Chapter 92 - 89: King Yama’s Roll Call
In late May, Jiangcheng was already starting to feel the sweltering heat of early summer.
On the blackboard in Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School’s Honors Class, the countdown to the college entrance exams in the top-right corner ticked down day by day.
The day of the exams was drawing ever closer.
Aside from the first and second-year underclassmen who were still focused purely on academic competitions, the third-year top students were all feeling the pressure.
In this class, although nearly everyone held a few provincial or even national-level awards, only Qin Yan had managed to secure a direct, guaranteed admission to Shuimu University.
Most of the others, even those who had received conditional offers from Shuimu’s Lingjun Program, Yan University’s Boya Program, or the Qiangji Programs of other top universities, still had a prerequisite to meet.
You first had to achieve a score on the college entrance exam high enough to cross that rigid threshold!
So, during this period, the third-year students in the Honors Class were giving it their all, shoring up their weak spots and frantically grinding through practice exams from all over the country.
However, whenever they immersed themselves in this sea of problems, a certain figure would always appear to mercilessly shatter their resolve.
Recently, Li Dong had "descended from the heavens" of the laboratory and started to diligently sit in the classroom to prepare for the exams.
If he had just quietly worked on his own exams, everyone could have coexisted peacefully.
But the fatal blow was that this "deity" had suddenly become studious, frequently approaching his classmates to ask for help with problems.
"Hey, excuse me."
Li Dong walked over to the desk of a male student who perennially ranked near the bottom of the class, holding a math practice exam.
The boy was stunned and flattered.
’Holy shit! Brother Dong, the national champion of the Huaxuan Cup, the guy who can tear through the final questions of the Physics Ossai, is actually asking *me* a question?’
’Has he finally seen through to the unparalleled talent hidden within me?’
"Brother Dong, which problem? Ask away!" the boy said, suppressing his excitement.
Li Dong pointed to a major question on conic sections in analytic geometry and asked with great humility.
"For the second part of this question, how did you think to set up a system of equations for the line and the ellipse, and then brute-force it with Vieta’s formulas and the chord length formula?"
The boy froze.
"Huh? Isn’t... isn’t this the standard method high school teachers teach? How else are you supposed to solve it?"
Li Dong sighed, a troubled look on his face.
"I originally used an affine transformation to stretch the ellipse into a circle, then used the pole and polar theorem to get the answer in two steps."
"But Old Cai only gave me points for the answer and deducted all the points for the steps."
"He said you can’t use theorems beyond the curriculum to skip steps on major exam questions, and that you have to write out the conventional algebraic derivation to get points for your work."
He looked at the student with a resentful gaze.
"I just want to know, when there was clearly a shortcut available, how did your brain manage to perfectly avoid all advanced mathematical tools and precisely lock onto the dumbest, most time-consuming, calculation-heavy method that just so happens to perfectly fit the college entrance exam’s scoring criteria?"
"Could you break down for me your... simple thought process from that moment?"
"..."
The boy’s face instantly went from red to white, then from white to purple.
’Simple my ass!’
’Who the fuck wouldn’t take a shortcut if they saw one!’
’It’s because I don’t know any damn pole and polar theorem in the first place!’
After this incident, his requests for help in the Honors Class became known as "King Yama’s Roll Call."
Whenever Li Dong approached someone with an exam paper, it was tantamount to a public announcement:
’Your way of thinking is the dumbest, your problem-solving method is the most primitive, and you’re the one in our class who has the most "solid" grasp of this topic!’
So humiliating!
So fucking humiliating!
It got to the point where now, during study hall, the moment Li Dong stood up, the surrounding students would tense up as if facing a great enemy, silently chanting in their heads:
’Don’t pick me, don’t pick me, I don’t want to be a caveman today...’
What made them despair even more was that they used to be able to secretly look down on Li Dong’s Chinese and English scores.
But when the results of the last few practice exams came out, this final fig leaf was mercilessly torn away.
Li Dong, with his 0.3 attribute, had already devoured the required reading for high school Chinese, the underlying logic of reading comprehension, and the vocabulary and grammar of English.
His Chinese score had now steadily soared to around 130 points.
During Chinese class that morning.
Teacher Wang strutted onto the podium.
"The essays from this practice exam were, for many of you, simply atrocious! A pile of flowery words, chaotic logic... it’s a disgrace to the learned!"
Teacher Wang scolded them with a pained heart before his tone suddenly shifted.
"However! There is one student in our class whose essay showed me what it means to master both the arts and sciences, what it means to achieve profound simplicity!"
"Student Li Dong’s essay, ’On the Boundary Between Technology and Humanity,’ was brilliantly sourced, discussing everything from Zhuangzi’s ’Heaven and Earth and I were born together’ to the fundamental ethics of the information age."
"The prose flowed like water, the logic was airtight, and even more impressively, the piece was imbued with a spirit of philosophical contemplation!"
"This is what an essay should be! This is the attitude of a true scholar!"
On the podium, Teacher Wang praised Li Dong to the high heavens, declaring him unparalleled.
Below the stage, the students of the Honors Class listened with ashen faces, completely numb.
’It’s over. It’s all over.’
’If this guy does well on the college entrance exam, scores a 132 or 133, and adds that to his perfect scores in science and math... is he really aiming for the top science student in the entire province?’
And yet, just when everyone thought they would have to spend their final pre-exam days trembling in Li Dong’s shadow, he suddenly vanished again.
For several days in a row, aside from mandatory practice exams, he was nowhere to be seen in the Honors Class classroom.
No one knew what he was up to.
「...」
Meanwhile, in a faculty office at Jiangcheng Sixth Middle School.
A male teacher, balding on top, was standing before Elder Chen and bitterly pouring out his woes.
"Elder Chen, you have to do something about that prized prodigy of your physics department, Li Dong!" Teacher Li was genuinely frantic.
Elder Chen was sipping his tea and spoke nonchalantly.
"Xiaoli, what’s all the excitement about? Just let him do whatever he wants."
"The boy knows his limits, and the school administration has granted him the utmost freedom."
"It’s not that I want to stop him, Elder Chen!"
Teacher Li looked completely aggrieved.
"He’s in my computer lab, and he’s completely taken over the small server cluster with high-performance graphics cards that I painstakingly scraped together over the last few years!"
"I could live with the electricity bill and the used resources, but he’s running some god-knows-what program that’s pushing both the CPU and GPU loads to 100%!"
Teacher Li complained.
"You have no idea! The cooling fans in the lab are spinning nonstop now, and the noise is deafening!"
"The students training for the informatics competitions can’t focus to write their algorithms with all that noise. It’s severely affecting their training!"
Hearing this, Elder Chen was also taken aback. That was something he hadn’t considered.
Ever since Li Dong had asked his alma mater for resources, the kid had gone off on some new tangent, suddenly developing an interest in low-level computer algorithms.
"What kind of program is he running that needs to max out a server cluster?" Elder Chen asked, puzzled.
Teacher Li sighed.
"How should I know! I tried to look at his screen, but he was guarded and wouldn’t let me see the whole thing."
"And besides..."
"The kid keeps coming over to ask me questions from time to time."
"Isn’t asking questions a good thing? It’s a chance to discuss things," Elder Chen said with a smile.
"Discuss my ass!" Teacher Li was on the verge of tears.
"We’re in the business of informatics competitions. We teach algorithmic logic like dynamic programming, graph theory, and segment trees."
"But what does he ask me? He asks me how to avoid shared memory bank conflicts in CUDA thread synchronization! He asks how to reduce communication latency with the low-level Message Passing Interface in an MPI distributed cluster! He’s even trying to figure out how to squeeze the last drop out of L1 and L2 cache hit rates using low-level C++ pointers!"
The more Teacher Li spoke, the more aggrieved he sounded.
"Elder Chen, I’m just a coach who trains high school students for algorithm competitions, not a senior systems architect from Huawei! These hardcore, low-level concurrent computing problems he’s asking are worlds away from the competition curriculum. Sometimes I can’t even understand what he’s talking about, so how am I supposed to teach him?"
After hearing all this, Elder Chen fell completely silent.
’What on earth is that kid doing?’
But seeing Teacher Li’s near-breakdown state, Elder Chen could only offer some words of comfort.
"Ahem... well, Xiaoli, just bear with him. Bear with him."
"This will all blow over soon enough. The college entrance exams are right around the corner, anyway."