Tick. Tick. Tick.
Zhang Yu hunched over his desk, filling in an endless exam paper. No matter how fast he wrote, it never ended. His seat drifted further and further from the other students, their silhouettes swallowed by darkness creeping in from behind.
Cold sweat ran down his forehead. Panic rose in his chest. His hand went weak, his pen losing strength —
He plunged into bottomless black, books and papers tumbling around him, and woke with a gasp.
*A dream.*
*Memories. Someone else's memories.*
He rubbed his head. Fragments of the body's former owner churned in his mind, unstable, incomplete. He had taken over this body, but the old memories had not fully merged — many details surfaced only when he concentrated.
The memories of yesterday's strange ritual in particular made him dizzy. He could not recall what had happened at all.
He checked his phone. Five in the morning. He tried to go back to sleep — and found he couldn't. As if waking at five for school had become the body's very instinct.
*Why do I feel guilty lying here?*
He sat up. The influence of the original memories, probably.
His stomach was flat and empty. He got to his feet. *Fine. I'll go to school. At least I can get a free meal.*
Songyang High provided three meals a day, and this month's meal fees were already loaded on his card. With seven hundred thousand yuan of debt and fifty-some yuan to his name, he couldn't afford to eat anywhere else.
He left the stuffy apartment, threaded through alleys thick with sewage, and squeezed onto the bus with a crowd of others. The air was a cocktail of sweat and food; the air conditioning might as well have been off. He felt like a takeout box, squashed and jostled, being delivered to the city center.
Ninety minutes and two transfers later, sweating heavily, he finally stumbled off the bus.
*Why do I commute anyway?* he wondered.
*Oh, right. Can't afford the dormitory.*
The streets here were nothing like his neighborhood: gleaming towers, clean wide avenues, even the air tasted fresher. Well-dressed men and women walked past like urban elites.
Eventually, he reached the school gate. From far off he could see the words: SONGYANG ADVANCED CULTIVATION ACADEMY.
A digital screen beside the gate displayed a scoreboard — the top ten students of each grade, last month's results. It was immediately obvious that Songyang High valued results above all.
Summarizing it in one phrase: at Songyang High, scores were everything. In this world, everyone was judged by grades. Studying and exams were as natural as breathing, and grade discrimination was rampant.
*You scored so low, no wonder you queue so long for lunch. You scored so low, you have no right to sit at our table. The top students must thoroughly humiliate the slackers* — all of this was campus positivity.
*This is a world ruled by scores,* Zhang Yu thought. *A hell for slackers.*
He looked at the screen: "First-year total score, 10th place: Zhang Yu."
*Thank goodness I'm on the high side. Even if my rank is a bit undeserved, no one's caught on yet. I can still live with some dignity at school.*
The cafeteria served breakfast, and Zhang Yu followed his memories there. The line was long but silent — students queued, collected food, and ate with mechanical precision, like gears meshing perfectly. Some ate while reading, squeezing study into every minute.
He found a seat and bit into a meat bun. A girl sat down across from him.
Long black hair, a pale face. The name surfaced in his mind: