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Days flew by like tearing pages off a calendar — one sharp rip, and a day was gone.
Daylight gradually lost its slow-burning war against the dark. The two ginkgo trees at the entrance to the sports field spread out a dense, vivid gold between drifting wisps of cloud. The large-character notices posted on the bulletin board had begun to curl at their edges, fading in color, until one unremarkable day, they were quietly taken down.
The first monthly exam of the first-year grade was drawing near.
The monthly exam results would factor into the division of students into science and humanities tracks — and everyone took it seriously. Among the students of Class One, this seriousness was especially pronounced. As the sole honors class, the stakes were different: for students in regular classes, not working hard meant failing to cross the threshold into the honors track. For students in Class One, not working hard meant being cut.
Cut was, by a considerable margin, the crueler of the two outcomes.
The First Affiliated High School had always prioritized science over humanities; honors class students were, in practice, not permitted to choose the humanities track. But after the division, there would only be thirty spots in the science honors class — which meant someone was inevitably going to be left out.
Students who had scored high enough in the middle school entrance exam to place in the city’s top 100 had all been considered the shining stars of their respective schools back in middle school. And therein lay the cruel irony: when a group of exceptional individuals were all gathered in one place, exceptional scores could no longer stand out as rare, and becoming unremarkable became the norm.
How do you come to terms with that kind of fall?
This was the trial that many Class One students were enduring.
Zhou Fanghua was one of them. Although her middle school entrance exam results had contained an element of exceptional performance on the day, she had, during her middle school years, held complete mastery over the business of studying. She was quiet by nature — not the kind of person who immediately caught others’ attention — but because her grades were good, she had earned no small amount of recognition from teachers and classmates alike. Scores were the most presentable thing she had to show; they were the source of all her confidence and sense of security.
But now, everything was teetering at the edge of a small, quiet loss of control. Physics, for instance, a subject she had always liked — the concepts felt clear and luminous when the teacher explained them, but when she sat down to do problems, she found herself at a loss, and harder questions simply overwhelmed her. Or there was history and politics — she had genuinely memorized the material, yet she still got a lot of the multiple-choice questions wrong, and in the long-form answers, she couldn’t seem to hit the scoring criteria.
Knocked back enough times, she began to lose her nerve. She no longer wanted to attempt difficult problems. She just wanted to go back again and again to the problem types she already had a solid grasp on.
Even though she sat right next to the top student in the year, she didn’t dare ask her too many questions. For one thing, she was afraid of disturbing her studying. For another, she felt that asking so many questions so frequently was embarrassing.
She didn’t take the initiative to ask. Li Kuiyi didn’t take the initiative to teach.
Li Kuiyi rarely paid attention to other people’s study situations. The few times she had glanced over and noticed Zhou Fanghua wrestling stubbornly with a problem, she hadn’t intruded. That was because she had an irritating habit of her own: if she was thinking through a problem and someone came along to offer unsolicited guidance, she would be furious enough to lose three nights’ sleep — hmph, who do you think you are, looking down on me!
By extension, she assumed Zhou Fanghua felt the same way.
It was Qi Yu who regularly came over to work through problems with her.
Every problem he brought — whether math or physics — was, without exception, a competition-level question. To make it easier to discuss things with Li Kuiyi, he would sometimes swap seats with Zhou Fanghua during the evening self-study period.
Their discussions were essentially silent — a few quick lines sketched on paper, a step or two of working shown, and they understood each other’s meaning.
Qi Yu also brought along a piece of news.
The school was planning to select students for academic competition training and intended to separate them entirely from the regular college entrance exam students, placing them in a dedicated competition class where they would focus exclusively on competition subjects throughout the day. In previous years, competition students had still studied alongside their regular classes, only gathering for competition lessons during the evening self-study period. This year’s approach was a new experiment.
What this meant, in practical terms, was that entering the competition track was a high-risk decision. If that path didn’t work out, returning to the regular college entrance exam track would be significantly harder.
Qi Yu asked, “Are you going to participate?”
Li Kuiyi shook her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t made any plans for it yet.”
Back in middle school, Liuyuan City’s No. 158 High School had also had a competition class. Her homeroom teacher had recommended she try out for it, but the intensive training required a considerable sum of money, so she hadn’t gone — and hadn’t even mentioned it to Li Jianye or Xu Manhua.
She turned the question back on him. “What about you? Will you go?”
Qi Yu said, “In all likelihood, yes. My parents hope I’ll take that path.”
She thought of what Xia Leyi had mentioned — that Qi Yu’s parents were both teachers at the First Affiliated High School and kept a very close eye on him. She found herself drifting into thought: she had been raised with no real supervision, left largely to her own devices. The upside was complete freedom; the downside was that the risk of going astray was considerable, and whenever she needed guidance, she had to feel her way through alone. He, on the other hand, had been raised under careful watch — the upside was that someone was tirelessly laying each stone of the path beneath his feet; the downside was that he had no choice but to walk the predetermined road.
So which way of growing up was better?
Li Kuiyi weighed it for quite a while before suddenly realizing she was digging herself into a false dilemma — why did it have to be one extreme or the other? Couldn’t there be a middle ground?
She smiled to herself.
Qi Yu saw her smile and smiled back, a little tentative and a little curious. He rubbed his nose and said shyly, “What are you smiling at?”
Li Kuiyi didn’t answer directly. She just asked: “Do you want to take the competition path?”
Qi Yu thought carefully. “I have an interest in mathematics, and I still have room to grow with my current workload. Going the competition route would be a decent choice.” He paused, then suddenly changed course. “Actually, I think you’d be well-suited for math competitions too. It would be a shame to waste your talent.”
Talent —
Li Kuiyi had heard this word applied to herself more than once, and had once felt quietly pleased by it. But she remembered clearly: back when she was in her second year of middle school, there had been a girl in Liuyuan City, only two years older than her, who had been selected for China’s national mathematics training team in her first year of high school — earning an automatic recommendation to Tsinghua or Peking University. She had then gone on to represent the national team at the International Mathematical Olympiad and won a gold medal.
This had caused quite a stir in their small city of Liuyuan. It was also the first time Li Kuiyi had felt, truly and viscerally, what it meant to say there is always someone more capable, always a sky above your sky. Not envy, not bitterness — just a faint, wistful admiration.
She felt that at minimum one needed to be at that level to truly be called talented.
She herself was, at most, a little clever when it came to studying.
She didn’t actually want to admit this, because she was proud and she was ambitious — but she couldn’t avoid admitting it, because she knew clearly enough where her own ceiling was.
“Perhaps the heavens gave me a little talent,” she said with a hint of lightness in her tone, “but not much. If I went down the competition path, the effort I’d need to put in probably wouldn’t be any less than just preparing for the college entrance exam — it might even be more. So, for me, the cost-benefit ratio of that path isn’t very favorable.”
Qi Yu looked as though he were hearing this kind of reasoning for the first time. He raised his eyebrows in mild surprise, then fell back into silence — if she was saying her own talent was not high enough, then where did that leave him? His mathematical ability, at its peak, was only about on par with hers.
Was he perhaps also in need of a dose of self-awareness?
In a very rare moment, Qi Yu began to doubt whether the path beneath his feet was the right one. But that very doubt made him feel unsettled, because he felt he shouldn’t be losing his footing at this point — he should believe in himself, and believe in his parents. Shouldn’t he?
For several days in a row, he didn’t come by to work through problems with Li Kuiyi.
The official notice about the monthly exam came down quickly — the exam was scheduled for after the National Day holiday, with no buffer period in between. The holiday would end and the exam would begin immediately.
Students wailed and cursed the school for being inhuman. An exam right after the holiday meant that the break was going to be spent in a state of anxiety — unable to study properly, unable to relax properly, utterly stripped of any meaning a holiday was supposed to have.
In addition to that, Liu Xinzhao announced three more things.
First: after the monthly exam, the class would be reseated. Priority seating choice would be given to those with higher rankings. This method of assigning seats applied across the entire year — no class was exempt.
Second: as the only honors class in the first year, Class One naturally enjoyed certain “special treatment” — their National Day holiday would be only four days, with the remaining three days reserved for returning to school for supplementary lessons.
Third: as National Day approached, the school was organizing a “Our National Day” themed bulletin board competition. The propaganda committee member would be responsible for coordinating and directing classmates in painting the class bulletin board.
On the first matter, everyone took it in stride — nothing to be surprised about, nothing to resist.
On the second matter, the classroom erupted instantly, with complaints nearly blowing the roof off. Liu Xinzhao smiled and said, “What a wonderful opportunity — other classes don’t even get a chance to come back for extra lessons!”
“Tch —” No one was buying it.
The combined weight of the exam and the supplementary lessons had killed everyone’s enthusiasm for the bulletin board competition. The propaganda committee member rallied and cajoled for a long while before managing to drag in two or three reluctant participants, who took up their chalk with dejected expressions and began drawing half-heartedly on the blackboard at the back of the classroom.
On the afternoon before the National Day holiday began, there was no evening self-study session. When the afternoon bell rang, everyone shot out of the classroom like horses finally freed from their reins, backpacks grabbed, and gone — until only the students working on the board and Li Kuiyi remained.
Li Kuiyi couldn’t draw. She was only there to wait for Fang Zhixiao. The two of them had made plans to go to the women’s market street after school that day — there were many small accessory shops there, and a rental bookshop where you could borrow comics and romance novels.
Fang Zhixiao had taken two years of painting lessons as a child and still had some foundation in it, so she had naturally joined Class Twelve’s bulletin board project. Li Kuiyi sat quietly at her desk, reading After School while waiting for her.
Suddenly, her phone — which she had specifically brought today — vibrated twice inside her bag.
She glanced around the room, then carefully retrieved it.
It was a message from Fang Zhixiao: “Cordially inviting you to come admire a work of art in our classroom!”
Any amount of guesswork was enough to confirm that the so-called “work of art” was definitely Fang Zhixiao’s bulletin board.
Li Kuiyi: …That had better be a work of art.
Fang Zhixiao: It absolutely is!
Fine. For the sake of this self-admiring lady’s dignity. Li Kuiyi shook her head with a quiet laugh, put her phone away, packed up her bag, said goodbye to the classmates in the room, and climbed up to the third floor.
The evening sun was sinking. At the horizon, a gorgeous pink was reflected across the sky; the sunlight still blazed with warmth, spilling across one corner of the school building’s long corridor, where tiny particles of dust floated and danced through the air.
She walked slowly closer.
Through the window of Class Twelve, she could see that in the modest space at the back of that classroom, a magnificent landscape had already taken shape. Mountains rose deep and blue-green; the clouds at the horizon blazed like fire. A green-painted train wound its way through the mountains at speed, passing through sheets of gunfire, golden wheat fields, barren ruins, and towering skylines… Its destination was a flower sea — brilliant, vast, and glorious.
On the right side of the blackboard stood a tall, slender figure — poised and clear-edged. One hand held a palette; the other held a brush. The strokes looked both deeply deliberate and effortlessly casual at once, and from beneath that brush, layer upon layer of petals were steadily, continuously born. The last light of evening lingered in his hair, golden and warm, making him look impossibly soft.