Warring States Survival Guide
Chapter 67 - 40: Successfully obtaining a high school diploma is enough!

Chapter 67: Chapter 40: Successfully obtaining a high school diploma is enough!

There’s a saying in China: "Handwriting reflects the person." This really fits Yayoi, Ah Qing, and Ah Man.

Yayoi is super afraid of wasting things. Even when just starting to learn how to write, her characters would get tinier and tinier—you could just tell she instinctively thought that the smaller the writing, the better, as if saving paper was the ultimate win. Right from the start, her handwriting was aiming for fly-sized calligraphy.

Ah Qing, on the other hand, was all about being proper. She wrote with total seriousness, determined to make everything neat, straight lines and level strokes, each line and dash carefully separated, just like a little grade schooler. Even if she made a mistake, she’d carefully shade it in with a neat, square block of ink—definitely an A+ in presentation.

Ah Man, well, she was way behind. Her personality is just too all over the place, and it totally shows up in her writing. Every character she wrote looked like it was stretching its arms and kicking its legs—lined up on the page, it was like a parade of jumping bean letters. At a glance, it even had that wild "stones paving the street" vibe from Zheng Banqiao. Plus when Ah Man made a mistake, she’d just scribble over it any which way—square, round, who cares if it’s covered or not. Amidst all those flailing arms and legs, there’d be seven or eight twisted black blobs, and ink splotches everywhere, a total mess. It was such chaos that Harano nearly went blind trying to read it.

But despite that, Harano went over the page three times, top to bottom, and just couldn’t find a single wrong character or missing word. Even when he compared it to the original text, there wasn’t a thing left out or out of place. It made him seriously question reality.

This doesn’t feel possible, does it? She memorized over a hundred new characters in one night, and wrote them all out perfectly without a single mistake—that’s not something a human is supposed to be able to do!

Harano could hardly believe it. If he hadn’t seen it with his own eyes, and someone had just told him about it, he’d probably have kicked them—"You think I’m that dumb to fall for your nonsense?"

But somehow, this really happened in the real world...

Ah Man noticed him frowning and rereading her page over and over, looking like he was never going to finish. She couldn’t help sticking her head in and asking curiously, "What are you even looking at? Did I mess something up? Surely I didn’t! And if something’s wrong, it’s definitely because you remembered it wrong..."

Her babbling right beside him made Harano feel a bit embarrassed, like his teacherly dignity was on the ropes. But he was a practical guy, and started to reflect on what was going wrong—this thing was just too weird. Was Ah Man actually a genius? Or did she cheat?

Cheating didn’t seem likely—no reason to suspect her like that. Which meant... she really might be a genius...

He quickly took a good look at "Genius Ah Man," but honestly couldn’t see anything genius-like about her. No matter how you sliced it, she was still just the same lazy, always-hungry little wild kid!

Or maybe, starting to learn characters at ten or so and remembering a hundred a day is actually normal?

The more Harano thought about it, the more confused he got. Seriously, even setting aside the new character thing, he honestly wasn’t sure he could memorize two pages of text in one night and perfectly rewrite it the next day without a single mistake.

So the ancient saying "photographic memory" is actually real? Though Ah Man didn’t quite hit "photographic memory"—maybe a little off—but her memory was still insanely strong, probably beating 99.99% of people, right?

Surprised, he glanced over at Yayoi and Ah Qing, starting to wonder if they might be geniuses too.

Wasn’t impossible. Anime always does stuff like this—one genius surrounded by a bunch more weird genius types, all crazy talented. Plus, Yayoi was sweet and docile like a little bunny, Ah Qing had this cool, elegant vibe like a little crane, and both of them looked way smarter than Ah Man with her silly eyebrows. They definitely had that mini prodigy look.

Maybe they should give it a try too—after all, this was his first time teaching, and he didn’t want to mess things up for his students by accident...

"So did I make any mistakes or not!" Ah Man was still poking her head in, asking again and again, really invested in her results. She was super competitive, but it also felt like she was itching to rub Harano’s face in it, just to prove how smart she was.

Harano shot her a look, but held his tongue.

He was the kind of guy to admit when he was wrong, and didn’t really care about pride. If Ah Man was doing well, then she was doing well. He wasn’t the type to lie just to save face, so he said straight out, "No mistakes. Not a single one. I honestly underestimated you last night. You... did great—way better than I expected. Keep it up from now on!"

And not forgetting his other students, he turned to Yayoi and Ah Qing and added, "I hadn’t thought of this before, maybe I was teaching a bit too slowly. From now on, you two should let me know how fast you’re learning, and try to keep up with Ah Man. Let’s all work hard!"

Even if Yayoi and Ah Qing weren’t geniuses, it was worth trying. If it went well, in a month or two, when he was out and about, they could write him letters to tell him how things were going at home, keeping him in the loop. For day-to-day stuff, he could leave them notes, making life way more convenient all around.

Yayoi and Ah Qing both nodded seriously—they didn’t really understand much, so whatever the teacher said, went.

So that night, Harano tried upping the pace, making everyone work on two pages of new characters. Tao Liulang wanted to get better too, and showed up lured by the activity. He wanted to learn to read, but didn’t dare to ask directly—so he just lurked by the dirt-floor entrance, eavesdropping, and brought his younger brother Jing Qilang along too.

Those two were basically Harano’s "employees"—maybe even future startup partners—so of course he’d include them in the crash course. He pulled them into the night class as well. Plus, they might also be genius material—so they had to learn, and memorize, two pages of characters and then write the whole thing out from memory.

After trying it out for a day, though, everyone except Ah Man completely flopped.

Ah Man nailed it as usual: smooth, no errors, straight-up full marks;