Chapter 194: It Seems Something Has Been Discovered

No matter what, the long journey of catching up on homework continued.

Aside from eating a sumptuous lunch prepared by Aunt Anrou at noon, the room was almost filled the entire time with heated discussions about the problems.

Among them, there even seemed to be some small antics from a few “kids” in their late teens or early twenties.

After Ye Yuan received the delivery call on her phone, another spy-thriller scene unfolded.

With everyone distracting Aunt Anrou’s attention, Evin, Cecilia, and I used the excuse of going out to buy cold drinks.

Cecilia hid the newly purchased summer homework workbook under her skirt and successfully brought it upstairs.

Once we had the summer homework workbook in hand—or rather, the answer key for the later parts—it saved us a lot of effort.

Except for a few places where the writing was a bit vague and required some thought, the rest of the problems were finished quickly.

In fact, toward the end, we even felt the speed wasn’t fast enough.

We had Aunt Yuyu stall Aunt Anrou to prevent any sudden attacks.

Evin, Cecilia, and I worked on the exercise books and diaries.

Sister Luo Qing and Sister Ye Yuan handled the foreign language workbook that didn’t have answers.

The other four each took one math and Chinese workbook, upper and lower volumes, and copied from the answers to finish them.

However, midway through, Sister Qiuru suddenly returned, which really gave us a scare.

Fortunately, she didn’t intend to come in for a surprise inspection.

According to Aunt Yuyu, who was keeping watch at the door, it seemed she was discussing something with Aunt Anrou.

By the time most of the homework was done and I figured it should be enough to pass Father’s check that evening, we started playing Old Maid with everyone.

Only then did Sister Qiuru, who entered the room with Aunt Anrou, check the progress of my summer homework.

This time I wasn’t worried at all.

With answer keys helping on all the problems, there shouldn’t be any flaws to find.

However, I had ultimately underestimated a homeroom teacher’s capabilities.

“Xiaotong, I remember when I left this morning, you had only gotten to about page five, right?”

Sister Qiuru flipped through it back and forth and gave me a scrutinizing look.

Almost everyone in the room subconsciously froze in place.

My mind raced, but I couldn’t think of a suitable excuse.

At that moment, Aunt Anrou came to the rescue.

“Xiaotong mentioned earlier that she had written some. Maybe she found the first few pages a bit difficult and left them blank to do today.”

Aunt Anrou drew a card from beside Aunt Yuyu.

But it seemed she hadn’t drawn a matching number, and she looked a bit dejected.

“So that’s how it is. You’re even allocating your time reasonably. Pretty smart.”

Sister Qiuru nodded.

Everyone, including me, breathed a sigh of relief.

However, the next second, our hands froze again.

“It feels like some of the handwriting looks like it was written by different people.”

Sister Qiuru narrowed her eyes as she examined it, her gaze sweeping across our faces one by one.

Those who were looked at guiltily averted their eyes.

“Maybe it looks a bit different because we were writing in a hurry.”

Aunt Anrou came to the rescue again.

“Sister Qiuru, don’t worry about it so much. Why don’t you join us for a game?”

But when she glanced at me with a slightly reproachful look, I knew Aunt Anrou had probably guessed something.

I couldn’t help feeling a bit touched.

“That’s true.”

Sister Qiuru smiled slightly and gave me a meaningful look.

For some reason, she also seemed to glance at Evin and Cecilia.

“But…”

Her drawn-out words successfully made our hearts, which had just relaxed, tense up again.

Sister Qiuru leaned close to my ear but spoke in a voice everyone could hear.

“The second card from the left in Ye Yuan’s hand is the Old Maid you’re looking for.”

I immediately reacted, reached out, and drew the card from Sister Ye Yuan’s hand.

I completed the victory first.

“Sister Qiuru, no providing outside help! Protest, protest!”

“That’s too much! This is cheating!”

Although the game of Old Maid didn’t last very long, everyone had a lot of fun.

After all, party games like this were all about the lively atmosphere.

The same went for dinner together.

The TV was playing an entertainment variety show.

While listening to Aunt Yuyu and the others talk about funny stories from their university days, it felt warm and wonderful.

This was something my previous life had never experienced.

Or rather, after being reborn, this was already a completely different kind of experience.

It strengthened my determination to protect this kind of life now.

Whether it was matters in the game or my parents being healthy and alive, it made me feel this way even more.

However, the cheerful atmosphere didn’t last too long.

After eating dinner and resting for a bit, Sister Qiuru and the others bid farewell one after another.

Evin and Cecilia also returned to their own homes.

“Aren’t Mom and Dad back yet?”

After helping Aunt Anrou tidy up the table and returning to my room, I glanced at the wall clock.

Since I had plans with Evin and the others to log in tomorrow, and I had no clues about the puzzle yet, I had nothing to do for the moment.

After thinking about it, I took out my homework to check it over, just in case something unexpected came up later.

It would have been better if I hadn’t looked.

As soon as I did, I didn’t know how to complain.

Everything else was fine.

The problems all came from Evin and Cecilia’s side.

Although the answers to the questions matched, the key issue was that they matched way too ridiculously.

For questions where you could know the answer just by counting, Evin had used concepts from sequence operations.

For simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division problems, she had specially set up unknown variables and binary linear equations.

Cecilia’s side might not seem off at a glance, but upon closer inspection, a single paragraph often contained multiple famous quotes or philosophical insights, surpassing even the level of New Concept essays.

That wasn’t the most important part.

The most important was the diary section.

The entire thing was filled with gorgeous rhetoric, elegant prose, and perfectly quoted famous poems and lines.

Yet every single one was describing the experience of eating desserts.

Strawberry milkshake, mango shaved ice, taro sago soup, chocolate pie…

This was my diary.

If I kept writing like this, I was going to get diabetes!

It was obvious to anyone with eyes that someone else had helped with it.

They would probably think it was done by a high school student.

In reality, though, it had come from the hands of two lolis around my own age.

I guessed that Sister Scarlet Rain and the others had subconsciously approached it from an adult’s perspective and hadn’t realized that such answers didn’t quite fit an elementary schooler’s style.

I sighed and used an eraser to completely rub out the application problems Evin had written, rewriting them all over again.

As for Cecilia’s part, I’d probably have to buy a new diary.

While I was modifying it, I must have been too focused.

I didn’t even notice when the door was pushed open.

“You’re still doing homework this late?”

“Ah, Dad.”

Only then did I realize my father was behind me.

I quickly explained,

“Most of it is done. I just found a few mistakes earlier and was checking them.”

Father suddenly said,

“Doesn’t it feel pretty tiring writing all this?”

“It’s… it’s okay, I guess.”

I answered cautiously, sitting up straight.

Father pondered for a moment.

“Actually, Anrou told me that Qiuru praised you for being quite smart and thought there was no point in you doing these problems.”

Dad knows Sister Qiuru too?

I was a bit surprised, but what surprised me more was his next sentence.

“How about this? Here’s a math test paper. Do it and see. If your score is decent, you won’t have to do these homework assignments anymore—including future ones. I’ll talk to your teacher about it.”

“Huh? Really?!”

Father ruffled my hair.

“Would I lie to you?”

With that, he handed me the test paper in his hand and sat down nearby to look through some documents.

With the promise of no more homework, I excitedly buried my head in it right away.

But as I wrote, I started feeling something was off.

These problems were at the junior high level… wait, some were even high school material?

Could it be that Sister Qiuru told Dad about what happened this morning, and Dad wants to verify if I’m a bit different from normal kids?

Full of doubts, I thought about it and decided to scrape together a passing score.

That way, it should satisfy Dad without exposing too much.

Little did I know that this action of mine would plant the seeds for a disastrous outcome later.