The Shifting Exam Paper and a Dark Revelation

He sat bolt upright in bed, gasping.

In the dim old dormitory, the gentle-faced teenager suddenly sat upright from his sleep.

His face was full of confusion, with a trace of fear in his eyes. He sat on the bed, not moving for a long time.

Was it a dream? Or had he met the pig-headed man again?

Huang Xiu tried hard to recall everything from last night. He had played on his phone until he felt sleepy, then drifted off.

All his memories were so Coherent that there was no break.

“Scared me to death. It was just a dream.”

Right. If there really was a pig-headed man that big, wouldn’t the Earth have been swallowed in one bite?

He reached up to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then checked the time on his phone. Huang Xiu quickly climbed out of bed.

The preliminary exam was set for 8:30, but that didn’t mean he had plenty of time.

It was already 7:30. Washing up and eating would take time.

He woke the other lazybones in the dorm, then washed up, grabbed his ID, and headed to the cafeteria.

April weather was like a child’s face. Yesterday had been sunny, but today the air was heavy with low pressure, oppressive.

After breakfast, walking along the small path to the exam hall, students occasionally brushed past him.

The exam hall was in the first-year classrooms. Yesterday, the second and third years had gone for physical exams, so the first years had used the time to clear the books from the classrooms and set up the exam rooms.

Though everyone said they held no hope of passing the entrance exam, when the test actually came, no one skipped it.

That was the unique modesty of Daxia people, which Huang Xiu usually didn’t believe.

After all, those who said they hadn’t studied before an exam often scored better than anyone else.

At 8:15, they officially entered the hall.

After a search, Huang Xiu lined up and entered the exam room. His seat was number 34.

The seating seemed to be arranged by grades. Scanning the room, Huang Xiu could see plenty of poor students with similar academic levels.

Just as Baldy Liu had said, the proctor was not a teacher from his school, or at least Huang Xiu didn’t recognize him.

It was a handsome young man in a suit and glasses, so young he looked like a recent college graduate.

While waiting for the exam to start, Huang Xiu wondered if it was his imagination.

The young proctor seemed to be watching him.

This made Huang Xiu feel uneasy.

“The time has arrived. The entrance exam officially begins. Proctors, please distribute the papers.” A gentle female voice came from the speakers.

Huang Xiu had to suppress his doubts.

The proctor on stage tore open the sealed folder marked “Top Secret” in red, took out a stack of test papers, divided them into five sets of eight sheets each, and handed them out.

The seats were arranged in an S-shape. Huang Xiu’s seat was near the front, so he got the paper quickly.

The paper was thick, four sheets, sixteen pages in total.

The content covered all high school subjects, and the test points went beyond the standard college entrance exam syllabus.

He wrote his name and exam number, then flipped directly to the last page to look at the essay.

The weighting of subjects changed every year, but the essay was always there.

With only four hours for the exam, finishing so many questions was unrealistic. He had to make choices.

But the essay was the highest-scoring part. As long as you wrote the required length and stayed on topic, you got a passing grade. No one dared skip it.

“Read the following material and write according to the requirements. People due to technological development…”

Huang Xiu was still reading the essay prompt carefully.

But then, the standard printed font on the paper suddenly began to twist and deform.

“Read the following material and write according to the requirements. Blowing out others’ lamps will not make you brighter; blocking others’ paths will not let you go further.”

What the hell!

Huang Xiu froze, almost shouting out loud.

Was he seeing things? Was it a hallucination? How had the question suddenly changed?

He rubbed his eyes and checked again in disbelief. The question was indeed different.

He quickly flipped back to the first page.

In his memory, the first question had been a math multiple choice, but now it had turned into a Chinese language error-correction question.

It really had changed!

Huang Xiu was stunned, but quickly recovered.

How could this happen? Why was the exam hall so quiet? Why wasn’t anyone reacting?

Was it only his paper that had changed?

Could it be… again?

Huang Xiu jerked his head up. The proctor on the podium was smiling and had placed a finger to his lips.

“Shh.”

Behind the proctor, written in bold chalk on the blackboard, was the slogan: “Stay calm, be careful.”

The eight-character slogan carried a strange energy that instantly calmed Huang Xiu’s panicked heart.

The nationwide Tiandu University entrance exam, the mandatory physical exam for everyone, the sudden change in his paper…

These elements combined in Huang Xiu’s mind. Together with the changes he had noticed in himself recently, he suddenly understood everything.

Perhaps Tiandu University’s nationwide recruitment was precisely to screen out special people like him from the vast crowd.

The Tiandu entrance exam was a selection, a selection specifically for them!

If that was the case… could Fang Miaoqing still pass this exam?

Huang Xiu’s heart grew as heavy as the clouds outside the window.

Maybe… she couldn’t.

But whether Fang Miaoqing could pass or not, the only thing he could do now, sitting in the exam hall, was to finish this test and earn his ticket to the truth.

He refocused and began answering. But soon he found the paper seemed a bit easy, so easy that even he could handle it smoothly.

‘No, it’s not that the exam is easy. It’s that this paper is easier.’ Huang Xiu’s mind raced.

Tiandu’s preliminary exam likely had two sets of papers.

One was Paper A, for ordinary students, extremely difficult. Only true top students could score high.

Though he didn’t know the principle, this Paper B was only visible to ‘special’ students like him. It was easier and had fewer questions.

Huang Xiu even suspected that on this Paper B, if he answered just a few questions, he could pass the preliminary exam.

“Ha, so this is the paper suited for ‘special’ students like us?”

He mocked himself.

‘This is an unfair exam,’ he wanted to say, but as a beneficiary, he couldn’t stand up.

Most of the questions on Paper B were examples from textbooks. As a diligent student who did his own homework, Huang Xiu worked through them quickly.

He soon reached the fifth page, where he found a bunch of psychological test questions.

What amused him was that these questions, which had no right answers, were marked for five points each.

Question 1: What are you most afraid of?

Huang Xiu recalled and pondered. For a moment, he couldn’t think of his greatest fear.

Not because he was brave and fearless; on the contrary, he feared many things.

He feared snakes, weird bugs, rats, and now he had a bit of PTSD about pigs.

But then he thought of this morning’s dream and the helplessness of drowning in deep water.

He suddenly seemed to understand the deepest fear in his heart.