Surviving Tribulation in Senior Year

Senior Year: Surviving Tribulation (also known as: No Cultivation, Just Building a Door: The Senior-Year Cultivation Chronicle | Promotional Subtitle: My Deskmate Is a Demonic Cultivator)

My deskmate, Zhang Wei, said, "Lin Xun, let's punch a hole in the Heavenly Dao."

I said, "Are you crazy? The college entrance exam is in 286 days."

He said, "It's fine. My expiration date is that day too." I looked over and saw the bottle of Red Bull on his desk. Sure enough, it expired on the day of the exam.

Zhang Wei slept through class, phoned in his homework, and had hovered around the passing mark on exams for years. Our homeroom teacher said he was a hopeless case. But at the first monthly diagnostic exam, he finished the hardest problem in three minutes and got a perfect score in math. One night, I found him in an abandoned classroom: a solitary lamp, mountains of scratch paper, and a boy pushing himself past his limits. He had taken apart ten years of past exam papers and invented his own loophole-based study method.

"The orthodox path is a maze. My demonic path is to knock down the walls."

"And after you knock them down?"

"...Build a new door."

I tried to think outside the box, but went off the rails and got three basic questions wrong in a row. Lao Wang warned me, "If you build a house before laying the foundation, the faster you build, the sooner it collapses."

286 days. Every last ounce of strength spent, to see one grand tribulation through to the end.

A demonic cultivator desk mate who slacked off but never gave up; a strict yet gentle homeroom teacher; the merciless Daoist prodigy who traded his life for exam points; the silent classmate who couldn't withstand the pressure and left. Some traded grades for survival, some traded sleep for a higher ranking, and some sat up late, building a door of their own on scratch paper, stroke by stroke.

No golden finger. Just two ordinary boys, unwilling to stay trapped in a maze, desperately searching for a third path. The doors they build are crooked and wonky. They may collapse, they may crack. But building a door itself is the only way to fight back against the walls.

The jokes are a breather. The silence is what senior year is really like.