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On Saturday afternoon, after a short quiz, Zhang Chuang went as usual to find He Youyuan and Qi Yu for a basketball game. It was something of a weekly ritual for the three of them — on regular days, aside from P.E. class, there was barely any time to play, let alone time to play together.

But, to his surprise, both of them refused, each saying they had other plans.

Qi Yu’s excuse was reasonable and completely understandable: there was a math winter camp the following week, held in the provincial capital, and he was leaving early the next morning, so he needed to go home tonight to pack.

Zhang Chuang patted him on the shoulder, wished him a safe journey and a good result, then turned to He Youyuan and raised an eyebrow: “And you, you wealthy man of leisure — what could you possibly have going on?”

He Youyuan slouched with his hands in his pockets and let two words drift out: “Studying.”

“You—”

Zhang Chuang couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He sucked in a sharp breath. “Say that again?”

Qi Yu also turned to look at him with an odd expression.

He Youyuan wasn’t the kind of student who never did his homework or spent his days causing trouble — but he rarely put any extra thought into his studies. Especially during the two years when he’d been shooting up in height — growing so fast that he would get leg cramps at night, some nights so badly that he couldn’t sleep at all — so during the day he’d been dead on his feet in class. His grades had dropped to the seven or eight hundredth ranking in the year group. By middle school graduation, though, he’d made one real push and managed to get into First High.

Once he crossed that threshold into high school, he went back to coasting. Qi Yu knew he was probably going to take the arts track eventually, so the stakes on his academic grades weren’t as high, and he’d stayed generally uninterested — content as long as his scores were serviceable.

No one could figure out what had suddenly possessed him to want to study.

He Youyuan kept his expression easy and untroubled: “Studying. What’s wrong with that — is the word not in your vocabulary?”

Zhang Chuang practically unraveled: “What got into you? Did Little He give you a talking-to after the parent conference, or did aliens beam something into your brain last night?”

Before He Youyuan could get to the word “get lost,” Qi Yu said, quite calmly, from the side: “That’s a good thing.” He found it a bit bizarre, true, but he couldn’t say it was unwelcome — at least the reason He Youyuan was acting strangely happened to be studying, which was still somehow… admirable.

He Youyuan pulled Qi Yu in by the shoulder and walked with him toward the school gate. “See, you get it.”

Qi Yu frowned: “…Get what?”

“Oh — wrong phrase.” He Youyuan caught himself. “You’re the reasonable one.”

Zhang Chuang was still standing where they’d left him. The basketball slipped from his hands and hit the ground with a thud. He watched their retreating figures and shouted after them: “Hold on — you’re actually serious?”

At the school gate, Qi Yu’s mother pulled up to collect him. Qi Yu waved goodbye. As he turned, He Youyuan noticed a brand new insulated flask tucked into the side pocket of his backpack — long and slender, matte black.

Ugly, He Youyuan thought.

He’d barely taken two steps when Zhang Chuang caught up and put him in a headlock: “I’m coming to your house to see for myself whether you’re actually going to study!”

“Be my guest,” He Youyuan said lazily.

Zhang Chuang squinted at him: “Who annoyed you this time?”

He knew the pattern well enough. When He Youyuan pulled this kind of thing, it meant this rotten friend of his was in a sulk about something — that was just how he worked. Something would get under his skin, and he’d mope for a while before it cleared. Which also made Zhang Chuang a little curious: when He Youyuan eventually got into a relationship, would he be the one comforting his girlfriend, or would she be the one comforting him? If he ended up with a girl who had a strong personality, he gave it three days before they broke up.

He Youyuan shot him a sideways look: “You don’t think I’m actually in a standoff with someone, do you? Genuinely, I want to study.”

“You?” Zhang Chuang refused to believe a word of it. He thought the odds of He Youyuan being possessed by a ghost were higher than the odds of He Youyuan genuinely wanting to study. “I’m not looking down on you, but if you last until tomorrow, I’ll admit I was wrong.”

Any other time, He Youyuan would have taken that bet. Today, he just left him with “believe what you want” and went home.

Zhang Chuang, not actually believing it, followed him home anyway.

They’d been friends for over ten years — neighbors for a few of those years — but Zhang Chuang rarely went to He Youyuan’s place, because He Youyuan had an aunt who was a teacher. Who wanted to run into a teacher in their off hours? And this particular aunt happened to teach English — Zhang Chuang’s worst subject — and she loved calling on students one by one in class. Every English lesson in middle school had felt like a trial by fire. So going home with He Youyuan today was something of a brave act.

Fortunately, the aunt was not home.

Zhang Chuang looked around He Youyuan’s bedroom. It was a fairly large room, but a little crowded — several easels of different sizes stood around the space, a tall stack of art books and thick pads of sketch paper covered the floor, and the paintings on the walls were He Youyuan’s own, varied in style but not chaotic — they gave the impression of a room bursting with color. There were two desks. One was buried in pencils of every grade, brushes, palette knives, markers, and crayons of every color, with a neat cabinet beside it holding rows of paint — tubes, jars, tins, each type organized in its place. The other desk was for studying — noticeably bare compared to the artist’s table, with just a pen holder and two workbooks, and only two ballpoint pens in the holder, looking rather forlorn. The bookshelf was full: a complete set of required classical literature for secondary school, which had clearly been bought by his parents. There were also books he’d chosen himself — the complete Jin Yong martial arts collection, the complete Sherlock Holmes, the complete Those Events of the Ming Dynasty, the full Black Humor Comics series, and some novels by Lu Xun and Charles Dickens.

“Whoa! Where did you get this stick? That’s so cool!” Zhang Chuang swept the room with one glance and zeroed in, with perfect accuracy, on the item of lowest monetary value.

He Youyuan settled into his chair with a touch of pride: “Picked it up.” It was the stick he’d found in a landscaped hedge the first night he’d walked Li Kuiyi home. He hadn’t wanted to throw it away, so he’d brought it back. “If you want it, you can have it for a thousand yuan. Consider it a bargain.”

“Give me a break — your heart is darker than Justice Bao’s face.”

That said, Zhang Chuang couldn’t stop handling the stick, turning it over and giving it a few experimental swings.

He Youyuan ignored him and turned back to his desk, pulling a math test paper from his bag.

Zhang Chuang leaned over for a look: “You’re actually doing this?”

He Youyuan didn’t answer. He opened a drawer and produced his PSP, which he tossed to Zhang Chuang: “Go entertain yourself. Stop bothering me.”

Zhang Chuang: “…”

Having accepted the gift, he settled into the beanbag chair in the corner and started playing. Of course, he played distractedly — every so often he looked up to check whether He Youyuan was really working.

…He actually was.

At least by the time Zhang Chuang’s patience wore out and he went to check, the math paper was more than half finished.

Finishing one test paper doesn’t prove anything, Zhang Chuang told himself.

But He Youyuan seemed serious about it.

He started reciting material during morning reading. Before, his mouth had barely moved during that time; when teachers approached, he might hum a few syllables — or sometimes what he was humming was a song.

He started doing his own homework. Before, he’d done it selectively — anything with too much writing was automatically skipped, anything that just irritated him was also skipped. Now, he still skipped the writing-heavy ones, but he reined in his impatience enough to finish the rest.

He started asking teachers questions…

“At first, none of us noticed he was actually studying — maybe because his face doesn’t look like the face of someone who studies, and when he’s doing homework he looks like he’s composing a reply to a love letter. But then today during vocabulary dictation, he was called up to the board. Forty-plus words — and he got every single one right. That’s when we knew something was different…”

After dinner, on the sports field, Fang Zhixiao reported this momentous discovery to Li Kuiyi and Zhou Fanghua with a deeply serious expression. Her concluding remarks were delivered with an air of profound mystery: “This is completely abnormal. Based on my years of reading novels, he has clearly experienced a major turning point in his life. For example—”

Fang Zhixiao’s voice dropped to a near-whisper. Li Kuiyi and Zhou Fanghua held their breath.

“His family has probably gone bankrupt.”

Li Kuiyi: “…”

Zhou Fanghua: “…”

That’s your reliable, well-reasoned conclusion?

“What would his family even have worth going bankrupt over?” Li Kuiyi asked. The only times she’d seen “bankruptcy” was in novels and TV dramas — companies worth hundreds of billions, collapsing overnight.

“No idea.” Fang Zhixiao shook her head. “But it’s possible, right? Think about it — he does fine arts, which is incredibly expensive. And he lives in Champion Residence — that development is extremely pricey.”

Fair enough, Li Kuiyi supposed. She had no idea how much his family actually had, but the fact that he’d given her — someone who wasn’t even really a friend — a box of chocolates costing over five hundred yuan probably meant money wasn’t a concern. Usually.

Could he really have gone bankrupt? That would be genuinely pitiable.

The three girls sniffled, sighed, and continued their lap around the sports field.

It was already the beginning of December. The air was a dry, biting cold — every breath was visible. Their sweaters were no match for the temperatures anymore, and everyone had moved on to down jackets. Most people wore them over their school uniforms, ready to zip open for inspection if a teacher came along. A few, however, wore their uniform jackets over their down coats, making themselves look remarkably like rotund penguins waddling along.

Li Kuiyi had two black down jackets, neither especially stylish but both resistant to stains, and she rotated between them. She also owned a white cotton-padded jacket she really liked — but she didn’t dare wear it. Lean over a desk for half a day and the sleeves would be filthy. Some girls in class wore sleeve protectors, but a boy had laughed at them for it — so old-fashioned — and the girl, furious, had refused to wear them ever again.

Getting out of bed was becoming an increasingly difficult task. Every morning she walked into the classroom in the biting cold and the first thing she did was breathe on her hands. The classroom had no air conditioning and no heat. Her hands would go numb during homework, requiring a good rub before she could write properly — but once the writing warmed them up, it was fine.

Once winter came, it seemed to announce that something was ending. It gave everything an inexplicable sense of urgency.

The students’ approach to their work grew more anxious too. At the end of this term came the arts-and-sciences split, and the split came with placement into either the sciences advanced class or the arts advanced class — spots were limited, but everyone wanted one.

The students in Class 1, confident in their abilities, had spent the first part of the semester keeping all nine subjects up. But the landscape had shifted. Competition was fierce, time was scarce, and most of them had made the call to quietly let go of the subjects they wouldn’t be taking going forward. Of the thirty-seven students, nearly all were aiming for the sciences advanced class — so politics, history, and geography had become decidedly unfashionable all at once. Even the teachers who came to teach those classes could feel the subtle shift, and though there was nothing to be done, they sighed and carried on. Still, when someone was caught doing physics homework during geography class, the geography teacher erupted — shaking with anger, asking how hard it was to show a teacher basic respect.

Someone muttered from the back: “It’s not like anyone thinks to respect the music teacher or the P.E. teacher when those classes get taken over for exam prep.”

After the geography teacher’s outburst, at least no one dared openly ignore the humanities classes anymore. But the mentality had changed entirely — they listened to those lessons the way they listened to stories: a form of relaxation.

Li Kuiyi, however, treated every subject the same — listening attentively and taking notes with meticulous care.