Chapter 102
Chapter 102
So this school’s one-hundred-percent first-tier university admission rate hadn’t been achieved through actual studying.
If anyone’s weekly exam score failed to reach last year’s first-tier cutoff, then the student in last place would end up in the same situation as Passerby A.
And now, after Passerby A’s death, if they went by the order in which the homeroom teacher had called people out, then the ones called out didn’t just have poor grades in their character settings-they also didn’t seem to be all that fond of studying.
For example, Ning Wang, who was described by the NPC characters as the school bully.
And the person in last place was also this very school bully.
—
Barely ten minutes later, Ning Shuo looked out the window again and found that the corpse had already disappeared.
During morning reading in the science class, some students were reciting Chinese and English, while others were working through practice problems. After morning reading ended, Ning Wang swaggered over and slapped a workbook onto Ning Shuo’s desk. Pointing at a basic question, he asked Ning Shuo how to do it.
Ning Shuo said coldly, “Get lost.”
To the uninformed NPC characters, Ning Wang’s grinning face looked truly punchable. “Come on, Ge. We’re brothers born of the same father, after all. Help each other out a little, won’t you?”
He portrayed the shameless illegitimate son to perfection.
No wonder Xie Ning seemed born for this kind of thing.
Ning Shuo pretended not to see him. Only after most of the NPC characters had gone to the cafeteria did he say to Ning Wang, “Little brother?”
Ning Wang said, “Yeah. I’m a day student. Ge, your parents had a business marriage, my mom was the mistress who moved in, and that bastard is pretty damn fond of her too.”
So when Ning Wang said, “My dad doesn’t care what I do,” he had meant in the indulgent, spoiled-rotten sense.
And in ordinary times, he and Ning Wang didn’t get along either. Because of his status as an illegitimate son, Ning Wang didn’t dare do much to him, while Ning Shuo treated him coldly, as if he looked down on him.
Ning Shuo swept his gaze around the room.
Zhuang Yao seemed to be the class discipline committee member, and she cared a great deal about the class average. So, using the perfectly legitimate excuse of “dragging down the class average,” she detained Qin Genan for “tutoring.”
Rao Lin went big-he loudly confessed his love to Song Zhu, and Song Zhu went along with it, telling Rao Lin, “When you raise your grades to the top three in the class, I’ll say yes.”
Luo Li, on the other hand, wasn’t worried in the slightest. Her character setting had decent grades, so she didn’t need to bother finding an excuse to study hard.
Then there was Zone B.
Yu Min, codename Qi Yu, class monitor of Senior 3 Class 1; Lian Fang, codename Floating Life; and Chen Qu’an, codename Chen Feng.
All three had character settings with good grades in Zone B. As for the remaining four, although they had also guessed the cause of Passerby A’s death and had started competing over grades using that legend as a pretext, compared to the people from Zone F-who had other excuses-their excuse of using the legend to justify suddenly grinding away at their studies didn’t hold up very well.
If it was because of the legend, then this was already Week 19. They should have started working themselves to the bone long ago.
Still, all of this was based on the assumption that their character settings had not been studying hard before. Ning Shuo didn’t know what their actual settings were like. If their settings were the type where no amount of effort could raise their grades, then this excuse could still stand.
After all, Passerby A was dead now. If they still failed to reach the first-tier cutoff on this week’s weekly exam, then next week, one of them would be chosen to die.
However, character settings aside, there was still one major problem.
Whether it was Zone B or Zone F, not counting Lolita, every single one of them was twenty-three or older. After so many years, who still remembered how to solve these problems?
How to keep themselves from becoming the class’s dead last within a single week was an obvious hurdle.
And right now, Ning Shuo was facing a major problem of his own.
An NPC had come to ask Ning Shuo about a trigonometry problem. He stared at the question he had never seen before, feeling the beginnings of a headache.
Ning Wang shoved the NPC away at once. “Hey, ever heard of first come, first served? He has to teach me first!”
His school-bully persona was domineering to the extreme, but this NPC was also clingy as a plaster. “Which question do you want to ask about? Maybe I don’t know it either. We can listen together.”
Ning Wang pointed at the first question on the weekly math test. “This one. I forgot.”
As everyone knew, the first question was as basic as basic got.
The NPC: “…You can’t even do this one? How did you get into the advanced class?”
You couldn’t treat an NPC’s jab as a real jab. It might be a sign that they were beginning to mutate.
Ning Shuo was about to smooth things over when he heard Ning Wang say, “I just want to waste his time. Got a problem with that?”
Waste his time, drag down his grades.
Not only did that cement Ning Wang’s character setting, it also prepared an excuse for Ning Shuo’s grades to drop later.
Ningning was so smart.
Ning Shuo wanted to laugh, but he had to hold it in. He even had to put on an impatient expression and say, “Can you two both stop bothering me?”
The NPC didn’t have the nerve to keep bothering him.
But Ning Wang did.
And in the NPC’s eyes, Ning Wang was being this shameless for the family fortune.
After the NPC left, Ning Shuo asked, “If you took a full math paper right now, how much could you score?”
Ning Wang said, “Sixty-one.”
Ning Shuo, who had reviewed some of the material on the way over that morning, patted him on the shoulder. There was a bizarre hint of showing off in his tone. “I’m at eighty-two.”
Ning Wang: “…Ge, this is out of one hundred and fifty. If neither of us can even pass, we’ll be separated by life and death.”
The main mission was to survive the remaining forty-two days.
Ning Shuo shared a piece of bread with him. “We pick things up fast. With a week, we shouldn’t end up dead last.”
The one he was more worried about was Luo Li.
Song Zhu was fine. He was a Joker to begin with, and his brain could rival the System. He had probably more or less mastered everything already. The others had all gone to high school too, and none of them had low educational backgrounds. Picking up old material again wasn’t that difficult.
But Luo Li was different.
As far as Ning Shuo knew, before Luo Li became a Player, she seemed to have only been a doll.
And before Zhu Xiangfeng entered the System, she seemed to have only been in elementary school.
During noon self-study, Ning Shuo brought this up to Luo Li. Luo Li, puzzled, handed him a math test with a score of one hundred and thirty. “You mean this? I just did it casually.”
“…When did you learn it?”
Luo Li said, “When I’m in the Rest Area and not entering a Script, I do problems while drinking milk tea. It’s very enjoyable.” The feeling of absorbing new knowledge really was wonderful.
Ning Shuo sincerely praised her. “Nice work.”
Looking at it this way, it seemed the only people on the team under any academic pressure were Ning Shuo and Ning Wang.
But it didn’t count as that much pressure either.
They had both dabbled in language and mathematics back in ancient times, so once they truly started studying, it wasn’t that difficult.
After class, Ning Shuo once again shook off the NPC who wanted to ask him questions and went to the restroom.
But while he was in the restroom, the moment he stood up, he saw a derivative problem pasted on the door. There was even a pen thoughtfully placed on the floor for him.
Ning Shuo: “…” Incredible. He had to solve problems even while using the bathroom? Was he really a human problem-solving machine?
He had just reviewed derivatives. Though the problem was difficult, he could solve it.
However, the moment he picked up the pen, he sensed someone watching him from above and to the side.
The hand Ning Shuo held the pen in paused. As he tore down the problem sheet, he glanced upward out of the corner of his eye and saw a head above the stall partition.
The homeroom teacher’s eerie, unfocused eyes were fixed firmly on him, just like that.