Xia Siqiao had actually surpassed Zhao Zhihuan.
And he had done it by such a commanding margin. Even compared with He Pei, he was hardly inferior.
There had previously been some rumors on the forum claiming that Xia Siqiao was pretending to be weak while secretly hiding his abilities, but most of them had been jokes and wild gossip. The majority of students had simply tossed out the idea for fun and laughed it off. No one had genuinely believed Xia Siqiao could make such a comeback. After all, his previous grades had been disastrously bad, and that was no exaggeration.
After the first brief shock, everyone began whispering among themselves.
"Do you think there's a chance he bought the test questions in advance and found an expert to solve them, just like with that physics competition problem?"
"Hard to say. Our exam papers are controlled really strictly. They shouldn't have leaked, right? Could he actually have been pretending to be a bad student? Or maybe he's some once-in-a-century genius?"
"A genius? Why don't you just say a magical ring fell out of the sky and landed in front of him, and then that night an old master appeared in his dream asking to take him as a disciple? With how difficult our monthly exam is, even a genius would struggle to pass after studying for only one month."
"This is way too mysterious. I'm completely lost. What is actually going on?"
Zhao Zhihuan had originally been sitting confidently and calmly in the Class 1 classroom. But when he heard the results, he slammed both hands on the desk and stared with bloodshot eyes at the student who had run over to tell him. "Impossible. How could he possibly score higher than me?"
His shout drew plenty of sideways glances.
Zhao Zhihuan looked around, shoved his desk aside, and ran out. By the time he stood weak-kneed in front of the ranking list, the final trace of hope in him was abruptly drained away.
His originally flushed face went completely pale. Hearing the whispers around him–"bought the answers," "cheated," "abnormal"–his nerves suddenly tightened as though he had grabbed the final lifeline available to him.
Right. Xia Siqiao must have cheated.
He turned and rushed toward the teachers' office.
Xia Siqiao, meanwhile, who had once again become the center of everyone's attention, had pulled his school uniform over his head and was lying listlessly across his desk in a foul mood.
His delicate face drooped, and gloomy frustration gathered heavily between his brows.
He had actually scored lower than He Pei. He was deeply unwilling to accept it.
He knew He Pei had been written as an alpha who was flawless in every possible respect, but Xia Siqiao himself had pursued perfection since childhood. He had never experienced what it felt like to rank beneath someone else.