BTO CH22.2

Xu Sheng suddenly found it hard to breathe. He reached up and unbuttoned his uniform collar, fully exposing his sharp collarbones.

“I heard you were always ranked first before,” Xu Sheng asked.

“I heard you were always ranked dead last before,” Shao Zhan replied.

“…………”

Following those two sentences came an endless silence.

Xu Sheng realized he had wanted to drop out of school far too early.

“Stand further to the side.” “Fuck, this wasn’t the spot last time—face that tree behind you first. Right, move right… a bit more.” “You weren’t in this spot last time either.” “Where was I last time? Wasn’t I right fucking here?!” “…”

It was already night, the sky completely dark. The dry, blistering summer wind swept through the rustling shadows of the trees. The drone of cicadas bled through the foliage, with only the dim yellow glow of a distant streetlight offering a sliver of visibility.

Amidst the rustling, the first voice spoke up again: “Are you serious about this?”

The other muttered a low “Fuck.”

After cursing, Xu Sheng propped one long leg up, letting the other dangle lazily over the wall. Sitting on the edge, he asked, “Do you have a better idea?”

Shao Zhan stood below the wall—in the exact same spot where Xu Sheng had vaulted over and crashed into him over a dozen days ago. The angle was precisely aligned, splitting the difference between the two sycamore trees on the path behind him.

He felt like he was losing his mind too!

When Xu Sheng suggested jumping the wall again, he actually hadn’t shot it down immediately.

Whatever shredded remnants of his rationality remained had been completely obliterated by the words monthly exams.

“Jumping the wall again… it definitely feels like a moronic idea. But can you think of a more viable plan? The time you ran into me was roughly around curfew,” Xu Sheng had specifically checked his phone before getting off the bus that day because his battery was dying. “Today happens to be the same day of the week. It takes about ten minutes to walk here from the bus stop, so we jump at exactly twenty past.”

Pulling his phone out while keeping one hand anchored to the wall, Xu Sheng checked the screen: 8:14 PM. “Wait six more minutes, then I jump.”

Shao Zhan: “How do we determine if you should jump or I should jump? Who exactly counts as ‘Xu Sheng’ right now?”

That was an excellent question.

Xu Sheng hadn’t thought that deeply when he proposed jumping the wall, subconsciously defaulting to himself as Xu Sheng. But right now, while Xu Sheng’s soul resided here, his physical body was with Shao Zhan.

Which one of them actually counted as him?!

Pondering for a moment, Xu Sheng proposed a compromise: “If I jump and there’s no reaction, we swap and you go up and jump.”

Shao Zhan: “…”

As they spoke, the time on the screen ticked slowly from 8:14 to 8:19.

“Ready?” Xu Sheng asked.

“Jump,” Shao Zhan said.

Shao Zhan appeared calmer than him. Dressed entirely in black, standing there looked like a scene in rewind. The boy melted seamlessly into the darkness, with only the sheer coldness radiating from him seemingly sharp enough to pierce the night and bleed through the shadows.

But that calm was merely a facade. No matter who it was, standing there facing a desk mate about to hurl himself off a wall, staying calm was impossible.

Taking a deep breath, Xu Sheng felt exactly as if he were standing on a starting block, muscles coiled, waiting for the gunshot. He flexed his hands and rolled his wrists; Shao Zhan’s body possessed the unique vitality and strength of youth, so he wasn’t terribly worried about sustaining serious injuries from the fall.

40 seconds. 41 seconds. …

Counting silently in his head, Xu Sheng rose slightly and shoved the phone back into his pocket. He maintained his one-handed grip on the wall, but shifted the leg that had been propped up, planting his foot on the edge in a ready stance—

Timing it perfectly, alongside the numbers ticking in his head, he could hear his heartbeat hammering louder and faster against his ribs.

The instant the screen in his pocket flashed from 8:19 to 8:20, he released his grip cleanly, pushed off with his feet, and vaulted straight off the wall!

It took every ounce of Shao Zhan’s self-control to suppress the human instinct to dodge. Standing rooted to the spot, he watched Xu Sheng plummet toward him at an alarming speed.

The two crashed to the ground together.

This time, there was no thunder and lightning, nor did they pass out. The damage taken was perfectly consistent with falling from a wall that wasn’t exceptionally high; only their elbows, braced against the grass, stung a little from the scrape.

Immediately after, they swapped positions and jumped again. The result was identical.

The second time around, Xu Sheng lay flat on the grass, not bothering to get up right away. Staring up at the cloudless night sky, his mind was consumed by a single sentence: How could this happen?

Shao Zhan had originally crashed into Xu Sheng, but his reflexes were sharp. After they went down together, he braced one hand against the grass beside Xu Sheng’s waist. His palm still seemed to carry the lingering warmth of the other’s body: “Are you okay?”

“Fuck,” Xu Sheng’s back had scraped against gravel, but he couldn’t bring himself to care about a minor cut. “I’m fine.”

Resting for a moment before sitting up, Xu Sheng’s mental state officially collapsed: “…Are we really stuck like this?”

Having finished the wall jumps, Shao Zhan regained his composure: “There might be other conditions required to swap back.”

As for what those “other conditions” were, it was impossible to deduce further.

Xu Sheng: “So we jumped for nothing.”

Shao Zhan: “Yes. Twice.”

Xu Sheng: “…”

Doing something as idiotic as jumping off a wall wouldn’t matter if it actually worked. But doing it only for absolutely nothing to happen was profoundly embarrassing.

Shao Zhan sighed: “Get up. Let’s head back to the dorm.”

Returning to his room, Xu Sheng pulled off his shirt, walked into the bathroom, and stared into the mirror for a long time.

Staring back at him was still Shao Zhan’s face.

Looking at Shao Zhan’s face now made Xu Sheng think of the monthly exams, filling him with the profound sensation that his world was… rapidly collapsing.

Stepping out of the shower, he remembered he hadn’t started today’s calligraphy practice yet.

Thus, after throwing himself off a wall, Xu Sheng sat down with unspeakable emotions and began practicing penmanship.

Zhang Feng had messaged him twice during this time.

Zhang Feng: Why did you bolt so fast after school? Do you have another crew outside of school now?I was in a rush to jump off a wall.

Zhang Feng: Wanna game?Practicing calligraphy. Not playing.

Zhang Feng: Haven’t seen you squad up in days. What have you been up to lately?Spending every day figuring out how to drop out of school.

Zhang Feng’s messages made the screen light up and dim repeatedly. When the screen lit up for the final time, the flashing contact name wasn’t Zhang Feng.

It was his Study God desk mate.

Setting his pen down, Xu Sheng grabbed the phone. Shao Zhan had sent three curt words: Open the door.

By the time Xu Sheng set the pen aside and got up to open the door, Shao Zhan had already been standing outside for a while. As the door swung open, Shao Zhan was looking down, idly scrolling through his phone with one hand. Fresh out of the shower, damp hair fell across his forehead. He wore dark blue sweatpants, the fabric hanging loosely and tracing the lines of his legs. Hearing the door, he looked up.

Xu Sheng was about to ask, “Do you need something?” But the words died on his lips as his gaze dropped to the stack of workbooks in Shao Zhan’s hand: “You…”

Of the workbooks, one had a black spine reading Complete Solutions to High School Sophomore Mathematics. The other two were Conceptual English and Mastering Physics and Chemistry.

Alarm bells blared in Xu Sheng’s mind.

Fuck, this scene felt way too familiar!

This was exactly how those volumes of Liu Qingchun copybooks had ended up in his hands, inflicting trauma that had yet to fade.

Pausing for several seconds, Xu Sheng finally forced out the second half of his sentence: “Don’t tell me you want me to start grinding problems from today onward.”

Are you even human?

Shao Zhan had barely pocketed his phone and hadn’t gotten a word out before Xu Sheng, moving with astonishing speed, slammed the door shut with a loud BANG: “…Get out.”

“Piss off,” Xu Sheng yelled from inside. “I’m not doing problems.”

“…”

Back pressed flat against the door, Xu Sheng braced himself against it with all his might, fully aware it was locked and the person outside couldn’t get in anyway: “I’d rather kill myself!”

Separated by the door panel, the two engaged in a drawn-out standoff.

“I’ll watch you work,” Shao Zhan said. “You can ask me if you don’t know how to do them.”

If anyone else at Sixth High heard that sentence, they’d probably pass out on the spot.

It was widely known that the Study God rarely explained problems to others, and no one dared disturb him. The name “Shao Zhan” had long been deified—an untouchable figure people only secretly prayed to before exams.

But Xu Sheng had absolutely zero desire to suffer this torture: “Instead of wasting time teaching me how to solve problems, you’d be better off researching how we can cheat!”

Shao Zhan: “The monthly exams aren’t hard.”

Not long ago, Xu Sheng had been able to look King of Hell Gu in the eye and say, ‘I feel the only difficulty is that it’s too easy.’ Now, he had no choice but to confront his own true self: “Our definitions of the word ‘hard’ might be slightly different.”

A long silence followed from outside the door.

Then, Shao Zhan delivered his final line: “I have the key.”

“…………”

The first thing Shao Zhan did upon entering wasn’t throwing the workbooks at him and demanding he solve problems. Holding a bottle of iodine in his other hand, he tilted his chin slightly: “Take your shirt off.”

Xu Sheng: “?”

Shao Zhan pointed at his elbow, then his back: “Do you feel like you haven’t scraped yourself up enough?”

Only then did Xu Sheng realize that the spots he bumped earlier had broken the skin; he hadn’t even noticed.

This time, the pain in his back was far more pronounced than the last. His luck must have been poor—he had landed on some sharper gravel. He could reach his elbow to apply the medicine himself, but his back was genuinely out of reach.

Pinching the hem of the T-shirt, Xu Sheng slowly pulled it up, revealing the teenager’s lean waist, the line of his spine, and finally his slightly protruding shoulder blades—and the glaring tattoo inked across one of them.

Its existence on Shao Zhan’s body felt indescribably jarring, yet within that incongruity, something else seemed to lie hidden.

Turning his head slightly, Xu Sheng figured that since they were now comrades in adversity and shared this bizarre twist of fate, he couldn’t hold back the question: “That… that thing on your body. Is it to cover up a scar?”

This was the first time the tattoo had been brought out into the open.

Xu Sheng added: “Don’t worry, I won’t tell the teachers.”

Shao Zhan’s hands didn’t pause. The scrape was close to the wing, so his gaze naturally fell upon the ink.

Seeing the tattoo on his own back from a third-person perspective felt somewhat surreal. For hundreds of days and nights prior, he had barely felt its presence—or rather, he had deliberately avoided feeling its presence.

Xu Sheng didn’t receive an answer.

Shao Zhan dipped a cotton swab in the iodine. With his back turned, Xu Sheng couldn’t see the expression on his face, ultimately catching only a single sentence: “Stop moving.”

There was just over a week until the monthly exams.

Xu Sheng didn’t dwell on the tattoo issue—he simply didn’t have the time. Right after the medicine was applied, he was buried under a bombardment of thrown study materials.

Sitting on the bed, positioned directly across from the narrow end of the study desk—which offered roughly an arm’s length of workspace—Xu Sheng chewed on his pen cap, forced to flip open a page of Complete Solutions to High School Sophomore Mathematics.

Sitting across from him, Shao Zhan worked through practice papers in his room. His posture remained immovably rigid, pausing only occasionally to scan a prompt before marking out calculations on scratch paper. Yet even while doing this, he could spare enough attention to warn him: “Read the prompt carefully.”

Xu Sheng really wanted to pull out his phone right now and search: Linjiang Sixth High withdrawal procedures, or transfer procedures, anything works.

Other people went to school solely to study; he had to spend every day strategizing how to stay alive. This existence was simply too brutal.

Shao Zhan hadn’t picked these workbooks at random. The moment Xu Sheng flipped it open, he saw red pen markings. A sharp red line slashed under a formula, accompanied by a single character written with razor-sharp intensity. Just looking at the handwriting, one could practically hear the writer’s cold, commanding tone: Memorize.

The scope of the monthly exams wasn’t overly broad. Shao Zhan had highlighted the key concepts and flagged several guaranteed question types.

If any other student from Class 7 sat here and saw these key points and Shao Zhan’s predicted questions, they would undoubtedly experience a moment of sheer enlightenment, feeling capable of rocketing up fifty ranks on the upcoming exam!

“You probably don’t understand me very well yet.” But Xu Sheng was built differently from them. After a long pause, holding the sophomore workbook and accepting his reality, Xu Sheng sighed and asked, “Do you have any freshman materials?”

Shao Zhan: “…”

Xu Sheng’s self-awareness was incredibly precise: “I need to patch up my foundation first.”

Halfway through writing an answer, Shao Zhan’s pen stalled, momentarily forgetting which variable to eliminate. He had assumed that highlighting the key points and drilling the guaranteed questions a few extra times would be enough to get by.

He ended up asking a question even Meng Guowei was desperate to know: “How did you pass your high school entrance exams?”

At the mention of the entrance exams, Xu Sheng uncharacteristically didn’t talk back, instead freezing for a second.

His memory was instantly yanked far into the past.

Pressing his lips together, the text on the sophomore workbook in front of him gradually blurred. In a trance, he felt as if the book in his hands had morphed into a familiar copy of Middle School Exam Sprint.

He had flipped through that stack of test papers until they were practically falling apart. The sheets were densely packed with formula derivations and reworkings of incorrect problems. Yet with another blink, the hallucinated words vanished abruptly, replaced by a slender hand extending across his vision.

Twirling a pen in his hand, Shao Zhan tapped the tip against the workbook Xu Sheng was holding and said, “Bring it here.”

“Which part don’t you understand?”

Xu Sheng didn’t know if it was his imagination, but even though the teenager was using the exact same tone, it somehow didn’t sound quite as cold anymore.

Xu Sheng pointed to the first highlighted problem.

Aside from the new concepts introduced in sophomore year, this question incorporated theorems learned in freshman year—a comprehensive problem type. Pulling a sheet of scratch paper from the side, Shao Zhan placed it over the workbook and jotted down the freshman theorem: “I’ll derive it once. Watch closely.”

As he spoke, he drew a set of coordinate axes on the paper.

“The mathematical definition of a function is: given a non-empty set of numbers A,” Shao Zhan wrote an ‘A’ beside the axes, “applying a correspondence rule f to A, denoted as f(A).”

Shao Zhan started teaching from the absolute basics.

Xu Sheng had assumed Shao Zhan’s teaching style would match his personality—not giving a damn whether the other person understood or not. This unapproachable demeanor didn’t look like someone capable of patiently explaining a problem.

Yet, unexpectedly, Shao Zhan’s logic was crystal clear without a single wasted word. He even paused after explaining a key concept to ask, “Understand?”

Xu Sheng actually did understand, but he genuinely lacked any passion for studying. Even if he absorbed everything Shao Zhan said, he remained thoroughly unserious, seizing every available opportunity to temporarily detach himself from “study mode.”

Resting his chin on one hand, he noted how Shao Zhan’s naturally imposing iceberg face currently carried a trace of indolence. Leaning in slightly, Xu Sheng drawled out his words: “Teacher, if I say I didn’t understand, could you explain it again?”

The title Teacher was laced with ambiguous intent.

Calling Xu Sheng a “gal-pal” wasn’t entirely accurate. The moment he dropped his seriousness, he easily gave off a specific illusion—like right now, acting exactly like an absentminded, bad-boy student trying to flirt with his private tutor.

“If you understand it, do it yourself.”

Ignoring him, Shao Zhan added coldly: “Look at the problem. Don’t look at me.”

“If you aren’t looking at me,” Xu Sheng spun his pen, “how do you know I’m looking at you?”

As long as he could avoid talking about studying, Xu Sheng could spin any nonsense imaginable.

“If you keep a cold face like that, my study efficiency is going to take a hit… Shouldn’t you consider your student’s feelings?”

“Or we could talk about something else,” Xu Sheng pressed on. “Since you don’t have a partner, what about someone you like?”

The drone of the cicadas outside faded. Approaching lights-out, the dorm corridor was exceptionally quiet. Gripping his pen, Shao Zhan maintained his stony silence. Looking up, his gaze met a pair of eyes holding a faint, lingering smile.

For a split second, Shao Zhan’s mind blanked.

Right at that moment, the clock struck ten. The lights-out curfew hit, and the entire building plunged abruptly into darkness.

Figuring tutoring time was over with the lights out, Xu Sheng reached out blindly in the dark to snap the workbook shut. But the room was pitch-black; unable to adjust immediately and completely blind, his hand grasped Shao Zhan’s instead.

It was clearly his own hand, yet it seemed to hold an entirely different temperature.

Until, from the darkness, a low, cold voice asked: “Have you felt it enough?”

Xu Sheng blinked, finally realizing what had happened, and retracted his hand as if he’d been electrocuted.