Su Song and Wang Zhao walked the stone steps honestly and reached the top in a short while.
There were several people sitting in the pavilion on the top of the mountain. They wanted to stay alone, so they found a rock and sat down some distance away from the pavilion. The direction they sat down was exactly opposite the direction where the Mianjiang River merged into the sea.
From a distance, it was full of mist, small black spots of stars, and probably ships entering the sea.
Wang Zhao has been holding Su Song tightly, leaning against him, as if afraid that she would fall. Seeing his nervous appearance, Su Song was inexplicably happy, and comforted him: "It's okay. It won't fall."
Wang Zhao turned his head to look at Su Song, stunned, and then slowly said, "I was scared to stand on a high place for a while, and I always felt that I would fall."
"Fear of heights?"
Wang Zhao shook his head, and after a while he said, "Let me tell you a story about a little boy!"
When he was 5 years old, the little boy started to go to an Olympiad training institution every day after school. In the second year, he began to participate in the Olympiad. Then that life about the competition lasted until the age of 17.
On the road of Olympic Mathematics, for most children, they usually disappear halfway. But Wang Zhao is one of the few survivors.
In the fifth grade, he won the team first and individual first in the Hua Luogeng Gold Cup. He won the first prize of the high league in the third year. At that time, he was the only junior high school student among all high school students. In the first year of high school, he entered the national team of imo (International Mathematical Olympiad).
To fight imo on behalf of the country, you need to go through layers of brutal selection. The first is the National High School Mathematics League, with 100,000 participants, and in the end only about 180 can enter the winter camp. Then, they were eliminated one after another, and 30 people were selected for the national training team. Finally, after a month of closed training, the final 6 were selected. This is the Chinese National Mathematical Olympiad.
At that time, as a senior, he didn't dare to expect much to participate in the competition, but the result was very unexpected-he was one of the two people in the Chinese team with full marks.
Wang Zhao kept a photo of the competition that year-six Chinese teenagers in red team uniforms stood in a row on the stage.
That photo was taken by a respected senior. The senior said to them, "The world is huge, and the future is very promising. What a beauty, my youth is China!"
Although the original era of winning glory for the country is long gone, now the teenagers who learn Mathematical Olympiad only use Mathematical Olympiad as a springboard for a certain purpose, or just a means to train their thinking. But for them who can represent the country to participate in the competition, winning the gold medal is still the highest honor.
Wang Zhao wants to win many gold medals that can represent the glory of the country.
In the second year, he continued to compete. After another year of training, he is certainly stronger. People around him also think that he can still get full marks this time without any suspense.
The goal of the teenager is very clear. The goal of this campaign is to be the perfect score gold medal winner for two consecutive years.
There is a word in mathematical terminology called "obviously", which indicates that an event should be understood without being explained.
For example, the Pythagorean theorem is obvious, the differential median theorem is obvious, and "accidents always exist" are also obvious.
The juvenile was the only one who was at the bottom of the contestants that year. So obviously, the life of a teenager began to crack the first gap.
"My thoughts at the time were actually very simple. I wanted to keep going like this, and I always thought that there would be no special surprises. After all, I am the kind of talented person, and I came here relatively smoothly since I was young. I have heard a lot of compliments. Later on, I don’t distinguish between true and false, and I even inevitably rely on my talents..."
Wang Zhao stopped talking, just laughed, but the laugh made Su Song feel uncomfortable, and he realized that he didn't know him at all.
There was nothing Su Song could do, she could only shake his hand back.
"More than two years have passed. This is the first time I have seriously looked at myself in those years as a bystander, so..."
Su Song could only tell him with a very firm look: "I know."
Wang Zhao laughed normally this time, a smile familiar to Su Song. He continued: "Did you know? At that time, my greatest ideal was the Fields Medal. That was known as the'Nobel Prize in Mathematics'! Now that I think about it, I really want to punch him! What's up! Even if the hairs are uneven, you dare to say such lie."
Su Song stretched out his hand to pinch a small tuft of Wang Zhao's hair and pulled it out, "But the coolest and truest appearance of a teenager is the dare to speak and fearless at such an age! Moreover, most great people have never spoken such big words. It’s started with the little boy of the United States. And I think that humility needs not only years to settle, but also the fact that success is needed to support it."
Wang Zhao laughed stupidly, "Really?"
"Yes!"
But everyone knows that misfortunes do not come singly, not to mention that the cracks open will cause cracks.
Before Wang Zhao had time to sympathize with his defeat, he was told that his mother had passed away.
Mom committed suicide.
Wang Zhao said: "I felt that I was abandoned by the world at the time. The ideal that I once aspired to was destroyed, and even my mother was taken back by God."
There was a long silence in the middle, and he seemed to be trying to organize words to describe the feeling, and finally he said: "The feeling is like floating freely in the Dead Sea one second before, and being naked in the next second. The ground was thrown to the North Pole without a piece of clothing covering the ugliness."
This absolutely transcendent "child of someone else's family", with the arrogance of a teenager, decided to abandon that unusual path and chose to return to a normal student life. But even so, in ordinary student life, it still fails continuously.
"After that time, I had a very restrained fear for everything related to the competition. After being a normal student, I tried to treat every exam as a constant fight back against that failure. But the same, Every time I fear and fail without exception.
The confidence that was once indestructible has been continuously worn down like this. I began to hate myself. "
Su Song knows that according to personality psychology, when the personality's "real self" and "ideal self" do not match, the difference between the two will continue to trigger emotions of self-disgust.
Wang Zhao, who fell from a height, began to be unable to study calmly, and even unable to take exams normally, especially during important exams.
He couldn't overcome that fear, as long as he sat in the examination room, the fear that he would definitely fail again would hang over him.
The tip of the pen is always reminding him that he will definitely break the chain in his mind at an unexpected moment as it did in the past.
In the first college entrance examination, the total score was less than three hundred, and the second time was just one point more than three hundred.
Such progress is "obviously" ironic.