Early morning at Linchuan Number Five Middle School.
A thin layer of frost covered the classroom windows; it had snowed heavily again yesterday.
People in the front row were chatting, while those in the back were sleeping.
Occasionally, a few bursts of ill-timed laughter broke the silence.
When Gu Yebai entered the classroom, several malicious snickers immediately drifted through the air.
“Whoa, isn’t this Ai Lian’s husband?”
As the man brave enough to call the school’s number one ugliest girl, Ai Lian, his wife, Gu Yebai was slowly becoming a campus legend.
However, Gu Yebai always turned a deaf ear to these taunts.
As he passed Ai Lian’s seat, he gave her a small smile.
“Good morning, Xiao Lian.”
“G-Good morning, Gu…”
Ai Lian smiled back, though it was a bit strained.
She used her elbow to cover several exam papers on her desk, trying to hide her scores.
Unfortunately, Gu Yebai had already seen them.
“The monthly exam from last time?”
“Yes.”
Ai Lian buried her head very low, looking ashamed.
“You saw it?”
Hiss…
“Say something at least…”
Gu Yebai thought for a moment and offered some encouragement.
“At least there’s a lot of room for improvement.”
He stole another glance.
The test paper was covered in large red crosses; it could only be described as pathetic.
The scores for the three subjects — Language, Math, and English — totaled less than 100 points.
Snickers broke out nearby.
Normally, Ai Lian was the kind of student who looked incredibly hardworking.
In class, she acted as if she wanted to carve everything the teacher said directly into her brain.
Yet, her results were truly disappointing.
Some people refuse to try because failing after giving their all makes them look like clowns to others.
It was better to be lazy from the start and slack off as if resigned to fate; it seemed cooler that way.
“Anyway, don’t be discouraged,” Gu Yebai said in a soft, patient voice.
“Do you mind if I take a look at your test papers?”
Gu Yebai was first in the class and fifth in the grade.
Even though he had taken intermittent leaves of absence for an entire year because his parents were sick, his grades remained an unshakable existence in this class full of slackers.
“Is that okay?”
Ai Lian was a bit overwhelmed by the attention.
“Learning is one thing, but taking exams is another. Some people might just be bad at tests. Anyway, let me see where you went wrong. Maybe you filled in the bubble sheet incorrectly, or maybe they’re the kind of questions where it’s easy to be careless and miss the teacher’s traps.”
Seeing him standing in front of Ai Lian, the people around them began to jeer again.
“Look at these lovebirds, so passionate so early in the morning!”
“I’ll recommend a hotel to you two later so you can go get a room.”
Gu Yebai remained deaf to it all, as if it were nothing but irrelevant background noise.
His gaze stayed fixed on Ai Lian’s answer sheet.
“Well?”
After seeing Ai Lian’s test paper, Gu Yebai was momentarily speechless.
“You’re pulling my leg, right?”
Admittedly, not a single question on the paper was left blank, which was commendable.
But the issue was that Ai Lian’s answers were exceptionally abstract.
First of all, her Chinese writing was hideous; it didn’t look like normal characters at all.
It looked more like some Stone Age pictographs or an artist’s sketches — completely illegible.
Most of the English words weren’t spelled correctly either.
“Because” was spelled “beccus,” and “apple” was written as “aoole.”
Even if he could guess the words, the grammar was a disaster of the century.
Normally, sentences should follow the subject-verb-object structure, but he could never find a subject in Ai Lian’s sentences, and verbs and nouns seemed to run wild without any pattern.
When it came to math, it was even more absurd.
She even got one plus one equals two wrong…
“Ai Lian, tell the truth. Do you have a grudge against the teacher?”
Ai Lian shook her head like a little rattle.
“One plus one equals the square root of two… you’re a genius…”
“I didn’t do it on purpose. I have my own way of thinking,” Ai Lian gulped and muttered.
“You have too many ideas…”
“Look, if the sides of a square are one, doesn’t it add up to the square root of two?”
An aggrieved expression that said ‘I’m not lying’ flickered in Ai Lian’s eyes.
In fact, it was true.
Ai Lian possessed a pen that could automatically write the correct answers, which could easily get her a perfect score.
However, she preferred to get good grades through her own strength and use her own understanding to grasp the way Earthlings thought.
But she had forgotten one thing.
The knowledge systems of high-level civilizations were completely different from those of low-level civilizations.
Much knowledge could not be easily solved by taking it for granted.
The two worlds didn’t even share the same physical laws.
“Your knowledge is a complete mess.”
“No, it’s not. Isn’t this the well-known normalization theory?”
“What on earth is normalization theory? A theory you invented?”
Gu Yebai couldn’t help but find it funny.
“Shoot, wait, I forgot. Earth’s standard arithmetic formulas aren’t like this…”
“What are Earth’s standard arithmetic formulas? Are you an alien? Quick, tell me what your purpose is on Earth.”
“I’m from the planet Atlantis, and I’m here to conquer Earth. Okay, just kidding.”
So she really was joking.
Since he didn’t know Ai Lian well before, he hadn’t realized she was quite the chunibyo.
“But I really do want to get good grades…”
“How do you explain the English? And the Chinese? Why are there no subjects?”
“Isn’t it very dangerous for any language to put the subject at the very beginning?”
“How is it dangerous?”
“Look, if an enemy knows your name, they can detect your home through your name, thereby endangering your compatriots. Therefore, subjects equal danger. No information should be exposed in a sentence.”
“You’re quite the talent. When we speak normally, don’t we use subjects too?”
Ai Lian lowered her head again.
In reality, Ai Lian didn’t understand any Earth language at all.
She had attended school in Marseille, Nagasaki, and Seoul, and could easily communicate with people using the local languages because she possessed a special device for real-time translation…
Unfortunately, communicating through a local language didn’t mean understanding the language.
Because of this, her Chinese and English were absolute disaster zones.
“I feel like you’re suited for writing science fiction. Seriously, if you actually wrote sci-fi, I doubt Liu Cixin would have a job. Why don’t you go write ‘The Four-Body Problem’?”
“I really don’t want to get these kinds of scores. There’s a lot of knowledge I can’t fully understand.”
“Sigh. I’ll tutor you later. Your foundation is just too weak.”
Meanwhile, the teacher had already entered the classroom holding the lesson plan.
“Ahem. We’ll start the first period now. Everyone, please take out the monthly exam papers that were handed back yesterday.”
Even though the teacher stood on the podium and gave clear instructions, hardly any students were willing to listen.
They were all busy with their own things.
The teacher was already used to this situation.
“Class, we’ll start with the first question.”
Of the more than fifty students in the class, half were skipping.
Of those remaining, only five were actually listening.
Ai Lian had the worst grades among them.
However, she was always the most serious of those five.
She listened while writing furiously, transcribing the logic for the answers onto her paper.
Sometimes, she really didn’t understand why Earthlings stored information through the primitive method of writing when they clearly had computers and cell phones.
“I see…”
Even for the simplest freebie questions, Ai Lian needed to study them for a very long time.
What she had to do was overturn the logic of advanced civilizations that she was accustomed to and accept the logic of Earthlings.
Ai Lian stared at the test paper, her eyes so serious they were almost stubborn.
‘I think I understand a little…’
It really was a primitive way of thinking.