Taoist Master, wishing for a sacrifice-based system

The second day of exam week, Wednesday afternoon.

The second exam: Final exam for "C++ Programming".

This was a core course for the Computer Science department, a closed-book written exam. The four top students sat in the exam hall, feeling quite pleased with themselves, waiting for God's second "miracle."

Fifteen minutes have passed.

Twenty minutes have passed.

The proctor on the podium anxiously looked at his watch, sweating profusely, and frantically made phone calls, but the exam papers were still not delivered.

Just then, the director of the academic affairs office led several teachers into the classroom. Everyone was soaked to the bone, as if they had just been pulled out of the water.

"Students, quiet down! Quiet down!"

Holding a megaphone, the dean of academic affairs spoke with an air of utter absurd disbelief: "Ten minutes ago, a long-neglected main water pipe in the printing room in the basement of the school's administration building suddenly burst!"

The students below erupted in uproar.

"As luck would have it, the burst water pipe is right above the safe where the C++ final exam papers are stored! Thousands of papers are now completely soaked and turned into a pulp!"

"The electronic version of the spare print is stored in the computer mainframe that was damaged in the power outage in the printing room, and there's simply no time to re-typeset and print it!"

The dean of academic affairs wiped the water off his face and announced through gritted teeth:

"Following an emergency meeting of the college leadership, it has been decided that, in order not to disrupt the overall final exam schedule, the final written exam for 'C++ Programming' has been cancelled! The final grade for this course will be based directly on the average score of your 'regular assignments' submitted to the system this semester!"

"Whoosh—!!!"

The entire exam hall erupted in chaos! No exam?! Grades will be based on participation?!

And in the corner.

The four warriors covered their mouths tightly to stop themselves from laughing out loud, their bodies trembling violently from extreme excitement.

Your grades on regular homework?!

These four academic underachievers, although they never wrote a single line of code for their homework, had an extremely powerful skill—Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V!

They cloned the entire GitHub repository of the top student in their grade, made minor changes to the variable names, and committed it. When the teacher graded it, the code ran perfectly, and they all got an A!

Their average score on regular assignments is all above 90!

"God, you're awesome!!! Pipe-blasting tactics! Physical destruction of the exam paper!" the fat man shouted in his mind.

Friday, the last day of exam week.

The ultimate boss battle – University Physics.

This is a nightmare for all science and engineering students.

This time, it seemed like Mother Nature was quiet. No teacher broke their leg, and no water pipes burst.

The heavy test curls came down, with their densely packed force analysis diagrams, Lorentz force formulas, and quantum mechanical wave functions. Understanding the four major concepts made me dizzy.

"Oh no... have I run out of magic power?" The dormitory head looked at the blank exam paper and was on the verge of tears.

They racked their brains, frantically writing down every nonsensical formula they could think of, such as F=ma and E=mc², on the exam paper, hoping to impress the examiners with some points for neatness.

Two hours later, the four of them handed in their papers like zombies.

They estimated that they could get a maximum of 20 points on the exam. They were certain they would fail the course.

however.

Miracles always bloom in the deepest despair.

Friday evening is the time when the school's academic affairs office will uniformly enter and release grades into the system.

It was exactly 10 p.m.

The servers in the Yunnan University Academic Affairs Office computer room experienced an extremely minor and bizarre bug in their underlying code logic due to the influx of tens of thousands of students checking their grades within a short period of time, causing them to become overloaded.

This bug did not cause the system to crash, nor did it tamper with student information.

It was merely a tiny data shift that occurred when reading the basic score data for the "University Physics" course exam.

To prevent a major teaching incident caused by widespread data loss, the computer lab's disaster recovery system immediately intervened. However, the system's rudimentary algorithm, in an effort to "protect vulnerable data," made an extremely crude decision—

A basic compensation curve was forcibly assigned to all data sources that submitted "University Physics" grades.

In layman's terms—a 40-point bonus for boosting everyone's scores!

In dormitory 404.

Four people huddled around their dormitory head's computer, their hands trembling, as they clicked the "refresh" button on the academic affairs system.

The page is spinning in circles.

With a "whoosh," the report card popped up!

The four people pressed their heads close to the screen, their eyes wide, staring intently at the rows of numbers.

Advanced Mathematics (Part 1): Final score 60 points.

C++ Programming: Final score 85.

University Physics: Final score 60 points.

"..."

Dead silence.

A deathly silence fell over the dormitory.

A full ten seconds passed.

"Aaaaaaaahh ...

The deafening roar almost blew the roof off dormitory room 404!

The four of them hugged each other frantically, jumping and hopping in the cramped dormitory room, tears and snot streaming down their faces.

"Passed! Passed everything! Didn't fail a single subject!"

"God wasn't lying to us! Qingyun Temple is real! Our code logic is working perfectly!"

The dorm leader, trembling with excitement, knelt down and frantically kowtowed towards the direction of Qingyun Temple outside the window: "May the Ancestral Master protect us! Heaven is awesome! Physical changes alter reality, system bugs defy fate! From now on, if anyone dares to say a bad word about Qingyun Temple, I'll hack their computer!"

On the campus of Yunzhou University, the joyous celebration of the Four Heavenly Kings surviving their ordeal echoed.

…………

Outside the south gate of Yunzhou University, there is a food stall called "Fatty's Barbecue".

The aroma of cumin and lamb filled the summer night breeze, while the foam of chilled draft beer overflowed from the glass and flowed down the side.

"Cheers!!!"

Four boys with dark circles under their eyes suddenly slammed a huge beer mug together, splashing the clear yellow liquid everywhere.

"To hell with the Four Great Constables! To hell with failing and having to repeat the course!"

The dormitory head, his face flushed, stood with one foot on a plastic stool, holding half a handful of lamb skewers in his hand. He looked radiant, as if he had just commanded a massive army to victory in an epic battle.

"Brothers! It turns out that as long as you're good at logic, you can even fool God!"

"Boss, you're awesome! The code is meticulous, flawless!" The fat guy took a big bite of his kidney, his mouth greasy, and chimed in, "I'm going to send a red envelope in the class group right now, let them see how our 404 dorm staged a comeback!"

Soon, a shower of red envelopes fell in the WeChat group of the second-year students in the Computer Science Department of Yunnan University.

[404 Dorm Leader: Thank you so much! We all survived this semester's Calculus, C++, and Physics courses! Thank God, thank the bugs!]

The students in the group were so envious they were practically grinding their teeth. Everyone knew these four guys did nothing but play video games, and yet during this final exam, either the teacher broke their tailbone and let them pass, or the exam papers were flooded and graded based on participation, and in the end, the physics department even got a once-in-a-lifetime system compensation!

Where the hell can I go to complain to them?!