Inside a spacious conference room in the office building, the air conditioning was blasting, sealing out the summer heat from outside thoroughly.
Chen Yuanchu sat alone at the long table. Instead of pen and ink, he first lifted the lid of the boxed meal in front of him. The aroma of the food wafted out; it was packed by Principal Zhou specially from the staff cafeteria and was quite sumptuous.
"How is it, Xuanmo? Is the food to your liking?"
"Meow."
"Usually, you ignore me when I call you Xuanmo, but the moment you see food, you answer, is that it?"
"..."
Chen Yuanchu picked up the lid of the lunch box and scooped out half of the rice and dishes for the black cat. Neither master nor servant was picky; compared to the austere vegetarian meals on the mountain, the variety in the cafeteria food was obviously much richer.
Thus, a man and a cat ate their boxed meals, enjoying the cool air indoors, feeling quite content.
By now, the sun was climbing higher. It was near lunchtime. The clamor of the new high school freshmen reporting for duty had slowly faded, and the seniors from the second and third years had also put down their pens, flocking to the cafeteria in twos and threes. Only Chen Yuanchu's transfer procedures were not yet finalized, so he had to stay in the conference room a while longer.
Chen Yuanchu was a particular person. He didn't rush to write, fearing he might stain the test papers while eating. It was only after he finished his meal and wiped the table and lunch box clean with a paper towel that he turned his gaze to the stack of papers neatly piled in the corner of the table.
There were six test papers waiting to be answered, covering six subjects: National Language, Mathematics, Foreign Language, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology.
The black cat poked its head out to glance at them twice, feeling dizzy just looking at the dense handwriting. Anyway, it wasn't the one who had to study, go to school, or seek fame and success. Having eaten and drunk its fill, it simply lay down on the spacious conference table and fell fast asleep.
Facing these six papers, Chen Yuanchu's state wasn't much better than the cat's. His originally relaxed expression gradually became grave.
—This was his first encounter with proper exam papers.
This "exam" was somewhat special. The exam hall was a conference room, the candidate was him alone, there was no invigilator, no surveillance cameras, and his mobile phone hadn't been confiscated either.
According to Teacher Zhang, if he could find the answers using his phone or by flipping through books, then his foundation was considered passable.
The purpose of a placement test was, after all, to gauge the baseline. It wasn't just Teacher Zhang who wanted to probe his background; Chen Yuanchu also wanted to know how many points he could actually get on these papers.
Chen Yuanchu first spread out the National Language paper.
Two modern text reading passages, one classical Chinese reading passage, plus ancient poetry appreciation, dictation of famous lines, language usage, and finally, the essay.
He had assumed National Language would be his strongest subject, but he didn't expect to stumble right at the beginning.
An article discussing artificial intelligence was full of unfamiliar terms like "algorithms" and "neural networks."
Chen Yuanchu stared blankly at the proposition "Whether machines can possess consciousness." After pondering for a good while, he wrote in the blank space: [Form is the vessel of life, Qi is the filling of life, Spirit is the controller of life. A vessel without Qi or Spirit, how can it possess consciousness?]
Fortunately, after the modern text reading, the classical Chinese reading, ancient poetry appreciation, and famous line dictation were all content he was familiar with.
The classical Chinese reading passage was from the Records of the Grand Historian: Biographies of Laozi, Zhuangzi, Shen Buhai, and Han Fei. Chen Yuanchu read it even more smoothly than he read Daoist scriptures.
In the interpretation question regarding the word "Nature" in the phrase "Tao follows Nature," he not only wrote the annotation but also added a side note: [Heaven and Earth have great beauty but do not speak of it], feeling that the question posed by the examiner was somewhat shallow.
The dictation of famous lines went without saying. Although some questions appeared in the form of scenario applications, for him, who had read the Four Books and Five Classics since childhood, using these famous quotes was effortless.
Finally, for the essay, the topic was "On Innovation and Inheritance."
Seeing this topic, Chen Yuanchu felt quite touched. He wrote freely from Zhuangzi's "changing with the times" to Ge Hong's "transmitting but not creating," filling half a page. Looking up and seeing the requirement of no less than eight hundred words, he added a passage from the Taiping Jing. The entire piece used no punctuation marks, separated only by pauses, looking exactly like a classical masterpiece.
It had to be said that although the National Language paper felt unfamiliar to do, overall, it went smoothly. This gave the young Taoist immense confidence, and vaguely, a sentiment of "it's nothing special" began to rise in his heart.
However, this self-satisfaction did not last long.
When he turned to the Mathematics paper, Chen Yuanchu's brows knitted into a knot.
A large number of names he had never seen before and strangely shaped symbols filled the page. Those formulas printed with x, y, f(x), ∑, ∩, ∠, sin, cos... looked like talismans he had never seen before. He recognized the geometric solid as a "square box," but what on earth was an "angle formed by skew lines"?!
For a moment, Chen Yuanchu suspected he wasn't doing Mathematics, but some kind of foreign language paper.
When we ordinary folks buy vegetables, go shopping, or settle accounts, where would we ever use these things?
Perhaps he could use copper coins to cast a divination to find an answer that looked plausible among the four options from the hexagram. But after all, this was just a placement test; if he didn't know it, he didn't know it. Besides, the multiple-choice questions had limited points, so guessing a few right would be a drop in the bucket.
It could be said that such a set of questions far exceeded the young Taoist's cognition of the category of Mathematics. He racked his brains but could only recall his master's teaching of "seeking the circle within the square, and the square within the circle."
Finally, he simply drew circles behind all the questions, varying in size, looking like the Yao lines in a hexagram...
Mathematics was quickly "finished."
Chen Yuanchu then spread out the Foreign Language paper.
But a moment later, he silently put the Foreign Language paper aside.
Finally, it was the Integrated Science paper.
The terms like "acceleration," "kinetic energy," and "electromagnetism" in the Physics paper—he searched through the Artificers' Record in his mind but could find no corresponding explanation.
The various element symbols and reaction formulas in the Chemistry paper looked like ore diagrams for alchemy. He knew how to refine pills, but what on earth was this chemical experiment?