk of the rightmost row. He tossed his pen onto the desk and sat down to await the start of the exam.

Sitting in Shao Zhan’s seat to take an exam induced a mood that was truly beyond words.

Seated directly behind him was the Perennial Number Two, the very same guy he had raised the flag with. Number Two pushed up his glasses with a finger, not forgetting to issue a formal declaration of war even at a time like this: “Just you wait. I am extremely well-prepared for this exam.”

Xu Sheng thought to himself: Bro, you don’t even need to prepare. The number one spot is practically guaranteed to be yours this time.

But thoughts aside, when faced with other classmates asking things like, “Study God, I’m so nervous! Are you nervous?”, he quickly adjusted his state of mind. Mimicking Shao Zhan’s usual aloof tone, he replied, “I don’t know what being nervous actually feels like, because I’ve never experienced that emotion.”

…As expected of the Study God. The other students praised internally: Badass.

Someone else asked, “Study God, Study God, in your opinion, will this monthly exam be very hard?”

Xu Sheng: “I don’t know what ‘hard’ means either.”

“Then Study God, how well did you prepare for this exam?” “Prepare?” Having had his head shoved into study materials by Shao Zhan for a week—and still scoring a failing grade in every subject—Xu Sheng pondered for a second and said, “For this little stuff, is preparation even necessary?”

Fuck! So this is the gap between the Study God and the rest of humanity! Everyone was utterly convinced and in awe.

During a normal exam, the other students wouldn’t dare initiate a conversation with the Study God. But today, the Study God seemed to be in a pretty good mood, even answering so many of their questions. Thus, someone summoned the courage to ask: “Study God, can I touch your hand?”

Xu Sheng, who appeared calm on the outside but was internally agonizing over what to do when the exam started: “?”

Looking shy, the classmate added: “I’m too nervous and I’m scared of doing poorly. I want to rub off some of the Study God’s exam luck.”

This behavior was identical in principle to the countless “Praying to the Exam God” threads on the school’s Tieba forum. Moreover, because Shao Zhan’s exam performances were so absurdly heaven-defying, an urban legend circulated around campus: if you caught the real-life Study God and rubbed him a little, your exam scores would definitely skyrocket.

Xu Sheng wasn’t opposed to the hand-touching thing; it wasn’t his hand anyway. He was mainly just afraid the other party might rub off something they shouldn’t. —Like the exam luck of the dead-last student in the dead-last testing room.

Thinking of the last testing room, Xu Sheng wondered how Shao Zhan was doing. For a model honor student like him… Then, Xu Sheng inexplicably recalled the scene outside the internet cafe that day and the tattoo on that back.

Well, maybe not entirely a model student.

Meanwhile, the “model honor student” Shao Zhan had just arrived at the doorway of the final testing room.

Linjiang Sixth High was still a key school, but every school had those students who suddenly lost all motivation upon entering high school, their grades falling off a cliff. The last testing room was the gathering place for these underachieving slackers. Of course, compared to Xu Sheng, they paled into insignificance.

They weren’t as thorough in their refusal to study as Xu Sheng, nor did they dare to act as brazenly. This brazenness manifested specifically as follows: during every exam, he basically only presented the back of his head to the invigilator. If the invigilator called him up, he would lazily lift his head and say, ‘Teacher, there’s no rule against sleeping during an exam, right? Even if I don’t sleep, I can’t answer this paper anyway. Or did you just want to have a chat?’

The classic scene in the last testing room usually consisted of the teenager sitting in the corner, propping up his head, reluctantly writing on the test paper for a bit, before simply tossing his pen aside and collapsing onto the desk to sleep. No teacher dared to reprimand him either.

When Shao Zhan walked in, the examinees in the last testing room were still in a state of chaos. A circle of people clustered at the back of the classroom: “You made some pretty good cheat sheets! Let me take a look, where did you print these? How did you shrink the font this small?”

Another student said, “Don’t mess with them, I just organized them. One copy for Chinese ancient poetry, one for math formulas, and one for English universal sentence structures that can be used for the essays. Don’t mess them up for me.” The group was huddled at the back, discussing how they were going to cheat later.

The scene was far too familiar. Halting at the doorway, Shao Zhan unconsciously tightened his grip on his pen, his thoughts suddenly drifting backward in time. The images in his memory continued from the shout of “Zhan-ge” that had surfaced in his mind that day.

A few youths walked out from the alleyway, the one in the lead sporting a buzzcut: “Zhan-ge, you’re still the most badass. Those instigators are probably just kneeling on the ground calling for their daddies right now.”

Another, slightly shorter but with large eyes, asked: “Are we still going to the exam later?”

The buzzcut ruthlessly slapped him on the head: “What kind of stupid fucking question is that? When have us bros ever taken an exam? You asking that makes us street delinquents look highly unprofessional!”

The short kid rubbed the back of his head and said, slightly wronged: “Zhan-ge takes it every time.”

“How much time is left until the exam?” the teenager leaning against the wall asked.

The short kid said, “About ten minutes, I think.”

The buzzcut said in surprise, “Zhan-ge? You’re actually going to the exam? The testing rooms at our school are basically just competitions in cheating skills, there’s no real point in taking the test…”

Shao Zhan saw his past self on the other side of the timeline crush out his cigarette. Raising a hand to wipe the wound at the corner of his mouth with his thumb, the teenager crossed the pedestrian path, vaulted over the street railing with one hand, and left behind a single sentence: “Just taking it casually.”

Pulling Shao Zhan’s thoughts back to reality were the laser-like, intensely heated stares of the students gathered at the back of the classroom—stares that looked as though they wanted to pierce right through him—along with a robust shout: “Xu Sheng!”

Shao Zhan snapped out of it: “?”

The student who had prepared the stacks of cheat sheets was sitting in the second-to-last row; based on the seating arrangement, he should be the second-to-last ranked student. Seeing him, the second-to-last student became extremely agitated and shouted again: “You still dare to show up!”

Shao Zhan: “…………”

The scene was incredibly familiar; even the dialogue felt like an ancestral inheritance. He was certain Xu Sheng had never told him that he had also made enemies in the testing room.

Unaware of what was going on, Shao Zhan simply ignored him. He bypassed the front rows, but as he passed the second-to-last row, his wrist was grabbed by the second-to-last student. The unprompted, frequent flashbacks to his past had left him inexplicably irritable. Shao Zhan’s current mood was far from good. Assuming “Second-to-Last” wanted to start a fight, he relied almost purely on instinct, backhanding and locking the guy’s wrist. Second-to-Last only felt a sudden burst of pain from his wrist—but he had absolutely no time to react. The next second, he was hoisted up and cleanly pinned flat against the desk.

Bang! Shoved by the external force and bearing the sudden weight, the desk broke from its neatly arranged formation, screeching a few centimeters sideways. Everyone in the testing room was dumbfounded. “Holy shit, what’s going on…”

Actually, from the moment “Xu Sheng” walked through the door, quite a few eyes had been glued to him. Letting out an “Ouch,” Second-to-Last shouted, “Xu Sheng, are you crazy?!”

Only after pinning the guy down did Shao Zhan realize that Second-to-Last had seemingly only wanted to block his path. Judging by his tone, the two of them were probably quite familiar with each other. Moreover, inside the school wasn’t like outside; very few people would actually resort to physical violence directly. And even if they did, no one dared to throw hands with Xu Sheng. He loosened his grip: “Sorry.”

Second-to-Last rubbed his wrist, not taking it to heart: “Don’t you have anything else you want to say to me?”

Say what?

As if he had suffered some astonishing injustice, Second-to-Last continued, “After what you did to me, you don’t feel a shred of guilt? Touch your conscience.”

“During the last exam, you asked me to let you copy my answers. And the result? You said that after eliminating my answers, your accuracy rate definitely went up by a lot!”

The ‘last exam’ he mentioned was the one before the baseline test. “You were insulting my answers.” “…………”

“Insulting me is one thing, but you actually got physical!”

The exam bell rang. Taking the distributed Chinese test paper, Shao Zhan wrote the two characters “Xu Sheng” in the candidate name slot. He thought to himself that this was indeed something Xu Sheng was capable of doing. He could even picture Xu Sheng sitting in this exact seat, looking half-asleep, delivering the line, “After eliminating your answers, the accuracy rate definitely went up by a lot.”

At the same time, in Testing Room 1. Using what he believed to be his neatest handwriting, Xu Sheng wrote two characters in the candidate name slot: Shao Zhan.