Chapter 37: Want to Eat Lots and Lots of Delicious Food

Chapter 37: Chapter 37: Want to Eat Lots and Lots of Delicious Food

"How tall are you now?" Chen Jingle asked her.

Chen Qiyun was in low spirits. "During my last physical exam, I think I was 1.52 meters."

Yeesh.

Chen Jingle thought about how, even though he had been a little shrimp in middle school due to malnutrition, he was still at least 1.55 meters tall.

"You’re fifteen this year, right?"

"Yeah."

"Hmm. Even though society doesn’t have strict height requirements for girls, the post-00s generation grew up with plenty of nutrition and are generally much taller than us post-90s. The same goes for the post-10s. You’re practically half a post-10s yourself. You might not notice it now, but if you’re still this height in ten years, it’s going to be a bit of a problem. You need to reach at least 1.6 meters to pass," Chen Jingle said thoughtfully.

Chen Qiyun completely deflated upon hearing this. She rested her chin in her hands, her eyes losing their focus. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to grow taller, but the problem was she simply couldn’t!

Chen Jingle glanced at her. "From now on, before you eat at my place, you have to jump rope a thousand times."

"Huh? A thousand?" Chen Qiyun jumped up from her chair in disbelief.

Was he trying to kill her? Walking to and from school every day was already exhausting enough!

Chen Jingle was unfazed. "Using 1.52 meters as your baseline, for every centimeter you grow, I’ll reward you with a mystery gift."

Chen Qiyun froze, then quickly asked, "What mystery gift?"

"You’ll find out when the time comes. I guarantee it won’t disappoint you, anyway. So, what do you say?" Chen Jingle raised an eyebrow.

Chen Qiyun frowned, thinking for a long time before gritting her teeth. "Fine, a thousand it is! But if the gifts don’t satisfy me, you know what I’m capable of!"

"Oh? What are you capable of?"

"Hmph, you’ll find out when the time comes!"

He chuckled inwardly.

"Also, you’d better kick that habit of playing on your phone after lights out," Chen Jingle added. "Staying up late suppresses the secretion of growth hormones."

Chen Qiyun twitched her lips and stayed silent.

Chen Jingle smiled faintly. "Just play games in moderation. If you can’t even make it into the top hundred on the national leaderboards, it means you’re simply not cut out to make a living off of gaming. Just be good and treat it as after-school entertainment."

"I know, I know. You’re so naggy!"

"Alright, head back now. I need to get to work."

"..."

After Chen Qiyun left, Chen Jingle fed Tiger Cub, who had been messing around outside all day and had only just returned.

"Eat, eat, eat. That’s all you know how to do! You’re never home. Sooner or later, I’m going to chop your balls off!" Chen Jingle cursed at the cat.

Tiger Cub ignored him completely, burying its head in its food. Once it had eaten and drank its fill, the cat flopped directly onto the floor, exposing its chubby belly, which Chen Jingle immediately seized to aggressively rub. Even when its hindquarters were smacked—SMACK SMACK SMACK—it didn’t lift its head.

Alas, this was the reality of living under someone else’s roof. Who could it blame for not being able to earn its own cat food?

When Chen Jingle took out a brush to groom its fur, the cat couldn’t help but let out a rumble like a running tractor. With a pat on its butt, it even rolled over on its own.

Sheesh. So experienced!

"You little rascal, you sure know how to enjoy life!" Chen Jingle chuckled and scolded affectionately.

After brushing the cat and receiving a system notification, Chen Jingle went to take a shower, as per his usual routine. Then, he returned to his room and turned on his computer.

He decided not to learn any new knowledge tonight. Instead, he was going to try his hand at some past postgraduate entrance exam papers. It wasn’t that he wanted to pursue a master’s degree. With his current slacker mentality, going to grad school would be pure torture! He just wanted to use the exam papers to test his current level of professional knowledge.

Today, he was doing the past papers for the Marxist Principles major. He used the past papers from SCUT—Huagong—as an example. As one of only two 985-tier universities in the province, its exams held a decent amount of weight, even though the program’s academic rating wasn’t particularly high.

The postgraduate entrance exam was different from the college entrance exam. For grad school, you had to choose a university first, study specifically for its curriculum, and then take the exam. When the results came out, just passing the national baseline score wasn’t enough; you had to pass the specific university’s cutoff score to be eligible for the second-round exams.

The postgraduate exam typically consisted of four subjects. For purely humanities majors like this one, math was excluded, meaning there would be two specialized subject exams. Some specific university programs only tested one specialized subject.

For Huagong’s 0305 category, the tested subjects were 101 Politics, 201 English, 624 Marxist Principles, and 825 Comprehensive Specialty. Subjects like 101 and 201 were standard across the board. Assuming one had a solid foundation, scoring over 70 points wasn’t a problem, and anything above 80 was top-student territory.

The first subject, Politics, consisted of sixteen single-choice questions, seventeen multiple-choice questions, and five source-analysis questions. After finishing, Chen Jingle found that he had missed one single-choice and one multiple-choice question. As for the source-analysis section, it was hard to score accurately, but he had hit the main points for most of the questions. At a conservative estimate, he figured he should have scored around 80 points.

"Ah, it seems watching Taozi’s lectures at double speed actually paid off," he mused, even though he had treated the videos like a stand-up comedy routine most of the time.

For the second subject, English, thanks to his recently skyrocketed proficiency, he breezed through it like a fish in water. Barring any surprises, he could get an 80-plus on that, too. And that was even while he was rushing through it for speed.

However, the two specialized subjects posed a bit of a challenge. For example, this year’s 624 Marxist Principles paper had five term-explanation questions worth eight points each for a total of forty; five short-answer questions worth ten points each for fifty; and three essay questions worth twenty points each for sixty.

Even Chen Jingle had to frown slightly when he saw them.

"The unity and diversity of the replacement of social formations... The essence and cognitive function of materialist dialectics..."

He figured most people would feel their scalps tingle with dread the moment they laid eyes on these prompts. And this was considering that Marxist Principles was already a relatively easy major to test into.

By the time Chen Jingle finished the 624 exam paper, he was out of time, and it was time for bed. Conservatively speaking, he would only get around 120 points.

As long as his fourth subject didn’t fall below 100, this total score would still be enough to pass the preliminary exam. Because Huagong’s cutoff score for this major wasn’t high, it was actually easier to get into than the neighboring Huashi. Normal universities were far more competitive for postgrad exams.

However, this was far from Chen Jingle’s ultimate goal. After all, even in ordinary 985 and 211-tier universities, there were plenty of people who scored over 130 or even 140 in specialized subjects. On the other hand, he had the help of the system, making his learning efficiency many times higher than others. This score was a bit embarrassing to present.

"Sure enough, I still haven’t read enough books!"

Chen Jingle wasn’t too surprised by the result; he had expected it. How many days had he even been studying? Even if he frantically crammed books into his head, the daily study sessions allocated to him were limited, so there was a ceiling to what he could absorb. Moreover, he hadn’t been studying specifically for the postgraduate entrance exam in the first place.

Still, he was quite satisfied with this score.

"Facts have proven that there are benefits to reading more."

If this were a week ago, he wouldn’t have dared to imagine getting this kind of score on a postgraduate exam paper. How many years had it been since he left school? He hadn’t had any plans or preparations for grad school whatsoever beforehand.

Content, Chen Jingle went to sleep. Contentment brings happiness. From now on, he just needed to follow the system’s schedule and continue studying diligently.

"When the day comes that I get tired of this lying-flat lifestyle and want to join the rat race to relive everyday campus life, I’ll go take the grad school exam then!" he thought.

Meanwhile.

Chen Qiyun did something rare today: she put down her phone after 10:00 PM to go to bed.

She just wasn’t used to staying up late without her phone. In the darkness, she rested her head on her hands and stared wide-eyed at the ceiling. It took an unknown amount of time before she gradually grew drowsy and drifted off to sleep in a daze.

"Chen Jingle, you’d better not lie to me! I want to eat so many delicious things!" she mumbled in her sleep.