The Chinese Class Murder Mystery

The day before the start of her junior year, the plane Jiang Song was on made an emergency landing in City G. The entire city was under lockdown, and no one was allowed in or out.

Trapped in City G and unable to attend S University, Jiang Song could only wait for news. After waiting for half a month, word finally came, but it wasn’t news that the lockdown had been lifted or that students could return to campus. It was a notice allowing her to attend another university as a visiting student.

Her advisor told her that, given the special circumstances, S University and the well-known Z University in City G had reached an agreement to make an exception and let Jiang Song attend classes at Z University as a visiting student.

Paying one tuition fee to experience two different university lives sounded great to Jiang Song, so she immediately grabbed her suitcase and headed to Z University.

On her first day on campus, the president of Z University personally welcomed her and repeatedly warned her, “Don’t fail any classes. Don’t fail any classes.”

When finals came around, Jiang Song had studied for ages, only to discover that the exam had just one requirement: sleep.

Though she didn’t understand what that meant, Jiang Song decided to follow local customs. But as soon as she started drifting off, the mechanical voice of the exam System rang out in her mind.

[Candidate 3966, you did not enter the exam System within the allotted time. Forty-one points have been deducted from your test score.]

Jiang Song, who felt guilty about sleeping in an exam hall and had tossed and turned until she missed the start: “I’d like to report that the exam begins at 9:00. It’s 8:60 now, so I can’t be considered late.”

The exam System’s indicator light flashed again and again, as if it were constipated, but it deducted the points anyway.

[Welcome, candidates, to the live-action murder mystery game. The exam will last two hours, with a maximum score of 100. Anyone who fails to reach 60 points by the deadline will be considered to have failed and will be permanently erased.]

Jiang Song, who now had only 59 points left: “!!?”

As the exam went on, Jiang Song suddenly realized that the scenarios seemed familiar: a seven-colored flower that could grant wishes, a lottery ticket with a K written on it and then erased, a makeshift fishing hook made from a sewing needle, antelopes lining up to fly across a cliff...

[Reading Guide]

1. No romance.

2. Just as the title suggests, the scenarios are based on content from elementary, middle, and high school Chinese textbooks published by the People’s Education Press.

3. The original text is not altered. The story unfolds around the textbook passages from a third-person perspective, with some original additions.

[To avoid any future disputes, this blurb was written on April 23, 2023, and a screenshot has been saved as proof.]

Theme: Even when fierce winds rise, never give up on life.