Chapter 40

The seating arrangement for the monthly exam pooled all the names from Class 1 to Class 5 together, shuffling them randomly.

Sebastian remained at Class 1, while Asher was assigned to Class 2's room, which was hosted inside Class 5's regular classroom.

During the exam, the desk drawers had to be completely cleared out, and no electronic devices were allowed on one's person. Phones had to be packed inside backpacks, and the backpacks were placed on the metal lockers at the back of the classroom.

Only then would everyone carry their stationery pouches and head to their respective examination rooms.

Asher strolled over to Class 5 and found his seat according to his exam admission number—the last row of the second group.

He arrived relatively late. When he got there, the person in the row ahead of him was leaning toward the student next to him, whispering urgently about something. One pressed with frantic anxiety, while the other was acting thoroughly submissive.

Asher felt the guy in the front row looked familiar, as if they had played basketball together a few times before. But he disliked memorizing names; to this day, he still thought Huangfu Yi was truly named Huangfu Tieniu, let alone this kind of passerby with zero presence.

Too lazy to mind other people's business, he let out a yawn and prostrated on the desk to catch up on sleep, waiting for the test papers to be handed out. The moment the language papers were distributed, he smiled.

This time, the poetry appreciation and reading comprehension questions were completely standard and exceptionally easy to match with templates. The poetry appreciation section, in particular, practically felt like it had been lifted straight out of the documentation Sebastian had provided. For the first time, Asher experienced a smooth, fluid sensation while doing a language exam, matching the feel of math and science.

As long as the language track was conquered, his empire would return.

Asher was in an excellent mood, which carried over into his evening math exam, where his intuition for the problems felt great.

Except for the student in the front row occasionally making some noise, frequently dropping things onto the floor and bumping into his desk, the overall exam experience was quite decent.

Under normal circumstances, whenever Asher felt he had done exceptionally well on an exam, he would proudly show off in front of Sebastian, throwing out a flurry of boastful remarks to disrupt Sebastian's mental state. But for some unknown reason, after returning to their regular classroom post-exam, he felt completely out of energy.

Lazy, listless, and thoroughly soft—he didn't even want to speak.

During evening self-study, he prostrated on the desk and slept for a full two hours, yet upon dismissal, he still felt exhausted and weak, refraining from uttering a single line of text to Sebastian the entire way home.

Sebastian reached out to touch his forehead.

It felt normal.

He asked, "Did you cripple yourself on the exam?"

Asher slanted a glance at him. "You're the one who crippled yourself. Do you see the wings on my back? That's the symbol of my scores taking flight."

Sebastian nodded with total gravity. "I see them. A pair of short little wings, chubby and round, but thoroughly deflated. Looks like an imminent crash."

"Who's deflated? I'm just sleepy." As Asher spoke, he let out another yawn, then knitted his brows. "Did you poison the milk you gave me yesterday? Why do I feel uncomfortable all over? This kind of malicious competitive tactic of yours is entirely unseemly."

Sebastian thought of something, calculated the dates, yet felt the timeline was incorrect, so he refrained from voicing it. He merely mentioned, "You just haven't rested well. No training today; head back and sleep early."

"Oh."

It didn't matter to miss a single day anyway; Asher didn't try to force himself.

Yet after catching a night of sleep, the symptoms still failed to ease. To prevent Sebastian from worrying, Asher forcefully built up his energy, putting on a front that nothing was wrong before heading straight to the examination room.

Only when his eyes locked onto the comprehensive science paper did he finally manage to perk up a bit.

The directors of physics, chemistry, and biology seemed to have gone collectively insane at the exact same time. The problem designs were extremely psychotic, particularly the physics section, where the final question of every single problem type crossed straight into the competition domain.

Asher scanned it casually and knew that rank one across the grade was securely locked down this time.

It was time to let a certain little garbage like Sebastian witness his father's true strength.

Perhaps because the questions were truly psychotic, the atmosphere inside the examination room turned a fraction volatile. The relentless rustling of pencils scratching scratch paper, the heavy sounds of sighs, the gnashing of teeth, the desperate calculations, the clicking and dropping of pens, and the rattling of desks and chairs all intermingled.

The various noises blended together, amplified infinitely, driving Asher's head into a stinging ache.

His features dropped into an unhappy line, and the fingers gripping his 2B pencil felt a bit feather-light.

Finally, when the student in the front row dropped his pen onto the floor for the fourth time, picked it up, and slammed his chair back against Asher's desk with a loud clatter, forcing Asher to smear a crooked stroke across his bubble sheet—

Asher slapped his pencil onto the desk, leaned back, and asked lazily, "Friend, can you keep a lower profile?"

His volume wasn't high, yet the proctor instantly lifted his head with alert vigilance. "Asher, what's going on?"

"Ask him."

Asher was thoroughly impatient to get entangled in this garbage, tossing out two words before continuing his paper, too lazy to offer any extra attention.

The student in the front row, however, turned so tense he forgot to breathe, clutching a crumpled ball of paper, entirely at a loss for where to hide it.

The proctor walked over, his eyes scanning across the group a few times. Years of professional instinct allowed him to make an immediate judgment. He tapped his knuckles twice against the desk of the student in front of Asher. "Lee, step out with me."

The boy named Lee knew he had been caught red-handed with the evidence. He could only stand up and follow the proctor out.

Right before clearing the door, he turned back to shoot a fierce, vicious glare at Asher's silhouette.

In the end, his disciplinary penalty resulted in the absolute cancellation of his monthly exam scores.

Independent admissions evaluated baseline academic performance logs, and the foundation for these metrics relied entirely on two monthly exams, one midterm, and one final exam.

Directly wiping out a monthly exam score meant his hopes for independent admissions were completely ruined.

He had originally intended to cheat to secure an independent admission slot for a top-tier provincial university, but now, let alone a top-tier institution, even the lowest-tier university in the province wouldn't accept his self-recommendation form.

Lee was filled with both grievance and fury, yet his own logic lagged behind, leaving him with nothing to say. Coupled with the cautionary example of Huangfu Yi, he knew he couldn't afford to offend Asher. He could only clamp down on his rage, choosing to directly skip the afternoon English exam entirely.

Stripped of the constant clattering from the front row, Asher didn't feel as irritable while doing the English exam, yet he was still completely devoid of physical strength. Several times while filling out the bubble sheet, he nearly smeared the marks crooked.

Asher laid his pen down, pinching the bridge of his nose to capture a brief buffer.

Yet in a single fraction of a second, his entire body tensed rigidly.

The exact moment his fingers pinched his nose, his wrist came close to his nose, and he caught the scent of a microscopic, barely detectable fragrance of wild roses.

On regular days, he could control his pheromone scent perfectly. If his pheromones leaked out while his mind was unconscious, it could only point to a solitary reason.

His mating heat had arrived.

He cast a watchful look to evaluate his surroundings, discovering that not a single soul displayed a reaction. He remembered that he had habitually sprayed a layer of scent blocker this morning out of routine. Since it was merely the initial onset, the pheromone concentration remained extremely low and shouldn't have been detected by anyone yet.

Except he had been lazy, casually misting it on like bug spray every time, so there was no telling exactly how long it would successfully block the scent.

Just as Asher wanted to harbor a slice of hope, a sudden wave of heat surged violently across his entire body, causing him to shudder.

It was back. This damn, familiar sensation was back again.

And his absolute first reflex was unexpectedly a burning desire for Sebastian's pheromone scent.

He gave his head a firm shake, throwing that terrifying, pathetic thought straight out of his system.

Then, gripping his pen, he aggressively executed the questions with unprecedented velocity.

Fortunately, the English exam consisted almost entirely of multiple-choice questions, which consumed zero time to write.

He desisted from structural analysis, desisted from reviewing grammar, and didn't even evaluate the text details carefully. He skimmed through the lines at a frantic pace, selecting answers purely based on linguistic intuition. When he hit the essay section, he relied entirely on raw feel, executing a flurry of strokes to clear a full hundred and twenty words. Then, with a loud slap, he dropped his pen, turning his paper in ahead of schedule. Rushing out of the classroom, he turned straight into the restroom.

The examination room hosted inside Class 5 preserved zero alternative advantages, except for the reality that it sat extremely close to the restroom coordinate.

Meanwhile, Class 1's room sat at the absolute far end of the long corridor.

Asher locked himself inside a stall, his back pressed flat against the light blue partition board, his upper body hunched over as he gasped for air.

He had essentially deployed a speed-running methodology for the latter half of the test paper, purely racing against the clock. Consequently, nearly an hour still remained before the official conclusion of the exam window.

Meanwhile, his suppressants, scent blockers, and phone were all packed inside his backpack. Prior to the official conclusion of the exam, he was completely barred from returning to retrieve them.

The sensation grew increasingly distinct. Waves of heat ran rampant across his entire body, and a soft, aching numbness seeped out from deep within his bones. His physical frame felt thoroughly parched and volatile. He expended his absolute maximum efforts to clamp down, compressing the scent of his pheromones, yet his subconscious mind grew increasingly attached to the memory of that cold, gentle, soothing presence of snow.

He craved Sebastian's pheromone scent. At a certain milestone flash, it unexpectedly outmatched his rational need for suppressants.

Fortunately, his rational core quickly reclaimed the dominant position.

He was an individual who had firmly resolved to lock his existence alongside suppressants for an entire lifetime. His heart could only accommodate suppressants; he completely refused to mimic a toxic scumbag, keeping the memory of another Alpha's pheromone scent stored inside his core.

But it was truly painful.

Asher finally comprehended why it was extremely difficult for an Omega to occupy a high-ranking position. This specific physical build tied to a mating heat cycle was an absolute, glaring weakness.

Genes were truly both the most fair and the most unfair entity across existence.

Asher deposited both hands over his knees, hunched over to support his legs. His light blue uniform pants were clutched into deep, heavy wrinkles, his knuckles flashing a pale color. His teeth clamped down on his lip, to the point where a microscopic bead of crimson faintly seeped past the corner of his mouth.

Pain and sheer willpower forced him to maintain a baseline of clarity, preventing him from being entirely dictated by hormones and primal desire, while simultaneously preventing his pheromones from drifting outward to trigger an absolute commotion.

He was completely stripped of alternative methodologies, only able to pray that time would bleed away a fraction faster, and pray that his luck would remain decent enough to survive past the exam window without being discovered by a single soul.

This once, Sebastian likely had zero capacity to advance assistance to rescue his frame.

Which was upstanding after all; he couldn't allow his system to rely far too heavily onto Sebastian anyway.

Sebastian would eventually secure his own Omega. Regardless of whether his choice to return to this school this once tracked to the reasoning he personally assumed, he would leave sooner or later anyway. Consequently, he completely couldn't treat the man's kindness as an absolute reality taken for granted, nor could he truly utilize him as his own Alpha.

Otherwise, everything would drop into an absolute mess.

Asher's thoughts drifted chaotically as time trickled past at a slow pace.

He was volatile with intense heat. The burning desire stemming from the absolute depths of his body grew increasingly catalyzed and intense alongside the rising temperature. He was barely able to maintain his balance, relying entirely on the partition board to prevent his frame from sliding flat onto the earth.

Asher pulled open his uniform jacket, tugging at the collar of his T-shirt. Even without a mirror, he possessed the absolute awareness that his face must be completely flushed red right now.

He wanted to step outside to wash his face alongside cold water, yet he abruptly caught the sound of approaching footsteps.

This aligned as an absolute Alpha male restroom; the individuals stepping inside could only be Alphas.

Asher instantly choked his respiration track, expending his absolute maximum capabilities to compress his pheromones, relying heavily onto the top-tier blocking potency of the scent blocker he had casually sprayed a few times this morning, coupled with his own passable luck.

Yet the door to the stall was tapped. "Is someone inside?"

The voice couldn't be described as familiar, carrying a trace of deep suspicion.

Asher calculated that this once, his luck might be a fraction sallow after all.

The entire corridor and every single classroom stood completely silent and muted. Class 1's room at the far end of the corridor was so quiet that only the sharp scratching of pen tips gliding across paper could be detected.

Absolutely nothing had transpired.

Yet Sebastian abruptly halted his pen, his brows knitting slightly.

Just now, he seemed to have caught the scent of a wave of wild roses—extremely faint, so faint it perfectly mimicked a total illusion.

It was the scent of Asher’s pheromones.

But Asher was clearly taking his exam down the hall. If the scent could be detected all the way at Class 1, the Alphas inside the closer classrooms should have launched an absolute commotion long ago. Yet the entire floor remained perfectly quiet.

The Alphas encircling his own perimeter displayed zero reaction either.

In a single fraction of a second, Sebastian confirmed the reality that Asher’s mating heat had arrived.

Due to the reality that the compatibility shared between his own pheromones and Asher’s outmatched normal human boundaries by a vast distance, paired with his baseline as a top-tier Alpha, his capturing capability far outstripped ordinary Alphas. Furthermore, Asher’s pheromone scent was the absolute most potent trigger to goad his primal desire for possession. Consequently, even if it was extremely faint, faint to the point of being completely non-existent, and separated by a considerable distance, his system could still lock onto the scent flawlessly.

The scent blocker must still be exerting a layer of utility, coupled with Asher’s own self-control, which was why the remaining individuals temporarily failed to catch a single trace.

But that merely summarized the current baseline. If the timeline dragged out any further...

Without even capping his pen, Sebastian snared his test paper and marched swiftly toward the podium. "Turning it in."

The proctor flipped through the paper, hurriedly shouting toward Sebastian’s retreating silhouette: "What do you mean turning it in? The timeline hasn't hit the conclusion yet, you still have an entire page left blank!"

"Too difficult. Don't know how."

Leaving a cold response behind, Sebastian slung Asher’s backpack over his shoulder and accelerated his pace toward the far end of the corridor.