Chapter 7: Chapter 3: Caged Bird and Gear Diagram (Part 2)
He slowly set down his pen. He didn’t try to hide his work, but instead looked up, his face adopting the perfect, bewildered expression of ’I’m being good, but I have no idea what’s happening.’
Standing before him was his homeroom teacher, Teacher Wang.
Teacher Wang was young, having graduated from teacher’s college just a couple of years ago. Her hair was tied in a ponytail, and fine beads of sweat had formed on the tip of her nose.
At this moment, her expression was grim.
She’d had her eye on Chen Zhuo for a while now.
This child was an outlier in her class.
He wasn’t disruptive, he didn’t talk, he never raised his hand, and he didn’t wet his pants.
He was too quiet, so quiet he was like part of the air.
Every time she lectured, the other children’s eyes were either eager or wandering. Only Chen Zhuo was different. Although he sat perfectly upright, his eyes always held a certain... sense of detachment.
It was as if an adult had been forced to sit in a room full of children.
A moment ago, she had seen Chen Zhuo with his head lowered. That look of intense concentration was definitely not for his textbook.
"Chen Zhuo."
Teacher Wang kept her voice low, but it was tinged with the sternness of someone who felt they had been slighted.
"What are you doing?"
Instantly, forty-five heads in the classroom swiveled toward him like sunflowers.
The little chubby boy in the front row, who had been picking his nose, widened his eyes, relishing the unfolding drama.
Chen Zhuo stood up.
His height of 1.2 meters forced him to crane his neck to look up at Teacher Wang.
"I was... drawing," Chen Zhuo answered honestly.
It was the truth, and also the safest excuse. A child caught doodling in class would, at worst, get a mild scolding.
"Drawing?"
Teacher Wang reached out. Her fingers, dry from years of holding chalk, pinched the sheet of scratch paper tucked under Chen Zhuo’s textbook.
"Hand it over."
Chen Zhuo didn’t resist and let go.
The sheet of mimeograph paper was pulled out, exposed in the afternoon sunlight.
Teacher Wang had expected to see doodles of Ultraman, Black Cat Detective, or just some random scribbles.
She had even prepared a little speech, something along the lines of, "This is quite good, but there’s a time and a place for it."
But when her gaze fell on the paper, she froze.
That wasn’t a drawing.
Or rather, it wasn’t something she thought a first-grader was capable of drawing.
There was no color on the paper, only a dense network of lines.
Perfect concentric circles drawn with a compass, straight tangents drawn with a ruler, and jagged, gear-like structures that, while crudely drawn, clearly followed some kind of pattern.
Next to the shapes were some strange symbols and numbers.
Although there were no written explanations, the stark, cold beauty unique to industrial schematics hit her like a wave.
It was like finding a manuscript by da Vinci mixed in with a pile of children’s stick-figure drawings.
Teacher Wang taught Language Arts; she didn’t understand what she was looking at.
But she could recognize its sense of order.
The rigorous, precise order it displayed—an order completely alien to a seven-year-old child.
"Did... you draw this?"
Teacher Wang’s voice was a little unsteady. She instinctively glanced at Chen Zhuo’s hand, which was still smudged with graphite.
"Yeah."
Chen Zhuo nodded.
"I got tired of listening to the lesson, so I just drew for fun."
’Fun?’
Teacher Wang stared at the complex structure of concentric circles and felt her perception of reality being challenged.
"What is this?"
She pointed to the gear in the middle that looked like a sun.
"A wheel."
Chen Zhuo blinked, trying his best to make his vocabulary seem limited.
"A wheel from my dad’s factory."
"Did you copy it from something?"
"No, I drew it from memory."
The classroom was dead silent.
Although the students couldn’t understand what they were talking about, they could sense that Teacher Wang’s expression was very strange.
Not angry, not happy, but... the expression of someone who’d just seen a ghost.
Teacher Wang took a deep breath.
She realized this matter was beyond her ability to handle.
If it were just a drawing, she could confiscate it.
If he were just daydreaming, she could make him stand in the corner.
But this... this display of almost preternatural talent... she couldn’t handle it rashly.
She was a responsible teacher, and she had a vague feeling that she might have stumbled upon an extraordinary child.
"Chen Zhuo, pack your schoolbag."
Teacher Wang carefully tucked the scratch paper into her lesson plan. Her tone was no longer critical, but had become incredibly complex.
"Come with me to my office. And... do you know the phone number for your dad’s work?"
Chen Zhuo’s heart sank.
’Call the parents.’
This was the instinctive, physiological reaction of every student in China—transmigrator or not—upon hearing those three words.
But he quickly calmed down.
’Fine.’
’Since I can’t hide it anymore, I might as well lay my cards on the table.’
’I can’t stand another day of this inefficient teaching.’
’If I can use this to get a little freedom, or even skip a grade, it’ll be worth it—even if Dad gives me a spanking.’
Chen Zhuo silently packed his bag and, under the awed and sympathetic gazes of his classmates, followed Teacher Wang out of the classroom.
In the hallway, the cicadas were still chirping.
But to Chen Zhuo’s ears, the sound no longer seemed so grating.
「...」
「Three o’clock in the afternoon. The principal’s office.」
The principal’s office at Yu Hong Primary School wasn’t large. A banner on the wall read, "Study hard and make progress every day," and stacks of new textbooks were piled in a corner.
An old-fashioned ceiling fan wobbled overhead, letting out a grating squeal.
Chen Zhuo sat on the old leather sofa meant for guests, his feet not reaching the floor, swinging back and forth in the air.
Across from him sat three people.
His homeroom teacher, Teacher Wang; the dean of instruction, Director Zhang; and the white-haired old principal.
On the table lay that piece of scratch paper.
"Old Chen’s boy?"
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