The second day back in the rainy season.

Lin Shilan had great difficulty getting up. Yesterday, being pestered by Tan Jin to talk, she’d gotten home late. Her mother nagged at her all evening, saying that even as a senior in high school her mind wasn’t on studying, forcing her to finish her original homework and do an extra English test paper.

Having a teacher for a mother, Lin Shilan had been educated since childhood to value learning.

While other children played on slides and in sandboxes outside, she stayed home memorizing English vocabulary and the Three Hundred Tang Poems.

While other children were just beginning systematic education in elementary school, she’d already been enrolled in various after-school classes by her mother.

When other children also started tutoring, she began participating in competitions and getting even more tutoring than them.

Having to travel back to senior year and retake the college entrance exam every year was, for Lin Shilan, a nightmare within nightmares.

Days like yesterday—she really had no mood to do homework. But her home was so small, her mother could see clearly whatever Lin Shilan did. Wanting to slack off? No chance.

At the age when bodies were still growing, she’d barely slept a few hours and was so tired she couldn’t open her eyes.

Before Lü Xiaorong left, she instructed Lin Shilan to help her photocopy materials after class.

Still half-asleep, she groggily agreed. After a while, she heard movement at the front door again.

Thinking her mother had forgotten her keys, Lin Shilan opened the door directly.

Outside stood a Tan Jin with eye crud stuck in the corners of his eyes.

“Morning.”

With bedhead, he greeted her.

“…Morning.”

Lin Shilan hastily used the door to hide her butterfly-print pajama pants: “You came looking for me this early?”

His expression was smug, as if taking credit: “Of course. As soon as I saw your mom leave, I came right over.”

“Huh?” She found it a bit horrifying: “You’ve been secretly observing my house?”

“Exactly.” Tan Jin admitted generously.

Lin Shilan looked him over carefully.

She’d thought he came to go to school with her, but why didn’t Tan Jin have his backpack?

He yawned and asked: “Do you want to sleep a bit more?”

Lin Shilan shook her head: “We have to go to school—how can I sleep more? We’ll be late.”

“School?”

The two were clearly communicating on different frequencies.

She reacted first: “You got up this early but don’t plan to go to school?”

A beat behind her, he also showed shock: “What? You’re planning to go to school today?”

Lin Shilan’s three years of high school could be summarized in two words—studying.

Tan Jin’s three years of high school could likewise be summarized in two words—playing around.

“Lin Shilan, you’ve time-traveled—how many people on Earth can have such a miraculous experience? As the protagonist, all you have in your mind is studying?” Tan Jin looked utterly incredulous at such waste.

“What else, then? What should I do?” Lin Shilan looked completely matter-of-fact.

“Come on! Forget about sleeping. We need to go out and accomplish some great undertaking.”

“Where to?”

He tossed her a confident look: “I have a plan.”

Thus, Lin Shilan, who studied diligently every time she traveled through time, was successfully lured away by Tan Jin.

They took Bus Route 8, walked for twenty minutes, then transferred to Route 312.

Finally, after three hours, they arrived at their destination.

Standing beneath the flourishing calligraphy reading “Flower and Bird Market,” small Lin Shilan had big confusion.

“You really have a plan?”

The bumpy journey hadn’t diminished his energy one bit. The youth rolled up his sleeves, full of vigor.

“Of course. This isn’t just a flower and bird market—go upstairs to Treasure City, and we can find antiques, jade, and paintings. There are always good things floating around among the common people that haven’t been discovered yet. We have the advantage of time and can buy them first. Or things that will be valuable four years from now but aren’t worth much now—we can buy them and store them. Like jade—the price of jade bracelet material will increase several times over four years from now.”

Lin Shilan wouldn’t even evaluate whether Tan Jin had the eye for buying such things—his idea was fundamentally unworkable from the start.

“Things here can’t be brought to the future.”

“Oh, seems like it. We didn’t physically time-travel, so things can’t be carried with us…”

Her words didn’t make him abandon the idea. Tan Jin thought about it and provided another plan: “Then is it possible for us to find a place and bury them?”

“It’s useless.”

Having been brought all this way to such a place, Lin Shilan was in a gloomy mood and no longer gave him any face.

“Let me clarify for you a bit more—our current actions won’t have any impact on the future. Based on this conclusion, even if we bury things now, they won’t appear in the future.”

Tan Jin stopped talking.

He frowned, falling into deep thought.

Lin Shilan had previously been friends with Tan Ziheng, and because of this connection, she always felt Tan Jin belonged to the “younger brother” generation.

Looking at their reflections in the glass window, she also zoned out.

High ponytail, small face, fair skin—a face that was a smooth, tender girl’s face, yet because of her overly calm expression showed an adult’s staleness. This was herself.

And beside her, he had the fresh, clean look of a high school student—a head of messy hair, thin ears, his expression becoming dazed from thinking too hard, his black-and-white eyes revealing a childish innocence not yet shed.

Just a little kid really…

She felt momentarily dazed: Had he experienced the cycle of these rainy seasons the same as her?

“I’ve got it!” Tan Jin slapped his thigh.

“If we can’t change the future, we’ll observe what everyone in the original world is doing. Listening and watching more will always reveal ways to create wealth. If we observe someone secretly burying treasure somewhere, we can revisit that place and dig it up.”

“Oh? An antique buried underground for four years—can it sell for ten yuan more or twenty yuan more?”

Lin Shilan bluntly threw cold water on it.

“Too unreliable.”

She had no interest, turning to head toward the bus stop.

“Let’s go back to school. If we hurry, we can still make afternoon classes.”

“Not going back.”

Unable to argue logically, Tan Jin simply stopped being logical.

“I want to take you around here to have fun.”

“If current actions won’t affect the future, then why go back to study? Wasting time randomly is better than being locked in a classroom.”

Without waiting for her to speak, he ran off in a flash.

Probably not confident Lin Shilan would chase him, he also took her bus card with him.

Facts proved Tan Jin’s prediction was correct—she indeed had no intention of chasing him.

Watching his retreating figure, Lin Shilan deeply felt: she and Tan Jin were incompatible.

Actually, they’d been incompatible from before.

Only when Tan Ziheng was home and she went to find Tan Ziheng would she see Tan Jin. Even with such rare opportunities to meet, they could still bicker from time to time.

Tan Jin’s room was on the first floor. Every time he opened the door for her, he’d say: “Oh, here again to pretend to study with my brother?”

Lin Shilan always struck back unceremoniously: “That’s right. You have so many shoes on your shoe rack—all fake, right?”

Meeting again, they’d become companions because of encountering the same strange events. In their momentary excitement, they’d overlooked the essence of being companions.

Partnering up was for two people to solve together what one person couldn’t solve alone.

But when two people had different ideas, different goals, and weren’t in sync—what could they accomplish together?

Play? She didn’t have that kind of mood and didn’t know where his good mood came from.

Tan Jin found it fun, but Lin Shilan didn’t. She’d never been to a flower and bird market before, wasn’t interested in the things here, and didn’t want to understand them. His suggestions seemed to her to have no meaning or substance whatsoever.

He wanted to browse, he wanted to take her around to have fun—she didn’t want to.

The trouble of coming all this way with Tan Jin’s reckless behavior made the dissatisfaction Lin Shilan had been holding in completely explode, happily tearing off the mask of “companions.”

Even without her bus card, Lin Shilan didn’t chase after Tan Jin.

She sat at the bus stop, facing the dusty main road, sitting there blankly.

Ten minutes later, Tan Jin appeared.

He returned her bus card.

“Why didn’t you come find me?” he said.

She didn’t answer.

After that, the bus came.

Lin Shilan sat in a single seat toward the front; Tan Jin sat behind her.

They transferred once more.

She got off; he followed.

Lin Shilan half-walked, half-ran to catch up to the bus stop.

As soon as the bus heading to school arrived, she got on.

Tan Jin didn’t catch this bus.

Lin Shilan had never been good-tempered or easy to get along with.

She had no friends. In all her years of schooling, she hadn’t made a single friend—only attended school.

Classmates said behind her back that she was boring, a robot who only knew how to study. She knew this.

But perhaps all of this was worth it, because she’d gotten into a top university, the university her mother dreamed of her attending.

If she weren’t unlucky, trapped in an inescapable rainy season, she would have lived perfectly, as perfect as the future her mother had imagined for her a thousand times.

The old days were meaningless. Unable to end them, she would close her eyes and count the days until they passed.

The rule-abiding Lin Shilan returned to school in a rule-abiding manner.

She gave the teacher a leave slip and, as usual, attended class seriously, took notes, and listened to lectures.

After half a day of classes, Lin Shilan returned home.

She’d thought the morning’s events were just an interlude. Even though she hadn’t seen Tan Jin at school afterward, her state was completely unaffected. Until Lü Xiaorong came home, and she realized—after school, she’d forgotten about the photocopying her mother had instructed her to do.

“Well, the copy shop is closed now. I need these materials first thing tomorrow morning. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have asked you to do it.”

“I ask you to do one thing and you forget—I should have known, counting on you means counting on nothing.”

The floors weren’t soundproof. When Lü Xiaorong scolded her child, the neighbors could all hear.

“Crying? Do you have the face to cry? Is crying useful? After crying, will the print shop reopen? So useless—useless people love to cry the most.”

“Just said a couple things to you and here you are crying—is it really necessary? You’ve truly disappointed me!”

Tan Jin sat dumbly at Lin Shilan’s door.

That afternoon he’d bought cherries and brought them over for her to eat.

He hadn’t intentionally come to eavesdrop on her mother scolding her.

Tan Jin had never seen Lin Shilan cry.

Outside the door, he didn’t hear her crying either.

Honestly, it was hard for him to imagine what she looked like crying.

Because this was Lin Shilan.

She was like one of those neatly folded square military-style comforters that could be shaken out smoothly countless times and laid out flat and neat again.

With her cold expression, she always handled everything properly and neatly, appearing smart and appropriate.

Tan Jin recalled asking her this morning: Why go back to study?

From his perspective, studying was boring and painful. Coming back, there was no benefit to going to school—he would never want to return to school to study.

But she was different. She was Lin Shilan, perennially the school’s top student.

Her slacking off in studies would be seen by her mother as betrayal. Even an inadvertent mistake on her part was enough to turn her into an imperfect child in her mother’s eyes.

Her time travel brought nothing with her and took nothing away, except for feelings.

What Lin Shilan feared most and was most unwilling to do was disappoint her mother.