In the Yuncheng Military Region, while everyone was worried about what Ruan Ruan would face next, Ruan Ruan carried a basket on her back and headed towards the river.

"Ruan Ruan, where are you going with that basket on your back? Are you going up the mountain?" Teacher Shen and Gu Jingming were picking vegetables in the field. It had just rained, and the cowpeas, radishes, eggplants, cucumbers, and other vegetables were growing very well. If they didn't pick them soon, they would get too old. From afar, they could see Ruan Ruan carrying a basket and walking towards the mountain. She was all alone; that wouldn't do, the path was too slippery.

"Auntie, Xiaoming, are you picking vegetables? I'm not going up the mountain, it's just that it's been raining these past few days, and the yard is all muddy, so now that the weather's cleared up, I thought I'd go to the river to collect some pebbles to pave the yard." Ruan Ruan heard someone calling her and turned around to see Teacher Shen and Gu Jingming in the vegetable garden. The two were partially obscured by the vegetable trellises, and you wouldn't really see them if you weren't looking carefully.

"Then wait a bit, let Xiaoming go with you. It's dangerous for a girl like you to go to the riverbank." Hearing that Ruan Ruan was just going to the riverbank to collect pebbles, Teacher Shen thought it was alright, but she was still worried. She looked at the vegetable garden, which was almost ready, and she could finish harvesting by herself in no time. So she thought of having Gu Jingming go with her. Gu Jingming was young, but he was big. He was a big guy, and he could definitely help carry the basket.

“Go help your sister, I can manage here alone,” she then said to her youngest son beside her.

"Okay, Mom, if you can't carry it later, just leave it here. I'll help my sister get it ready and then come back to carry it back."

"Alright, I got it. I can manage with this little bit of food. Go on, keep an eye on your sister. It just rained, the roadside is slippery, be careful, and don't go into deep water, understand?"

"Okay, okay, don't worry." Then, Gu Jingming put the vegetables in his hand into the basket and ran towards Ruan Ruan.

"Auntie, no need. I just came to pick some because it's still early and I don't have anything else to do. You can have Xiaoming help you pick some. I'll just pick a little bit. Huo Haocheng will come back later and he can help with the rest." Ruan Ruan felt embarrassed when she saw Gu Jingming come over like this. Although they were relatives, they all had their own families. It was too much trouble for them to leave their own things to help her. Besides, her aunt hadn't asked her for help with anything.

“It’s alright, I’m almost done picking them too. Let him go with you so you can look out for each other.” After saying that, Teacher Shen stopped looking at them and buried herself in picking vegetables.

"Sister, don't think so much. Let's go. There are only so many vegetables, and we've already picked most of them. We were just about to go back anyway." Gu Jingming ran to Ruan Ruan's side, took the basket from her back, and walked forward.

"Hey, I just wanted to come and pick up some things to kill time. I'll come back with your brother-in-law later. You have time for this, you might as well go back and study some more." Ruan Ruan sighed as she saw Gu Jingming had already left, and followed him. Then she thought back to when she was tutoring Gu Jingming in his homework this morning. His Chinese was really a mess. How could someone be so unbalanced in his subjects? He could get full marks in math, but he could get zero in Chinese if he wasn't careful. He's a real talent.

"Sister, please stop talking. I don't know why either. I can recognize the individual characters in Chinese, but when they're put together, I can't recognize them at all. Sister, you know our current writing system is pretty much modern, right? How could people in ancient times understand the meaning of the books they read?"

Gu Jingming thought about the poems and classical Chinese texts in the book, and realized they were really hard to understand. A single character could have so many meanings, and different interpretations in different contexts. It was really difficult to be a good person. Wouldn't it be better to be more straightforward? What if the person he wanted to confess to was an illiterate person who had never been to school? If he were to say something like "A fair maiden is a gentleman's desire" in a pretentious manner, the woman might think he wanted something from her. Just thinking about it made him feel terrible.

"Do you think everyone is like you? The words they spoke back then are now what you're learning, which is basically your colloquial speech. With your current attitude towards learning, if you were in that era, the teachers at the academy would definitely beat your palms with a ruler!"

Ruan Ruan couldn't understand it either. Logically speaking, her maternal grandmother came from a scholarly family, her two uncles were also quite knowledgeable, and her aunt was even the dean of students at a high school. How could they have raised someone with such poor comprehension of words? Sigh, she couldn't figure it out. Could this be the kind of genetic mutation that she saw on Douyin before, where both parents were top students, but the child only scored a few points on the exam?

"Sister, don't look at me like that, it's making my scalp tingle." Gu Jingming didn't know what Ruan Ruan was thinking, but he felt very uncomfortable being looked at by her strange gaze.

"You can't even read many words, so how can you be so good at math? It shouldn't be like this."

"Sister, is that how you put it? What do you mean you don't even know a few characters? Are the characters in math and Chinese the same?" Gu Jingming was internally injured by Ruan Ruan's question. He didn't know why he could understand math problems at a glance, but couldn't understand Chinese problems even after reading them several times. Sometimes he could recognize the same character in a math problem, but not in a Chinese problem.

"Have you ever reflected on why your reaction to the same word differs depending on where it appears?" Ruan Ruan was also puzzled. It was clearly the same word, so why did one person recognize it while another didn't, even though they were taught by different teachers?

"Sister, I really haven't thought about this question. If I really want to, then it's because there are too many meanings in Chinese, while math only has one meaning, which is relatively simple!" Gu Jingming held a large pebble and thought seriously for a moment before answering.

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