We agreed not to date, so why are you crying now that I've become the richest man?

Upon hearing this, Zhang Haoran, the class monitor in the front row, turned his head with a subtle expression.

Several boys around couldn't help but burst out laughing.

Caught red-faced by the public rebuke of his time-traveling privilege, Zhao Qiang forced a smile and raised his voice, "Even if I'm the class's life committee member, the class committee is a unified entity! We're almost fifty, and you think you're in the right place at the last minute? If you don't follow the rules, you can forget about being considered for awards this semester!"

Ye Chen slowly inserted the straw into the soy milk and took a sip.

"Zhao, the life committee member, you not only have a long reach, but you also have a strong desire for power."

He paused for a moment, then lazily curled the corner of his mouth.

"What, didn't you get enough of showing off when you were getting supplies during military training? Do you think your head is particularly good at catching things?"

The whole class burst into laughter.

The iconic scene from military training, where a sweat-soaked pad accurately hit Zhao Qiang's forehead, was now replaying in everyone's minds.

"You!" Zhao Qiang was furious, his fingers trembling.

"Alright."

A clear, cold female voice came from the front door of the classroom.

Counselor Xu Man walked in, wearing high heels.

She stood in the corridor for a while, hearing the conversation clearly.

"There are still a few minutes before it's time, everyone sit down." Xu Man walked to the front of the podium and gave Zhao Qiang a cold glance.

"Class officers should each perform their duties. The life committee member should just do their job. Don't overstep your bounds by checking attendance or wielding your authority like a tyrant. Don't do that in my class."

Zhao Qiang's face flushed red and then turned pale; his lips moved, but he couldn't utter a single word.

He slunk back to his seat.

The bell rang at the right time as morning self-study ended, and the tense atmosphere in the classroom relaxed.

Next up is the first major lecture.

The freshmen packed their bags and walked in twos and threes along the tree-lined path toward the computer labs in the south area.

"Old Ye, that was absolutely brilliant!" Sun Haoyu leaned close to Ye Chen, his shoulders shaking with laughter. "Didn't you see Zhao Qiang's face? It looks like purple cabbage."

Ye Chen, with his bag slung over one shoulder and a straw in his mouth, didn't say a word.

The competitive nature of eighteen or nineteen-year-old boys is childish to him, like playing house.

Zhao Qiang, who was walking in front, clenched his teeth tightly when he heard the laughter behind him.

The spine of the book "Easy Introduction to C Programming" that I was holding in my hand was almost deformed from being squeezed.

I had to make up for the embarrassment I made during morning self-study today in my major course.

I spent 3,000 yuan on a crash course during the summer vacation. It was a huge advantage to deal with these newbies who had never even properly touched a keyboard.

At 8:00 AM sharp, in the South District computer room.

The first class for freshmen in the Computer Science Department was "Fundamentals of C Programming".

Professor Zhou, who was giving the lecture, was a Mediterranean-looking old man with reading glasses, and he was notorious in the department for failing courses.

Instead of reading from the textbook as usual, he projected a piece of nested loop code directly onto all the students' monitors.

"You are all new to programming, and this course is the foundation for your four years of university."

Old Zhou pointed to the densely packed characters on the screen.

"We won't go into theory in today's first lesson. Let's get a feel for each of you and see how many of you have basic logical thinking skills."

Twenty minutes passed.

The atmosphere in the server room grew increasingly oppressive, with many people scratching their heads in front of their screens.

Old Zhou stopped using his laser pointer and tapped the podium: "Who wants to come up and demonstrate this loop? The requirements aren't high; just apply the logic and write a very simple multiplication table of nine."

A deathly silence.

Everyone lowered their heads to avoid eye contact.

"Teacher, let me do it."

In the first row, Zhao Qiang took a deep breath and suddenly raised his hand.

He stood up, straightened his collar, and walked to the podium under the watchful eyes of the entire class.

My vanity swelled to its peak.

"Good, that's courageous." Old Zhou nodded in satisfaction and gave up the position of the main control unit.

Zhao Qiang sat down and placed his hands on the keyboard.

The first few lines of the basic framework are fairly smooth.

But once you get into the core of the nested loops, the little bit of knowledge you've cramed into your brain won't be enough.

Under the pressure of being watched by the whole class, he even mistyped several punctuation marks.

Five minutes passed.

Old Zhou stood to the side, his brows furrowing deeper and deeper.

"Alright, let's run it and see the results."

Zhao Qiang swallowed hard and pressed the run button with a forced smile.

The screen is flickering.

The black console window contained no multiplication table, only a series of glaring red error messages that filled half the screen.

"Syntax error, undefined variable, infinite loop." Old Zhou pointed out each error mercilessly. "Fancy but illogical, get out of here."

A few suppressed chuckles came from below.

Zhao Qiang stood up, his face flushed, unsure of where to look.

Old Zhou sighed and searched the classroom with his eyes.

Suddenly, it froze.

In the last row, a tall boy was resting his chin on one hand and idly clicking the mouse with the other.

With a "click," a landmine exploded on the screen.

He was playing Minesweeper.

"The guy in the last row." Old Zhou's face darkened, and he pointed through the code. "Yes, the one playing Minesweeper. You seem pretty relaxed. Come up here and fix this code for me."

All eyes in the class immediately turned to that direction.

Sun Haoyu tugged at Ye Chen's sleeve, his face turning pale.

Ye Chen turned off Minesweeper and stood up.

With his hands in his pockets, he walked slowly and deliberately to the podium.

As soon as Zhao Qiang sat back down, he saw Ye Chen go on stage, and all the pent-up anger in his body suddenly dissipated.

A subtle smile played at the corners of his lips.

If he can't even handle it after taking classes, what does Ye Chen know about programming? They're going to get yelled at together.

Ye Chen walked to the main control unit.

The chair wasn't pulled out.

He bent down and placed his hands on the keyboard.

The next second, a series of crisp, rapid tapping sounds exploded in the quiet server room.

The cursor on the projection screen jumped wildly, and large sections of the error code left by Zhao Qiang were selected and deleted.

A clean and concise instruction line was overlaid.

Without pause, without hesitation.

For a senior engineer who spent over a decade working nights at a major company and reviewed countless crash logs of top-tier projects, this kind of introductory-level stuff doesn't even qualify him to engage his brain.

It's purely the muscle memory in my fingers that's making the movement.

In less than twenty seconds, the logic of the nine-multiplication table was completed.

Ye Chen's fingers didn't stop.

He casually added a dozen or so lines of code to the end of the program, calling the console's character coloring and cursor positioning commands, and embedding a looping animation logic.

It took less than ten seconds longer.

Snapped.

Press Enter.

"alright."

Old Zhou, who had been frowning, froze the moment his gaze fell on the screen.

He quickly moved closer, his reading glasses almost touching the monitor.

This code completely abandons the standard way of writing code in textbooks and uses the most concise and efficient underlying optimization logic.

The structure is extremely clean, with not a single line of redundant code.

This is not something a student could write.

Before Lao Zhou could even speak, the results popped up in the console.

The neat multiplication table instantly filled the upper half of the screen.

Immediately afterwards, the bottom started refreshing.

Asterisks, diagonal lines, and dots change positions in a certain pattern, forming a dynamic pattern of slow descent against a pure black background.

Like snow, and like flower petals.

It floated down layer by layer.

The entire server room was deathly silent.

Three seconds later, several boys in the back row started swearing.

Holy crap!

"That's awesome!"

The girls' eyes lit up.

The mere sight of animated patterns floating on a monotonous black-and-white screen is incredibly impactful for a newly enrolled female student.