“No, no, no no no... Something’s wrong!”
“Huff~~~ huff~~~”
Wu Jin lay sprawled at the pool’s edge, gasping for breath in great mouthfuls.
The exhaustion coursing through his entire body, the emptiness after staking everything to swim to the very end, made the sensation grow ever more intense.
This feeling... why was it so real?
A dream could never be this vivid; the icy water stimulated every inch of him, making his mind feel clearer and clearer.
His thoughts, too, became more focused.
“Wu Jin, are you all right?”
The safety officer had swum over to Wu Jin’s side. Wu Jin waved his hand, swallowed as he panted, and said, “I’m... I’m fine, Brother Li!”
“You brat, that was way too reckless!”
“You were oxygen-deprived just now—why did you get back in the water?”
“Do you really not care whether you live or die?!”
The safety officer called Brother Li was also an excellent swimmer, but just now, even after following close behind Wu Jin, he had failed to catch up to him.
“Wu Jin, do you have a death wish? Huh?”
Assistant coach Zhu Ying also stormed over aggressively. Standing at the edge, she immediately unleashed a scolding at Wu Jin. “You don’t know you can’t do strenuous exercise after oxygen deprivation, is that it? I told you to stay on the shore and monitor yourself. What were you doing?”
“Who told you to get in the water?!!”
Wu Jin: “...”
He had no room to talk back at all, because... this really was his fault.
He had thought he was dreaming!
Just like Xia Luo in Goodbye Mr. Loser, wanting to act without restraint in his dream, Wu Jin had also indulged himself for once.
But what he had not expected was that he... seemed to have truly been reborn, just like Xia Luo.
Before he had even climbed ashore, Wu Jin had been pinching his own thigh hard underwater. The sharp pain only made his heart grow more and more excited.
It was the excitement of possibly having been reborn.
And on top of that, he had activated something called the “Swimmer’s Heart”!
A system?
Wu Jin did know about such things.
“Can you get up?”
After scolding him for a while, Zhu Ying, in truth, felt sorry for this twelve-year-old disciple. Her voice gradually softened.
She understood very well why Wu Jin had done this.
Athletes going through puberty—this was the first “talent wall” he had to face!
Not many could get through it. One out of ten, perhaps. The rest all became ordinary people; either they returned to their studies, or they persisted while seeing no prospects at all, ultimately ending up like her—spending their whole lives learning swimming, only to become a coach or work at a swimming institution.
This was the cruelest side of competitive sports.
Talent would always be more important than hard work, but hard work would always accompany talent.
Having talent alone was useless. You had to use your own heart and willpower to overcome all the problems brought about by development.
Longitudinal bone growth affected body streamline, causing stroke efficiency to decline... Male puberty brought increased androgen secretion, increasing muscle cross-sectional area and causing movements to deform and lose coordination...
And, of course, there was body weight!
During adolescence, the average weight gain was twenty to twenty-five kilograms. If the proportion of fat rose, the buoyancy advantage might be offset by the burden of body weight.
And so on and so forth.
The current Wu Jin was facing exactly this series of bodily changes.
He truly did work hard—trained very hard, swam painstakingly, wanting to break through his developmental barrier—but... it really was difficult.
Zhu Ying reached out her hand, but Wu Jin smiled at her. “Coach Zhu, I can do it myself!”
“Really?”
Zhu Ying suddenly smiled. She liked students with resilience.
Though she was very worried about Wu Jin’s physical condition.
“I can!”
Wu Jin pushed himself up with one hand, and his body stood nimbly at the poolside.
At nearly one meter seventy in height, barring any surprises, he would definitely grow past one ninety in the future. This was the ideal template for an outstanding swimmer. On top of that, he had long arms, broad shoulders, and the beginnings of a streamlined physique.
Moreover, Wu Jin had a sunny, handsome face, something rarely seen among many of his peers.
This was also why Zhu Ying liked this student so much.
In the future, he would be a proper tall, athletic, big boy. Even if he did not swim, he would probably be very popular with girls.
“Go sit for a while. I’m still not at ease. I’ll take you to the hospital for a checkup later!”
“If something really happened, wouldn’t your parents come after me?”
Zhu Ying deliberately put on a stern face. Wu Jin said somewhat helplessly, “There’s no need, right, Coach? I feel pretty okay!”
One could even say that, adding together both his lives, he had never felt this good before!
His whole body was full of strength, as well as the vigorous vitality of having returned to a young body and being able to control it.
Wu Jin could only sigh... Youth was truly wonderful!
“Go have a look. It’ll put us at ease!”
After saying this, Zhu Ying shouted at the other students who had been watching the show. “What are you doing? Have you all finished your aerobic and anaerobic training?”
“Sun Yang, are you proud of beating Wu Jin?”
Splash, splash!
A group of boys and girls around Wu Jin’s age instantly did what they had to do—some plunged into the water, while those on shore started doing core training.
Sun Yang even made a funny face, stuck out his tongue, then hurriedly lay down by the poolside and began dryland training.
“Sister Zhu!”
At this moment, an intern coach came to Zhu Ying’s side.
Although Zhu Ying was only an assistant coach, she had decent seniority at Chen Jinglun Sports School, so she had been assigned two assistants.
This was one of them.
“What is it?”
Zhu Ying looked at the young assistant.
“The fifty meters we timed for Wu Jin just now, hand-timed!”
The young assistant handed the stopwatch to Zhu Ying. Zhu Ying was caught between laughter and helplessness. “At a time like this, you still timed him?”
In that situation just now, this little assistant had actually had the spare attention to time the kid’s fifty-meter freestyle?
Zhu Ying shook her head, her gaze subconsciously falling on the stopwatch.
“...”
With just one glance, her expression immediately sobered.
27.54 seconds.
“You didn’t time it wrong?”
Zhu Ying abruptly raised her head. This result made her take notice.
“No!”
“I timed it just now. I pressed it the moment he entered the water... I estimate that with electronic timing, it wouldn’t be over 28 either!”
“Not bad. He met the second-class standard!”
“Before, it was hard for him to even break thirty seconds in fifty meters!”
“Unbelievable. He improved by two seconds all at once?”
Zhu Ying glanced at Wu Jin, who had just lain down not far away, and a hint of a smile immediately appeared on her face.
28.09 seconds—this was the current 2003 domestic technical grade standard for a second-class swimmer in the men’s fifty-meter freestyle!
In other words, if Wu Jin had swum this result in an official competition just now, he would have been able to obtain the certificate and accreditation of a national second-class athlete.
And in China, in the sport of swimming, athletes specializing in the fifty-meter freestyle were the fewest.
Because whether now or in the future, the fifty-meter freestyle was a very weak event for yellow people.
Unlike the eight-hundred- and fifteen-hundred-meter long-distance events, where yellow people could rely on technique to contend somewhat with swimming powerhouses like Europe, America, and Australia.
Short distances were entirely the domain of white people!
Just like sprinting was for black people.
This was a certain natural advantage of race in a particular sport.
“Have him switch to training the fifty meters?”
Such a thought suddenly emerged in Zhu Ying’s mind, but... in the next second, she snuffed it out.
Too unrealistic.
Domestically, in the fifty-meter freestyle, the current gap with foreign countries was even bigger than the gap between black and yellow athletes in the hundred-meter dash!
A full two seconds or so.
In track and field, the hundred-meter gap was only within one second.
“Eh, wait, that’s not right. How did this kid improve so much in the fifty-meter freestyle?”
“Yet his hundred-meter freestyle regressed instead?”
No matter how she thought about it, Zhu Ying could not figure it out. If Wu Jin had not trained so hard just now that he became oxygen-deprived, she would have wanted him to swim it again.
To her, as a coach, such an improvement was clearly very unscientific.
She would rather believe that the stopwatch had malfunctioned.
“No, I’ll take him to the hospital first!”
“If there’s no problem, I’ll have him test again...”
Zhu Ying looked at the 27.54 on the stopwatch, her thoughts drifting somewhat.
If Wu Jin could truly stabilize within this range, then with proper focused training, perhaps he could even make it into a domestic final in the fifty-meter freestyle... That would have far more prospects than the fiercely competitive men’s hundred-meter freestyle!
After all, there were few people who trained specifically for the fifty-meter freestyle. Most only took it as a secondary event and practiced it occasionally!
As for Wu Jin at this moment, he was studying the system he had just obtained.