The Dragon Gate Countercurrent Chronicles

Zhang Lijun, a senior-year homeroom teacher, discovers that top student Chen Mo has been forging sick-leave notes for three months. He tracks him to an illegal internet cafe in the urban village and finds the math prodigy hunched over an esports chair, earning money by piloting accounts to support his family. Chen’s city-level “Merit Student” certificate, worn through from being carried around; the calculus notes hidden inside his keyboard switches; and chat records on his game account with a Chinese Academy of Sciences academic reveal a brutal truth: Chen’s father was left paralyzed after falling from a building while trying to collect unpaid wages, and his mother barely makes ends meet by sweeping the streets for twelve hours before dawn. Zhang risks taking his student to try out for an esports youth training camp, but the education bureau suspends him for “promoting the idea that studying is useless.” He is also reported for giving unauthorized tutoring and faces a lawsuit.

This rebellious teacher mortgages his home to set up an “experimental class,” weaving MOBA tactics into math lessons: using Han Xin’s backdoor push routes to teach analytic geometry, Diaochan’s dashes to solve difficult physics problems on magnetic fields, and even combining I Ching trigrams to reassemble code for a hackathon. When professors from Tsinghua and Peking University try to lure his students with special admissions offers, Zhang leads them to an abandoned classroom, where they use chalk dust to build a “Kongming lock” and livestream their solution to a key step in the Riemann hypothesis. Millions of viewers witness a mathematical miracle assembled from classroom desks.