00:00 Beijing time, the intensive care unit.
The beeping of the heart monitor grew slower and slower, like a dull blade cutting into flesh again and again.
Lin Tingwan stared at the cracks on the ceiling, a ventilator tube stuck down her throat, her whole body pierced with tubes.
A thirty-year-old actress, winner of a global grand slam of film festival awards, now curled up on the hospital bed like a broken rag doll.
“Miss Lin, your father signed the consent form to give up treatment.” The nurse’s voice was muffled behind the oxygen mask. “He said… you continuing like this would only be suffering.”
She wanted to laugh, but it pulled at her lungs with sharp pain.
Right, terminal cancer, spread throughout her body, even the painkillers had stopped working.
And she had no family left.
The young new wife her father had just married would soon give him a son.
Before this, she, the daughter, had just been a tool for her father to extort money.
From now on, her father might even be happier once she died.
Lin Tingwan had her own dignity too.
Rather than turn into a breathing skeleton during chemotherapy, better to leave with dignity.
She slowly closed her eyes.
Goodbye, Oscar trophy.
Goodbye, the stage worshipped by countless people.
This time, I want to take my final bow in the most beautiful pose—
【Ding! Host’s vital signs detected at zero, “Top Student System” forcibly activated!】
…
Homeroom 6, first year of high school, math class.
Chalk dust floated in the stifling afternoon air.
Teacher Zhou’s rigid voice recited a complicated formula, which to Lin Tingwan sounded like some otherworldly noise.
Her whole world was heavy panting, sticky sweat, and the cold feeling of the desk’s edge pressing into her enormous waist and belly.
Her vision was blurred by the pressure of fat, and even every breath came with unbearable difficulty.
“Lin Tingwan!”
A sudden sharp shout from above made Lin Tingwan’s body jerk violently.
She clumsily tried to stand up.
But her bloated body knocked the chair over, making a piercing crash.
The classroom instantly burst into an uproar of laughter from her classmates.
“Hahaha, look, the fat pig fell over again.”
“Did she crush the chair flat?”
“Disgusting, fat and stupid, how does she have the nerve to come to school?”
The mocking laughter was like needle points, stabbing densely into Lin Tingwan’s already riddled heart.
On the platform, Teacher Zhou’s brow furrowed, his eyes full of undisguised impatience and annoyance. “Lin Tingwan, where did I leave off? What’s the vertex formula for a parabola? You can’t even answer such a simple question, is there anything in your head besides fat?”
In fact, most first-year high school students couldn’t solve this problem either.
But as the homeroom teacher of the fast-track class at the city’s best key high school, he was very displeased with this student who had squeezed in through family money and whose grades had been dragging the class down ever since.
At this moment, he was deliberately making things difficult for this female student.
Lin Tingwan’s face instantly flushed the color of pig liver, her lips trembling, unable to get a single word out.
An overwhelming sense of shame and long-accumulated inferiority nearly drowned her.
Just then, a familiar, knife-twisting pain surged from her lower abdomen, fiercer than ever before.
She suddenly remembered the “calming tea” she was made to drink every night without fail.
Last night, her stepmother had even specially stewed her a nourishing soup.
Made especially for her alone, something even her stepsister Lin Yuexuan hadn’t been given the honor of.
“Ah—” Lin Tingwan’s body bent over in pain.
Cold sweat instantly soaked through her oversized school uniform, her stomach churned, and a sour-sweet taste rushed up her throat.
“What are you pretending for? Trying to dodge the question again?” said Lin Yuexuan, sitting in front of her.
This was Lin Tingwan’s radiant, top-scoring stepsister.
She turned back with a contemptuous yet smug look, mouthing silently: trash.
Sharp pain, suffocation, endless mockery, cold stares…
Like an invisible hand closing around Lin Tingwan’s throat.
Her vision darkened again and again, she felt her strength draining away rapidly, as if in the next second she would completely collapse in this classroom full of malice.
【Extreme negative emotional peak detected, soul on the verge of collapse, forced binding conditions met.】
【Lin Tingwan!】
An absolutely rational, utterly calm electronic voice rang out at the final moment her consciousness sank into darkness.
【Binding host: Lin Tingwan (a fused soul from another world).
Vital signs rapidly failing—
Warning!
“Heart-Corroding Powder” compound toxin detected, continuously ingested for over 42 months.
Major organ function failure rate: 70%
Natural life countdown: 71 hours 59 minutes
Top Student System, activated.】
Fragments of memory flooded in wildly—
She was the actress Lin Tingwan, who had just gracefully bid farewell to a world of illness and suffering.
She opened her eyes to find herself turned into this sixteen-year-old girl of the same name, extremely overweight, whose life was about to be extinguished from being poisoned.
Her mother had died young, her father had quickly remarried, and the stepsister her stepmother brought with her was actually her father’s illegitimate daughter.
In this family, she was unwanted,
At school, she was everyone’s laughingstock.
On this point, the original owner of this body’s background had something pitiably in common with her own.
【Top Student System binding successful, core rule: knowledge is currency, exchangeable for life, health, wealth, and all possibilities.】
The survival instinct and the fury of having her dignity thoroughly trampled erupted inside Lin Tingwan like magma.
In those eyes that had once been lifeless, two terrifying flames suddenly ignited.
A blue light screen unfolded in her mind:
【Host’s current status:
Life value countdown: 71 hours 59 minutes
Health value: 0 (severe obesity, chronic poisoning, metabolic syndrome, severely impaired cardiopulmonary function…)
Wisdom points: 0
Wealth value: 0】
【Instant task (newbie reward): within 10 seconds, correctly answer the vertex formula for a parabola that Teacher Zhou just asked.
Reward: Wisdom points +3 (exchangeable for 0.3 days of life value)
Failure penalty: Life value -0.1 day】
Teacher Zhou impatiently tapped the set square against the blackboard. “Lin Tingwan! Do you know it or not? If not, go stand at the back of the classroom, don’t waste everyone’s time!”
The eyes of the whole class were like searchlights, and the corner of Lin Yuexuan’s mouth curled into a triumphant smile.
Time seemed to freeze.
The sharp pain was still tearing at her, but a colder, more resolute will exploded in the newly reborn Lin Tingwan’s mind.
The vertex formula for a parabola?
For an actress who loved learning but had never had a proper chance at schooling due to various reasons.
This was as easy as breathing!
Lin Tingwan used all her strength and abruptly raised her head.
Those eyes that had once been cloudy and timid now burst with astonishing sharpness and coldness, shooting straight at the stunned Teacher Zhou.
Hoarsely but with unusual clarity, she spoke the standard answer.
Dead silence.
Teacher Zhou’s hand, holding the set square, froze in midair, the disgust on his face instantly replaced by disbelief.
Lin Yuexuan’s smug smile froze.
You could have heard a pin drop in the classroom.
【Task complete, wisdom points +3.】
The cold electronic voice sounded like heaven’s music.
Ignoring everyone’s stunned stares, Lin Tingwan’s consciousness sank quickly into the light screen, without hesitation exchanging all 3 wisdom points for life value.
【Life value countdown: 79 hours 06 minutes】