Five years ago. Zhou Lei's bedroom.
Zhou Lei woke up, his bed creaking as he squirmed on the mattress.
He rubbed his eyes, glancing at the light passing through the small window on the wall.
"Hmm, it's already too bright. I should get ready."
He stepped off the small bed, his bare feet touching the floor carpeted with paper.
"Ah, I forgot..." Zhou Lei recalled the night before. He crammed all of the homework in one hour and fell asleep as soon as he finished them. As such, all of the papers were brushed away by the fan on his bedside.
He scratched his hair. "What a bother."
Kneeling down on the floor, he started to pick up each and every piece of paper on the floor and stacking them on his arms.
While doing so, a smell drifted beneath the closed door of his room. "Breakfast!"
With the sweet smell of rice and eggs reaching his nose, he hurried to complete the current task at hand.
"Lei, wake up!" A stern voice resounded from right outside the little room.
"I'm doing something -- I'll finish it quickly!"
With his father pressuring him to hasten his current pace, he finished picking up the piles of paper on the floor. He stood up and placed them down on a wooden desk by his bed, rushing to get out of the door.
Soon enough, he was ready to head to the school he was attending.
Zhou Lei walked out of the door of his home, forgetting something crucial...
Inside the Zhou house, in Zhou Lei's bedroom, on a desk, there lay a pile of papers filled to the brim with writing. The breeze did nothing to topple the stack, standing firm on the wooden top of the desk.
Finally, Zhou Lei arrived at his middle school. He saw the huge letters embedded on the hanging roof leading to the door: District 5 District 5 Middle School.
Yes, the name of the school was officially just District 5 Middle School, but the ones who built the place made a mistake and accidentally doubled it.
The school tried to remove one of the "District 5"s off the hanging roof, but there was a massive outrage from the alumni and the current students.
In the end, they gave up on removing the double, so it had become commonplace for everyone in District 5 to call this middle school the District 5 District 5 Middle School.
Zhou Lei walked along, softly laughing at the name again. It was the umpteenth time he had seen this name, yet it never failed to make his mood brighter.
Eventually, he reached his classroom and entered it. He was placed at Section 1, along with his two fellow geniuses, Huang Fulin and Jiang Zi Yun.
As a first-year middle schooler, Zhou Lei was one of the top performers of his year. He was the best at many subjects, including Mathematics and English.
He had two main rivals at the top spot.
One was Huang Fulin, a bespectacled and arrogant man. He always gloated on Zhou Lei whenever he got a higher score. Of course, in the long run, Zhou Lei always won, but Huang Fulin got very close in a few occasions.
The other was Jiang Zi Yun, the school belle. Known for her cold personality, she treated everyone equally — in the worst way possible. She ignored you or she spoke harshly to you, it was either of the two. The former was the more favorable result...
