Shen Dan was a thoroughly orthodox academic, a quintessential product of the Alliance’s education system – this was something Cheng Feng had always known.
She was certainly more familiar with the parameters of various Alliance mechs, and more confident about this assessment. Cheng Feng had already braced herself for her to score higher than her. What she hadn’t anticipated was that she would hand in her paper so quickly.
Cheng Feng stared blankly at the two simple characters for a second, then quickly cleared her mind, withdrew her gaze, and refocused on her own 3D model.
Following the instructions of the third question, she used the pre-written computational program to generate the auxiliary lines.
Instantly, the screen became overwhelmed by a dense tangle of numbers and lines in various colors – overlapping, intertwining, and in the most congested areas, even obscuring the original terrain beneath. Just looking at it made one’s scalp tingle.
Filter, cut, revise…
Time slipped through his fingers like sand, and before she knew it, half an hour had passed.
When the exam-ending bell rang, an uproar of heated chatter erupted around her. Candidates leaned toward one another, comparing answers and letting out anguished groans. The proctors repeatedly gestured for them to quiet down, but to no avail.
After three hours of stifled tension, letting off some steam with a few good shouts was the only way to regain any semblance of calm.
Cheng Feng’s eyes were dry and sore. She pressed the bridge of her nose, sat back in her seat, and mentally reviewed her performance in the exam. Confirming that she hadn’t made any major mistakes, she stood up and left the examination hall.
The crowd jostled and pushed their way out. The thoroughly traumatized students, no longer caring whether the person next to them was someone they actually knew, latched onto any friendly-looking face and began to vent.
“That was way too hard! What the hell was that? What’s the point of a test like this? To teach students not to get too cocky – that they’re basically nothing?”
“Honestly, I didn’t even understand the last few questions.”
“The examiners think way too highly of me. They set questions that went straight into the stratosphere – like they were terrified I might actually get a point! It’s just ridiculous.”
“The candidate next to me finished an hour early. That’s just insane! Even if you’re just building a basic model with a few random scribbles, it would take at least two hours, right? It totally threw me off – I lost my rhythm after that.”
Bonds between the young students quickly formed in the face of shared misery. They clasped each other’s hands as if in some revolutionary meeting.
“Are you also a fellow sufferer from first year?”
“No, I’m a third-year.”
“…Goodbye, senior.”
“Hey, wait – let’s talk some more!”
And just as quickly, the bonds shattered.
The cold, mundane side of society played out again and again in the corridor outside the exam hall.
…Oh, humans.
Cheng Feng quietly trailed behind a few third-year students, listening to them compare answers. She confirmed that although she had left most of the paper blank, her accuracy rate on the questions she did answer was high. That gave her a small measure of comfort.
The crowd slowly poured out of the building.
The winter sunlight shone down coldly along with the biting wind. Cheng Feng tightened her scarf, pulled out her photonic brain from her pocket, and received a photo sent by Shen Dan.
Shen Dan had bought four cups of milk tea from a nearby vending machine and was squatting on the steps in front of the exam hall waiting for them.
She was tall, lean, and refused to wear thick clothes even in the cold winter. With her long legs bent and her arms wrapped around her knees, the smooth lines of her spine were accentuated by the taut fabric of her clothes, radiating a meter of chill around her.
Cheng Feng took the warm milk tea Shen Dan handed her. Seeing the bored, sleepy look on her face, after taking a couple of sips, she couldn’t help asking, “You knew how to do all of it?”
Shen Dan lifted her eyelids and said, “How is that possible? A few of the questions had models that were too complex – there’s no way to solve them without teamwork.”
Cheng Feng asked, “Then why did you come out so early?”
Shen Dan shrugged, unconcerned. “If you don’t know it, you don’t know it. Code isn’t something you can just conjure up by sitting there all day.”
Cheng Feng fell silent, took a hard sip of her drink, and let out a soft breath.
Her two other roommates also found their way over and happened to catch this exchange. They bellowed with full energy, “I am not leaving until the exam is over! That’s the last comfort I can give myself!”
“The first question took me two hours! I finally finished building the model, only to realize I’d misread it! Is this level of difficulty fair to first-year students at the UFU?”
The two spoke with indignation. Shen Dan reassured them, “Don’t worry. An exam this hard probably isn’t a regular quiz. It’s likely some kind of selection test.”
Cheng Feng looked up and asked, “Selection for what?”
“No idea. The military university runs all kinds of selection tests every year. If you miss this one, just catch the next.” Shen Dan waved her hand casually. “Come on, let’s go eat.”
…
Mr. Luo blew away the lingering steam, squinted, and took a sip, then casually placed the goji-berry-infused cup on the desk.
He pushed up his glasses with a crooked index finger, straightened up, and asked, “So, who’s going to re-evaluate the first-year papers?”
The teachers around him looked like they were facing a formidable enemy, shaking their heads and declining one after another.
“You guys do it. I think you’re more suited for it.”
“No need to be afraid – the system has already graded everything. This is just a re-evaluation. First-year students left a lot of questions blank, so it should be quick.”
“My heart can’t take it. I’m getting old.”
“Then let’s do it randomly,” Mr. Luo said, pulling up a list. “Let’s pull a few student papers and review them together.”
Everyone was mentally prepared for this exam to be difficult. If the students performed too well, it would actually be a bit awkward. They would have been more than satisfied with just a basic framework.
Still, the top few papers were somewhat impressive, greatly soothing their unease.
After skimming through a batch of high-scoring papers, Mr. Luo felt they had built up enough of a buffer. He pulled up Shen Dan’s file from the list.
He unscrewed the lid of his thermos, took a deep breath, and prepared himself – ready to rely on the goji-and-red-date tea to calm his temper at any moment. Having mentally braced himself, he clicked to project the file.
The 3D model materialized above the conference table, slowly rotating and cycling through close-up and distant views.
A group of specialized course instructors watched in silence, unsure of what to say even after a long while. Finally, it was Mr. Luo who broke the stillness with a chuckle. “Shen Dan,” he said, “has truly mastered the essence of knowing when to quit.”
The questions she wasn’t supposed to answer were indeed left completely blank – not even a tentative step toward earning partial credit. Her paper was so clean and concise it felt as stingy as an unscrupulous vendor shortchanging their customers.
That said, after being called out face-to-face by that little owl last time, she had made some slight improvement. Before tossing out an answer, she reluctantly added a few transitional steps. By her own standards, that was already a modest progress.
Mr. Luo remarked, “Her score is higher than I estimated. Looks like her daily grind in the San Yao arena has paid off a bit.”
Shen Dan was one of the rare students who enjoyed independently analyzing mech operations – and did it well. She might have been slightly lacking in overall strategic vision, but she was highly sensitive to raw data processing.
A middle-aged man beside him nodded. “A lot of commanders would want a deputy like Shen Dan. There’s nothing wrong with her style. From a command perspective, she has the highest adaptability.”
Mr. Luo searched for Cheng Feng’s name and double-clicked to project her work.
In the dimly lit room, light and shadows shifted.
“Whoa.” The middle-aged man leaned his head back and said, “That’s a whole lot of blank space.”
Mr. Luo pulled up the model for the first question. The annotations, spanning more than a dozen levels, startled everyone in the room.
If Shen Dan pursued minimalism, Cheng Feng represented the polar opposite -meticulous, detailed, and expansive. A dense, machine-like chain of analytical processes lay hidden beneath an iceberg model that only revealed a single corner.
“This question…” The assistant beside him was taken aback and murmured, “Has anyone actually solved it completely yet?”
He pulled up the backend data. Sure enough, for the final part of the first question, most students had given up. A small minority had produced a rough framework. A few had blindly guessed the correct answer.
Only Cheng Feng, through repeated calculations using fundamental knowledge and cross-referencing known data in the database, had stubbornly plotted the final map using an analytical method several times more complex than the standard solution.
The analysis model for this question was already highly complex, testing a knowledge point intended for third-year students. Coupled with the immense computational load, even examinees who knew the solution process would have abandoned it due to time constraints – let alone the fact that Cheng Feng was not familiar with mech parameters.
Given the result, she had brute-forced her way through this question with sheer tenacity. It was no wonder that most of the rest of her paper was left blank.
Several people nodded and remarked:
“Cheng Feng’s effective APM is very high.”
“Her deductive reasoning is also quite sharp.”
“She’s held back by her knowledge base. But her accuracy rate on the questions she answered is close to 100%.”
“If you gave her enough time, I think she could grind out the remaining questions too.”
“That ‘if’ is meaningless. Speed itself is the most important requirement for a Class B commander.”
Mr. Luo sighed with feeling. “What a distinctive student. I wonder how she ought to be mentored.”
…
The exam results were posted a day later.
Cheng Feng received a text notification and logged onto the official website to check her score. Only then did she learn that this had been a joint exam involving multiple military universities.
She didn’t know what the selection criteria were, but judging from the statistical results, the gaps were stark.
The top spots were almost entirely occupied by third-year students, with their average score trailing that of the first-year students at the bottom by a factor of four or five.
Cheng Feng searched for her own name and found herself ranked in the upper-middle range – not embarrassing, but not particularly outstanding either.
Shen Dan’s total score was 13 points higher than hers, placing her in the upper tier. She was also the best-performing first-year student in this joint exam.
Cheng Feng had always taken her failures to heart, and this assessment had exposed a fatal weakness. After the exam, she had stayed in her dormitory, searching through materials and trying to fill in the gaps. But she didn’t care too much about the actual ranking.
She scrolled through a few threads on the topic, where students from the command departments of various military universities were all discussing the results, and skimmed a few comments.
“Shen Dan’s pretty impressive – she actually broke into the third-year bracket.”
“Now it’s my turn to say it. Sigh. We’re all students from top military universities, so why is the gap still this big?”
“Cheng Feng didn’t do well this time either. She spent all last semester focused on manual operations. I almost forgot she was even in the command department. This is what happens when you underestimate data analysis.”
“This isn’t fair to first-year students at all. There’s no point in comparing.”
“Cheng Feng – fine, whatever. She’s just a special admit from a post-war planet. In a specialization like infantry that relies on personal skill, sure. But no one’s actually comparing her to the top technical talents in the Alliance, right?”
“You can always trust Tao Rui! As long as he’s around, the Second Military’s command department is an unbreachable fortress!”
“Everyone eats different amounts of rice, let alone something like this. And Tao Rui has a professional background to begin with – his spot for the expeditionary force is already locked in. If he didn’t do well, that would be the real anomaly.”
Cheng Feng switched back to the scoreboard and saw for the first time that the top student in this exam was named Tao Rui.
In fact, the scores among the top few examinees were quite close, hovering between 87 and 92. But Tao Rui’s completion time was only 2 hours and 31 minutes, while the several candidates just behind him all used the full three hours before leaving the exam hall.
Additionally, among the top ten, UFU only claimed a single spot. The results looked rather bleak.
Cheng Feng’s two roommates from across the hall had just checked their scores and were so angry they looked ready to smash their photonic brains.
“I got 35. I knew it. Everyone secretly did prep work behind my back and didn’t even tell me!”
“I got 46!”
“Congrats, you beat the average! But how the hell did you get 46? Didn’t you say you spent the whole winter break just eating and drinking, you bastard?”
“Thanks a lot! What’s there to fight about between the two of you? Are you so crazy that you’re jealous of a 46?”
Cheng Feng asked, “Who is Tao Rui? Is he really that good?”
The two were in the middle of wrestling with each other. They paused at her question.
The short-haired girl gave a quick shrug, let out a short, low laugh, and hooked her arm around her roommate. The two of them, trading lines back and forth, began chanting slogans with loud, fervent enthusiasm.
“The eternal god!”
“The light of the command department!”
“The king of the great battlefield!”
“The undefeated legend!”
“The harbor of victory!”
Cheng Feng: “…” She leaned back in horror, pressing herself tightly against the back of the sofa.
“That’s just the kind of person he is.” The short-haired girl grabbed her bangs and sighed. “A chief commander, you know, has more charisma than a deputy commander. Especially when they turn the tide. One match can decide the fate of thousands – an even brighter spotlight than a single soldier’s MVP.”
Cheng Feng asked curiously, “Isn’t he a data analyst?”
“He is. But a Class A commander isn’t necessarily qualified to be a Class B commander. However, a Class B commander, with enough experience, can act as a chief commander.” The short-haired girl crossed her arms and recalled, “On the grand battlefield, the commander role isn’t strictly required to be Class A. Tao Rui comes from a family with a deep background in this – he was a special admit to the First Military, and they’ve heavily invested in his training. He made a name for himself in the leagues with three major victories. But at our uni, there hasn’t been an absolute leader in recent years.”
Her roommate added, “Xiang Yunjian has good strategic vision, but he’s an infantry.”
The short-haired girl nodded and said with regret, “Although it’s pretty satisfying that he’s stolen the spotlight from Class A commanders, the people from the First Military are way too arrogant. We’re on different sides, so I’m not really a fan.”
Her companion shook her head repeatedly. “Besides, the First Military’s slogans are way too cringey. I can’t do it. Just no.”
Cheng Feng turned to look at Shen Dan. She was lying on the sofa, eyes wide open, staring blankly at the ceiling, motionless like a corpse.
Cheng Feng leaned closer and found herself face to face with Shen Dan’s suddenly shifting pupils. Startled, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’m thinking.” Shen Dan sat up, rubbed her face, and said, “I heard you. Tao Rui. I’ve heard of him before, but I don’t know much about him. From what upperclassmen have said, he’s a very arrogant psycho.”
