The distillery’s Beauty Drunk sold quite well, and it was a major taxpayer in Vessaria. The Thorne family never lacked for wine, as Frederick Thorne always brought some home.

"Howard and Patrick have been studying very hard this semester. They don’t daydream in class anymore, their homework is neat, and they’ve stopped copying others. They do it all themselves," Lana Steiner said with a smile, her expression one of relief.

It was just a pity that Howard Thorne was already a sophomore in high school. It was hard to say if he could make a final push in the year and a half he had left. After all, his academic foundation was just too poor. He basically guessed his way through exams, only ever doing the multiple-choice questions. He never touched the fill-in-the-blanks or short-answer sections because he didn’t know how. He could at least guess his way to a few points on the multiple-choice, but his grades were exactly what you’d expect. He was always dead last in his class, a position he never budged from.

Patrick Thorne was now in eighth grade, and his grades were actually not bad—below average for his class, but not terrible. The boy was very smart, much like his uncle Frederick Thorne. He had a natural talent for learning but just refused to apply himself. He was flippant in class and never took notes or did his homework.

His textbooks were completely clean, without a single note in them. His workbooks had all been torn out to make paper airplanes. His teachers had scolded him until they were blue in the face, but the words went in one ear and out the other. He didn’t listen to a single word and even talked back to his teachers—

"What’s the damn point of learning all this stuff? You can’t even get a wife!"

The teacher he’d snapped at was named Caldwell, the math teacher. At the time, Patrick Thorne hadn’t actually known Teacher Caldwell’s story. He was new, having just been transferred to the school. Patrick had just blurted it out, but his words had happened to strike a nerve.

Teacher Caldwell was forty years old, a top student from the provincial normal university. He was brilliant and an excellent teacher, but fate had played a cruel joke on him.

Because of his forthright nature, he had offended the school leadership and was demoted from a provincial city high school to one in the county, then from the county to a township. Eventually, he wasn’t allowed to teach at all. His fiancée, whom he was about to marry, married someone else, and his parents were too ashamed to show their faces because of him.

Teacher Caldwell spent the best years of his life on a farm and never managed to find a wife. It wasn’t until last year that his name was cleared. After hearing that rascal Patrick Thorne’s words, Teacher Caldwell was so furious he stormed out. He went straight to the principal and declared that in any class he taught, it was either Patrick Thorne or him—they couldn’t both be there.

When Lana Steiner found out, she rushed to apologize to Teacher Caldwell. In front of the teacher, Frederick Thorne gave Patrick Thorne a sound beating. This made Teacher Caldwell quite embarrassed. He had just been so angry at the time that he’d said something irrational. ’How can a teacher give up on a student?’

Even the most mischievous and troublesome students have their good points, and Patrick Thorne was no exception. Besides, Teacher Caldwell believed that Patrick Thorne hadn’t meant to target him. What did a kid know about the "stinking old ninth"? He was just a product of a terrible social environment.

Afterward, when Patrick Thorne learned about Teacher Caldwell’s tragic past, he was filled with regret. He truly hadn’t known that his teacher was one of the "stinking old ninth," let alone an old bachelor. You don’t hit a man where it hurts. If he had known, he never would have said it. That’s why when Frederick Thorne beat him, Patrick Thorne didn’t make a sound and sincerely apologized to Teacher Caldwell.

This semester, Patrick Thorne seemed to have become a different person. He shed his usual flippant attitude and paid attention in class. Although he still didn’t take notes, he completed his homework on time. His improvement was obvious. In the first unified exam after the school year started, his ranking had jumped more than twenty places compared to his final exams last semester, placing him in the top eighty of his grade.

And that was after only a month. If Patrick Thorne kept this up, getting into a university would be no problem at all.