Chapter 539: Chapter 181: The ’80s Drama Queen is Forced to Become a Top Student (16)

They told Gong Zicheng they wanted to take a leave of absence from school.

Gong Zicheng nodded. "Alright. In that case, I’ll teach you every evening, and the next day you’ll review, memorize, and work through practice problems."

"You’re all progressing so quickly, it really would be a waste of time to keep you in those slow-paced regular classes."

He took it upon himself to handle it, and by the next morning, he had already sorted out all the arrangements for their leave of absence.

Gong Zicheng was quite well-known in the area. Now that word got out he was personally tutoring, many parents showed up with their children in tow, hoping to squeeze them into his lessons.

However, they couldn’t even get past the main gate of the courtyard home.

Gong Xiaofei and his gang of rowdy kids marched right up to them. "My brother is giving his best friends special lessons, and he’s doing it at our house. What’s that got to do with your kids?"

"Did they step in to help when they saw me getting bullied? No? So what, do they want to come study first-grade material with us?"

"My brother’s time is precious. Every extra person is another minute he’s wasting. If my auntie finds out, she’ll definitely flip out!"

The parents’ faces flushed. "We... we can pay tutoring fees, can’t we? We’ll pay by the hour."

Gong Xiaofei waved a dismissive hand with a "tsk, tsk." "Does my brother look like he needs the money?"

"I couldn’t have even gotten my brother to do this if it weren’t for my grandma. And you want him to teach your kids? What are you thinking?"

Sheng Leyun blinked, suddenly feeling like she’d really hit the jackpot.

After the truck driver was taken to the station, who knows what kind of psychological tactics the officers used, but he confessed to everything.

It wasn’t his first time doing something like this. Certain people knew about his past and used it as leverage to force him to comply.

Just like this time—he had no idea who hired him. He just received a note and a thick stack of cash.

He couldn’t resist the temptation and foolishly did the job for the money.

The person behind it never showed their face. The note itself was unremarkable—the words were all cut and pasted from newspapers, and not a single fingerprint was left behind.

It seemed the trail had gone cold.

However, they weren’t just fumbling in the dark; they had a very obvious suspect in mind.

Coincidentally, that person was a newspaper column editor. While anyone could cut up a newspaper, for him, it would be more of a professional habit.

The police didn’t want to tip their hand. Back at the scene, they had instructed everyone to remain tight-lipped to cooperate with the investigation and avoid alerting the mastermind hiding in the shadows.

Everyone took the responsibility entrusted to them by the officers very seriously. They all spoke much less over the next few days, carefully thinking through every word, terrified they might let something slip.

Thanks to Sheng Leyun’s close attention and the key clues she kept providing, the case was quickly cracked.

The person who made the pasted-word note wasn’t Xiao Xuezhen, but Li Qiangjian—the man in the floral shirt who had been following Sheng Leyun!

This Li Qiangjian, however, had been in the same military unit as Xiao Xuezhen. The two were also from the same hometown, so their relationship was much closer than with others.

After being discharged from the army, Li Qiangjian had fallen on hard times. It was Xiao Xuezhen who extended a helping hand, finding him a well-paying job in the Capital City.

From then on, Li Qiangjian did whatever Xiao Xuezhen told him to. With one working in the open and the other in the shadows, the two of them orchestrated numerous schemes.

After six months, the truth about Xiao Xuezhen murdering Sheng Xibao also came to light, causing an uproar among all who heard.

They never would have imagined that the gentle and refined Xiao Xuezhen actually had blood on his hands, and that he had been living his life behind the thick mask of a hypocrite.

When they thought about how they had been his neighbors for so long, and had even argued with him at times, they would touch their necks, feeling incredibly lucky just to still be breathing.

Xiao Xuezhen was sentenced to life in prison. In an instant, Xiao Hailan and Xiao Haiyang went from being a beloved young master and mistress to pitiful wretches, scorned by their maternal grandparents, their father in jail, their stepmother cruel, and loathed by all their neighbors.

They lost all their arrogance, wishing they could just curl up into a ball and disappear.

Ren Xingchen had nowhere to go. She shamelessly claimed that Xiao Xuezhen had coerced her and demanded that the neighborhood committee find her a job so she could support her family.

But nobody was buying it. They sneered, "You’d better stop bringing up Sheng Ying. For all we know, he’s dead because you were secretly seeing someone else. Now your husband is in jail, and you’re crying foul?"

"Where is Sheng Ying supposed to go to cry foul? And what about Yunyun? Where does she go?"

"Just find a place and move out. Don’t let a woman like you, without a man, corrupt the morals of our whole family compound!"

Ren Xingchen was furious. "I have no money, and you won’t give me a job! Where am I supposed to move?"

"Fine! If you’re not going to let me live, I’ll just hang myself at the entrance to the alley you all walk through every day!"

Her shameless theatrics just made everyone angrier.

But she had a point. Since the officers hadn’t arrested her, she must not have committed any major crime.

It’s tough for a woman raising two adolescents on her own. You have to give people a way to make a living.

The neighborhood committee official sighed. "It’s true you weren’t arrested, but your reputation is ruined. You certainly won’t be considered for any of the better jobs."

"All we can offer is manual labor. Do you think you can handle that?"

Others chimed in, sneering, "That’s right. You’re still young. Are you really going to let hard labor ruin your soft, delicate skin?"

"If I were you, I wouldn’t be able to stand it. You’d be better off finding a rich man to marry..."

The more they said things like that, the more Ren Xingchen’s stubborn streak flared up.

She was determined to hold on to her last shred of dignity. At the very least, she had to work and earn money to support Xiao Hailan and Xiao Haiyang. That way, she might be able to slowly change people’s opinion of her.

Sheng Leyun paid no mind to any of this. Through sheer hard work, she and her friends were now sitting in a sixth-grade classroom!

What’s more, their grades were in the top ten of their respective classes, and they were on track to start middle school after the summer break.

In just six months, they had leaped from first grade all the way to sixth, cutting a full four years off their academic journey compared to their peers.

Even though they had taken such a huge leap, their fundamentals were solid. Gong Zicheng had focused on cultivating their study habits and techniques, enabling them to achieve twice the results with half the effort, even without his direct guidance.

As a result, they were easily keeping up with their sixth-grade classes while also starting to tackle seventh-grade material, preparing to make another small leap over the summer.

From then on, they would proceed with their studies at a normal pace.

’Six months of hellish training... it was truly painful, but joyful too!’

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