Chapter 24: Competition Class

After lunch, seeing that it was still early, Lin Yumo and Song Xingran took a couple of laps around the track to walk off their meal.

The autumn sun painted the field in honey tones as they strolled over fallen leaves.

Her white sneakers crushed the dry ginkgo leaves, making a faint crisp sound—like the quick, uneven rhythm of her heart at that moment.

When dusk crept across the track, she glanced at her watch.
“I’ve got to head to competition class.”

“Good luck, Little Jasmine!” Song Xingran made a heart with her fingers, her ponytail swinging in lively arcs in the evening breeze.

The sunset’s afterglow slanted through the windows into the classroom. The moment Lin Yumo pushed open the door to the competition class, more than twenty pairs of eyes turned toward her in unison.

Her fingers tightened slightly on her backpack strap.
“Lin Yumo?”

Mr. Han looked up from his lesson plan, the lenses of his glasses catching the warm orange light of the setting sun.

“Yes,” she answered softly, her voice sounding unusually clear in the quiet room.

Mr. Han pointed to an empty seat inside the classroom, where sunlight was falling at an angle.

Chi Ling sat beside it, his uniform sleeves rolled to his forearms, the silver watch on his wrist catching a cool glint.

“Sit next to Chi Ling.”

Following the direction of the teacher’s finger, Lin Yumo met Chi Ling’s gaze for an instant.

In that moment, she felt her breath falter for half a beat.

The boy’s cool, distant features were softened by a layer of golden warmth from the sunset, yet the aloofness in his demeanor remained untouched.

“Alright, sir,” she heard herself reply in an even tone.

The few short steps to her seat felt like walking across the entire evening.

The tiled floor reflected her faintly trembling shadow, which gradually drew closer to Chi Ling’s outline.

As she sat down beside him, she caught a trace of the fresh, clean scent of soap on him.

From her bag, Lin Yumo took out the competition prep book she’d flipped through that morning, her fingertips brushing lightly along the edges of the pages.

The soft rustle of turning paper couldn’t mask the distinct sound of breathing beside her—steady, unhurried, carrying the quiet rhythm unique to a teenage boy.

She subtly adjusted her own breathing, willing her heartbeat to calm.

On the desk between them, the light cast two intersecting shadows. Lin Yumo noticed Chi Ling leaning slightly forward, his long fingers curled around a pen, the joints distinct, the skin glowing faintly under the sunset.

Without drawing attention, she shifted her notebook slightly away, careful not to let her arm brush his.

Gradually, the room filled with the quiet scratch of pen on paper, and Lin Yumo finally relaxed, focusing on her textbook.

As more students arrived, the cicadas outside became faintly audible.

Mr. Han adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses, the lenses catching the daylight from the window.

“Let’s begin.”

Using red chalk, he began drawing the derivation diagram for L’Hôpital’s Rule on the blackboard, chalk dust sprinkling down onto the navy shoulders of his suit.

Lin Yumo opened her brand-new competition prep book. Her finger traced the bold heading for Lagrange’s Mean Value Theorem, the fresh ink mingling with the osmanthus fragrance drifting in from outside to create a subtle, layered scent in the air.

A few scattered page flips sounded in the room. In the front row, a boy shaded auxiliary lines over and over on his scratch paper, eraser crumbs falling like snowflakes onto his blue school uniform.

“Pay attention to the boundary conditions for this parameter domain.”

Mr. Han suddenly turned, tapping the top right corner of the function graph with his chalk.

“Many students make the mistake of overlooking the sign change in the second derivative here.”

Lin Yumo instinctively straightened her back, her gaze following the pointer in his hand.

She noticed the girl beside her had highlighted three different colored sections in her notes, while her own textbook’s margins held only a small question mark next to the example problem.

As the end-of-class bell ticked closer, Mr. Han announced,
“Next, a quick in-class test.”

From his briefcase, he pulled out a stack of papers.
“Three questions, sixty minutes.”

His gaze swept over the room.
“I want to see your thought process—not memorized tricks.”

Lin Yumo took the test paper and gave it a quick scan.

Three problems:
The first—a function problem with nested parameters.
The second—an inequality with a complex fractional structure.
The third—an analytic geometry problem involving a family of parabolas.

“Time limit: one hour. Begin.”
Mr. Han’s wristwatch cast an oval shadow across the podium.

Taking a deep breath, Lin Yumo circled the domain of the first function problem. But when she started to write the first step, she paused—
A hidden maximum-minimum trap in the problem statement.

She tapped her pen lightly on the domain, her mind immediately producing several possible solution paths.

Pressing her lips together, she chose the safest approach: recursion. Her pen moved smoothly across the paper.

Just as she began, a sound came from the back row—the clack of a pen against a desk. A boy was tugging at his hair in frustration, his test paper creased into fine wrinkles.

The second problem’s inequality was dizzyingly complex.

Biting her pen cap, she thought for a moment and suddenly recalled a university textbook she had leafed through in the library.

Using the convexity property from that textbook, she tried to expand the inequality—but her process stalled on the third step.

Her scratch paper was soon crisscrossed with erasures, like a tangled spider web.

The most troublesome was the third problem, the analytic geometry one. The parabolas overlapped and intersected in the coordinate plane, leaving her mind a muddle.

She drew and erased, erased and drew, finally managing only to derive an incomplete trajectory equation.

Sighing, she wrote down every idea she could think of as clearly as possible on the answer sheet, her handwriting neater than usual.

When the signal to collect papers sounded, groans erupted across the room.

“Who the heck could solve that inequality?” a boy in the front row complained, crumpling his scratch paper into a ball.

Folding her own scratch paper into a square, Lin Yumo realized she had only fully solved the function problem. The inequality she had expanded using Taylor series, but wasn’t sure about, and the analytic geometry problem had been cut short at the trajectory equation.

Noises from other classes drifted in from the hallway. She stared at the corner of her blank scratch paper, recalling what Teacher Zhang had said—“The competition class is another battlefield.”

Mr. Han stacked the collected test papers into a perfect square, the pages whispering softly against each other.

“Class is over for today. You can begin self-study.” His leather shoes clicked against the floor, fading away at the hallway’s corner.

The classroom gradually grew quiet again, filled only with the rustle of turning pages and the faint scratch of pens.

Lin Yumo took out all her subject workbooks from her bag, laying them out neatly on the desk.

She habitually tackled liberal arts assignments first. The memorization work was already second nature to her, and her slender fingers held her fountain pen as she swiftly wrote out the standard answers.

These problems were far too easy for her.

Her habit of doing other assignments during English class saved her a lot of time. With ten minutes between classes, she could finish her English homework, which now sat quietly at the bottom of her pile.

After finishing the last biology problem, she reached into the depths of her bag for an extra physics test paper.

The bluish-white light of the fluorescent lamp washed over the page. The final big question on electromagnetic induction—its dense conditions made her frown.

On the scratch paper, she repeatedly sketched force diagrams, erasing so often that tiny piles of eraser shavings gathered like little snowdrifts.

When stuck, she absentmindedly tapped the end of her pen against her cheek, leaving faint marks on her pale skin.

Her lashes cast trembling shadows beneath her eyes. As drowsiness crept in, she stifled a small yawn, eyes watering slightly, her fingers playing with her neatly trimmed nails.

In the end, she resigned herself to circling the problem number in bright red, deciding to ask the teacher about it tomorrow in the office.

Just as she pulled out a chemistry reference book, she remained completely unaware that every move she made had been quietly observed by the student beside her.

Chi Ling had been focused on working through a complex differential equation, his long fingers holding his pen as he wrote out a neat, logical derivation.

Then, a faint, fresh scent of jasmine drifted to his nose, making his pen pause for a moment.

Instinctively turning his head, he caught sight of Lin Yumo rubbing her eyes in fatigue.

The girl’s long lashes cast delicate shadows under the light, like a lazy cat—irresistibly endearing.

The corners of his lips curved faintly before he quickly smoothed them away, returning all his focus to the problem in front of him.

When the dismissal bell rang abruptly, the classroom burst into the clatter of moving desks and chairs. She packed her books slowly; by the time she finished, Chi Ling had already left. She stepped outside into the bright glow of the streetlamps and headed home.