Although Lin Wanxing understood clearly that Coach Wang was encouraging students to think for themselves, she still felt his teaching method had “borrowed” elements.

After showering that evening, Lin Wanxing worked on the rooftop terrace, her laptop open on the wooden table.

She was organizing the students’ names and identity information.

According to the committee’s latest schedule, their match against the Yongchuan Hengda Youth Team would begin at 8:00 AM on Sunday, so everyone needed to travel to Yongchuan a day early.

The school bus couldn’t stay overnight with them as it was needed the next day. So she discussed with Teacher Qian how to handle the students’ travel and accommodation. Teacher Qian felt that with the poor weather lately, frequent morning fog, and recent highway robbery cases, they should book high-speed train tickets for the students, putting safety first.

Lin Wanxing verified all the students’ identity information, booked the high-speed train tickets, and reserved hotel rooms near the match venue according to the budget.

Downstairs, the evening news shifted from “highway robbery cases” to reports about recently targeted criminal gangs. The host was announcing the gang’s crimes including robbery, illegal activities, organizing underground gambling on soccer matches, and other offenses.

The neighbor across the hall was showering. The sound of running water and news became the background of Lin Wanxing’s work. Just as she finished these tasks, Wang Fa finished his shower and pushed open the door.

The spring evening was still cold on the rooftop, with the wind carrying the scent of lemon-mint shower gel. Outside, a light rain had started falling. Lin Wanxing worked barefoot, opening a new email page. She uploaded the match schedule and other content, typed out her message with rapid keystrokes, hit send, and finally looked up to complain to Wang Fa, “Just because you made them write essays, Grandma downstairs said the children left unhappy, telling us not to put so much pressure on them.”

A large blanket descended from above, covering Lin Wanxing’s head, instantly enveloping her in the lemon-mint scent. She struggled a bit, adjusted her position, and tucked her feet under the blanket.

“Learned from Teacher Lin.” Wang Fa sat down across from her, drying his hair with a waffle-textured towel. “Teaching methods evolve with the times.”

“Evolving toward laziness!” Lin Wanxing laughed, picking up a nearby can to take a sip before realizing the Sprite was empty.

Wang Fa was already brewing tea.

On the table was a pack of tea leaves wrapped in oil paper, printed with red characters reading “Manufactured by Wannan Village Tea Factory.”

The soft waffle-textured towel lay at hand. The spring night temperature was a bit low, but the small stove provided a soft, quiet warmth.

Lin Wanxing had always felt that although Wang Fa had lived abroad for a long time, he didn’t have many obvious foreign habits. He didn’t talk much, spoke Chinese without problems, and was occasionally quite humorous.

Just as she thought this, Wang Fa’s gaze drifted toward her. Lin Wanxing’s eyes met his, causing her to cough lightly.

“What does Teacher Lin want to ask?” Wang Fa inquired.

“Ah!” Lin Wanxing was about to speak when she suddenly noticed something on her computer screen. She pressed pause and asked Wang Fa, “Actually, Coach knew from the beginning, right?”

Lin Wanxing was watching the video of their earliest match against Yongchuan Hengda. Her soccer knowledge had been accumulating bit by bit recently, but she could sense that in the video, Wen Chengye wasn’t completely disrupting things intentionally or refusing to defend properly. Sometimes he seemed like a sharp hunting dog, always ready to charge.

“Knew what?”

“About Wen Chengye…” Lin Wanxing thought for a moment, then said, “Wen Chengye wasn’t deliberately uncooperative; he had his ideas.”

“Where?” Wang Fa asked.

Lin Wanxing promptly lifted the blanket, picked up her laptop, and prepared to sit beside Wang Fa to watch the match together. But before her backside touched the bench, she noticed Wang Fa’s gaze falling on the blanket at the opposite side of the table.

Lin Wanxing quickly put down the computer and hurried back to retrieve the blanket, covering herself.

Only then did Wang Fa shift his gaze to the laptop screen.

The water had just been put on to boil, not yet heated through, with the soft crackling of firewood in the air.

On the field, whenever Wen Chengye made a move, Lin Wanxing would pause the video.

“This is deliberately playing poorly,” Wang Fa said.

Lin Wanxing felt awkward, let the video play for a while, then paused again.

“What about this?”

“A very good counterattack idea.”

“And here?”

“A misjudgment.”

Under the rooftop’s dim yellow light, each time Lin Wanxing paused, Wang Fa could offer an interpretation of Wen Chengye’s intentions.

It seemed as if he had watched these matches many times.

Another possibility was that at the time these matches were taking place, Wang Fa already understood the players’ intentions and the flow of the game.

Perhaps not just during matches, but in daily training and game reviews, he was clear about the players’ thoughts.

Lin Wanxing suddenly realized that Wang Fa had always been shepherding his lambs. Though he appeared lazy and casual, he would pull them back when they were about to cross boundaries.

He had always been in control of this team, with that decisive “forfeit” being the best proof.

But why hadn’t he expressed any opinion about Wen Chengye’s performance before? Why did he wait until conflicts had escalated and the team had disbanded before letting the players look back at the match once they had calmed down?

The water in the iron kettle was just about to boil, the sizzling sound in the air growing louder.

Lin Wanxing pondered, her pen tapping lightly on her draft paper.

Wang Fa warmed the teacups, his expression serene, beginning the leisurely tea-brewing process.

Many times, the image of Wen Chengye ignoring instructions during training flashed in Lin Wanxing’s mind. The students’ disputes on the field, Wen Chengye choosing to dribble himself during “return pass training,” completely ignoring arrangements…

A cup of fresh tea was placed at her side.

Lin Wanxing instinctively picked it up and took a sip, immediately feeling the fragrance fill her mouth.

Turning a page in her draft book, Lin Wanxing suddenly realized that the draft notebook she was using today was made from students’ old homework papers bound together.

It was a fill-in-the-blank exercise for classical Chinese poetry.

“Looking South of the Yangtze River – Written at Chaoran Terrace”

Song Dynasty: Su Shi

Spring is not yet old, the wind blows the willows askew. I tried climbing Chaoran Terrace to look out, half the moat filled with spring water, the entire city in bloom.

After the Cold Food Festival, sobering from wine brings only sighs. Don’t face old friends and think of the old country, instead try new fire to brew new tea.

The handwriting was crooked, but remarkably, those two lines of poetry were correctly filled in.

Looking at the top left corner, in the name field, it read “Wen Chengye.”

Lin Wanxing twirled her pen and marked it with a check.

In the night, fine rain moved from one side of the city to the other.

Fuan Garden was Hongjing’s earliest villa community, and because of its age, every building looked somewhat dilapidated.

The remnants of Virginia creeper hung on the brick walls. The community had no separate paths for vehicles and pedestrians, so even sitting in your room, you could hear cars rolling over the small roads outside, making a “clunk” sound when passing over manhole covers, producing a teeth-jarring noise.

Fuan Garden, Building 14.

Overall, it was a very lively house.

Downstairs, the housekeeper had just cleared the dining table, while the ladies’ mahjong game continued. The house had not been peaceful these past few days; the picture frames on the walls and the visibly damaged porcelain ornaments all testified to fierce conflicts that had occurred.

But this didn’t mean the home wasn’t warm.

The old villa district had no floor heating, but two oil radiators stood by the ladies’ mahjong table. As the little housekeeper approached with tea and cake, she felt the warm air hitting her face. The amber-colored Earl Grey tea poured steaming into cups as she overheard the ladies’ conversation.

Ms. Li was talking about a new counter boy she had recently met.

Mrs. Wang said he was certainly nothing good.

As they played mahjong, they took time to analyze the counter boy’s social media, checking if it was clean, and if there was any potential.

Finally, Mrs. Chen looked at the mistress of the house and said, “Mrs. Wen has experience with these things.”

The housekeeper, who was pouring tea, almost spilled it in shock.

But their mistress remained unperturbed, playing a one bamboo tile, “What experience? Wasn’t it just my dead ex-husband constantly finding women outside? I never expected that during a Spring Festival vacation, he would even sleep with his business partner’s female secretary, leaving us stranded in a hellhole like Iceland.”

“Old Wen is dead?”

“You divorced?”

The ladies at the table were all stunned.

“Dead or not, divorced or not, what’s the difference?” Mrs. Wen said leisurely.

“Have you divided the property yet?”

“How did you structure your equity before?”

In an instant, the ladies began to gossip again.

Taking advantage of everyone’s surprise, Mrs. Wen smiled with satisfaction, revealing a tile she had just drawn, and declared, “Self-drawn win.”

The ladies at the table began to protest.

Mrs. Wen said, “I won’t be short a single penny of my money, I still have my son. My son received another award from school today. The most reliable is still my good boy.”

Mrs. Chen quite obviously rolled her eyes.

Ms. Li lowered her head to continue browsing the counter boy’s social media.

For a moment, the mahjong game was disrupted, the tiles reshuffled, and the room once again filled with the shuffling sound of mahjong tiles.

Sound could penetrate through the floorboards, but the warmth from downstairs could not.

The room at the end of the second floor was dim and cold.

It was unclear whether the air conditioning was broken or if it was the preference of the room’s occupant. Either way, in the spacious room, only the computer screen provided light. The atmosphere was icy, freezing one’s hands and feet.

On the screen, only a small area of the Summoner’s Rift map was illuminated, with most areas in the fog of war.

Through the headphones, the death notifications of teammates sounded one after another, but the Fiora on screen was focused solely on destroying the defensive tower in front of her.

Suddenly, question mark pings appeared around the sleek female character in the game.

Teammates typed in public chat, flaming Fiora for not joining team fights.

A pair of hands moved to the keyboard, typed in the chat box: “mute all,” pressed Enter, and continued the solo game.

The game progressed dramatically, but it had nothing to do with the top laner. The portraits in the bottom right flickered, teammates died and respawned, but the Fiora in the championship skin simply repeated the routine of farming minions, pushing towers, getting killed, and returning to lane.

As both sides pushed into the high ground, teammates fell one after another near our team’s crystal.

At the other end of the rift, Fiora delivered the final blow, causing the crystal to explode in blue light.

The victory icon flashed.

Simultaneously, in the bottom right of the screen, the mailbox indicated a new email had arrived.

A pair of hands lightly pressed on the mouse, instinctively wanting to click the X, but stopped upon seeing the sender.

A moment later, the window switched, and the email was opened.

The argument downstairs had started when the black sedan returned.

First came the loud engine noise invading the night, then the tires scraped over a manhole cover with a “clunk,” followed by the brake sound, the car door opening and being slammed shut with a “bang.”

At the mahjong table, Mrs. Wen’s expression visibly changed. Following this was the violently pushed open front door. Cold wind and fine rain poured into the house, and Mr. Wen’s figure appeared under the entrance hall chandelier.

A couple whose marriage had already collapsed did not need to maintain any pretense.

Mr. Wen didn’t even change his shoes, walking directly to the mahjong table.

Just as the ladies at the table put on shocked expressions, Mr. Wen kicked over the table, sending mahjong tiles raining down like a violent storm.

“Whore, you’ve taken your men to the school?”

With a furious roar, the cold window frame upstairs shook a few times.

Mahjong tiles rolled across the floor, crashing everywhere, with cries of “slut” and “cheap man” resounding. These sounds suddenly escalated, invading every corner of the small building.

Until—

At the desk in the second-floor room.

The computer window had already switched from “League of Legends” to the inbox.

Bright white light cast down from the screen, yet it seemed to possess a strange magic, temporarily isolating those particularly shrill sounds of quarreling.

The window displayed a row of emails.

The title of the topmost one was “Hongjing No. 8 Middle School Football Team Schedule and Related Assignments.”

A hand, frozen white with cold, gripped the mouse, double-clicked, and opened the email.

As the letter gradually unfolded, the spine-chilling background noise faded away, and a light, cheerful female voice emerged…

Hello Wen Chengye:

1. As per the committee’s notice, the latest Youth Super League schedule is set for 8 AM next Sunday. We will face the Yongchuan Hengda Youth Team at their home field.

The specific match address and location are shown in the image below.

2. The coach assigned a review assignment today, asking everyone to write a short essay titled: “A Brief Discussion on Methods for a 10-Person High School Team to Defeat Yongchuan Hengda Youth Team.” I hope you submit your assignment on time before next Sunday.

3. I will send you the match review video via cloud storage for you to download.

PS: We’re taking the high-speed train to Yongchuan. The time and train number are as follows. You’ll have a surprise when you scan your ID card at the station.

Finally:

Where’s my homework? Where’s my homework? Where’s my homework?

When will you submit my homework?

Your beloved teacher, Lin Wanxing

Year X Month X Day

A map of the match location, cloud storage address, and train ticket screenshots were all attached at the bottom of the email.

Mixing formal and informal tones, as Wen Chengye dragged those screenshots to the end, a sense of absurdity spread in his heart.

After a long time, long enough for the voices downstairs to gradually subside, he switched the computer window.

Copy, paste, enter password…

The mouse hovered over the download button for a moment as the old villa’s wooden stairs creaked.

Mr. Wen stepped onto the second floor and pushed open the door with force.

Light from the hallway flooded into the room, making it seem even darker inside.

“Good son, how have you been at school these past few days?” Father Wen switched to a gentle smile.

The computer window was quickly changed. Wen Chengye’s fingers moved slightly. He covered the homework on the desk with draft paper and looked coldly toward the doorway.

“Next Sunday, Dad has arranged a meeting with a teacher from the overseas education agency for you at 8 AM. Driver Zhang will come to pick you up, so get up early.”

No response.

“Good son, sleep early.” Mr. Wen closed the door.

Downstairs, the woman cried even more heartbrokenly.

“Wen Zihuan! Don’t think about taking my son away! He’s MY son!”

The door was slammed shut heavily.

The room returned to silence.

The computer screen became the only light source in the room, faintly illuminating those few pages hidden under the paper.

The cursor moved.

“Are you sure you want to download this content?”

The person at the desk put the headphones back on and blew a breath of warm air into his palm.

Then he lightly clicked the mouse.