Shi He exhaled and began filling in the answers.
One question.
Two questions.
Three questions.
The fourth fill-in-the-blank for a poem:
“If substance surpasses style, it becomes crude, —————.”
Shi He lifted his pen and began to write: “If style...”
The tip of the pen trembled, leaving a black ink blot on the answer sheet.
“If style...”
“If style…what?”
What comes after style?
What comes after style!
The tip of the pen shook more violently, and Shi He’s eyes gradually widened.
He must have forgotten this question because of his nerves.
This kind of situation was common in exams. It’s perfectly normal to momentarily forget a small piece of knowledge.
He just needed to skip it and move on to the next question. After finishing the later ones, he could come back and remember it.
Even if he couldn’t remember, losing one point wouldn’t matter.
It’s fine. It’s no big deal.
Shi He kept reassuring himself, not stressing over it, skipping this question and moving on.
The next question:
“————, and thus regain one’s natural state.”
The pen tip shook even more violently, and now his whole body trembled.
Sweat seeped out of Shi He’s forehead, tiny droplets sliding past his wide, terrified eyes. Like tears, they flowed from his eyes, dripping steadily onto the test paper.
Shi He had a habit when answering questions.
Before attempting each major question, he would first skim through the entire section to get a sense of it.
For something like filling in the blanks for ancient poetry, which only had five questions, just a glance was enough for all the answers to surface in his mind.
That was just two minutes ago.
He stiffly turned his head toward Ning Su.
Ning Su was also turning to look at him.
The young man had a straight, slender back. Dressed in a school uniform shirt, he looked like a clean-cut high school student. His sleeves were neatly rolled up just below his elbows, revealing a thin, pale wrist, brimming with youthful energy.
His light-colored lips moved slightly, as if he was about to say something, but stopped. His clear peach blossom eyes quietly gazed at him with a hint of pity.
It was as if he had seen through everything.
“What are you two doing? Focus on your own test, not on others!” the invigilator shouted from not far away.
Shi He instinctively turned towards the voice to look at the invigilator.
“Don’t look!” Ning Su warned.
Panicking, Shi He immediately remembered—players wouldn’t be discovered as having memory loss as long as they avoided looking into the teacher’s strange eyes. But once they made eye contact…
His heart pounded, and he quickly lowered his head.
Whether it was due to his anxiety or hypersensitivity, he felt that the teacher’s attitude toward him had changed. Previously, the teacher had spoken to him softly and gently, but now it was all harsh reprimands.
In his panic, he skipped the poetry fill-in-the-blank section and moved on to the language usage questions.
A desperate, terrified whimper escaped from his mouth.
The densely packed words on the third page of the Chinese exam appeared to shift in and out of focus, growing larger and smaller, blurring in and out.
When he finally saw them clearly again, he realized he didn’t recognize any of the words on the entire page.
He didn’t recognize a single one.
His body trembled uncontrollably. He wasn’t sure if the sound coming from his throat was heavy breathing or sobbing, but it poured out in sync with his violent shaking.
He couldn’t tell whether the liquid dripping from his chin onto the test paper was sweat or tears.
It fell onto the test paper, drop by drop.
Just like Wang Zhiqiu back then.
Players who have experienced one horror world after another naturally have stronger mental resilience than ordinary third-year high school students.
For a third-year high school student, suddenly losing their memory only means failing the college entrance exam. For the players, it means death—facing death head-on.
Shi He had participated in many college entrance exams.
He never thought that he wouldn’t be able to take the exam for himself.
The college entrance exam that should have belonged to him at eighteen, in the real world, he didn’t have.
And in the endless game dungeon, the college entrance exam that decides life and death, he couldn’t take that either.
Ning Su, Ning Changfeng, and the Gu Witch silently watched him.
Before the invigilators noticed, they averted their gaze and focused on their test papers.
But even so, the invigilators still noticed something unusual about Shi He. Two of them came over.
They looked at Shi He’s test paper.
When Shi He did the multiple-choice questions, he first marked the correct answers on the test paper and then filled them all in on the answer sheet.
The choices marked on the test paper were almost all correct, perfectly matching the level of the top student in the grade.
At that moment, he was engrossed in writing his essay.
Everything seemed fine.
The invigilators, after taking a couple of glances, thoughtfully left, not disturbing the top student in the grade during his exam.
What they didn’t know as they left was how the top student was writing his essay.
He was writing as if he were drawing.
He could no longer recognize any of the characters.
But he still knew he was taking an exam and had to write an essay.
So, he found the page with the most characters and copied those characters that he didn’t recognize or understand into the essay box.
Sometimes he couldn’t tell if something was a single character or multiple characters, and he would mistakenly place two or more characters in one box.
“Ring—”
The long exam had finally ended.
He handed in the worst test paper of his life.
As soon as the invigilator left, the three players in Exam Room 1 immediately dragged the dazed Shi He to the corner of the hallway.
Ning Changfeng: “Shi He, did you lose your memory? What’s going on with you right now?”
The dazed and weakened Shi He suddenly pushed Ning Changfeng away. “Why should I tell you? Why?!”
“You all knew we couldn’t do too well on the exam, but you didn’t tell me! You all planned to avoid getting in the top ten and just watch me make a fool of myself!”
Ning Su: “You lost your memory while doing the classical poetry fill-in-the-blank section.”
Just like Wang Zhiqiu.
Ning Su: “Your memory loss was rapid, and it affected all your knowledge-based memories.”
It was very similar to Wang Zhiqiu, but different from Shi Tianzhu and Zhou Xiang.
With just two sentences, Ning Su summed up Shi He’s condition. Shi He, who had been trying to withhold information in exchange for something, opened his mouth, but was left speechless.
Ning Changfeng frowned. “You lost all of it at once? That doesn’t match the pattern we’ve observed.”
Zhou Xiang did lose his knowledge-based memories first, but before those were completely gone, he started losing other memories as well.
Moreover, Zhou Xiang’s loss of knowledge-based memories lasted about ten hours; it took him ten hours to lose all of them.
As for Shi Tianzhu, it took even longer—about three days.
They suspected this had something to do with the players’ physical condition, or, more bluntly, their level.
Shi He, having made it to the finals of the individual competition, was stronger than Zhou Xiang. The order of strength among the three should be Zhou Xiang < Shi He < Shi Tianzhu.
Why did Shi He lose all of his knowledge-based memories so quickly? His time should have been longer than Zhou Xiang’s.
Gu Witch: “In that case, there are two possibilities.”
“One, losing memory in the exam room is different from losing memory elsewhere.”
“Two, memory loss for top students is different from that for poor students.”
Ning Su: “Maybe we should consider both together. Have you noticed that all the people who lost their memory in the exam room are top students?”
“The top students went to the Reflection Hall to receive their prize the day before the exam, and then lost their memory in the exam room the next day.”
Ning Changfeng: “That’s right. But why? Why are the situations different?”
He looked at Ning Su. “Do you have any guesses?”
Ning Su was staring at the corner on the other side of the hallway.
There was a boy walking toward the examination hall.
He was wearing the same school uniform as them, and when he raised his hand to check the time, he revealed a watch on his wrist that was clearly expensive at a glance.
There wasn’t much expression on his face, but from his eyes, one could tell he was in a pretty good mood. However, there was an indescribable oddness in his gaze.
Ning Su retracted his gaze. “We’ll have to wait for the exam results to come out to know.”
Ning Changfeng said, “Then let’s go check out Shi Tianzhu’s exam room first.”
maybe mc can try sending small zombie into that room
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