BTO CH24

The desks were littered with cold, ruthless, despair-shattering red scores, plunging the dorm into a dead silence.

Shao Zhan silently put down his red pen. No one was willing to be the first to break the stillness.

Shao Zhan: “…” 

Xu Sheng: “…”

After a long while, Shao Zhan awkwardly forced out three words, trying to comfort the candidate—and perhaps comfort himself: “You improved.”

Faced with these disastrous scores, Xu Sheng genuinely couldn’t fathom where he had improved: “You can actually praise a score like this? Are you just trying to console me?”

Shao Zhan: “On the baseline assessment exam, your paper was out of one hundred and fifty, and you scored around this much too.”

Xu Sheng: “…………”

Shao Zhan added: “These test sheets were only out of a hundred points for the section.”

Xu Sheng didn’t even know whether he should be happy about that.

Fairly speaking, compared to his past scores, Xu Sheng’s current result did show a fair amount of progress. If it were scaled to a 150-point paper, his combined average would practically count as a meteoric rise. Meng Guowei would shed tears of moved gratitude and enshrine Xu Sheng’s test paper in the office: “The Bodhisattva has manifested! Xu Sheng actually managed to pull off a score like this? Is this really our Class 7 student Xu Sheng? He’s finally willing to study!”

Having finished speaking, Shao Zhan began meticulously analyzing his error sections to pinpoint exactly where the lost points were coming from.

Scores were only one aspect. Xu Sheng had a weak foundation, so just looking at numbers couldn’t fully reveal his grasp of the knowledge points. To put it simply: assuming a certain problem required three steps to reach the final solution, Xu Sheng previously couldn’t even execute a single step.

However, cross-referencing Xu Sheng’s scratch paper, Shao Zhan found that Xu Sheng could now manage at least one step.

On a good day, he could even manage two.

Though Xu Sheng disliked studying, being trapped in an ocean of workbooks and suffocated by Shao Zhan for days meant he didn’t want his suffering to go to waste: “Did I actually get stronger?”

“You could say that,” Shao Zhan said. “Though for fill-in-the-blank questions, the process doesn’t really matter.”

Xu Sheng: “Then that’s fucking useless.”

Shao Zhan: “But your problem-solving intuition has caught up.”

Shao Zhan’s words failed to console Xu Sheng; they only made the sense of suffocation worse: “That so-called problem-solving intuition doesn’t matter either. The real question is: what do we do now?”

What to do.

This was the grim reality the two of them had to face. Ever since swapping bodies, they had encountered plenty of hurdles, but none came close to the sheer, tidal wave force of the “monthly exams.” In the face of monthly exams, peach-blossom mesmerizing eyes were nothing more than little brothers.

Shao Zhan had originally assumed bombing an exam would be easy for him, but after reviewing several of Xu Sheng’s answer sheets, he realized he genuinely couldn’t mimic Xu Sheng’s thought process.

Xu Sheng wasn’t the type of candidate who simply handed in a blank sheet for a low score; he would write down his own line of reasoning for questions he could attempt—which, naturally, were entirely wrong. For questions he couldn’t touch, perhaps because the long exam hours grew too boring, he would scribble random nonsense.

Nor could he manage to compose a few lines of dogshit poetry on the composition page to pad the word count.

Faced with impending disaster, inspiration struck Xu Sheng. Leaning semi-propped against the desk, he sat straight up and asked: “Is there any way we can skip the exam?”

Skipping the exam might be the only path left for them. If they didn’t take the test, wouldn’t all their problems vanish? Delay it as long as possible.

The more Xu Sheng thought about it, the more viable the plan seemed.

Shao Zhan remembered the school regulations quite clearly and said coldly: “Students must strictly follow school rules during examinations. Those with special circumstances may temporarily be excused from testing, pending a subsequent make-up exam notice. One: major events occurring at home…”

“A major family event,” Xu Sheng said. “That lie’s too hard to spin. Next.”

Shao Zhan thought to himself: What on earth am I doing right now? He raised a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose and continued down the list: “Two: severe illness…”

Before Shao Zhan could even finish the second point, Xu Sheng slammed his palm on the desk: “This one works.”

Shao Zhan looked at him.

Xu Sheng: “Fake an illness. That’s easy.”

“A simple fever or headache is simple enough. Even if the school clinic can’t find anything, we’ll just claim excessive academic pressure. We can spin any symptom that doesn’t have an organic root cause into a psychological issue.”

To give Shao Zhan some confidence, Xu Sheng added: “I’ve pulled stunts like this before. It’s way easier than claiming a family emergency—where are we going to find two people to pose as parents and come to school? A few sentences and the whole thing falls apart, and Old Meng isn’t an idiot.”

Having settled on the excuse to skip the exam and agreeing to put it into action the next day, Shao Zhan was about to get up and leave when Xu Sheng grabbed his arm: “Hey, do you have any of that ointment left from last time? I might have bruised it pretty hard, and soaking in the shower made it act up—the wound is itching a bit.”

As he spoke, Xu Sheng tugged at his collar. The black T-shirt was already loose to begin with, and the tug exposed half a shoulder along with a corner of the tattoo.

By the time the medicine was applied, the dorm was nearly ready for lights-out. Shao Zhan picked up his stack of test papers and headed back to his own room.

Closing the door, the room plunged into quiet.

Without any other extraneous sounds, Shao Zhan placed the test sheets on the desk, the name Xu Sheng facing upward. Xu Sheng’s handwriting hadn’t changed much from before; the hook on the upper half of the character Sheng still looked sharp enough to pierce paper.

Right then, his phone lit up. A group chat tagged with the label “Nanping” flashed in the notification bar.

Ignoring it, Shao Zhan directly blanked the screen and slipped into the bathroom for a shower before lights-out.

The summer air was stifling, and cold water poured down the pipes—

Between climbing walls, tutoring Xu Sheng, and finally confronting test papers where every subject was an absolute fail, Shao Zhan’s mind was somewhat scrambled. Closing his eyes, what drifted into his thoughts after a moment wasn’t anything else, but the tattoo he had stared straight at while applying medicine to Xu Sheng earlier.

Despite keeping his eyes shut, the totem remained stubbornly, brilliantly clear behind his eyelids.

It was his first time seeing it so clearly.

Images spun and unspooled in his mind, cascading backward. The totem faded away, replaced by the alleyways bordering Nanping Middle School—a scene far too familiar, with decaying brick walls and a permanent, damp gloom due to the lack of sunlight. Leaning against the wall at the mouth of this dim alley stood a figure: tall, long-legged, clad in a Nanping Sixth High uniform on the bottom and a simple T-shirt on top, fluttering violently in the alley wind.

Because the light was too dim, only the glowing ember of a cigarette pinched between his fingers was visible, burning like a tiny star in the dark.

The light pulsed, brightening and dimming like a breath.

Shao Zhan seemed to hear someone outside the alley shout “Zhan-ge.”

Then, the camera angle slowly pushed forward, and Shao Zhan watched that figure lift his head—the teenager’s mouth bore a fresh bruise from a fight, his eyes blazed with a fierce, blinding戾气 (aggression), icy yet unbridled, carrying the green, unpolished edges of youth that had yet to fully mature.

That was himself.

…

Plop.

Shao Zhan killed the shower. Opening his eyes, water streamed steadily down his soaked hair.

Stepping out of the bathroom, the notification flashing on his phone wasn’t that group chat anymore, but “S.”

Xu Sheng had changed his avatar. Abandoning his previous flashy picture, he had switched to a scenic photo. Unlike a standard landscape shot, it didn’t feature a clear blue sky; instead, it captured sunlight piercing through cloud cover to cast light against a wall, using hand shadows to silhouette a pair of wings mid-flight.

Those hands belonged to Xu Sheng himself.

Shao Zhan had no idea why a single glance was all it took for him to recognize them through the shadow reflection.

S: Stay a bit later tomorrow. S: Got something for you.

Shao Zhan replied: What is it?

S: A mask. Faking an illness requires buildup; you can’t just dive in too violently or it looks fake. Tomorrow we put on masks first and fake a cold. S: …

The next morning, Xu Sheng actually rummaged frantically through his boxes until he found two disposable masks. Carrying them over to knock on Shao Zhan’s dorm door, he handed one across before heading out, tossing out a few final instructions: “Today the two of us just cough. Lead with coughing.”

In the entirety of Shao Zhan’s high school career, nothing this magical had ever transpired.

He took the mask.

Since Xu Sheng was currently playing Shao Zhan, he had to head to the classroom early. Putting on his mask ahead of time, he hooked the edge with a single finger, pulling the black fabric down slightly to say: “If a teacher asks what’s wrong, just say it’s nothing.”

Shao Zhan hooked his own mask: “Your routine is pretty well-practiced.”

Releasing his finger, Xu Sheng pulled the mask back up: “It’s alright.”

Claiming he had experience with this wasn’t a lie; back in middle school, he had fooled plenty of teachers just to skip class. His acting had been so convincing that a teacher had once earnestly advised him: “Xu Sheng, with your grades, high school is going to be a stretch. Have you considered trying out for a drama academy instead? Your odds might actually be better.”

After a quick breakfast, Xu Sheng walked toward the academic building wearing his mask. Even before stepping into the room, he caught plenty of concerned glances.

Hou Jun was busy catching up on homework. Looking up, he was jolted by the sight of Xu Sheng with half his face hidden behind a mask, completely losing track of where he was in his worksheet: “Holy shit, Zhan-ge, what happened to you?”

Hiding half his face only served to make Xu Sheng’s brows and eyes stand out more sharply. Faking a cough, he rasped, “Nothing much. Catching a bit of a cold, maybe.”

Hou Jun thought to himself that the weather had been pretty stable lately. Catching a cold in this weather?

Still, he didn’t dwell on it. As class monitor, looking out for his classmates was his prime directive: “Watch out for your health, man. Your body is the capital of learning! If you feel any discomfort at all, let me know and I’ll drag you to the school clinic.”

Xu Sheng waved his hands frantically, coughing as he spoke: “…Seriously, I’m fine.”

Hou Jun watched the weak, sickly figure of the “Study God” bypass the front row and head toward the back, tracking him with a worried gaze until Zhan-ge finally settled into his seat, before reluctantly turning back to his homework.

By the time he finished one subject and pulled out another to keep grinding, he happened to look up again—and saw the school tyrant enter the room wearing a mask as well.

What. The. Hell.

The school tyrant exuded pure frost. And he wasn’t wearing a uniform either.

The black mask covering his face made him look even more unfathomable.

Xu Sheng flipped a page of his vocabulary booklet and looked up to catch the scene. He had wanted to say it earlier: Shao Zhan’s natural aura was exceptionally ice-cold—cold to the point of seeming aggressively arrogant.

And it was the kind of arrogance where the person was completely oblivious to it.

He thought to himself: I told you to fake an illness, not act like a mob boss.

“Xu—” Hou Jun felt calling him Xu Sheng sounded too distant, so he improvised, “Sheng-ge, you?”

Shao Zhan: “Nothing.”

Why was it one after the other saying nothing?! They didn’t look like nothing was wrong at all!

Hou Jun looked suspicious: “Zhan-ge said he caught a cold earlier. You wouldn’t happen to…”

The mention of a cold prompted Shao Zhan to tilt his head slightly. Pressing a hand over the fabric of his mask, he let out a cold, deliberate cough.

Hou Jun: “…”

Catching a cold in this weather? And both of them catching it at the same time?

A burning question popped unbidden into Hou Jun’s head: The school tyrant and the Study God—what on earth did these two have to do to catch a cold together in this kind of weather?!