After Shan Chong’s video was edited and posted, the response was indeed extraordinary. On their way back to the hotel, in just a short hour or so, the video had garnered tens of thousands of views and thousands of comments.

There were praises, compliments, and even casual shipping in the comment section. The top three most-liked comments were:

1. I knew it, the throne of China’s top snowboard big air still belongs to you.

2. The king has returned.

3. You retire when you can jump so well? I thought you couldn’t jump anymore. I don’t know what you’re thinking.

The third comment wasn’t particularly friendly, and the 2,413 people who liked it certainly weren’t blind.

Sitting in the car, Wei Zhi held her phone, finally understanding what Shan Chong meant earlier when he said, “Jumping well doesn’t necessarily mean people will praise you.”

There were always sour comments, nitpicking, people sticking their noses where they didn’t belong, trying to control others’ words and actions, and even their lives…

The scariest part was that these people weren’t few.

She cautiously looked up at the front. The man was wearing a Bluetooth earpiece, and driving while talking to a sponsor on the phone. His expression was natural, and even when he stopped at a red light and looked down at the video comments, he didn’t even furrow his brow…

He must have seen those negative comments, but he acted as if he hadn’t.

He didn’t seem to care much about what these people said, normally submitting the link to the sponsor for review. At this moment, the other party was overwhelmed with gratitude, using phrases like “For a second, I started to wonder what good deed I did in my past life”—

After two years, Shan Chong returns to the snowboard big air using our board!

This advertisement would surely make this board the best-seller of this snow season!

On the phone, the sponsor was elated and offered to send Shan Chong two more pairs of shoes. The man thought for a moment, didn’t refuse, and glanced at the girl sitting in the back seat through the rearview mirror.

Sensing his gaze, she reflexively looked up at the rearview mirror too. Their eyes met in the mirror—

There’s a saying: when two people’s gazes meet in a mirror, it means that when you’re looking at them, they’re also looking at you.

Wei Zhi blinked.

Shan Chong withdrew his gaze and said to the person on the phone in a calm voice, “Do you have any new all-around women’s boards this year? Could you bring one?”

At this moment, if he asked for the stars in the sky, the other party would have stood on tiptoes to pluck them down for him. A mere women’s board was nothing, and they agreed without hesitation.

Having gotten what he wanted, the man hung up without much hesitation and continued driving… After driving for several hundred meters, he still felt a chilling gaze sweeping across his neck from behind.

Finally unable to bear it anymore.

“That day at dinner, weren’t you searching for snowboards while sitting next to me?” he asked. “In the end, either there was no size or you thought they weren’t good-looking, so you had no choice but to watch tutorial videos to pass the time?”

“You knew all that?” she realized, “How dare you peek at my screen!”

“You were fiddling with it for so long next to me, it would have been hard not to notice.”

“Since you saw, let me emphasize, those boards weren’t lacking in size, I just thought they weren’t good-looking so I didn’t want them—they weren’t good-looking! Not that they were too long or unsuitable!”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Don’t make things up.”

The man lifted his eyelids slightly, glancing at the girl whose face had puffed up like a bun in the rearview mirror. He thought for a moment and chuckled lightly, “Don’t get too angry, if you lose weight from anger, you really will only be able to use children’s boards—”

“Ahhh!”

“Don’t shout,” the culprit who provoked the young girl’s outburst said lazily, “You’re making the wound on my right-hand hurt. I touched the ground when I landed earlier and it got scraped, now it’s very fragile.”

…

They returned to the hotel around dinner time.

In the few hours since the video was posted, it had mainly been people in the snow sports circle praising it and gossiping, spreading the news about “Shan Chong’s return to big air,” and speculating whether he was provoked by Dai Duo…

Wei Zhi went upstairs to change clothes and came down. The group, including Lao Yan, Jiang Nanfeng, and others, were waiting in the lobby to have dinner together. Everyone was discussing the man’s big air jump from earlier.

“Chong God must have been practicing in secret.”

“Yeah, who the hell can do an inward 2160 after not flying on the big air for three years? Trying to scare someone to death—I didn’t know our country’s ice and snow sports had developed to this extent, that was a 2160!!!”

“You can’t say that, he’s been doing small and medium jumps quite often, right? We’ve seen it too?”

“Suddenly going on the big air, wasn’t he afraid of heights?”

“You’d have to ask Bei Ci about that, he was there at the time, right? There should have been a warm-up before the jump… But is that important? Not really. Now those people are already arguing fiercely about whether Dai Duo or Shan Chong is better—”

“Where’s the main battlefield? I want to go be a water army too.”

Everyone was eager to join, those who had long been unhappy with Dai Duo were all jumping up and down, wanting to add fuel to the fire on the front lines.

Wei Zhi walked over, and everyone made room for her to sit down. She asked, “Where’s Master?”

“Changing clothes, changing bandages,” Lao Yan glanced at her, “I heard you encouraged him to go to the big air this afternoon?”

“What do you mean I encouraged him, I just handed him a ladder,” Wei Zhi said, “Did you see his caption and video text?… If you still don’t understand, I’ll read you a comment and you’ll understand everything—’ Dai God: Two places of longing, both in the snow, it counts as a lifetime together with white heads’… Do you understand now? Do you understand!”

Bei Ci and Lao Yan laughed, hugging each other.

Bei Ci: “You’re so sour.”

Lao Yan: “Even jealous of a man, you’re something.”

Wei Zhi expressionlessly: “It’s okay, Dai Duo is better looking than me, I accept defeat gracefully.”

This brought another round of laughter. Hua Yan was just telling Bei Ci to shut up when Shan Chong came down. At this, everyone did shut up and obediently went to the restaurant as a group to eat.

They sat down at the restaurant and ordered. By now, several hours had passed since Shan Chong posted the big air video. The video was open for sharing and downloading, and it spread everywhere in no time—

Plus, with Dai Duo’s supporters fanning the flames, the matter seemed to have the flavor of wanting to ferment.

At first, Wei Zhi was scrolling through her phone while waiting for the food when she came across a video—

These days, if something good happens and there’s no movement for half a day, those who want to ride the wave act quickly. There was this self-proclaimed snow sports-related uploader who wanted to join in on the excitement. They posted a video with the caption “Why Shan Chong doesn’t do big air anymore, perhaps the fall of a former god is due to willful degradation.”

This title made Wei Zhi frown immediately.

She turned to look at Shan Chong, who was turning his head to play games with Lao Yan and the others, not paying attention to this side. Wei Zhi turned the volume down to the minimum and watched—

What was this person saying?

They said a lot of irrelevant things.

First, they introduced Shan Chong, saying that around the 2014 snow season, when people in China weren’t paying much attention to the Winter Olympics and snowboarding wasn’t a popular sport, he managed to enter the Sochi Olympics qualifying list with a ranking of 29th in points.

Unfortunately, Shan Chong was too young that year and his competition results weren’t great, but it was enough for some people in the snow sports circle to notice this young man in that era—mainly because China had started late in freestyle snowboarding, and in each Winter Olympics, while figure skating and speed skating were okay, there were only one or two people who could enter the snow event list. At that time, Shan Chong was young and ambitious, and seen as a good prospect by everyone.

In 2016, Shan Chong joined the national professional team. At that time, the now-famous “devil coach” Wang Xin was his head coach. By this year, there were already some sayings that whether China would medal in snowboarding big air all depended on this person.

Then from the 2016 snow season to the 2017 snow season, for a full two years, Shan Chong lived up to expectations. He participated in various World Cups, qualifying competitions, continental competitions, and other Olympic point races. Starting from winning his first gold medal at a certain cup competition in Northern Europe and North America at the end of the 2016 snow season, he never placed lower than fifth in various competitions, winning so many gold, silver, and bronze medals that his hands were full…

At that time, everyone thought he had a limitless future.

In 2018, Shan Chong entered the PyeongChang Winter Olympics list with a total of 932 points in the snowboard big air event, ranking fourth in the total points for that event.

At that time, the country had already started to promote ice and snow sports with the “300 million people on ice and snow” initiative. As skiing became increasingly popular, the attention given to the PyeongChang Winter Olympics… should have been more than ten times that of the Sochi Winter Olympics.

Many people had high hopes for Shan Chong.

In the first few rounds, he indeed performed very well, advancing all the way. Even the commentators never forgot to mention phrases like “our only seedling” and “hope for a medal” during each competition—

But in the semi-finals, when Shan Chong was ranked third after the first jump and the situation looked promising, he failed to land both his second and third jumps, resulting in two rounds of invalid scores, and his hopes were dashed.

Everyone was inevitably disappointed, but up to this point, the problem wasn’t too big. Some people criticized him, but not too many—

The problem came after he returned to the team. While everyone was consoling him with “See you in Beijing,” right after the 2019 Spring Festival, people received the news: Shan Chong had suffered a serious spinal injury during training and was hospitalized.

During the 2019 Spring Festival, there were rumors that Shan Chong had injured his spine, and the situation was once very dangerous with the possibility of paralysis. Fortunately, the surgery was very successful, he had escaped the risk of paralysis and was undergoing rehabilitation.

People had just breathed a sigh of relief.

Just after the 2019 Spring Festival, on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, a day for family reunions, news came from the national snowboard big air team that Shan Chong, who was already able to walk, had directly submitted his retirement application.

A single stone stirred up a thousand waves.

From then on, rumors and gossip about “coward,” “Did he develop a fear of heights after falling?” “Maybe his body really can’t handle the risk of falling again,” “He’s already fallen from grace,” “Those two jumps in PyeongChang ruined Shan Chong” never stopped.

After recounting all this, this trend-chasing blogger made some “irresponsible speculations”—

[Today, to everyone’s surprise, Shan Chong released a video about the big air, seemingly responding to Dai God’s “useless” comment. In the video, we can see that his jumping condition is truly not bad, having nothing to do with fans’ claims of “body unable to withstand jump errors” or “psychological trauma.” So there’s only one possibility left—

The former god didn’t fall naturally, but after failing in two consecutive Winter Olympics, he chose to step down from his pedestal, giving up on pursuing medals at the Beijing Winter Olympics, and willingly becoming an ordinary, mediocre enthusiast.

After all, retiring at this point would still leave him with admirers seeking his teaching, but if he failed at the Olympics a third time, he might not be able to shine so brightly afterward.]

The video ended.

Wei Zhi’s temples were throbbing. She looked around bewilderedly, but there wasn’t a single suitable target for her to punch a hundred times. So she could only click on the commenter’s section, and among a bunch of black comments like “The analysis makes sense,” “I knew something seemed off,” “His lessons are expensive at 6,000 per hour and he’s picky,” “Coward,” “Money-grubber,” she left a few crude words—

[What utter bullshit!!!!!!]

She didn’t care if those praising the uploader would call her a brainless fan—

She grabbed Jiang Nanfeng and, under her puzzled gaze, showed her the first half of the video.

Jiang Nanfeng exclaimed, “Oh my!” Wei Zhi asked expressionlessly, “I hope you live up to your lawyer qualification—these days, can people just spout nonsense by saying ‘irresponsible speculation’?!”

“How do you think ‘irresponsible murder’ sounds?” Jiang Nanfeng said with exasperation, “It’s pretty much the same thing.”

Wei Zhi’s mind had already sent a hundred lawyer’s letters to this idiot—

She was so angry she threw down her chopsticks and couldn’t eat, only to realize that many people around had already seen this video…

It wasn’t a coincidence. The snow sports circle was this small, and with the short video app’s ability to capture big data, it wasn’t surprising for anyone who had watched skiing-related content to come across this video.

Some people weren’t like Wei Zhi, sneakily hiding it, afraid to let Shan Chong see—

The guys thought simply. For example, Lao Yan cursed, “F*ck your grandpa,” and directly threw his phone on the table, playing it out loud for everyone to hear.

The only good thing was that it successfully angered everyone to the point of heart attacks.

For the first time, Wei Zhi heard how swear words from all over China were used, with adjectives and nouns ranging from “melon” to “turtle” to “pineapple” to “ball” to “genitals” to “horse”—

Throughout it all, only Shan Chong gave this idiot who owed a hundred lawyer’s letters some affirmation: “He’s not wrong, I can jump, I just choose not to.”

The others didn’t stop cursing.

Bei Ci’s chopsticks flew off.

Shan Chong got a headshot in the game, only then did he slowly look up from the game, put down his phone, and after thinking for a moment, said: “Whether it’s the Winter Olympics or the Summer Olympics, the number of people who choose to give up on the path of pursuing medals will always be several times more than those who shine on the podium… I’m just one of them, is it worth making a special video about me?”

His tone was calm, seemingly unaffected by those words calling him “willingly degraded.”

It was genuine confusion.

Bei Ci casually grabbed a sweet potato and held it to Shan Chong’s mouth: “May I ask, Mr. Shan, what was the purpose of your video today? If you’re not steaming buns to prove a point, and you’re not even trying to prove this point, could it be because of your little disciple’s tears?”

Wei Zhi whipped her head around, glaring at him.

“Dai Duo was just short of reporting my ID number,” Shan Chong said expressionlessly, “I have a temper too, thank you.”

Everyone: Oh.jpg.

For some reason, no matter how earth-shattering the event, when it came to Shan Chong, it suddenly became uninteresting.

…

While everyone was cursing those usually silent but now frantically trend-chasing idiots in the snow sports circle, Shan Chong’s phone rang.

The man looked at the caller ID but didn’t answer immediately.

After everyone looked over, he asked Bei Ci for a cigarette and a lighter. With the cigarette between his lips but not yet lit, he stood up and said, “I’m going out to take a call.”

Everyone looked away, except for Wei Zhi, who kept staring at him blankly.

“What are you looking at,” Shan Chong pursed his lips, “Did the doctor say I can’t smoke?”

“He didn’t,” Wei Zhi said, “But every corner of the world has signs saying ‘Smoking is harmful to health’—including on cigarette boxes.”

The man snorted a laugh, slightly narrowing his eyes, and turned to leave—it had started snowing again outside, and when he opened the door, he was hit by a gust of cold wind that made him want to retreat. He hesitated, looked back, and saw the girl not far from the dining table, still perked up like a meerkat, her bright eyes fixed on him.

So he still walked out into the wind.

His gaze swept around outside, and inexplicably, it fell on a familiar set of steps—a few days ago, he had caught two little animals huddled together, sitting side by side there…

Now it was empty.

The man let out a brief laugh from his nose, walked over, and sat down.

He dialed back the number from earlier.

The phone rang twice before it was picked up. The person on the other end said “Hello,” it was a young girl’s voice, probably in her teens or early twenties, and she called him “Brother.”

Before Shan Chong could speak, the little girl on the other end had already started: “You finally deigned to answer the phone? You’re in trouble, there’s a volcano erupting at home, Mom wants to buy a plane ticket to come and chop you up.”

Shan Chong: “…”

“Shan Shan,” he called the girl’s name, “Speak properly.”

“I am speaking properly, do you want to hear me not speak properly? Because I can do that,” the voice on the other end was crisp, “You went on the big air again, right? And posted it on a short video app, where did you get the courage? Don’t you know that the app now spans users from 3 to 83 years old? Mom came across your video, Dad saw it too, Mom just cried for a round thinking you’re forcing her to die, Dad smoked half a pack of cigarettes, the whole family is filled with an atmosphere of you being unfilial—”

Shan Chong lit his cigarette with a “click,” biting the butt: “Mm.”

Shan Shan paused: “Are you smoking to calm your nerves?”

With the cigarette butt in his mouth, the man laughed vaguely and helplessly.

The other end of the phone was silent for a few seconds.

The girl finally put away the playful and teasing tone she had when she first answered the phone. Her voice became a bit low, and now she sounded a bit like Shan Chong when he usually spoke—

“Shan Chong, don’t go on the big air anymore. I’ve said this a million times. When you got hurt and passed out from the pain and were carried to the ambulance, you didn’t see what Mom was like, what the family was like… Your spinal surgery took eleven hours, Mom went in to sign various consent forms three times, and spent the rest of the time holding me, begging every god and Buddha for you to get better.”

Shan Chong didn’t speak.

The person on the other end of the phone then said: “Didn’t you promise the family you wouldn’t go on the big air again? Are you going back on your word?”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he looked up at the street lamp. A snowflake accidentally fell into his eye, making him frown slightly. His voice was a bit hoarse: “Shan Shan.”

He just called her name.

The person called hesitated for two seconds.

“I know you’re not content.”

“…”

“Otherwise you wouldn’t have tentatively posted such a video today. What foul-mouthed Dai Duo, you’ve long been used to his dog mouth, he’s just a ladder.”

Shan Chong wanted to deny it.

But when the words reached his lips, they were too bitter to speak. He could only laugh hastily, and in the mist, the remaining words were stuck in his throat.

On the other end of the phone, silence fell along with him. All that remained was the sound of the howling cold wind on Shan Chong’s end and the girl’s steady breathing…

After a long time.

Probably as long as a lifetime, her slightly husky voice sounded again.

“Shan Chong, I’m sorry.”

The man was stunned for a moment, his wandering gaze refocusing: “What does it have to do with you? What are you apologizing for?”

“…, I’ve always felt that Mom shouldn’t have held me and prayed to any gods or buddhas outside the operating room that day, after all, I’m not a good precedent.”

His expression gradually darkened, and his voice became harsh and cold when he spoke: “Shan Shan, are you crazy?”

On the other end of the phone, the little girl who had been warningly called by her full name again laughed briefly: “Brother, don’t jump anymore, okay? If you like skiing, just go ski, no one’s stopping you…”

She paused before continuing—

“But don’t go on the 8-meter platform anymore. Having one person in the family who can only live in a wheelchair due to a training accident is already too much. If something happens to you again, Mom really won’t be able to go on, okay? You promised the family, you promised.”

You promised, Shan Chong.

To stay away from the 8-meter platform from now on, nothing is more important than peace and happiness, to make skiing just a personal hobby, not a life goal.

You promised.

You can’t go back on your word.