At the ski resort’s summit, inside a cable car.
A man and a woman occupied the entire cable car. Two park-specific snowboards hung outside, trembling slightly in the morning breeze. Inside, silence reigned.
The girl who had arranged lessons with Shan Chong through Huayan was named Huhu. She was staying at a hotel near the base of the ski resort. They had agreed to meet for lessons at the summit early this morning. Shan Chong had gone down the mountain to collect new protective gear from the equipment shop owner and picked her up on his way back up.
Today, they were scheduled for a two-hour lesson, costing 12,000 yuan.
For other instructors, 12,000 yuan would conservatively cover about twenty lessons.
But when Huhu first stepped out of the hotel lobby and saw the man leaning against a Beijing BJ-30 car, smoking, she felt the money was well spent.
[White Fox: I got a lesson with Shan Chong!]
[White Fox: Crying! It wasn’t in vain that I came to Chongli. The 3,000 yuan flight was worth it! He’s just as handsome as in the videos, aaahhh!]
[White Fox: No, he’s even more handsome.]
[White Fox: What should I say to him? Should I jump straight into discussing the lesson? Wouldn’t that be too stiff?]
While excitedly texting her friends, she kept sneaking glances at the man sitting opposite her. He was leaning back in his seat, relatively relaxed, holding his outdated iPhone 7 with one hand, slowly moving a finger across the screen.
She wondered who he might be texting.
After finishing his message, he stared at the screen for a moment. Whether the other person hadn’t replied or for some other reason, he clicked his tongue impatiently, furrowing his brow slightly.
His finger swiped across the screen a couple of times, presumably switching to a different chat. He brought the phone to his lips: “You’re at the mid-mountain slope today, right? Ask in the group if anyone’s on the advanced run. Tell them to keep an eye out for anyone who shouldn’t be there.”
A few seconds later, the phone chimed with a new message.
Shan Chong tapped it, and a rough, masculine voice crackled through the phone’s worn-out speaker: “Yeah, what’s up, Master? I’m at the mid-mountain slope! Who? Who shouldn’t be on the advanced run?”
Shan Chong pondered for a moment.
“The current holder of the turtle butt pad.”
He paused, then added, “I have a lesson today, so she went by herself. If you see her on the advanced run in your area, have someone bring her down.”
The advanced run at the mid-mountain slope was on the mountainside, not too steep, with a long stretch along the mountain without safety nets.
Experienced riders usually didn’t take beginners there.
But novices going alone could easily take a wrong turn and end up there. One wrong move, and they’d crash into a tree.
They wouldn’t die.
But they might not escape being carried down the mountain by the rescue team.
After arranging this sabotage, Shan Chong switched back to check another chat. The girl’s avatar was lit up. He opened it to find a listless “Okay, thanks,” the perfunctory tone practically leaping off the screen.
His cautionary message had sunk like a stone.
He began to wonder if his tone had been too gentle, leading to a lack of authority and his words being ignored.
Putting away his phone, he finally looked up calmly at today’s student. Although he had been looking down at his phone, he could feel her intense gaze on him for quite some time.
The moment their eyes met, he saw the girl’s eyes light up.
Shan Chong: “…”
Shan Chong: “Learning lines?”
Shan Chong’s words were concise.
This opened the conversation.
Huhu sat up straighter and began to enthusiastically describe her learning progress: “Yes, I came to Chongli mainly to learn lines. I’ve been practicing various grabs on the trampoline, and I’ve tried melons on the dry slope air cushion, but I can only do melons. I can’t fully rotate…”
She wasn’t speaking quickly, but it was enough for Shan Chong to start zoning out after a couple of sentences. He raised an eyebrow and interrupted her, focusing on the key point: “Have you done melons on real snow?”
Huhu shook her head.
Before Shan Chong could respond, the cable car arrived.
Shan Chong exited first, grabbed his board, and headed towards the entrance of the advanced B run leading to the park. After a few steps, not hearing the “tap tap” of footsteps beside him, he habitually glanced back. The girl following him, carrying her board, was quite tall with bright pink hair that shone brilliantly in the sunlight.
Shan Chong: “…”
He turned back without waiting for her to catch up and continued walking.
At the entrance to the advanced run, he efficiently strapped on his board and descended the advanced B run. He instructed Huhu to ride in front while he silently followed behind. After about ten minutes of riding, they reached the park entrance.
As Huhu turned around, she caught sight of Shan Chong performing a nollie 360, landing with a small pivot to come to her side. He glanced up at her and said flatly, “To be honest, I think you’re entering the park too early.”
Huhu: “?”
“It’s better to master basic riding before entering the park. Otherwise, progress is slow, and the tricks you manage to do won’t look good. It’s pointless,” he said emotionlessly. Without considering how cold and cruel his words might sound, he nodded towards the park, “Go on, small jump, no tricks, just straight air.”
Huhu: “…”
Before Huhu could react, he had already entered the park.
He went straight for the small jump, riding straight, approaching the takeoff, his body stretching into a taut bow as he launched. He jumped high, nearly twice the height of the small jump at his apex. He tucked his legs, grabbed his board, and executed a forward 720, landing smoothly.
A beautiful and textbook-perfect line 720 was completed, as if by a cold, emotionless snowboarding machine.
Shan Chong stood at the base of the one-meter jump, hands behind his back, balancing on his toe edge. He nodded towards the girl standing at the park entrance: “Your turn.”
Huhu: “…”
…
It was Huhu’s first time hitting a jump on real snow. Unlike the air cushion, real snow was hard, and the force and height of the takeoff were different. Under Shan Chong’s watchful eye, she shakily approached the small jump and took off—
Unlike Shan Chong, her highest point was the same as her takeoff height.
But with the basic theoretical posture in mind, she hastily tucked her legs as soon as she left the jump, then extended them, landing heavily, nearly catching her toe edge…
She managed to stay upright without falling.
The girl came to a wobbly stop in front of Shan Chong.
Shan Chong remained silent.
He was tempted to pull out his phone and scold Huayan—
In the future, he wouldn’t believe a word when these people reported their skill level unless he saw it with his own eyes.
“You tucked too early, pulling the board before even extending your legs. What’s the rush?” He critiqued slowly, suppressing his irritation. “Forget about lines for now. If you can understand the breakdown of melon and backside 360 off the jump in these two lessons, you’ll have gotten your money’s worth.”
With that, he bent down and unstrapped his board, casually propping it against the fence at the park entrance. He found an open space and called Huhu over…
They started practicing flat-ground backside 180s.
“Pre-rotate your body, squat down, let your arms lead your shoulders, twist in the opposite direction of your forward motion, keep your head facing forward as you spin, jump, swing, and when you land stable your head should still be facing the direction of travel—”
“Pre-rotate.”
“Spin.”
“Not enough pre-rotation, your core is loose. You’ll fall if you try this on a jump.” “Core.”
“Do you even know where your core is?”
The man’s cold voice echoed across the small park.
Whether the young lady still found this Chongli trip as sweet as she did in the cable car earlier remained unknown.
Fortunately, Huhu had some figure skating background, so her flat-ground spins were passable. After a bit of struggle with the pre-rotation angle and core tension, she successfully executed a 180. After mastering the 180, they moved on to the 360s. Only then did Shan Chong strap back into his board…
He then found a small snow mound and had her hit it, incorporating the moves they’d practiced.
The snow mound was just a small pile of snow.
But even on this small feature (not even a proper jump), Huhu’s lack of basic riding skills became glaringly apparent—
She was unstable even riding straight, her weight not centered between her feet. As she approached the mound, she stared at her feet, hastily jumped, and became airborne.
Once in the air, she panicked a bit, momentarily forgetting whether she should extend first or pre-rotate…
In her confusion, she tried to do both at once.
As a result, both movements were distorted.
Her heart sank as she realized she had taken off but was going to land at an angle. Terrified, she let out a scream mid-air and closed her eyes—
The expected pain of her right arm hitting the ground first never came.
Instead, a pair of strong hands appeared behind her, firmly grasping her waist. They guided her already tilting body forward, using the momentum to dissipate the force!
The two snowboards scraped loudly across the snow surface with a sharp “swoosh”!
Eyes still closed, Huhu felt a twinge of pain where she was gripped around the waist. She sensed that she had been swung in a large arc, the tail of her board digging hard into the snow. A strong centrifugal force hit her before she finally came to a stable stop!
The unfamiliar man’s scent mixed with the cold smell of snow kicked up by the boards filled her nostrils. Her heart pounded fiercely a few times as she opened her eyes and instinctively looked back—
The handsome man who had descended like a guardian deity to protect her was mere inches away. His high, straight nose and the single-colored mole on the bridge were right before her eyes.
Huhu’s lips parted slightly, her heart now beating even faster than before. Still shaken, she felt her face rapidly warming up…
At the same time.
Shan Chong unhesitatingly released her waist, straightened his board, and slid a few meters down, distancing himself from her.
“A piece of advice: go back and spend a season mastering basic riding before entering the park,” he said emotionlessly. “I’ll refund your money in a bit. Go find someone who can teach you the basics.”
“…”
“Class dismissed.”
*
Meanwhile, at the mid-mountain slope.
Wei Zhi had no idea that her beloved master had already dispatched a pack of hounds to hunt her down on the mountain.
The advanced run at the mid-mountain slope was much narrower than the one at the summit. Due to higher temperatures, even early in the morning, the slope was already dotted with snow clumps, making it quite uneven…
As a result, Wei Zhi struggled to maintain stability even while side-slipping.
Coming down from the top of the advanced run, she only dared to try falling leaf turns on her toe and heel edges—attempting C-turns on a straight board was out of the question. She had mustered the courage to try once, but it was a complete failure—
The slightest disturbance, even a tiny pebble on the slope, could send her tumbling…
From start to finish, it was a series of rolls and tumbles. For the first half of the run, she practically slid down face-first.
But Shan Chong wasn’t there.
With no one to complain to when she fell, she could only spit out the snow in her mouth with a “ptui ptui,” silently dust off her backside, get up, and continue struggling. Fall again, get up again.
Stumbling along like this, she reached the halfway point of the run where it forked. She chose what looked like a slightly flatter path and continued down…
At this point, Wei Zhi was unaware that this path led directly to the mid-mountain terrain park.
As she clumsily practiced heel-edge C-turns, she watched several experts glide past her in various impressive stances. One of them, perhaps noticing a lone girl with a turtle backpack wobbling along the side of the run, even showed off a bit—
Just some carving on the steep sections and a couple of flat-ground tricks on the gentler slopes.
To be honest, Wei Zhi had seen her fair share of experts. She might be a novice, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t witnessed skilled riders… These showoffs, with all their fancy moves, still didn’t seem as impressive to her as that rude guy in the white snowsuit who had sprayed snow at her the other day.
So after watching two or three people perform, she lost interest.
Goggles on, indifferent to all, she continued her clumsy C-turn practice—
Side-slip, falling leaf, pivot the board, straighten it out.
Wei Zhi diligently repeated these movements, each time trying to keep the board straight for a little longer. But whenever she maintained a straight line for too long, her speed would quickly exceed her comfort zone!
Finally, after one straight run, she frantically flailed her arms, clumsily grabbing the side netting and sliding down on her backside for four or five meters before managing to stop, every part of her body splattered with snow.
She slowly got up, removing her helmet and goggles. The young girl’s face was covered in snow. Already fair-skinned, now with snow caught in her face guard and her cheeks flushed from the cold, she took off her helmet and shook the snow from her shoulder-length curly hair…
She was still wearing her gloves.
Her snowsuit was thick, and the rented board was a bit long for her. From a distance, she looked like a small bundle huddled against the side netting, earnestly cleaning herself up after the fall.
Many passersby couldn’t help but look, though the young girl remained oblivious. Fortunately, most just glanced and moved on after a moment’s hesitation.
But there were always a few overconfident ones.
Now that Wei Zhi had cleared the snow from her hair while standing on her snowboard, she faced a new dilemma: while moving, it wasn’t so bad, but once she stopped, a burning pain appeared in her heels, accompanied by a throbbing ache in a large area of flesh…
Even without removing her snow boots, she knew she had probably chafed the skin raw.
She wondered how much longer this run was.
As she patted her hands and sighed, craning her neck to see if she could spot the equipment hall at the bottom of the mountain, she suddenly heard a young male voice from behind—
“When you’re riding straight, you need to lean forward. The more you fear speed and shift your weight back, the more pressure you put on your back foot, which makes you go faster.”
Wei Zhi paused, turning around.
The young man standing behind her saw this scene: a small girl sitting at the edge of the run, turning back with a bewildered expression, red lips contrasting with white teeth, her black curly hair splayed across her light-colored snowsuit like seaweed…
Her eyes were large, her face chubby and very cute.
He paused before continuing in a serious tone: “If you don’t know what ‘shifting weight back’ means, you can try this: when riding straight, reach down towards your lead knee… This will naturally shift your center of gravity forward.”
Wei Zhi stared blankly at this suddenly appeared, suddenly teaching young man—
He wore a loose hoodie with colorful ribbons hanging from his pants. Instead of a proper helmet, he wore a soft-shell bucket hat.
He had goggles on, with a faceguard pulled down to his chin.
Then she recognized him—he was Rider B, who had been chatting with the one-armed Rider A earlier. She remembered hearing them mention something about the Wantongtang Club, and she had thought to herself that they must be real experts—
Having a club affiliation = expert.
That was novice Wei Zhi’s logic.
“I’m afraid to lean forward, the path ahead is very uneven,” Wei Zhi said. “I always feel like I’m about to fly off at any moment.”
The young man who had come to chat, hearing her honest response and noting her non-resistant tone, smiled at her.
“I’m K. You were sitting at the table next to us in the coffee shop earlier, right? I recognized your snowsuit and turtle backpack.”
He said, “Come on, want to ride together for a couple of runs?”
…
By the time Wei Zhi realized what was happening, she had already been led into the terrain park.
—If she had arrived twenty minutes earlier, she would have seen Bei Ci and some of her fellow disciples playing here. But by a twist of fate, at their master’s command, everyone had left the park and spread out across various advanced runs.
…If they knew that the person they were looking for had been snatched away by a Wantongtang Club “wild dog,” they might have died of anger.
“It’s so empty today,” K said, looking around before smiling at Wei Zhi. “When riding park features, you usually have a long straight approach. Try it out more, and hit some small jumps. Once you get used to the jumps, you’ll naturally ignore small bumps on regular slopes.”
Wei Zhi was skeptical.
But firstly, she was a beginner after all, and this person’s earlier explanation about “shifting weight” had seemed logical, so she felt he might know what he was talking about.
Secondly, although it was a park feature, the “jump” he mentioned wasn’t very high, just a small bump on the snow.
The expert who brought her into the park gave her some tips on hitting jumps, mainly to keep the board straight, maintain her center of gravity over the middle of the board, and just go for it—unlike the bumps on the regular slopes, she could see the takeoff point of park jumps, which helped overcome fear and prepare for landing.
Once she got used to park jumps, unexpected bumps on the slopes wouldn’t scare her anymore.
…This reasoning sounded a bit off, but upon closer consideration, it seemed to make some sense.
Standing at the starting point, Wei Zhi still hesitated: “I don’t know how to change edges yet. Can I hit a jump?”
“I’m not asking you to do a 180 switch landing,” K said. “What does edge control have to do with it? Just keep the board straight—fly, pull your center of gravity—land.”
Wei Zhi believed his nonsense.
She just pointed her board straight and set off.
With her board aimed directly at the jump, her speed increased rapidly. She instinctively wanted to brake with her heel edge, wobbling a bit, when K’s voice reached her ears: “Hold on! Don’t brake! Overcome the speed, you’ll get used to it!”
And so, in the sparsely populated park, a young girl who hadn’t even learned to change edges yet rode her snowboard up the jump—the jump that had seemed insignificant now felt terrifyingly real as she became airborne.
In that second, Wei Zhi’s heart sank as she realized something was wrong, but it was too late for regrets. Her entire body launched off the run, pitching forward!
As her whole body scraped harshly across the snow, sliding forward, the already raw skin on her heel likely suffered earth-shattering friction inside her snow boot—
The pain was probably comparable to one of the top ten ancient tortures, like having red-hot steel brushes scrape flesh off your body.
For a moment, her mind went blank.
She forgot who she was, why she was here, what she had done to deserve such pain…
Wei Zhi crashed to the ground, harder than ever before.
Besides the pain in her chest from slamming into the cold, hard snow surface, feeling like it was about to cave in, her heel felt like someone had directly carved out a large chunk of flesh with a knife…
Tears flowed uncontrollably, a purely physiological response. She lay in the snow for a long while, unable to get up, with only three words in her mind: F*ck, I’m done.
Through tear-blurred vision, she lay sprawled in the snow, her body feeling like it was falling apart. She saw a black figure appear at the park entrance.
That person glanced over and paused for a moment.
Then unstrapped his board, tossed it aside, and rushed over.
He dragged her up from the ground.
His movements were swift and decisive.
And so, with snot and tears streaming down her face, she buried her face in Bei Ci’s chest, her legs weak as he supported her under the arms, dragging her up from the cold snow…
In full view of everyone.
That soft, feminine bundle, crying “It hurts, it hurts” “My foot” “Don’t, don’t pull, my foot hurts so much,” while clutching at the young man’s chest, sobbing and gasping for breath.
Crying so hard her teeth chattered, she still managed to emphasize—
“If you dare tell you-know-who about this, I’ll smash my head against that metal barrel right now, I’m serious, you hear me!”