At that moment, the bell for the end of class suddenly rang.

The whole class acted as if they’d been granted amnesty, eager to scatter like startled birds and beasts.

But everyone knew that today, a piece of history had been made.

Chapter Two: A Different World

Zane Thompson practically stormed out, slamming the door so hard that it echoed through the frame. Ryan Carter sat back down in his chair, his hand landing on the desk marked by the wear and tear of years gone by, and said softly,

“Well then, let’s fast-forward to the part where I get into No. 1 High School!”

No response.

“All right, fine, let’s take a step back—just wake up already…”

Sunlight still shone on his face, the trees outside the window rustled in the wind. The heat lingered, and the sharp, layered pain in his palm radiated vividly. Rumors about him were spreading rapidly throughout the grade.

He hadn’t woken up.

But suddenly, he was wide awake, and realized a huge, absurd fact—

This isn’t a dream!

After a long moment, Ryan Carter felt his heart almost leap out of his throat.

He had been reborn!?

So, he was back in the classroom on the eve of graduating from junior high… So just now, he had really exposed The Butcher Thompson’s misconduct to his face, been called “vicious and heartless” by him, and even made a bet with him—staking his own future, he had to reach the admission score for No. 1 High School in the high school entrance exam!?

That’s a bit too melodramatic.

In another corner of the classroom, Jessica Bolton said to a pretty girl beside her, “Summer Young, your childhood friend is really too much trouble!”

Hearing this, Summer Young frowned slightly. “Please get it straight, there’s no way you can call us childhood friends. Can you stop making things up?”

Summer Young was undoubtedly the class beauty, and she had grown up in the same residential compound as Ryan Carter and Shawn Hughes.

When it came to Ryan Carter, she had always felt a bit conflicted. She was well aware of the care Ryan Carter had shown her over the years, even his sometimes excessive concern.

To be fair, she didn’t dislike Ryan Carter; in fact, she even had some fondness for him. But she was dissatisfied with his overly laid-back, go-with-the-flow attitude.

To put it bluntly, Ryan Carter lacked ambition, drifting through life in a daze. But today, he had actually confronted The Butcher Thompson face to face, and Summer Young was just as stunned as the other students.

The key point was that Summer Young knew his grades were terrible… Yet Ryan Carter still dared to make a bet with The Butcher Thompson. A knight with the strength to rescue the princess from the dragon is a hero, but someone riding a skinny horse to challenge a windmill is just a foolish Don Quixote. It’s important to have self-awareness; if a person doesn’t even have that, and insists on putting on a brave face and pretending to be a hero to challenge the teacher, that’s true stupidity.

Her opinion of him plummeted, almost dropping below the line of goodwill she’d built up over the years.

She was even… a little disappointed.

The episode quickly passed, and things returned to normal in the classroom. No matter how fierce the storm was outside, or how imminent the crisis, Ryan Carter was lost in his own turbulent thoughts.

It was real! Everything was real!

If being reborn in this world was a new reality, then Ryan Carter, who had already “jumped out of the Three Realms,” snapped back to his senses after the brief conflict, only to fall into an even deeper shock. Even the earnest advice from his deskmate beside him went in one ear and out the other.

Everyone has wondered how great it would be if they could live their life over again.

Now that this miracle had happened to him, Ryan Carter felt as if he’d been struck by divine enlightenment. Whether it was winning hundreds of millions in the lottery, falling off a cliff and picking up seventeen or eighteen peerless secret manuals, or opening his wardrobe to find a goddess hiding inside—well, okay, what the heck was that last one… In short, none of the world’s luck seemed to compare to this.

Just as Ryan Carter was thanking God, Allah, alien technology, and a whole mess of things, he suddenly noticed the corner of a mock high school entrance exam paper sticking out from the books on his desk.

The title was boldly printed—“Shanhai City High School Entrance Exam Mock Paper.”

Huh? Ryan Carter scratched his temple.

“Shanhai City?”

Ryan Carter was first thrown off by this name. To prepare for the entrance exam, the local education bureau usually issued standardized test papers, inviting teachers to write mock questions, and the name of the city would be printed on the exam papers.

But that wasn’t the main point. The main point was—Ryan Carter’s hometown was Qingshan City!

Definitely Qingshan City! He remembered that after it was developed for tourism, the whole city put up banners—“Qingshan City, a place you’ll never want to leave once you arrive!”

A sense of foreboding began to close in on Ryan Carter, as if he’d fallen into the deep sea, the pressure sealing his eyes and ears.

He pulled out the test paper and examined it carefully, then dug into his desk drawer for his backpack, searching for more items. Whether it was the school-issued exercise books or the personal information written on the covers of his textbooks, everything read: “Shanhai City No. 1 High School, Ryan Carter.”

Shanhai City, Shanhai City, Shanhai City!

Ryan Carter looked around, like a bird with a malfunctioning pineal gland, suddenly realizing he was lost in unfamiliar territory, frantically searching for a landmark.