"Daily exams?" Jiang Ye's eyes widened.
"Yes, it's basically submitting the day's learning results, inputting what you've learned onto the school's Holiday Happiness website," Cen Yemeng said. "Sometimes it takes half an hour, sometimes it takes until midnight to finish typing. Six hours of almost non-stop typing, inputting tens of thousands of words. We were all very fast typists by the time we were in junior high."
"Can't you use voice input?" Jiang Ye asked.
"No," Cen Yemeng shook her head. "The school's reasoning is that typing is more effective for reviewing the day's knowledge than speaking. If not typing, you can also write on a touchscreen, but writing is much more tiring than typing."
"Good heavens," Jiang Ye's expression changed. "Daily homework during the holidays, what kind of holiday is this? It's worse than being in school! Doesn't your hand get tired from typing so much every day?"
"Of course it's tiring!" Cen Yemeng nodded vigorously. "You can get tenosynovitis, tendinitis, a big lump on your wrist. Mild cases can be pushed back, but severe ones require surgery."
"That's too cruel," Jiang Ye was shocked. "The schools on Jiedian Star are so harsh, with caning and so much homework!"
"No, we're an elite school, so we have a lot of homework. Most ordinary schools are like yours during the holidays," Cen Yemeng thought for a moment. "Oh right, we also have vocational internships."
"Vocational internships?" Jiang Ye frowned. "Junior high vocational internships? Doing what?"
"All sorts of professions," Cen Yemeng said. "In junior high, you need to complete internships in 15 different professions, with each internship lasting five days."
Jiang Ye was stunned.
"Before each internship period, the school would give us a form listing at least 360 different professions with brief introductions, and then we would choose," Cen Yemeng said. "There were simple and complex, low-end and high-end jobs."
"What exactly is the internship like? Is there an internship base?" Jiang Ye asked. "Are there dedicated teachers to guide you?"
"No, you just go directly to the corresponding unit or company for the internship, and experienced employees will teach you how to do the work," Cen Yemeng said. "These internships have many benefits, one is to help us find our future desired professions, and the other is to help us understand society."
"What professions did you do?" Jiang Ye asked.
"Let me tell you about the ones that left a deep impression on me," Cen Yemeng smiled.
"Okay."
"I worked in the back kitchen of a dumpling restaurant, learning to peel garlic, wrap dumplings, mix fillings, and serve dishes. The kitchen was extremely busy, and my shoulders ached as if they were being sawed apart all day. On the afternoon of the third day, I sat behind the door to rest for a bit and ended up falling asleep." Cen Yemeng said. "After that, I developed a strong liking for the dumpling restaurant and understood how it operated. After graduating from university, I used my savings to open that dumpling restaurant. It was also where I met my husband."
"I see!" Jiang Ye suddenly understood.
"I also worked as an airborne soldier for five days," Cen Yemeng said.
Jiang Ye was shocked, "You can do that too? Junior high students becoming airborne soldiers?"
Then Jiang Ye showed a "I get it" smile and chuckled, "You just went to the barracks to stay for a few days, listen to lectures, and learn to march in formation, right?"
"No, we learned to parachute, from different altitudes, and escorting armored vehicles while parachuting," Cen Yemeng said. "We also learned to fire rocket launchers, urban assault, night positional warfare, and electronic warfare. Besides combat, we also learned battlefield first aid, combat engineer repairs, command and control, bomb deployment, and survival in nuclear and biological warfare zones."
Jiang Ye was shocked, "Don't brag."
"It's true, didn't expect your wife to be so good at fighting, did you?" Cen Yemeng said proudly. "I was first in battlefield first aid and rocket launcher accuracy, and second in night combat team. I parachuted three times at two in the morning, each time scoring highly."
"Can you learn so much in five days?" Jiang Ye was shocked again.
"We were trained according to wartime conscription standards," Cen Yemeng said. "Wartime conscripts, you know, new recruits are sent to the battlefield after half a month to a month of training, so everything taught was focused on survival and killing the enemy, making the process very efficient. I remember on the first day of reporting, we spent ten minutes on formation and saluting, then we were issued rifles to learn disassembly and reassembly, followed by target practice. An old soldier who had been to the battlefield taught us tactical movements."
"What kind of tactical movements?" Jiang Ye asked.
"They were very simple things, but extremely practical, experiences gained at the cost of lives," Cen Yemeng said. "For example, when advancing in a building, if you suddenly hear gunfire ahead, you must turn and run as fast as possible. Absolutely do not stop to engage in a firefight, nor try to locate the enemy. Stopping will surely get you killed."
"Also, when entering a new room, throw something in first, or briefly expose yourself at the doorway and then retract, and then enter and spray fire, regardless of whether it's a living person or a corpse. The gun should enter the room before you do," Cen Yemeng said. "When we were learning this, it felt very terrifying and immersive. We could feel that these experiences were passed down by surviving comrades from fallen soldiers on the front lines. There must have been some soldier who rashly entered a room and was shot dead on the spot."
"Those are indeed practical experiences," Jiang Ye nodded.
"The job I enjoyed the most was being an ice cream taste tester at an ice cream factory," Cen Yemeng said. "One ice cream company introduced over thirty new flavors every day, and we, the taste testers, would try them all and write down our impressions. I ate ice cream for five days straight, from morning to night, and was so full I didn't need to eat anything else."
"Did your stomach handle it?"
"It did, but I gained weight. I gained eight pounds in five days," Cen Yemeng said. "The rest of my internship experiences were not very interesting, not worth mentioning."
"Did you get paid for your internships?" Jiang Ye asked.
"Yes, it was divided into a base salary and commission," Cen Yemeng said. "If you did well, some internships could earn a lot. My deskmate went to be a real estate agent; he was very eloquent and successfully sold a luxury house, earning a commission of fifty thousand yuan, which the whole class admired."
"To reach that level as a junior high student, it's truly remarkable!" Jiang Ye exclaimed. "What is that person doing now?"
"He's dead," Cen Yemeng shook her head.
"Dead?"
"He died during the Mir War. After graduation, he became a real estate agent and lived a very prosperous life. During the Mir War, a 'frog bomb' landed near his house. He shielded his wife and children from the shrapnel and was severely injured, dying from his wounds," Cen Yemeng sighed. "When the list of casualties was published in the newspapers, it would fill several pages, with dense lists of names. Every time I read the newspaper, I would read through the names from beginning to end, and there would always be a few people I knew who had died."