Chapter 6

After Chen Kangjie brushed his teeth and washed his face, he was about to eat a fried dough stick when he saw Ma Wei calling him at the door. He put on his small backpack and went to school, this time with Ma Wei, Chen Qiancheng, and Zhu Balah.

Zhu Balah, originally named Zhu Qiang, had a scar on his face at some point, so everyone called him Zhu Balah. Gradually, no one called him by his real name anymore. He later got another nickname, "Principal Zhu." Zhu Qiang used to go to school with Chen Kangjie, Ma Wei, and Chen Qiancheng, but because his grades were so poor, he kept being held back. By the time Chen Kangjie and the others were in sixth grade, Zhu Balah was only in third grade. So everyone joked, "By the time the principal retires, you still won't have finished primary school. We might as well call you Principal Zhu." This nickname, however, hadn't been created yet.

Zhu Balah was a person with many humorous stories. If the butterfly effect of Chen Kangjie's rebirth wasn't so significant, these stories would have gradually unfolded in life. There were two times Chen Kangjie remembered particularly clearly, both times Zhu Qiang fell into the toilet.

Behind Zhu Qiang's house was a small vegetable garden. To make watering easier and save on fertilizer, his grandmother built a simple toilet in the garden. It was just a pit with some wooden planks over it, leaving gaps, and a shed on top. Because this toilet was closer than the public toilet at the workplace, the whole family chose to use their own simple toilet.

One morning, after Zhu Balah's grandmother got up and couldn't find him, but his schoolbag was still at home, she knew he hadn't gone to school yet. She searched for him, and her calls could be heard by the neighbors, but she got no response from Zhu Qiang. After searching for a long time, she finally found him in the toilet, where he had fallen in while dozing off. Afraid of being laughed at, he didn't dare to respond when his grandmother called him. This incident became a laughing matter.

Tragically, something similar happened to Zhu Qiang not long after. The difference was that this time, after his grandmother called a few times and got no response, she went directly to the toilet and found him standing in the pit. The probability of this happening was so rare that Chen Kangjie couldn't even calculate it.

"Zhu Balah, are you going to play chicken after school today?"

Chen Qiancheng asked Zhu Qiang. The "chicken" game didn't involve real chickens; it was a children's game where one leg was bent, and the other leg was used to hop while holding the bent leg. The goal was to use the bent knee to knock the opponent over or make them let go of their bent leg.

"Sure, who's afraid of who!"

Although he often lost to Chen Qiancheng, Zhu Balah was still不服气 (unwilling to admit defeat).

"Old Wen, are you going?"

Chen Qiancheng turned to ask Chen Kangjie. Before Chen Kangjie could answer, Ma Wei answered for him.

"Old Wen will definitely go. When the time comes, we two will be a team, and you two will be a team."

Chen Kangjie didn't like it when others made decisions for him, but seeing Ma Wei's hopeful eyes, he smiled and nodded. He actually wanted to enjoy the childhood game. In his previous life, Chen Kangjie was quite good at playing chicken, even the big guy Zhang Jiahua in his class wasn't much of a match for him.

"Alright, then let's invite more people after school. It's more fun with more people. Chen Qiancheng, invite a few from your class, and I'll invite a few from mine. Let's have Class 3 challenge Class 2."

Chen Kangjie suggested further, and Chen Qiancheng agreed.

"Let's go, Old Wen, hurry to the classroom and get your homework so I can copy it."

Feeling that his homework wasn't finished, Ma Wei temporarily put aside the thought of playing chicken. He decided to finish his homework first to avoid getting in trouble for not submitting it. Yesterday, he saw Chen Kangjie finish his homework quickly, so he didn't plan to do his own, thinking he could just copy Chen Kangjie's during morning study.

Ma Wei's plan was quite clever.

"You little guy, why didn't you do your homework again? Sigh, it seems what I said yesterday was in vain."

Chen Kangjie could only feel helpless about Ma Wei's "cleverness."

After sitting down in the classroom, Chen Kangjie threw his homework to Ma Wei and ignored it. By the time the morning study bell rang, Ma Wei still hadn't finished copying. He had no choice but to continue during morning study.

During morning study, Wang Hongjuan often turned around to look at Chen Kangjie (the good students sat in the second and third rows). She might have been checking if he had submitted his homework and was using her eyes to ask why he hadn't. Chen Kangjie ignored her; this little girl was really responsible!

Most of the time during morning study, students read aloud from their textbooks, sitting properly and reading loudly, but Chen Kangjie's voice was not heard.

Chen Kangjie was actually daydreaming. He wasn't really daydreaming; he was thinking about which songs to write after deciding to write songs last night. There were so many songs from the future, and he couldn't write them all. He could only choose some classics and popular ones. Of course, he couldn't write all the songs of excellent singers; that would be too cruel, almost like murder. If he wrote them all, how would they become famous?

After morning study, Ma Wei finished copying his homework and quickly submitted it to the class monitor.

The first two classes of the morning were math. The math teacher, a middle-aged woman in her forties named Zhang Fang, was from Beijing and spoke standard Mandarin. She was very serious about teaching and was responsible to both good and poor students. She had a daughter, Liu Yingying, who was also in Class 3, Grade 2. Liu Yingying was a very pretty and delicate girl with short hair like her mother, but her big eyes always sparkled, as if they could speak, and her skin was very fair.

Zhang Fang had a bad habit: she would set a score line for each exam, and anyone who fell short by even one point would be hit with a ruler. This was a tradition, as Chen Kangjie remembered his older sister Chen Mei, who was also a student of Zhang Fang, had been hit several times. Once, she cried and told Chen Qigang, but in the end, Chen Qigang had to apologize to Zhang Fang. First, Chen Qigang respected teachers, and second, teachers had the right to hit students in those days, and the more they hit, the more responsible they seemed. Chen Kangjie had also been hit by Zhang Fang's ruler in his previous life.

However, the current Chen Kangjie no longer took Zhang Fang's ruler seriously. He continued to think and write his own things during class.

"Chen Kangjie, Chen Kangjie."

Chen Kangjie heard someone calling him, and Ma Wei was gently nudging him with his arm.

Coming back to his senses, Chen Kangjie found Zhang Fang staring at him angrily.

"Teacher Zhang, did you call me? What's the matter?"

"Come up and solve this problem on the blackboard."

Chen Kangjie knew this was a common trick used by teachers. If you couldn't solve the problem, they would use it as an excuse to make you suffer. A few students who were close to the vice-class monitor even showed a smug smile.

Chen Kangjie wasn't really interested in this arithmetic problem, but he had to obediently go to the blackboard and solve it with chalk. Although Zhang Fang had bad habits, she was still a very responsible teacher. Chen Kangjie remembered that in his previous life, when he was about to graduate from primary school, a female classmate miraculously scored zero on an exam and was so scared that she cried when the paper was returned. Thinking about the punishment of one hit for each point lost, anyone would be scared to tears. Seeing the zero, it looked like a duck egg, and it seemed like one hand was missing. However, this time, Zhang Fang didn't hit her but talked to her. Chen Kangjie overheard her saying that she had hit everyone before to help them study better, but now that they were about to graduate, hitting them would be meaningless. If they couldn't study well, they should learn a skill. Chen Kangjie wrote an essay about Zhang Fang in high school, titled "My Teacher."

Chen Kangjie wrote the correct answers to the arithmetic problems in ten seconds without hesitation, dusted off the chalk from his hands, and walked down from the blackboard.

Zhang Fang was stunned by Chen Kangjie's performance and could only continue the class helplessly. The students who wanted to see Chen Kangjie fail were naturally disappointed.

Later, Zhang Fang observed that Chen Kangjie was sometimes biting his pen in thought and sometimes writing and drawing. Seeing that he was learning the math knowledge of the class and not disturbing the other students, she didn't interfere.