The afternoon exam was for the humanities and social sciences. The last exam hall had the same supervisor as before — the dean of discipline, Blackie — and the only sounds in the room were the air conditioning vent and his footsteps as he paced back and forth.

Most of the students at No. 10 High were more than a little intimidated by Blackie. With him in charge, cheating was simply not an option. Students sat rigid at their desks, not daring to turn their heads or glance around — spinning their pens aimlessly, unable to squeeze out more than five words in half an hour.

Lin Tao propped her cheek on one hand and worked through the multiple-choice questions with the other, marking off answers one by one. By the time she’d finished that section, her eyelids had already started their slow revolt. She adjusted her head into a more concealed position, settling in for a brief nap.

She hadn’t been asleep for more than a few minutes when something poked her in the back — not too hard, not too gentle, landing squarely on her spine.

Getting literally poked in the back felt like a verdict on her character. Lin Tao thought the situation might be a little serious.

She shifted her neck, which had begun to stiffen, and glanced toward the door. Blackie was outside in the corridor, talking to another teacher. She quickly turned to look behind her.

A completely unfamiliar face looked back at her.

Lin Tao lifted an eyebrow. She slid her exam booklet — answer sheet filled in only for the multiple choice section — over to the side.

The message was obvious.

Look and copy if you want. I’ve barely written anything either.

The small exchange complete, Blackie came back into the room. That brief poke had jolted Lin Tao awake, and she scrubbed her face and got back to work.

The reasons behind the Qing Dynasty reforms were… This represents a core concept of socialism with Chinese characteristics… The Kuroshio Current…

She wrote on steadily, filling page after page.

About an hour later, Lin Tao set down her pen and leaned back in her chair, letting her body unwind. A few seconds passed, then she worked her jaw, and — glancing up to make sure Blackie was occupied — slipped a piece of candy out of her pocket and tucked it swiftly into her mouth.

There was still half an hour left until the end of the exam.

Lin Tao looked over her answers, rolling the candy against her tongue, when something came back to her. Her arm gradually lowered.

Quiet rustling had begun to spread through the room. Somewhere in the corners, a few fearless souls — determined to salvage their summer break — had quietly launched a covert operation.

Xu Yichuan, from the back row, grumbled under his breath at Jiang Yan beside him: “Hey, could you write a bit bigger next time? I can’t read a thing.”

Jiang Yan shifted his exam paper slightly to the side. “Be grateful I’m letting you copy at all. So many complaints.”

Xu Yichuan grinned shamelessly. “Aw, come on — you’re the best, Yan. Love you.”

“…” Jiang Yan said nothing. But his gaze had drifted, settling somewhere in the direction of Lin Tao, seated diagonally in front of him.

From this angle, he could only catch half her profile — yet her features were fine, her skin fairer than most girls’. Her hair, neither very short nor particularly long, was tied back simply with a plain black elastic. She wasn’t wearing a jacket, just a short-sleeved uniform top with blue trim at the cuffs, and the arm visible from where he sat was pale and slender.

Right now, that arm had dropped to her side, her long, narrow fingers tapping a quiet rhythm against the leg of her chair.

Jiang Yan watched her fingers, watched as her arm slowly curved behind her back, watched as she curled her knuckles and rapped lightly on the desk of the girl seated behind her.

“?”

Something like amusement registered in his expression. He leaned against the wall, head resting on one hand, and watched Lin Tao quietly retract her arm, then shift her whole body to the right.

“Still looking out for others, even now,” Jiang Yan murmured under his breath.

Xu Yichuan, busy copying beside him, took a second to process this and assumed he was talking about copying homework. He raised his voice without thinking: “What was that? Speak up — I can’t hear you.”

Jiang Yan: “…”

Why, of all people, had he ended up friends with this particular fool.

When the humanities exam ended, the girl seated behind Lin Tao grabbed her arm before she could leave. “Hey — thank you so much for just now. I thought I was completely done for. I’m so glad there was someone as kind as you in this exam hall. Which class are you in? I’ll treat you to a meal after exams are over.”

Lin Tao offered a polite smile. “Class Six.”

For now, she added silently. That’s about to change.

“Alright, it’s settled then — once the English exam wraps up tomorrow, I’ll come find you.”

The girl spoke so quickly that Lin Tao couldn’t get a word in edgewise.

By the time she was ready to decline the invitation, the girl had already pulled out her phone. “Do you have any way I can reach you? I’m worried I won’t be able to find you after the exam tomorrow.”

That would be ideal.

Lin Tao performed a careful search of her pockets, then looked up with an expression of sincere regret. “Sorry — I didn’t bring my phone today. I can’t remember my QQ number off the top of my head, and my phone number is too long for me to have memorized it. I really don’t have any way to reach me.”

The girl: “…”

Jiang Yan, passing by from behind just in time to hear this: “…”

Honestly — finding someone who could spin a more brazen lie than him, while keeping a perfectly straight face, was a rare and remarkable thing. He had clearly just watched her put her phone in her jacket pocket.

In a spirit of pure public-spiritedness, Jiang Yan spoke up: “I think your phone is in your school uniform pocket. Memory slipping on you?”

Lin Tao: “…”

If she hadn’t just found out that very afternoon that this person had single-handedly taken on an entire class of boys, Lin Tao’s hand would already have found its way to his face by now.

As it stood — she wanted to. She just didn’t dare.

Lin Tao held the silence for a few seconds, then spoke through clenched teeth. “Well. Thank. You. Very. Much.”

Jiang Yan looked rather pleased with himself. “Not at all. Happy to help.”

Lin Tao: “…”

Oh, get lost.

Caught in a blatant lie in front of an audience, Lin Tao’s composure held admirably. She didn’t miss a beat, pivoting smoothly: “My phone’s tiny — I never feel it in my pocket. Anyway, you were asking for my contact information, right? Let’s add each other on QQ then.”

The pace of her speech was noticeably quicker than usual — not enough for most people to catch, but Jiang Yan, who had already sparred with her once before, picked up on it immediately.

He pressed his tongue against the inside of his cheek, and the corners of his mouth pulled upward. The lingering irritation left over from Xu Yichuan’s five-thousand-word incident dissolved considerably.

After the girl added Lin Tao on QQ, she took a call and left.

With the exam hall nearly emptied, Lin Tao scooped up her pencil case and walked past Jiang Yan without so much as glancing at him.

“Hey.” Xu Yichuan and the others had already been summoned to the office. Jiang Yan, left with nothing to do, fell into step behind her.

Lin Tao didn’t respond. She lengthened her strides — to the point where she was almost doing a split with every step. Jiang Yan swallowed a laugh, cut wide around her, and stepped in front of her to block her path. He bent his head and took a quick look at her eyes.

No redness. No trace of tears. The gaze fixed on him still carried its usual edge.

All clear.

The two of them came to a stop in the corridor. There hadn’t been many students assigned to this multimedia exam hall to begin with, and they’d spent extra time inside — the floor was nearly deserted by now.

Now and then, a student assigned to cleaning duty passed through. Anyone who caught a glimpse of Jiang Yan’s face couldn’t help but look twice — and then, almost immediately, looked twice at the girl standing across from him.

The notorious top dog — the one everyone said was exclusively interested in other boys — and a girl. Together in a corridor.

This is huge.

Two girls on their way downstairs to empty the trash couldn’t resist stealing another glance. Jiang Yan lazily shifted his gaze in their direction.

Both girls froze — then vanished around the corner with their trash bin in less than a second.

Jiang Yan watched them flee and felt vaguely puzzled. Was he really that frightening?

The thought didn’t occupy him long.

Because when he turned back around, ready to say something — the person who had been standing right in front of him had also disappeared without a trace.

Jiang Yan stood alone in the empty corridor, pressed his tongue to the inside of his cheek, and — suddenly, involuntarily — laughed.

Not far behind him, Xu Yichuan, Hu Hanghang, and Song Yuan had stopped in their tracks. They watched Jiang Yan standing there laughing at thin air, and felt a collective chill crawl up their spines.

Xu Yichuan rubbed his arms. “Did any of you… see something?”

Hu Hanghang swallowed, clutching Song Yuan’s arm. “Someone told me this building — someone died here once. And I think — I think it might have been right where Jiang Yan is standing.”

Jiang Yan heard them and turned around. He spotted all three of them, walked calmly over, and pointed at the empty air beside him with complete composure. “Gentlemen — allow me to introduce you to a new friend. This is Wan Nidou.”

The three of them stared at the spot next to him. When they confirmed there was absolutely nothing there but air, they bolted for the staircase at full speed, screaming all the way down: “THERE’S A GHOST!!!!!”

Jiang Yan strolled after them at a leisurely pace, in excellent spirits.

Whether or not Jiang Yan had some kind of influence on her, Lin Tao dreamed all night when she went to bed. She spent the dream as a wandering heroine — righting wrongs and punishing the wicked.

The consequence of dreaming such dramatic, adolescent dreams was that she woke the next morning to find a bruised patch of skin on the back of her hand — knocked against something in the night, apparently.

During morning reading, Meng Xin noticed the mark. “What happened to your hand?”

“No idea.” Lin Tao was gnawing on a straw in her yogurt pouch, digging through her bag for something with her free hand. “Probably thrashed around in my sleep and knocked into something.”

“Impressive.” Meng Xin fished a black pen out of her own pencil case and set it on the desk. “Here, stop searching — I’ll lend you one.”

Lin Tao inevitably lost something with every placement exam. Sometimes a textbook, sometimes just a pen refill — but something always went missing. It had become something of a personal tradition.

“Found it.” Lin Tao looked up, pulling a capless pen out of the bag, and scratched a line on a sheet of paper. Bone dry.

“…” Meng Xin reached for her own bag. “I’ll just head to the exam hall now.”

There were three subjects today: math in the morning, then the combined science exam and English in the afternoon. To fit everything in, the school had pushed all the starting times up by half an hour.

By the time Lin Tao arrived at the exam hall, most of her fellow examinees were already seated. One of the supervisors was there too, standing out in the corridor cradling a thermos, chatting with a teacher from another class.

Just as the warning bell rang, Jiang Yan and his crew came sprinting in, all four of them half-asleep, hair still disheveled — clearly rolling out of bed at the last minute.

Walking four abreast — shoulder to shoulder, filling the whole aisle — Jiang Yan came in last. Just as he stepped through the door, Lin Tao happened to look up.

He had his uniform on properly for once, jacket draped over one arm, but the carefully styled hair she’d seen on the previous occasions now flopped loosely across his forehead in a soft, undone kind of way.

He looked completely unthreatening.

Sensing eyes on him, Jiang Yan followed the gaze to its source.

A few seconds passed. Then, in full view of everyone in the exam hall, he directed a textbook ten-teeth smile at Lin Tao.

“Morning, fellow student Lin.”

“…”

Author’s Note: — Lin Tao: I really don’t want to engage with this person. / This person is probably some kind of idiot. / I think keeping my distance is the right call. / Stupidity might be contagious. —

Jiang Yan: …

Red envelopes in this chapter too! =w=