For the sake of Ning Sui’s college entrance exam, the family of four had been cramped into a school district apartment located relatively close to Huai’an No. 4 High School.
This neighborhood was the kind that housed families whose children had been admitted through the direct promotion track from middle school. The residential compound wasn’t large, but the landscaping was thoughtfully done. The location was also convenient, with schools and shopping centers close at hand.
The only issue was that the buildings were somewhat dated, and occasionally the soundproofing left something to be desired.
Right now, Ning Sui and Hu Ke’er were walking straight into Xia Fanghui’s terrifying low-pressure storm of fury, and it felt as though the entire floor could hear her: “Ning! Yue! Don’t you dare run — stand right there!”
The apartment itself was cramped enough at the best of times. Ning Yue dodged and weaved with impressive serpentine footwork as he fled, shooting Ning Sui a desperate look that begged to be rescued: “Sis —”
Ning Yue had Hu Ke’er, the unexpected guest who’d returned from Southeast Asia with a tan, to thank for his survival today.
Xia Fanghui had come charging out of the room with the look of someone ready to rain down retribution, but then she spotted the two girls standing in the living room. Family matters, after all, were not for outside eyes — Fanghui’s expression shifted with extraordinary speed, clouds parting to reveal sunshine: “Keke’s here? Come in, come in, sit down!”
Hu Ke’er had barely sat down after warmly linking arms with her when she heard Xia Fanghui ask with a puzzled frown: “Your father takes you along when he goes down into the coal mines for his survey fieldwork? That sounds terribly dangerous.”
Hu Ke’er: “…”
She shot a glare at Ning Sui, who was trying very hard not to laugh, and gave a dry cough: “Auntie, I just — I just got a tan.”
“From the sun?”
“Yes.” Hu Ke’er kept a perfectly straight face. “Just outdoor exercise, you know — a bit of running, some working out — that sort of thing. That’s why I got darker.”
Fanghui was straightforwardly trusting by nature, and soon enough was convinced. She sent Ning Sui to entertain Hu Ke’er — have her look around wherever she liked.
They’d only just finished the college entrance exam, so Ning Sui’s bedroom desk was still buried under complete sets of exam papers. Looking around the room, there were also countless mathematics competition exercise books. Hu Ke’er randomly picked one up — it was covered front and back in dense calculus, derivatives, and inequalities. She turned only a couple of pages before her brow furrowed deeply, and she snapped the book shut with a grimace.
Ning Sui found her expression amusing: “What’s wrong?”
Hu Ke’er said: “Some unpleasant memories surfaced.”
Ning Sui said: “You don’t even do the mathematics competition.”
“But I used to flirt with a guy who did,” Hu Ke’er said, her tone laden with lingering trauma.
Ning Sui: “?”
“That idiot deskmate of mine and former ambiguous love interest — every time he found a good competition problem, he’d enthusiastically recommend it to me. If I didn’t work through it, he’d say I didn’t love him.”
Hu Ke’er still shuddered at the memory, clutching her chest with a sigh. “Have you noticed there was a period when I barely talked to you? Once bitten twice shy, as they say.”
Ning Sui: “…”
“Speaking of which.” Ning Sui was sorting through the papers covered in red and black pen marks as she spoke. She ran her tongue over her lip, not quite sure whether she should ask. “You and Xu Zhou…”
Hu Ke’er blanked for a moment, then read her expression quickly and figured out what she was trying to ask.
They’d been in the same room the whole trip, and even a seasoned operator like herself turned somewhat bashful.
“It was pretty normal between us,” she said, then paused. “I mean — it was fine, there wasn’t any…”
She covered it up a little too obviously by reaching up to scratch her hair, not sure how to phrase it: “He probably wanted to — I’m not sure either. I think he dropped hints a few times during the trip, but I pretended not to catch on.”
Men — not a single one of them had anything better on his mind. Pure fluff and romance, the lot of them.
In Hu Ke’er’s own account of herself, she was walking straight into the tiger’s mouth knowing full well it was there, confident she could emerge unscathed. And this confidence came from the wealth of experience she’d accumulated going head-to-head with people like this before. Hu Ke’er certified herself as having a certain flair for being the heartbreaker — capable of both picking things up and letting them go, with no fear of being played.
She felt that, setting aside the aggravating bits, being in a relationship was actually quite wonderful. Especially the ambiguous phase — a single glance or small gesture from the other person could set your heart hammering, and it was far more interesting than after things had actually been officially established.
That said, over all these years, Hu Ke’er had never once witnessed Ning Sui develop a genuine liking for anyone. With those striking, radiant looks, she attracted all sorts — academic prodigies, school heartthrobs, local troublemakers — yet no one seemed to earn any special treatment from her.
“Suisui babe, with so many people chasing after you — is there really not a single one you can see yourself with?”
Hu Ke’er remembered how a good number of boys had taken the opportunity of writing yearbook messages to confess to Ning Sui. Rather than throwing the messages away, she’d tidied them up and stored them all in a cardboard box with her other keepsakes. “Why don’t we take out the yearbook, score each candidate across multiple dimensions, and pick the best one?”
“Being in a relationship isn’t like going to the market to pick out cabbage.” Ning Sui picked up an exam paper and folded it into a paper plane, her voice soft and unhurried. “Besides, I’m not really in a rush.”
Hu Ke’er shook her head in despair: “You’ve never tasted pork, so you don’t know what you’re missing.”
“Maybe.”
“I still don’t believe it — after all this time, not a single person has made your heart skip a beat?”
Ning Sui thought for a moment, then blinked and asked: “Do you still remember Liu Hang?”
Probably someone with a very low profile. Hu Ke’er looked genuinely confused: “Huh?!”
Ning Sui tossed the paper plane into the air and watched it trace a slow, graceful arc: “He set off firecrackers under the dormitory building at six in the morning to confess to me. At the time I felt like my heart might give out from the shock.”
Hu Ke’er gaped at her for a moment, then burst into table-slapping laughter.
— Research apparently suggests that boys the same age tend to have the emotional maturity of someone two years younger. These boys really were hopelessly childish — blunt in the most artless way, with absolutely no sense of romance.
Hu Ke’er still remembered that insufferable deskmate of hers, whose birthday gift to her had been a photo sticker of himself, expecting her to stick it on the back of her phone.
And then there was the time she scored two marks higher than him on a mathematics exam — the idiot had combed through the entire test paper until he found two major final questions where she’d forgotten to write “Solution:” before her working, and actually went to the teacher demanding her answers be remarked. He’d nearly driven her to an early grave.
Thinking about it that way, it made sense. Given Ning Sui’s temperament, and Auntie Xia’s own personality, she probably preferred someone a bit more mature and dependable.
“You did so well on the college entrance exam — Auntie Xia must be… in a better mood, I suppose?” Hu Ke’er’s tone was carefully measured.
“Mm.” Ning Sui looked down as she answered. “Her emotions have been pretty stable lately. No real problems.”
“Oh. That’s good, then.”
The air fell quiet for no particular reason. The evening sun slanted in through the window, painting everything in shades of orange. The two of them bent their heads over the desk, methodically sorting exam papers by subject, bundling them into stacks to sell to the newspaper recycling collector.
Hu Ke’er finished sorting her own large pile: “Hey Suibao — it would be such a waste to throw away all these untouched exercise books. Why not pass them down to your brother?”
She waited for an answer but got nothing. Hu Ke’er peered over and found Ning Sui with her thick lashes cast downward, staring intently at a mathematics competition exam paper.
It was from the first semester of Year 11. Ning Sui’s handwriting was neat and precise, every page covered in detailed annotations and worked solutions.
Hu Ke’er looked it over from every angle but couldn’t spot anything unusual. Except that beside Ning Sui’s name, the stroke of one character had a small spot where the ink had bled out.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, puzzled.
“Nothing.” Ning Sui absently turned the paper over. “This is a practice paper I worked through in Nanjing at the end of Year 10.”
Huai’an was a coastal city, and No. 4 High School wasn’t particularly competition-oriented. Teacher Yu Zhiguo had made a special effort to send the students who were doing the mathematics competition to an inland city to train under a famous teacher. Ning Sui remembered that the instructor who taught them had been involved in setting the CMO exam questions for several years running — someone with exceptional credentials and experience.
“Hey — I think I went on that trip too!” That had been around the time everyone was just getting started with competitions, and Hu Ke’er had wanted to give it a headstrong try. “Was that the old man who kept going on about water flowing?”
That renowned instructor had a famous maxim: “For someone who is truly gifted in mathematics, the process of solving a problem should flow forth from the mind as naturally as water.”
Hu Ke’er, speaking her thoughts without a filter, couldn’t help whispering to Ning Sui: “You’d need to have a head full of water for that to happen.”
She’d forgotten she was sitting in the front row. The old man’s sharp gaze immediately swept over to her, and for the remaining days of the training program, Hu Ke’er was called on to answer questions at least once a day: “This student here — would you please come and flow something through for the rest of the class?”
This was also why Hu Ke’er had never wanted to go near the mathematics competition again after that. She’d packed her bags and made her exit before the training was even over.
While the two of them were talking, the sound of the front door opening suddenly came from outside — Ning Deyan was home. Hu Ke’er heard it and smacked her forehead: “I’ll go out and say hello to your dad!”
It was just about dinnertime. The sky outside had rolled in a fold of deep dusk, and from somewhere in the distance the faint, rising chorus of cicadas began to build. Summer was like that — charged with vitality, warm and full to bursting.
Ning Sui’s gaze remained fixed on that small blot where the ink had spread. Without realizing it, she was sinking into a memory that had been sealed away.
It had been winter then. There had been four students altogether who went to Nanjing for the training program. Ning Sui remembered that the hotel where they stayed was a fifteen-minute walk from the school where classes were held — not particularly long, nor particularly short. She had always walked both ways on her own.
After Hu Ke’er made her early defection, only three of them were left. Besides Ning Sui, there were two male students. The way science-track boys were — reserved and restrained — they never felt comfortable inviting her to join them for any activities. They wouldn’t even sit with her in class.
So Ning Sui went about everything alone.
An unfamiliar city. The first time she’d been away from home by herself since turning sixteen. A low-grade anxiety settled into her heart.
Xia Fanghui’s state of mind during that period had been very poor.
Ning Sui’s grandmother had fallen gravely ill — kidney failure requiring dialysis — which had cost an enormous amount of money. Ning Deyan was having trouble at work too, with the company undergoing layoffs and him on the edge of unemployment. On top of this, Ning Yue was still young and required a great deal of care. The pressure had pushed Xia Fanghui nearly to her breaking point, and she would frequently lash out at home with hysterical rage.
Much of that pressure was indirectly transferred onto Ning Sui’s shoulders.
Xia Fanghui held her to impossibly high standards, demanding perfection in everything, and would explode in a torrent of harsh words at the slightest thing going wrong.
One night during a class session, Ning Sui hadn’t noticed her phone ringing. Xia Fanghui had called sixty-odd times, all unanswered.
The Nanjing nights were bitterly cold. The problems were brutally difficult. Ning Sui stood there shivering in her padded coat, hurriedly calling her mother back, only for Xia Fanghui to answer with this as her opening line: “What — are you trying to cut me off as your mother? You want to sever the mother-daughter relationship?”
Ning Sui didn’t blame her mother. She knew her mother was simply tired.
That night, in the small, cramped hotel room, she stayed up late working through exam papers. The warm dim light fell across the pages. She had just set her pen down after writing her name when a drop of water fell and blurred the ink.
Ning Sui quickly wiped away the tear, thinking: these problems are too hard.
The training sessions ran from eight in the morning to nine at night, with breaks only at mealtimes — every hour of the day was accounted for. Even after class ended, Ning Sui would stay behind at her desk to continue organizing her incorrect answers, writing down everything where she’d lost the thread of the instructor’s reasoning before it slipped away.
On this particular night she lost track of time, and before she knew it, it was eleven o’clock and the classroom was nearly empty.
She hadn’t stayed this late before. She got up quickly and started packing. She kept hoping to run into a fellow classmate who hadn’t left yet. But the moment she stepped through the main doors, her footsteps hesitated.
A figure was standing at the foot of the academic building’s steps. His silhouette was tall and straight — a dark-colored windbreaker over his upper half, the lapels half-open, its fabric tracing a clean, taut line across his shoulder width. His legs were straight and long. One hand was tucked loosely in a pocket, and the sleeve pulled taut at his forearm with the clean curve of lean muscle.
The curtain of snow seemed to become a kind of soft-filtered backdrop. The light was blurred. He had a bag slung over one shoulder, and the whole of him seemed to dissolve into the night.
It was snowing lightly outside. He’d probably forgotten his umbrella and was waiting for the snow to stop.
Without a sound, Ning Sui walked to a spot slightly behind him and to one side, and quietly looked up.
Before she’d even fully settled in place, the young man seemed to sense something and glanced back at her.
His nose bridge was sharply defined. Seen in profile, his features were angular. His eyes were long and deep-set, intense yet somehow suffused with an air of cool, languid indifference.
Backlit by the hazy glow, he looked down at her with dark eyes, his Adam’s apple prominent, his expression unreadable.
Ning Sui was startled, and instinctively averted her gaze.
— Strange. She’d been attending classes here for so many days now. How had she never seen this person before?
The two of them stood like that, one in front and one behind, with neither speaking.
The snow continued to fall. Its soft, hushing sound masked all the other faint noises around them.
Nothing stirred beside her. After holding back for a long while, Ning Sui looked up again — the young man had already turned his gaze elsewhere. Her eyes dropped of their own accord to the pale wrist just visible from the pocket of his jacket, the tendons and contours clean and striking.
She couldn’t say how long they stood there. The snow fell lighter and lighter, but hadn’t stopped entirely.
Yet at this moment, the young man stepped forward and walked down the stairs. The fresh snow gave softly under his footsteps, producing a fine and crisp sound. With those long legs, he’d already pulled well ahead of her in just a few strides.
Ning Sui tipped her head back to look at the sky. She tightened her grip on her bag strap and stepped out through the building’s entrance.
If he was one of the competition students here for training, they should all be staying at the same hotel.
It was late. Ning Sui saw him heading in the direction of the intersection that led to the hotel, and the knot in her chest eased a little.
From the school to their lodgings was really just the length of one long street. And so they walked — a dozen or so meters apart, one ahead and one behind.
The streets were quiet, the lampposts few and far between, with almost no one about. The snow had taken on a deep, dark cast from the night. Occasionally there was a sound — a stray cat darting past from somewhere nearby.
Ning Sui was a little afraid of the dark. She kept glancing from side to side, on guard for anyone suspicious who might be following, while at the same time staying close behind him.
His long legs gave him a natural advantage. His manner was thoroughly unhurried, yet every couple of steps he’d pull just a little farther ahead. Ning Sui had no choice but to take quick, small steps to close the gap, barely managing to keep the distance from widening.
Their shadows stretched long, swaying slowly in the glow of the streetlamps. Dead leaves rustled quietly underfoot. Fine white snow had begun to settle on the hood of Ning Sui’s down jacket.
She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination, but Ning Sui felt as though his pace had slowed slightly.
They passed a barbecue stall. The smell of charred, fragrant smoke hung in the air. Beer bottles clinked at a table by the door.
A few drunken men were slumped over the table, muttering something unintelligible. One man sat outside, bleary-eyed, and as Ning Sui walked past, he lifted his unfocused gaze and stared straight at her.
Ning Sui felt a jolt of unease in her chest and quickened her steps forward.
Just ahead was a corner. She looked up — and the young man had vanished.
Her heart lurched. She immediately broke into a run.
At the turning of the street, a warm amber streetlamp glowed overhead, its light spilling gently in all directions.
Ning Sui arrived breathless, and her steps came to an abrupt halt as she found herself looking directly into a pair of sharp, alert eyes.
— The young man was leaning against the lamppost with easy unconcern, his dark gaze languid yet bold. The snowy light caught the faint gleam of a lazy smile in his ink-black pupils. His voice was low and resonant, like cold liquor poured smooth.
“Keep up.”