Chapter 9
Shi Ye: “:D”
Shi Ye: “:(”
The moment Shi Ye received the message, his smile disappeared.
Ding Qizhen was sitting nearby studying his horoscope for the day. He firmly believed the world and humanity revolved around astrology. Seeing something was off with Shi Ye’s expression, he craned his neck over to take a look too.
“And you still can’t tell?”
“……”
Ding Qizhen had not seen Xia Fengsheng in seven years. His impression of him had always stayed frozen in middle school—a gloomy freak paler than a corpse, who did not like talking and liked standing in corners watching other people.
He had heard that now Xia Fengsheng had gotten into Jing University for graduate school, in the finance department.
The message Xia Fengsheng sent fit Ding Qizhen’s stereotype of finance perfectly.
Even though Ding Qizhen did not have a good impression of Xia Fengsheng, he did admire him a little. He had heard that Xia Fengsheng did badly on the college entrance exam back then, his score plunging all the way down, and he had barely scraped into an ordinary second-tier university.
To go from a second-tier school to Jing University—without family background or connections—was not just hard, it was harder than climbing to heaven. Even finding one person like that out of ten thousand would be difficult, and yet somehow he really did make it.
His old high school teacher was the one who told him.
Wuhai No.1 High had recently been preparing to hold an outstanding alumni gathering. When Ding Qizhen got the message, a teacher chatted with him casually and said they also wanted to invite Xia Fengsheng and were currently trying to get in touch.
The teacher asked, “You two were on pretty good terms back in high school. Do you have his number?”
Ding Qizhen tactfully said they had long since stopped contacting each other.
After Shi Ye got dumped, he never saw Xia Fengsheng again.
Wuhai City was the most backward little county town Ding Qizhen had ever been to, and it was also where he and Shi Ye met Xia Fengsheng.
Shi Ye had studied dance since childhood. Most people could not guess what style he danced. Unlike his current flamboyant appearance, he had actually studied ballet the whole time growing up. He first performed onstage at six, and continued until the year he turned sixteen, when his beloved teacher fell seriously ill and returned to his hometown to recuperate.
To Shi Ye, that teacher was more like family—his enlightenment in the love of dance, the wings that carried him toward his dreams.
When the teacher returned to Wuhai, Shi Ye went along too. His parents were very supportive of him. Human beings were not creatures without feelings. It was precisely because people had emotions and senses that they could be called human.
From childhood all the way up, Ding Qizhen had been Shi Ye’s best friend. When they got into trouble and got beaten, the parents on either side showed no mercy—however Shi Ye got beaten, Ding Qizhen got beaten the same. The two of them had practically grown up sharing one pair of pants.
If Shi Ye was leaving, then of course Ding Qizhen had to go with him. He treated it as a trip to clear his mind. Once the teacher recovered, they would come back. He just had not expected that they would end up staying there for three years.
In that little coastal city named Wuhai, the place that produced someone like Shi Ye’s teacher also let Shi Ye meet Xia Fengsheng.
A gloomy boy in a school uniform, carrying a patched-up schoolbag, with injuries often lingering on his face.
The first time they saw him, it was on a rainy day.
That was Shi Ye’s first day after transferring to Wuhai No.1 High. The weather was not beautiful, and what made it even more unbearable was that they still had to do morning assembly outside even though it was raining.
The southern air was already damp enough, and with the rain it felt as if mold would start growing on their bodies. Shi Ye felt like a mushroom that had sprouted from some corner.
He was good-looking, and his personality was decent too, so on his very first day in the new class, he was extremely popular.
When people heard that Class Six had a newly transferred boy handsome enough to qualify as a school heartthrob, plenty came to peek through the windows during breaks.
Shi Ye had long been used to being surrounded by crowds, as if he had been born the protagonist.
His youthful teenage face overflowed with vitality. The classmates around him smiled as they introduced him to the goings-on at No.1 High. Since he did not know where the field was, they escorted him there in a crowd.
The tops of colorful umbrellas opened up one after another, like flowers of different colors blooming beneath the rain curtain. Among the crowd, people were complaining that the school had no conscience at all, making them come out for assembly even on a rainy day.
Shi Ye also found it strange. With the rain falling like this, canceling assembly for a day was the most normal thing in the world, yet the school had made all the students come out to get drenched.
Each class lined up. The students all held umbrellas, and those who did not have one squeezed under someone else’s.
“In weather like this, we usually don’t have to come out for assembly.”
The two students in front whispered to each other. “It’s because the fight yesterday was so serious. They had to address it today, so they made us all come out.”
“I heard some parents came demanding an explanation. They even classified it as campus bullying at one point. No idea how they settled it in the end, but anyway, it didn’t get taken to the police station.”
The crowd was noisy. Someone asked, “Who caused the trouble?”
Then, along with a piercing gust of cold wind—
“Xia Fengsheng.”
That was the first time Shi Ye heard that name. The air still carried the damp, salty smell of the seaside.
“He trapped them in the bathroom, jammed the door shut with a mop, and started a group fight inside. The teachers couldn’t even get in. In the end, it was the dean who climbed through the window to stop it.”
Screech—The piercing feedback made most of the students bare their teeth and cover their ears. The microphone’s shriek was no less painful than fingernails scraping a blackboard.
Campus fights had always been handled by the dean, but the person standing on the drill platform now was the vice principal instead. That alone showed how serious this incident was.
The vice principal wore faculty uniform attire, holding an umbrella in one hand and a microphone in the other. “Our school has repeatedly seen ‘serious’ fighting incidents! At first I thought it was a failure of school management, but later I realized it was always the same few rotten worms!”
He slashed a hand through the air, and the microphone volume shot to the max.
“They ignore school rules, disrupt discipline, and affect both teachers and students! Just yesterday, another fight broke out. Things have simply reached the point of utter lawlessness!”
“Making all of you come out into the rain today is meant to warn everyone not to learn from students who violate rules and discipline!”
At that moment, the principal standing beside him coughed.
The vice principal hurriedly corrected himself. “Ah, yes, the good parts can be learned.”
“……”
“Pfft—” one student failed to hold it in. “What the hell? That’s so contradictory.”
What part of a rule-breaking student was there to learn from?
The vice principal continued, “The school has decided to record a major demerit for the students involved in yesterday’s fight, with some placed under probation for expulsion. I hope everyone will take this as a warning.”
Once he finished, several students went up onto the platform holding self-criticism letters. There were six in total, and every one of their faces was a riot of bruises and colors.
During yesterday’s group fight, everyone had silently gone all out.
It was not like Ding Qizhen had never seen fights before. There had been troublemakers at his previous school too, and he had seen a few people land in the hospital because of fights. But it was his first time seeing faces beaten up so spectacularly they looked like overturned paint palettes.
Only the very last one who went up looked a little better, but even half of his face was still blue-black, all the way up to the brow bone, giving him a dark and gloomy air.
He asked the classmate he had just met, “How many against how many?”
The classmate gave him an astonishing number. “Five against one.”
Five against one!
The classmate pointed at the instigator of the whole thing. “He locked those people in the bathroom up front and beat them until the teacher had to climb in through the window.”
Ding Qizhen was stunned. Was this some reincarnated war god? He fought one against five and was the least injured.
“Why did they fight?”
“No idea. Anyway, none of those people are good guys.” The classmate complained about them one by one—they were all in the same grade. Then when it came to the last one, he said, “Don’t let Xia Fengsheng fool you just because he looks quiet and honest. He’s always the one stirring up trouble.”
“Then why doesn’t the school expel him?” To cut off future trouble once and for all.
The microphone was handed to the students onstage to read their self-criticisms. The classmates who had been whispering before were no longer in the mood to chat. Everyone wanted to hear how those self-criticisms had been written—bad students’ self-criticisms usually contained a lot of entertainment.
At No.1 High, taller students stood in the back during assembly. Shi Ye stood in the very last row, too far away to see more than Xia Fengsheng’s outline. Compared with the others, he looked far too thin standing there on the platform, holding a red Paradise umbrella printed with a bank advertisement as he waited to speak.
Soon it was his turn. Completely different from the dazed, muddled attitude of the few before him, he held a sheet of paper in his hand and read his self-criticism with clear pronunciation and smooth flow. His voice suddenly turned clear and bright, like clouds parting to reveal the moon.
His voice was actually pretty nice.
With nothing better to do, Shi Ye looked off at the dark, pressing sky in the distance. He did not care what had happened on the platform or why they had fought. He just wanted to hurry back to the classroom and escape this dampness.
After all six finished and stepped down, the vice principal continued speaking.
“These six students are negative examples. I hope everyone will take warning from them and work together to create a harmonious campus.”
“Besides this serious incident, today the school also has good news. In last week’s citywide joint exam, our students achieved outstanding results, crushing No.24 High School and firmly holding first place on the high-score rankings. Now we will have the student representative speak.”
Student representative—obviously that meant the one who ranked first.
The very next second, the same Xia Fengsheng who had just come down from the platform went right back up, fresh and alive, clutching another sheet of paper.
“……”
Same familiar bruised face. Same familiar Paradise umbrella.
Ding Qizhen’s jaw nearly dropped. Wasn’t this the guy who had just read the self-criticism for fighting?
No wonder the school would not expel him. Turns out he was first in the entire school.
Xia Fengsheng stood at the front giving his speech, while the principal stood behind him silently watching.
His face was smiling, but his eyes were deeply sorrowful.
Why could he not have a first-place student who was both morally excellent and academically excellent, and who did not get into fights and cause trouble?
The principal’s feelings toward Xia Fengsheng were truly complicated.
Probably some kind of illness.
To get close to him was to get close to pain. To stay far from him was to stay far from happiness.
*
Looking at the message he had sent, Xia Fengsheng felt disgusted, so he quickly sent a few more messages to push that one upward.
The effect of disgusting Shi Ye had already been achieved—he could not keep disgusting himself too.
“What are you doing?”
“Have you eaten yet?”
“How about going out on a date tomorrow?”
Xia Fengsheng had always believed that human relationships needed face-to-face meetings to maintain them. No matter how good a relationship was, if people did not see each other for a long time, it would grow shallow.
Only face-to-face—hearing the other person’s words with your ears, seeing what they do with your eyes—could make you fully feel that person’s existence.
And only disgusting someone in person left a truly unforgettable kind of disgust.
Shi Ye’s replies came back at an unhurried pace.
“Looking at my phone.”
“Not yet. I’m planning to eat with a friend later.”
He replied to every message one by one, each separately.
Seeing him keep typing, Ding Qizhen asked, “What are you chatting about now?”
Shi Ye said blandly, “He asked me out on a date tomorrow.”
Ding Qizhen perked up at once. “Wait, let me check tomorrow’s horoscope for you.”
At the end of science lay mysticism. Zodiac signs really did have something to them—at least that was what Ding Qizhen firmly believed. He began calculating Shi Ye’s fortune. Shi Ye was an Aries…
After getting the result, Ding Qizhen said, “It’s not good for you to go out tomorrow. Better not go.”
Shi Ye did not believe in any of that. How could a person let their hands and feet be tied up by zodiac signs?
Ding Qizhen saw the disdain on his face. “Don’t act like you don’t believe it.”
Shi Ye glanced at him. “I believe.”
Ding Qizhen: ……
Dog bastard, try lying one more time.
Over on Xia Fengsheng’s side, he received Shi Ye’s message.
Shi Ye: “Okay.”
Still playing up his amnesia persona, Xia Fengsheng asked with curiosity, “Which friend are you eating with? Do I know them?”
Shi Ye: “You knew him before. Ding Qizhen.”
Ding Qizhen.
Xia Fengsheng rolled the name around in his mouth several times. The memories from seven years ago were too blurry. He could not remember a single name from high school. The same was true for Ding Qizhen—he could vaguely picture his outline, but could not recall his face.
Shi Ye added one more line, “He believes in zodiac signs.”
Ding Qizhen’s figure instantly became clear in his mind.
Ah. That Imperial Astronomer.
