Chapter 3: Catching Up on Homework and Doing Homework

On a September morning, the loudspeakers at Xia Minghan Primary School began playing the “Athletes’ March” right on schedule.

And I, a person with a mature soul, stood gloriously against the whitewashed wall at the back of Class One, Grade Three, legs together and back straight.

Yes, I’d been made to stand as punishment.

Because I hadn’t done my homework. Tragic!

In elementary school in this era, it didn’t matter how much brilliance you had tucked away inside you. If you dared fail to turn in those two thin pages of Chinese characters and pinyin practice, your teacher would regard you as an unforgivable criminal who deserved to be struck by lightning.

So when Old Wang called out “Fang Luo,” pointed toward the back, and told me to go stand there, my deskmate Chu Hanya slowly turned her head.

Her brows knotted on her fair, delicate little face. Her eyes held shock, pain, and a profound frustration at my failure to live up to her expectations.

At the corner of her desk lay her Chinese homework book, neatly open. A large, vivid “Excellent ☆” had been drawn on it in red ink; her handwriting was as neat and graceful as a copybook.

When Old Wang turned to write “The Virginia creeper’s feet grow on its stem” on the blackboard, Chu Hanya twisted halfway around and fired a barrage of whispered accusations at me.

“Fang Luo! I reminded you three times before school ended yesterday! Three times!”

She held up three fingers and spoke through clenched teeth. “Copy the characters twice, make words, and recite the passage! What were you doing last night? And here I thought you were a sensible student who studied ahead. You’re… you’re such a disappointment! Being punished on the second day of school! Our first group’s study points are all going to be deducted because of you!”

Looking at her distress, I thought, Good grief.

I got up helplessly and whispered back, “Calm down, Monitor. I actually know all of it. I just didn’t want to write it.”

Chu Hanya’s lovely eyes widened.

She bit her lip, her chest rising and falling slightly. The look she gave me now was reserved for the hopelessly arrogant.

“You’re… impossible!”

She gave a cold snort, turned away, and sat up perfectly straight again. Clearly, she’d decided to end our friendship unilaterally and never speak to a stubborn delinquent like me again.

Ha… This little girl.

I didn’t have any other thoughts about it. She took her duties so seriously that I felt bad upsetting her. Better not argue.

Let me reintroduce Chu Hanya. She consistently ranked first in her grade, was a model of discipline, and possessed an intense sense of responsibility and an academic achiever’s pride, all wrapped up in a miniature adult.

In her innocent black-and-white view of the world, a child who didn’t do homework was a bad child. My excuse of “I know it already, so I didn’t write it” was an open challenge to the academic order she upheld.

Still, the view from the back wasn’t as bleak as I’d expected.

Standing as punishment was hardly a VIP privilege reserved for me.

Less than two minutes later, the classroom’s back door creaked as a lean, agile figure sauntered around to it after Old Wang had sent her out the front.

It was Su Xiaoqing, my upstairs neighbor who’d robbed me of my lollipop last night.

She wore a loose athletic T-shirt again, her uniform jacket tied around her waist. Her fringe was a little messy, her hands were empty, and she showed no shame whatsoever at being punished. She looked more like a general who’d just finished inspecting her territory.

Yes, a general.

Clearly, being made to stand was nothing new to her.

She swaggered over, leaned against the wall with practiced ease, and bent one leg to brace her foot against it. Then she grinned at me, showing a little white canine tooth.

“Hey, Fang Luo. Fancy seeing you here. Enjoying the shade too?”

What could I do?

Keep a straight face.

“You didn’t do your Chinese homework either?”

“Please. I finished the copying ages ago. Anyone can draw those symbols with their eyes shut.” Su Xiaoqing pursed her lips and put her hands behind her head, looking troubled. “It was math I didn’t do.

“Those last two word problems on page two yesterday, with apples in big baskets and pears in little ones—they went round and round until my brain turned to mush. Dad was driving a night run and didn’t come home, so I sat there alone staring at the exercise book until after ten. I got so sleepy I just fell asleep.”

I felt a little sorry for her.

Maybe problems like that really were hard for kids.

But… wait. She hadn’t refused to do it. She just couldn’t solve it.

In that case, she was still a good kid. She’d done her Chinese copying; it was only the math she couldn’t manage.

Then again, my own failure to do homework was something I needed to deal with. Even if I knew everything, I couldn’t just leave it undone. Elementary school was a horror story with rules.

So I could find someone to do it for me, and Su Xiaoqing was a good candidate.

Hadn’t kids always swapped homework for snacks or money? I’d let her copy the math she couldn’t solve, and in return she’d copy out my Chinese and the rest.

I turned my head slightly and spoke in my most persuasive low voice. “Su Xiaoqing, how about a deal?”

“What kind?” She shot me a wary sideways look.

“From now on, I’ll handle your math homework every day, no matter how hard the word problems are. I’ll write out the answers, and if you don’t know how to do them, I can explain the steps. Teacher Liu won’t find a thing wrong.”

I dangled the bait. This was smurfing.

Su Xiaoqing’s eyes lit up. “Really?! What do I have to do?

“Uh—but just so you know, I’m not sharing my lunch.”

“…” Why was food always on her mind?

“It’s simple. An equal exchange.”

I gestured toward our classmates in the front rows. “From now on, you do my Chinese character copying, pinyin practice, and English alphabet copying for me.

“Just write normally and don’t make it too messy. Kids’ handwriting all looks about the same. The teachers will never notice.”

Su Xiaoqing blinked. After hesitating for a while, she asked, “You’ll really tell me how to solve the problems?”

Hmm… Writing out the steps counted as telling her.

Teaching her personally would be too much trouble. I’d gloss over that.

“I’ll write out the steps.”

“Deal! It’s a promise! Copying characters is easy. I can hold three pencils and scribble with all of them at once. Those math problems are what’ll kill me!”

“What are you doing?! You two at the back! You’re being punished and you’re still whispering? Do you think I’m not here?!”

Old Wang’s roar from the front struck like thunder. The half-stick of chalk in his hand skimmed the wall between Su Xiaoqing and me, then shattered on the concrete floor.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, terrifying.

Wait… I wasn’t really a kid.

Even so, Su Xiaoqing and I shut our mouths instantly, threw back our shoulders, and stood straighter than model recruits at military training.

The grim atmosphere lasted less than three minutes.

A timid figure appeared in the aisle at the front. Under the barely suppressed laughter of the class, he dragged his feet toward the back, looking over his shoulder every few steps.

It was Zhang Wei, the chubby boy from the second floor.

His plump face was miserable, and he’d clutched his homework book until it was crumpled. By the time he reached the back corner, he was close to tears.

“I’m done for… If Mom finds out my name got written down on the second day of school, she’ll definitely confiscate my Ultraman…”

“What’s wrong, Zhang Wei?” Su Xiaoqing asked, gleeful at his misfortune.

“Don’t even ask… I was busy looking for my pencil yesterday, so I only copied one page of Chinese. I forgot the other.” Zhang Wei wiped his nose and stared ahead in despair. “And of all people, Wen Shuyao was collecting homework today. She didn’t cut me any slack. She pulled my book out and handed it straight to Teacher Wang…”

I followed his gaze.

In the front row by the window sat a quiet girl with shoulder-length black hair, dressed in the blue-and-white uniform.

She was the girl who’d softly pointed out my open schoolbag zipper yesterday morning and gently closed it for me.

Wen Shuyao.

Her name had the literary elegance of an ink painting, completely at odds with a classroom full of sweat and spicy-snack smells.

She was the class’s Chinese subject representative, responsible for collecting the homework.

At the moment, an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty hung over Class One, Grade Three. With the impartial Chu Hanya guarding discipline at the front, meticulous Wen Shuyao checking homework, and hot-tempered Old Wang at the teacher’s desk, an elementary schooler’s life must be pure misery.

Sigh. Poor kids.

While the three of us were still catching up on our homework, Su Xiaoqing nudged Zhang Wei with her elbow and whispered the entire story of our homework partnership to him.

His little eyes, squeezed nearly shut by his chubby cheeks, lit up with joy.

“Luo! My brother!”

Somehow I’d suddenly become his brother.

Friendship between kids really was simple.

Zhang Wei was so excited he nearly dropped to his knees, his plump cheeks trembling. “Can you really do all the math? If you let me copy your math every day, I’ll take care of the rest of your English copying! I used to trace my sister’s seventh-grade English homework for her. Nobody’s better at copying handwriting than me!”

Seriously, man? What kind of person was your sister?

I nearly lost my composure, but his offer did tempt me. If I was lending out my homework anyway, another person to do my copying wouldn’t hurt.

“Okay.”

Su Xiaoqing would handle the manual labor of Chinese, Zhang Wei would take care of English, and all I had to do was spend two minutes a day dictating the math answers. I’d finally achieve hands-free elementary school living.

Mm. This kind of school life was perfect too.

Wait… Somehow it felt like I’d gone off track. A normal protagonist would be figuring out how to make a fortune and buy stocks by now, right?

Even as my thoughts wandered, I settled the matter. “All right. Find me after school this afternoon, and I’ll give you my exercise books.”

After enduring a long forty-minute Chinese lesson, I could finally return to my seat when Old Wang left the room.

Chu Hanya didn’t so much as glance at me. She simply pulled her arm coldly back onto her side of the desk, as though fortifying the penciled dividing line into the Maginot Line.

I wasn’t particularly interested in talking to a grade-school class monitor anyway. Most of the time she was the one who spoke to me. In high school, she probably wouldn’t have bothered; if you wanted to go to the dogs, who cared? Only elementary school kids saw the world so innocently.

Anyway, I pulled out the math exercise book Teacher Liu had ordered me to finish that morning.

On page two were four so-called advanced mixed-operation word problems.

To a grade-schooler they might as well have been written in a foreign language. To me, they were as simple as one plus one equals two.

I picked up my pencil, didn’t bother with scratch paper, and moved my wrist swiftly across the page.

Done in a second.

Done in a second.

Done in a second.

Wait, whoa! Was this what it felt like to be a top student?

I didn’t hesitate over a single problem. Equations, mental arithmetic, carrying, answers—it all came easily.

In less than two minutes, an entire densely packed page of math problems was complete, with neat, properly ordered steps.

I’m an academic genius!!!

Ha. I really was turning childish.

I tossed my pencil onto the desk and was just about to put my head down for a nap when a ding sounded deep in my mind.

That long-awaited mechanical notification—

【Ding! The host has independently completed third-grade math classwork (difficulty: E)!】

【Daily academic activity triggered. Reward: Learning Experience +1!】

【Daily diligence reward: +0.1 Corner Shop Coin! (Current balance: 0.1 coins)】

I froze halfway down to the desk.

Wait…

What?

Doing homework gave me experience? And Corner Shop Coins?

I hurriedly focused on the system interface in my mind. Sure enough, the experience bar beneath the formerly empty attribute panel had crept up an almost imperceptible amount, and a faintly glowing “0.1” sat in the shop wallet.

I tried tapping it.

Academic ability: S (Primary school knowledge is effortless for you)

Next level: 1/100,000.

Shit. I’d overlooked this!

I rubbed my temples.

For a nine-year-old working toward the perfect life of someone destined to stand above the crowd, wasn’t doing homework only natural?

The system obviously treated completing schoolwork as the most basic daily check-in!

But…

The thought of forcing myself to copy those idiotic pinyin exercises and word combinations every day, along with all twenty-six English letters as though I were drawing pictures, made my face pucker like bitter melon.

Speaking of English, that had been a lasting source of pain in my previous life.

The schools in my little county had been badly under-resourced when I was growing up. We hadn’t had proper English classes in primary school, and I hadn’t encountered phonetic symbols until seventh grade.

Our English teacher at the time spoke with such a thick local accent that “thank you” came out sounding like “three pieces of meat.” As a result, my English grades hovered near the passing line all through middle school, high school, and even college.

People liked to joke that they were bad at English because they loved their country, but the system’s first nonnegotiable order was to place first in class on the first monthly exam. English, one of the main subjects, was a mountain I couldn’t avoid.

Third-grade English was simple enough: basic words and phrases like “apple,” “banana,” and “good morning.” But if I wanted to win by a crushing margin, I had to make as few mistakes as possible in every subject.

“Since homework gives rewards…”

I pinched my chin thoughtfully and pulled the new green English exercise book from my bag.

The first lesson’s homework was to copy the uppercase and lowercase letters A through G, each five times in the four-line practice spaces.

It was tedious, but to test how the system’s rewards worked, I endured the embarrassment, picked up my pencil, and carefully traced each letter stroke by stroke.

When I finished the last stroke, I held my breath and waited eagerly for the notification in my head.

One second.

Five seconds.

Ten seconds passed.

Dead silence. Nothing.

Huh?

The experience value on the system panel was still a lonely “1,” and the coin balance remained fixed at “0.1.” Neither had budged.

What was going on?

“System? Did you crash? Where’s my experience? Where’s my tenth of a coin?” I pinged it in my mind.

The interface showed no reaction. Only a line of inconspicuous, translucent pale-gray text appeared at the bottom:

【Note: Daily academic rewards are settled only once per day (daily maximum: Experience +1, Coins +0.1). The limit increases as the host advances through school. Please balance work and rest.】

I understood when I read the fine print.

Experience could only be awarded once a day.

That made things easy.

Since only one assignment a day could earn a system reward, all I needed to do was pick the most worthwhile one—or the math I actually felt like doing—and casually check off my daily task.

As for copying Chinese characters and English letters, which did nothing but torture my wrist and teach me nothing…

I turned to look at Zhang Wei, who was wiping his snot under his desk, and Su Xiaoqing, who was spinning a ballpoint pen between her fingers, staring into space.

I’d leave the homework I didn’t want to do to those two suckers.

“Fang Luo.”

A clear voice, tinged with hesitation, suddenly came from beside me.

I turned. At some point, Chu Hanya, who’d been keeping her distance with a cold face, had brought her round little face close. Her big dark eyes were fixed on the math exercise book I’d just finished.

Her gaze swept over the neat, orderly calculations, worked out step by step without even a scrap of rough work. Her mouth opened into a cute little O.

“You finished these four big problems in two minutes after you came back from being punished?

“Teacher Liu hasn’t even taught us the distributive property of division for this one. How did you know to use a shortcut?”

“…” What should I do?

I thought for a moment, then slowly snapped the exercise book shut. Mimicking her tone from that morning, I decided to show off.

“Didn’t I tell you? This stuff is so easy I know how to do it at a glance.”

Chu Hanya’s face reddened. Her strong pride suppressed the admiration that had just arisen.

She abruptly sat up straight, grabbed her pencil case, and turned away indignantly, muttering under her breath, “What’s there to be smug about? It’s just a shortcut. I can learn it from a reference book tonight! When the monthly exam results come out on the second next month, let’s see what you score in Chinese and English!”

Watching her proud back as she stubbornly refused to admit how shocked she was, I leaned into my chair, unable to suppress a small smile.

It wasn’t what I’d intended.

But… bullying elementary schoolers felt really good.

Ha ha.

The second of next month, huh? I should take it seriously too. It was unlikely I’d trip up on third-grade questions, but since it was a system mission, I ought to make an effort.

I wondered what modules would unlock later.

As things stood, the system was completely useless. Wasn’t I just here to experience life all over again?

…

The Perfect Life Guidebook is now online.

Name: Fang Luo

Age: √81 + 0 × 9

Academic ability: S

(Can easily master everything taught in primary school)

Athletic ability: B

(Average for a third-grader)

Looks: B+

(The clean-cut type among primary school boys)

Current mission: Place first in class on the monthly exam.

Current ranking: 26th in class

Corner Shop Coins: 0.1