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What kind of person is this? Coming like a foreign emissary on a warpath, all imposing and aggressive — someone who didn’t know better would have thought she was here to pick a fight!

He Youyuan sucked in a large gulp of milk, puffing out his cheeks as he glared sideways at the sour-faced pineapple’s retreating figure out in the corridor, practically shooting sparks from his eyes.

He had his sword drawn and ready, only to realize the other person had come for a friendly exchange — and he wasn’t some formidable general either, just a lowly gatekeeper.

All he could do now was watch from behind the glass as the “scallion oil noodle diplomacy” played out with tremendous warmth and enthusiasm outside.

“So good, so good — you’d expect nothing less from a top Zhejiang University student. Even plain scallion oil noodles taste this good.” Fang Zhixiao twirled a chopstickful of noodles and crammed it into her mouth, nodding vigorously, offering Su Jianlin a heartfelt, embellished round of praise.

Love really does make people blind, Li Kuiyi thought silently.

But in the very next second, Fang Zhixiao picked up the fried egg from her bowl and held it carefully to Li Kuiyi’s lips: “Here — you take the egg, open up.”

Then again, love isn’t quite that blinding, Li Kuiyi thought, blinking, immediately revising her opinion. At the very least, Fang Zhixiao still remembered that she liked fried eggs — her heart hadn’t been entirely swept away.

Li Kuiyi opened her mouth and took a bite. The egg was cooked just right — golden and slightly crisp, edges just barely charred, with a pleasant chewiness. It was exactly the level of doneness she liked best.

So good. You’d expect nothing less from a top Zhejiang University student. Even plain fried eggs taste this good.

Hmph. No standards whatsoever, He Youyuan thought with disdain as he turned away. He and Zhang Chuang would never eat from the same pair of chopsticks.

“Did Su Jianlin say anything else to you?” Fang Zhixiao slurped another mouthful of noodles and started digging for details.

“No.” Li Kuiyi shook her head. “He just gave me a birthday present.”

“Oh.” Fang Zhixiao deflated slightly. She wasn’t jealous, exactly — she knew Su Jianlin was Li Kuiyi’s little uncle by title, and while that relationship might seem like “being in an advantageous position,” it actually cut off any romantic possibility entirely. Even without any blood between them, there was still the matter of ethics and decorum. Wasn’t there?

Still, she felt a little envious. “I want Su Jianlin to give me a birthday present too. What did he get you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t opened it yet.”

That is so like Li Kuiyi — iron-willed to the last. In Fang Zhixiao’s estimation, anyone who could resist opening a gift immediately was made of tough stuff. And this was Su Jianlin’s gift, no less.

“Honestly, you’re something else…”

Before Fang Zhixiao could finish her exasperation, a sharp voice rang out from behind them: “You two — what do you think you’re doing!”

Both of them startled and turned around to find a male teacher striding toward them. He was not particularly tall, but slim and upright, with hawk-like eyes and deep lines on his face. Fang Zhixiao tensed immediately and gulped down a large mouthful of noodles. She didn’t recognize him — but Li Kuiyi had dealt with him before. She knew this was Chen Guoming, the head of the Year One cohort.

He had also spoken at the opening ceremony from the stage, though hardly any of the students below had actually listened.

Scold her. Scold her hard! He Youyuan thought, delighting in the misfortune unfolding outside, a wicked smile curling at the corner of his mouth. Underhanded diplomatic tactics should be stamped out immediately.

Chen Guoming walked over to the two of them, hands clasped behind his back, face grave. But the moment he recognized Li Kuiyi, his expression softened completely — and his tone became rather warm and solicitous: “Li Kuiyi, what are you doing over here?”

Of course. She was the prize student he had personally poached from Yi Zhong’s competitor school during summer admissions, together with the enrollment office — 100,000 yuan in scholarship money, and the apple of his eye.

Li Kuiyi chose honesty, gesturing toward Fang Zhixiao: “I brought breakfast for a friend.”

Chen Guoming gave an understanding “oh,” then raised his wrist to check his watch and reminded them: “It’s 6:35 already!”

Year One students were required to arrive in their homerooms by 6:40 for morning reading, which started at 7:00. Arriving after 6:40 counted as late.

Li Kuiyi was aware, but she nodded anyway: “Thank you, sir. I’ll head back to class now.” She exchanged a glance with Fang Zhixiao, then turned and ran.

Fang Zhixiao immediately packed up the barely-touched noodles and let out an awkward laugh: “I’ll head back too, sir.” Before Chen Guoming could react, she had already slipped into the classroom.

He Youyuan’s smirk froze on his face. Wait — this was the same Chen Guoming he knew? He remembered that on the first day of school registration, he had been too busy filling in the wall cracks to pay attention to the homeroom teacher Old Ma’s instructions, and had been hauled to the office afterward. Chen Guoming had happened to be there and had, without a second word, joined Old Ma in giving him a thorough dressing down.

What a model student, Chen Guoming thought, with a look of warm approval on his face, watching Li Kuiyi’s figure disappear at the far end of the corridor. Then he turned — and came eye to eye with the handsome boy in Class Twelve staring back at him with undisguised resentment. Chen Guoming’s face snapped back to stern immediately. He reached through the window and gave He Youyuan’s head a firm rub: “He Youyuan — stop gawking and do your morning reading!”

He Youyuan: “…”

Unbelievable. Bystanders get hit too.

Saturday’s weekly exam arrived as scheduled. Whether the teachers who set the paper had deliberately decided to humble this overconfident batch of new students, or whether there simply wasn’t enough breadth to work with given how little they’d learned — forcing them to dig for depth instead — the result was a test paper that was catastrophically difficult.

Math in particular: since they’d only covered set theory, the questions had found a hundred different creative ways to torture it. Most of the problems went far beyond the syllabus. By the end of the exam, everyone’s brain was a foggy mess — they could barely remember what the union and intersection symbols even looked like.

Once the bell rang and the papers were collected, the classroom immediately broke out into an unofficial competition to see who had performed the worst.

“Ahhhh — it was so hard, I didn’t know anything!” someone wailed.

“Would you believe I left eight whole questions blank? Eight!” someone winced.

“That’s nothing — my paper is practically empty from halfway down,” someone countered.

Back and forth they went — each person claiming to have done worse than the last, complaining with great theatrical energy. Everyone understood the unspoken rule, though: when a top student said “I didn’t do well,” you could treat it like background noise. Take it in, let it wash over you, and move on.

Zhou Fanghua slowly packed up her pencil case, quietly listening to everyone’s “lamentations.” She wanted to believe them — needed to believe them — because she truly hadn’t known how to answer the questions. She didn’t expect to score brilliantly; she just hoped she hadn’t done embarrassingly, visibly worse than everyone else.

But she couldn’t convince herself. Because she’d seen that Li Kuiyi’s paper was completely filled in.

There’s always that kind of person in school — no matter how hard the exam, she answers everything with perfect composure.

Was it talent? Or had she worked hard enough? Zhou Fanghua had spent half a month around Li Kuiyi and hadn’t noticed her studying any harder than anyone else. If anything, when others were studying, Li Kuiyi would sometimes space out, leaning on the windowsill to watch the sunset.

Then it must be talent — and what a dispiriting answer that was. Any innate advantage, anything encoded in the genes, was always more enviable than something earned through effort — because it cost nothing, and sometimes couldn’t be acquired no matter how hard you tried.

That’s why some people preferred to maintain the illusion that they weren’t really trying. For many, being called “smart” ranked higher than being called “hardworking.”

“Could you do all of those problems?” Zhou Fanghua couldn’t help but ask.

Li Kuiyi shook her head earnestly as she packed her bag: “Not all of them. For multiple choice question ten, I wasn’t sure — I could only rule out options A and D, so I guessed between B and C.”

“Which one did you guess?” Zhou Fanghua’s eyes lit up with sudden hope. She’d gotten stuck on that one too and had randomly picked C. If it happened to match Li Kuiyi’s answer, then maybe she had a chance — even Li Kuiyi’s guesses, she reasoned, were probably more accurate than hers.

“I picked B — because I’d already chosen C for questions eight and nine, and I figured the odds of picking C again were probably low.”

Zhou Fanghua: “…”

That meant she’d also gotten question nine wrong.

Definitely shouldn’t have tried to match answers.

Saturday evenings were free of evening self-study — the one night a week students could truly relax.

After leaving the school gates, Li Kuiyi first stopped by the small magazine stand near the entrance. She had recently discovered this little stall was a hidden gem — magazines sold for remarkably little: Yilin and Reader and Youth Digest for only 2 yuan each; Wenyi Feng Xiang for 5 yuan; and sometimes you could even find issues of Harvest or Contemporary. The downside was that they were usually a bit out of date — but Li Kuiyi didn’t mind. She’d never read any of them before, so what did it matter which issue? Besides, each magazine was thin enough to finish in a single Saturday evening.

Li Kuiyi browsed through the selection and unexpectedly found a copy of Huacheng — a 2011 issue with an essay by Wang Anyi inside. She bought it on the spot.

It was past six o’clock. Dusk was thickening, and the last burst of orange sunlight broke through the clouds and poured over the distant treetops and rooftops, gilding everything like metal cast in a furnace.

At the bus stop in front of the school gates, a crowd of people craned their necks waiting; the slanted light fell across their dark hair, crowning each head with a soft halo.

Li Kuiyi decided to take the bus home.

This had been a plan she’d been looking forward to for some time. She loved riding the bus at dusk — ideally with a window seat, headphones in, music playing, watching the familiar buildings, streets, and storefronts rush past like frames from an old film. She had deliberately brought her phone along today just for this.

The only problem: from school to her house was only two stops.

Then she’d just ride a few more stops, she decided. Until nightfall.

Bus Route 6 lumbered into view — a heavy, blue whale of a vehicle that swayed and groaned to a stop. Li Kuiyi stepped forward and was carried aboard with the surge of passengers.

Good — there was still a window seat left in the very last row. She went and sat down, put her headphones in, and turned to look out the window. The sky was suspended between evening and night, the streetlamps already glowing softly in the not-quite-darkness, like distant stars just beginning to show. The inside of the bus was warm with the press of people — mostly students in Yi Zhong uniforms, buzzing excitedly about their weekend plans.

“Hey — Li Kuiyi?”

Someone suddenly called her name.

She came back to herself and saw Qi Yu, standing and gripping the back of a nearby seat, giving her a small wave.

She took out one earbud, genuinely surprised: “You take this bus home too?”

Qi Yu smiled and gestured toward Zhang Chuang and He Youyuan — who was doing his best impression of a corpse: “Not exactly — we made plans with some middle school friends to go play pool over by Nandu Commercial Street.”

Zhang Chuang waved hello too. Only He Youyuan gripped the overhead handle, turned his face firmly away, and was determined to see nothing, hear nothing.

How aggravating.

Weekends were supposed to be the happiest time of the week — so why did he have to run into the sour-faced pineapple? What terrible luck.

To avoid another round of being driven half-mad, the wisest course was to avoid any contact entirely.

He Youyuan held firm internally while making a show of chatting with Zhang Chuang like everything was normal. One stop passed — safe. Two stops — safe. Three stops — safe.

Two more and he’d be in the clear!

The sky grew gradually darker; the city’s lights came on one by one, transforming the streets into a flowing nightscape. The inside of the bus blinked to life with fluorescent lights — faint and slightly dim. A few clusters of passengers got off, leaving the bus more open and quiet.

The seat beside Li Kuiyi emptied. Qi Yu went over and sat down, and fell naturally into conversation about that afternoon’s math paper: “The last major problem — what did you get?”

Li Kuiyi thought about it: “The one asking for the range of values for e? I think it was from the square root of seven over four to three times the square root of two, closed on the right.”

“Good — that matches mine.” Qi Yu said. “And the last multiple choice?”

Li Kuiyi said: “That problem probably had a missing condition. If a is restricted to integers, then B is definitive, but if…” She worked through her reasoning, and finally said: “…So in the end I went with option B.”

Qi Yu said: “Your logic is the same as mine. I also avoided choosing C again since I’d already picked it for questions eight and nine.”

The two looked at each other and laughed in quiet understanding.

He Youyuan had been monitoring the situation from the corner of his eye this whole time — on guard against the sour-faced pineapple making any sudden moves against him. But now, seeing this, he couldn’t help but twitch the corner of his mouth. What was going on? Were they really clicking this fast? You two aren’t actually falling for each other from across a crowded bus, are you?

That couldn’t happen. He couldn’t just stand here and watch his friend fall into disaster. So he called out to Qi Yu: “We’re almost at the stop — why are you still standing around over there?”

“At the stop?” Qi Yu looked up, genuinely puzzled. “There’s still another stop after this one!”

But this remark inadvertently reminded Li Kuiyi. It was dark enough now — time to head home.

“Oh — I’m almost at my stop.”

Qi Yu moved aside to let her out: “Get home safe.”

“Mm.” Li Kuiyi nodded. “You too.”

To He Youyuan’s ears, of course, this entire exchange was nothing but loaded glances and covert signals. He rolled his eyes internally. Hah — didn’t think so. This sour-faced pineapple looks all prim and indifferent, but she’s actually greedy — adding him as a friend on one hand and making eyes at his friend on the other.

What, you want both?

Li Kuiyi walked to the back doors to wait for the stop. He Youyuan stood on the other side of the door, and they both ignored each other pointedly. Zhang Chuang looked back and forth between them with a puzzled expression: “You two standing there look like the two guardian deities at a temple gate.”

Guardian deity your head! He Youyuan was about to fire back when the driver hit the brakes sharply. The lurch of momentum sent him stumbling forward.

He caught himself — his grip had held. But the girl beside him apparently hadn’t managed to hold on. Her hand slipped from the overhead bar, and she was flung directly toward the bus doors.

Li Kuiyi was certain she was about to hit the ground. In the split second before impact, she threw one arm up to shield her head.

Then — a force grabbed her arm. Firm and decisive, it pulled her sharply toward him.

A clean, distinctly youthful scent flooded her senses all at once.