"The exam officially begins, with a duration of 120 minutes."

"Attention all examinees, do not bring any irrelevant items to the exam..."

The invigilator paced back and forth slowly, accompanied by the broadcast.

Xie Yu finished writing his name and quickly scanned through the exam paper.

He had thought that the difficulty level of this exam would be similar to the monthly exams, but unexpectedly, he came across two new types of questions.

Then he noticed the names of several teachers from other schools listed in the column of the examiners at the top.

No. 2 High School attached great importance to this exam. The joint exam among four schools directly affects the reputation of each school...Although No. 2 High School has never had much reputation to begin with, their average score just can't seem to improve.

Even the final results sheet didn't have many students who broke through and made it to the top.

"How was it?" Xie Yu barely answered any questions before He Chao poked him in the back with his pen. "How many points can you get?"

"I'll get as many points as I want," Xie Yu replied calmly, leaning back. "Are you scared? Beg me and I'll consider giving you two extra points."

The exam room was full of small movements, with paper balls being passed around and missing their targets, landing in the aisle.

He Chao held his pen in his left hand and lightly tapped Xie Yu on the back of his head. "...You're quite arrogant, little friend. Beg me and I'll give you twenty extra points."

As the rest of the exam room was busy passing answers, they had no idea what the two bottom-ranking students in the corner were saying - it was a conversation that would make a man go silent and a woman shed tears.

This group of people only wrote their class name and exam number smoothly, but once they finished, they started biting their pen caps and couldn't focus on the questions at all.

Soon, they noticed that the classmate who usually groaned with them about how difficult the questions were, was surprisingly quiet this time.

Without that person to groan with, they felt like something was missing during the exam. The classmate next to them even fell asleep for a while and woke up to see that He Chao was still answering questions. Hesitantly, he asked, "Brother Chao, you seem to be doing pretty well today...?"

He Chao flipped over his test paper and casually replied, "Yeah, I'm doing pretty well. No. 2 High School should feel proud to have a student like me."

"..."

The invigilator had initially wanted to turn a blind eye and not bother with this exam room, but the commotion caused by these students grew louder and louder. He put down the book in his hand and coughed heavily, "Quiet down, everyone."

The student who had wanted to make a sarcastic comment swallowed his words once again.

He looked at He Chao and couldn't understand this kind of blind confidence.

Xie Yu answered each question succinctly. After finishing and checking over his work, he glanced at the clock on the wall and estimated that he could sleep for another half hour.

Out of the corner of his eye, Xie Yu saw that He Chao was still working on his essay, in the final stages.

This person's handwriting was usually all over the place, and he never answered a question directly. Holding his pen, he always gave the impression of guessing randomly. But now, he had put aside that casual attitude, lowered his head, and was writing quite seriously.

After being warned by the invigilator, the exam room fell silent for a few minutes. But then, the person who was supposed to pass on the answers continued to do so: "Give me the answers. From now on, my life is in your hands, big brother. Please, I beg you, do a good deed."

"Don't cut in line, what are you trying to steal? Even in this exam room, copying answers requires order - wait, I haven't seen you before, are you new?"

"..."

Xie Yu didn't pay attention to what He Chao wrote in his essay. As he rested his head on his arm and closed his eyes, he suddenly remembered He Chao's essay from last semester, "The Back View".

In this exam room, he had passed answers around.

He had racked his brain, trying to figure out how to stray further from the topic and how to write a perfect zero-point essay.

They even held hands.

It was like a strange and absurd dream.

Xie Yu drifted off to sleep as he pondered, and halfway through, he faintly heard Head Teacher Jiang's announcement over the broadcast: "There are only fifteen minutes left until the end of the exam. Please make good use of your time, candidates."

All the answers that needed to be passed around had been passed around, and the 120 minutes in the exam room felt especially long. The group of underachievers gradually quieted down, dropping their pens and resigning themselves to fate, falling into a deep slumber.

The invigilator looked at this strange sight and shook his head.

The difficulty of this midterm exam was clearly higher than the questions they usually did in school.

After taking several exams, everyone felt as if their hearts had turned to ashes. Exhausted, they didn't even know how they had done this time.

"Finished, finished, it's really over this time," the bell rang as Liu Cunhao handed in his exam paper and walked out of the exam room, leaning against the wall for support. Finally making it back to the classroom, he shouted, "Comrades, let's report our battle results."

Luo Wenqiang said, "We've reached the end of the road."

Xu Qingqing said, "We can't go against fate."

Wan Da said, "We've been defeated."

The whole class looked like they had given up, except for Xie Yu and He Chao, who seemed unaffected.

He Chao was even pushing his desk and chair back into place when he heard Liu Cunhao's call. He raised his hand and said, "I performed exceptionally well!"

"..."

Liu Cunhao felt his heart, which was already full of holes, completely shatter.

Xie Yu sat half on the desk, waiting for Wan Da to move the chairs and tables to the front, blocking the way. His own desk was not easy to move, so he reached out and grabbed He Chao's collar, pulling him over directly. "Don't you have a good memory? If you keep talking, Hao-zi will jump off the building in the next second."

The teachers of various subjects were also worried about the results of this exam. From the invigilation situation, the average score may hit a new historical low.

In the teacher's office, several teachers gathered together to discuss the scores. "It's probably going to be dangerous. In the past, the gap between us and other schools was only two or three points, but this time it may be five or six points."

"Especially in mathematics, the questions were too difficult this time. We usually focus on building their foundation, but they did fewer of these types of questions."

As a few teachers were chatting, they suddenly remembered something and one of them spoke up, "Teacher Tang, are you going to No. 14 High School to grade papers this weekend?"

For the joint exam, each school would send a few teachers to participate in grading.

This time, the teachers grading for the second-year group were Tang Sen and Wu Zheng. Old Tang had just finished packing up and was about to head to his class when he nodded and replied, "Yes, I'm going with Teacher Wu."

Grading papers was a tough job. After a day of grading, their eyes would be so tired that not many teachers would be willing to spend their weekends grading papers.

"Thank you both for your hard work," the other teachers shook their heads and sighed, "I wonder how those two in your class did on the exam..."

They were referring to the two students in Class 3.

The office fell into a moment of silence, then everyone let out a collective sigh.

As the end of the school day approached, Madam Gu called to say she had arrived at the school gate, just as He Chao had angered everyone with his "exceptional performance" and was being chased by Liu Cunhao and Luo Wenqiang.

Seeing the low morale in the class, He Chao played along and let them chase him, easing the tension a bit.

He Chao was chased for a while, then changed course and climbed out the window, hanging onto the window frame with his feet dangling: "Is this how you treat your classmates, with violence?"

After climbing out, He Chao squeezed next to Xie Yu and pleaded for help: "Old Xie, save me."

Luo Wenqiang stopped and asked Xie Yu for his opinion before rolling up his sleeves: "Brother Yu, can I beat him?"

On the phone, Madam Gu spoke at length, but Xie Yu didn't listen carefully and absentmindedly replied, "Mm."

Luo Wenqiang said, "Thank you, Brother Yu! I won't be polite then!"

He Chao: "..."

Xie Yu: "..."

Old Tang came out of the office holding a stack of homework and breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the group of students playing in the hallway. He was afraid that their emotions would be affected by the exam, but these kids had good mental resilience. "Alright, everyone go back to your classrooms and sit down. What are you running around for?"

Liu Cunhao stopped his movements and asked, "Teacher, when will our grades be out?"

"Unless something unexpected happens, we should be able to finish grading the papers over the weekend."

After a moment of contemplation, Old Tang added, "But we'll still have to wait a few more days for the grades to be released."

Although he said that, Tang Sen couldn't have predicted the unexpected turn of events that would happen the next morning when he rushed out to catch the subway to No. 14 High School to grade papers.

"Thank you, teachers, for your hard work." A bespectacled female teacher handed out the exam papers, and then a dozen or so teachers crowded into a classroom, not saying a word, with only the sound of flipping papers filling the room.

No. 14 High School was one of the leading schools among several public high schools in City A.

Although its admission rate was not as high as those of the key schools, it was relatively stable.

This time, No. 14 High School specially prepared several empty classrooms for these teachers to use for grading papers, with Wu Zheng and Tang Sen sitting side by side.

After grading two papers, Wu Zheng took out his glasses case, put on his glasses, and continued to fill in the scores in the answer sheet.

The process of grading papers may be tedious, but occasionally there are some laughable mistakes that catch the attention of a few teachers. "This student has some interesting ideas about auxiliary lines in solid geometry. Let me count...thirteen lines drawn?"

The teachers chuckled as they buried their heads in grading for a while.

One of the teachers was a highly respected math teacher at No. 14 High School, who had been in the teaching profession for decades and was also the one who created the exam paper for this joint exam. After finishing grading one paper, he picked up another one from the side, but his brow furrowed as he graded it.

"Teacher Wang, what's wrong?"

"What's going on with the people in this exam room? What are they doing?"

As that Teacher Wang spoke, he flipped over another paper and became even more certain that the answers on these papers were all copied from each other. Even the mistakes were identical. This kind of trickery left him speechless. "Sharing answers and cheating as a group, they are quite united."

It was more than just unity, it was beyond imagination.

Teacher Wang lost his patience and quickly graded most of the papers.

Only the last two papers remained. He absentmindedly flipped through them, eager to get rid of this "united" exam room. However, when he saw the words on that paper, his hand suddenly stopped.

The red pen tip froze in mid-air.

It was a rather beautiful answer sheet.