Before the Gaokao Results: Redeeming an Admission Letter to the National University of Defense Technology

On the eve of the college entrance exam results, Ji Cunxi, a poor student living under someone else’s roof, awakened the Daily Choice System. Faced with a million-yuan scholarship from Tsinghua or Peking University, he chose the National University of Defense Technology without hesitation. His reward was just ten thousand yuan and a copy of Fundamentals of Interior Ballistics.

From being branded a “cheating top scorer” by the entire internet to retaking the exam in front of education officials and proving himself with a perfect score, from tearing into greedy relatives who had embezzled his family’s compensation money to sweeping all three military training events and crushing the sons of military families, Ji Cunxi repeatedly shut his doubters up with sheer ability. After entering the National University of Defense Technology, he led his research team in overcoming the accuracy limitations of current service rifles, developed a coating process that brought their night-vision devices up to imported standards, and swept all three categories at the national military-industry innovation competition, winning top prizes.

But this was only the beginning. During an internship at Institute 703, he was suppressed by an academician. In the materials group on the margins, he uncovered the unfinished GH4169 superalloy formula his father had left behind thirty years ago. The final set of data on optimizing the boron-zirconium ratio matched the System’s proposal exactly. From small arms to aircraft engines, from single-crystal blades to aerospace combined-cycle propulsion, from crewed missions to Mars to the frontiers of the solar system, the young man once told by his homeroom teacher that he “wouldn’t even get into a vocational college” is now walking the path his father never finished.

“Some roads are hard to travel, but they’re worth it.”