Back to 17, My Brother is the Cult Leader

In late February in Qingdao, the streetlights were already on before it was completely dark.

Fang Yuan rode very slowly, his mind preoccupied with the lessons he had learned that day.

He copied two pages of math on conic sections, but still didn't quite understand them.

He did listen attentively to the classical Chinese texts in the Chinese language class.

The article "Zhu Zhiwu Retires the Qin Army" tells the story of an old man who stepped forward when the country was in peril.

Fang Yuan felt that he hadn't lived as well as that old man in his previous life.

At least he's over seventy years old and people still remember to use him.

He collapsed in front of a computer at the age of forty-seven in his previous life; probably not many people remember that.

Fang Yuan rode his bike and stopped again when he passed the Xinhua Bookstore.

He thought about it for a moment, then decided not to go in and rode straight home.

Back home, Fang Yuan put down his schoolbag and sat down at his desk.

He opened his notebook, stared blankly at the little black dot he had marked yesterday.

Then he picked up his pen and wrote two lines at the top of the page:

I want to write something.

But I still don't know what to write.

After writing it, he felt that the sentence was pretty silly.

But he didn't cross it out.

Fang Yuan closed the notebook and put it back in the drawer.

He took out his math textbook and began to look at the notes he had copied that day.

He would read the parts he didn't understand several times.

If he still couldn't understand it, he would skip it and look at the next part.

Not urgent.

He had a year and a half.

The sky outside the window had completely darkened, and the light from the streetlights shone through the curtains, casting an orange glow on the floor.

Fang Yuan sat at his desk, looking at his math textbook, reading it word by word.

It was slow, but he was watching.

This is enough.

In the third week of school, homeroom teacher Jiang Shan announced the monthly exam schedule for the following Tuesday during the last class on Friday afternoon.

"Next Tuesday and Wednesday, six exams in two days."

Jiang Shan stood on the podium, adjusted her glasses, and glanced at the entire class.

"This is the first monthly exam of the semester, and also the last major exam before subject selection."

After this exam, you'll need to decide whether to choose humanities or sciences, so your exam results will be helpful in making that decision.

A buzzing sound filled the classroom.

Fang Yuan sat in the last row in the corner against the wall and listened to Jiang Shan's words.

Division.

He chose science in his past life.

Why choose science?

Because there was a popular saying at the time: "If you master math, physics, and chemistry, you can go anywhere in the world without fear."

His father said so, and his classmates said so too, so he followed the crowd and chose science.

The results of it?

He couldn't understand physics, couldn't keep up with chemistry, and was terrible at math. In the end, he only scored a little over 200 points on the college entrance exam and didn't even get into a vocational college.

He doesn't intend to make this mistake again in his life.

Fang Yuan looked down at his notes from the past two weeks.

One book for Chinese, one for English, one for Math, and one for Humanities—

He recorded history, geography, and politics in one notebook, divided into three columns.

For the past two weeks, he has been getting up at six o'clock every morning to memorize English words and classical Chinese poems.

When I get home in the evening, I finish my homework and then read for an hour.

I go to the library on weekends and sit there all day.

Liu Kai said he's gone mad.

"Did you suddenly become smart after being hit by a car?"

Liu Kai once came up to him during a break and asked him a question, looking at him like he was an alien.

"You used to either sleep or daydream in class, but now you're actually taking notes? Fang Yuan, what's wrong with you?"

Fang Yuan smiled and said, "I want to go to university."

Liu Kai paused for two seconds, then clicked his tongue.

"Who doesn't want to go to university? The key is whether you can get in or not."

Fang Yuan didn't argue with him.

Whether you pass the exam or not, you'll only know after you take it.

Tuesday, monthly exam.

The first exam was in Chinese.

Fang Yuan received the test paper and scanned it from beginning to end.

The dictation exercise consisted of ten lines, all of which were classical poems and prose from the textbook. He had been memorizing them every morning for the past two weeks and had basically memorized them all.

The reading comprehension passage was an essay about his hometown. The writing was quite beautiful, and Fang Yuan read it twice and felt he could understand it.

The essay topic is "The Price of Growing Up," and the requirement is 800 words.

Fang Yuan stared at the essay topic for a moment, stunned.

The price of growing up.

He lived to be fifty in his previous life, so he certainly grew up.

But that growth came too late, and at too high a price.

It was so great that he gave his entire life for it.

Fang Yuan took a deep breath and began to write.

He didn't use any fancy rhetoric or pile up any flowery words.

He simply wrote honestly, describing a person's journey from ignorance to clarity, and the lessons learned only after taking detours.

His language was simple, but every word was something he had personally pondered.

After writing about nine hundred words, he finished, checked the previous questions, and changed two of the multiple-choice questions he was unsure about.

When he handed in his paper, he felt that he had done fairly well in Chinese.

I have a math exam this afternoon.

When Fang Yuan received the exam paper, he first mentally prepared himself—

Don't panic. Do the ones you know how to do, and skip the ones you don't. Don't get stuck on one question.

He could manage the first ten multiple-choice questions, but he started to get confused about the rest.

I did two fill-in-the-blank questions, and left the other two blank.

The first major question was about trigonometric functions. He answered the first part, but couldn't answer the second part.

The second problem was solid geometry. He set up a coordinate system and did a lot of calculations, but he didn't know if it was correct.

He glanced at the next few big questions, wrote "Solution" on them, and then left them blank.

After finishing the math exam, Fang Yuan stood in the corridor for a while.

Looking at the students playing basketball on the playground, I felt nothing.

As for math, he never did well in his past life, and he's only picked it up again in this life for a little over half a month. It's no wonder he can't pass the exam.

But he wasn't in a hurry.

Mathematics is something you can't rush.

He had to start by reading the textbooks from the first year of high school and fill in the gaps little by little.

This will take time, and time is the last thing he has in abundance right now.

The next day, we had English and humanities subjects.

English was a subject that Fang Yuan was relatively good at in his previous life.

It wasn't because he was good at studying, but because when he was a screenwriter in his previous life, he gritted his teeth and read a lot of English materials in order to rewrite the scripts of American TV series. His vocabulary and sense of language were honed during that time.

Although my spoken English is still a bit clumsy, my reading and writing are okay.

After finishing the test, he felt he should be able to score above 110.

The humanities section is the last subject, combining history, geography, and politics onto a single exam paper.

Fang Yuan received the test paper and flipped through it first.

The history exam covers ancient Chinese history, from the pre-Qin period to the Ming and Qing dynasties.

He has read through the history textbook from beginning to end over the past two weeks and has a general framework in his mind.

The geography exam covered both physical and human geography. He had memorized a lot of information, but he still struggled with some of the comprehensive questions.

The political exam tested basic economics knowledge, such as supply and demand and the law of value. He had encountered some of these concepts when he was a screenwriter in his previous life, so they weren't entirely unfamiliar to him.

Fang Yuan worked through the problems one by one, writing down the ones he knew and leaving the ones he didn't know blank for later guessing.

When he handed in his paper, he glanced at his watch; there were still fifteen minutes left.

He handed in his paper, packed his things, and left the examination room.

There was a two-day break after the exam.

Teachers are grading papers, and students are studying on their own.