BTO CH54

After taking a shower, Shao Zhan knocked on the door while drying his hair to pick up the homework. Facing the unfamiliar scent of body wash coming off “his own body,” combined with their conversation just now, Xu Sheng felt a bit unaccustomed. He handed the A4 paper over: “Here are the problems.”

Shao Zhan took it, but before he had time to open and look at it, Xu Sheng pointed to the door and issued an eviction order: “Remember to close the door on your way out.”

Shao Zhan didn’t say much either. Pinching the stack of papers between his fingers, he stopped right at the doorway.

“Why close your eyes while showering?” Shao Zhan said, “Are you shy?”

“…”

Xu Sheng stared at Shao Zhan’s back, taking a long while to realize he had just been teased.

The shower topic quickly passed, because once Shao Zhan got the homework paper, he discovered another problem. He took a photo of the homework Xu Sheng had copied down. Calling those few lines of Xu Sheng’s writing chicken scratch was an overestimation of chicken scratch.

• Translate this.
• What does this say?

Xu Sheng let out a laugh with a “fuck,” for once not continuing his game, nor having any heart to play games anymore.

• Isn’t my handwriting pretty good?
• Go look up on Baidu what “good” means.

The two began chatting like this. Xu Sheng went to take a shower midway, and the guy opposite seemed to have placed a ward in his dorm room: not long after he finished showering, another picture was sent over.

The topic continued like that. With his hair half-dry, Xu Sheng initially sat on his bed sending messages, lying down directly once his hair dried completely.

• Do you competition students have to keep holding meetings from now on?
• Maybe.
• Can you skip this crappy meeting?
• If you want to seek death, you can try.
• Worst case, just write a self-reflection. A high school life without writing self-reflections is incomplete. Look at how boring your school life has been, considering you were once the big boss of Nanping.

Shao Zhan’s identity as a former school tyrant was unusually intriguing no matter how one thought about it. After sending that message, Xu Sheng couldn’t help but wonder what Shao Zhan was like back then.

• When you were the school tyrant, did you wear the school uniform?
• Occasionally.
• Occasionally?
• The dean was too noisy, so I wore it on weekly inspection days.

The topic imperceptibly shifted from Shao Zhan’s school tyrant persona back to the art studio.

With homework and test papers stacked by his hand, Shao Zhan didn’t touch them for the very first time. Instead, he allowed himself to chat with Xu Sheng for half a day, then typed out word by word: You paint very well.

You paint very well.

Xu Sheng stared at this line of text for a while.

With his fingertips touching the phone screen and the night deep outside the window, these five simple words seemed to strike something deep within his heart, so much so that he didn’t know what to reply for a moment.

Xu Sheng rolled over. He did everything following his heart without regard for consequences, possessing a wild, uninhibited quality at all times. Back in junior high, his grades weren’t good, but he fought hard for an entire academic year to get into Liyang Second High. High school entrance exam content wasn’t like high school material; as long as one mastered the textbooks thoroughly, it wasn’t difficult. In the end, he performed beyond expectations, hitting the cutoff line for a key high school.

Even though he had lowered his head and relented to Xu Yaping back then, after reporting to Linjiang Sixth High, things went back to how they were supposed to be. In the first semester of freshman year, he became a legendary figure in school due to the uniform non-compliance incident. The Xu Sheng back then, even if he had bowed his head, hadn’t actually bent his spine at all. At sixteen or seventeen, sometimes one didn’t even know what they were persisting for, easily losing sight of the path ahead.

Xu Sheng finally replied with “I think I paint pretty well too,” steering away from the topic. In the end, he didn’t even know when he fell asleep while chatting. When he opened his eyes in the morning and unlocked his phone to check the time, he saw a “Good night” sent at 1:00 AM.

After the two swapped their phones back, their social lives temporarily returned to normal.

Building upon the overall color tones Xu Sheng had modified, Kang Kai continued painting while reporting his progress to his mentor in real time, though the conversation gradually went off track.

Kang Kai: Your desk mate is really handsome! Those features, so aloof.

S: Nonsense.

S: My desk mate, of course he’s handsome.

Kang Kai: He must have tons of pursuers at school, right? You used to be the school heartthrob no matter which school you went to, the kind with no rival in sight across the whole school. This time you finally met a worthy opponent.

S: He’s slightly behind me, but he’s indeed pretty decent.

Kang Kai: …Keep bragging.

Xu Sheng avoided going to the classroom on weekends whenever possible, hiding in the dorm growing mushrooms. This morning, he thought Shao Zhan would force him to go to the classroom to study, having prepared himself to grab the doorknob and play the shameless rogue. However, Shao Zhan merely glanced at him: “Don’t want to go?”

Xu Sheng tugged at Shao Zhan’s shirt hem, repeating his old trick and saying shamelessly, “Don’t want to, I beg you.”

Shao Zhan fell silent: “…Let go.”

Xu Sheng: “I won’t.”

Shao Zhan: “You don’t want to go to self-study, you just want to pull and tug with me in the hallway?”

It took Xu Sheng two seconds to realize Shao Zhan had yielded.

Xu Sheng released his grip, half-teasing, half-casual: “Since when did Study God become so easy to talk to?”

Shao Zhan looked at him. Today he was wearing the outfit Xu Sheng wore during the swap two days ago: those ripped jeans that “Shao Zhan” had felt up. Standing very close to Xu Sheng, almost looking straight into his eyes, he lowered Xu Sheng’s habitually rising tone: “Toward you, when have I ever been hard to talk to?”

In fact, even before Shao Zhan spoke, right when this thought popped into Xu Sheng’s head, he had paused.

Indeed, it seemed like… from a long time ago, he had been very easy to talk to.

Thinking of this, Xu Sheng deleted the phrase “It’s a fact, okay? Who’s bragging with you?” from his chat box with Kang Kai letter by letter.

As if possessed, he typed out a line: Have you ever been in love?

Unlike his previous messages that took a few minutes to reply, Kang Kai sent back three question marks instantly: ???

Kang Kai: You.

Kang Kai: Bro, you fucking have something going on!

Kang Kai: Spill it, what’s the deal?!

Xu Sheng typed a lot of words, ultimately deleting them one by one. He didn’t deny the speculation of ‘something going on’: Forget it, nothing to talk about with a perpetual single dog like you.

Having gathered zero information and gotten mercilessly mocked instead, Kang Kai: Fuck?

After sending that message, Xu Sheng tossed his phone aside.

Although he mocked Kang Kai for being a perpetual single dog, he wasn’t much better himself. Kang Kai’s romantic luck had always been abysmal; whether it was a secret crush or an explicit one, he was always on the path of being rejected. In the end, he simply immersed himself in painting, painting only holy works and keeping his ears closed to matters of the heart.

Xu Sheng was the exact opposite in terms of conditions. He had always been popular with girls since childhood, a universal crowd-pleaser across all ages and genders. As long as he was willing, building good relationships with people simply depended on whether he wanted to or not. Doing art naturally made one more sensitive, paying extra care to girls; combined with looks like his, it was hard not to become a heartbreaker.

Yet even with opposite conditions, his final outcome was the same as Kang Kai’s.

Whenever Xu Sheng sensed someone’s feelings but couldn’t return them, he would quietly and consciously pull back to create distance.

Kang Kai had noticed it once. Setting down his brush, he turned to look at him, craning his neck behind him: “Where’s that girl who kept following you to the studio lately?”

“It’s exam week recently, I told her to spend more time reviewing.”

Kang Kai: “?”

“She probably won’t come often in the future either. She likes me,” Xu Sheng sighed and said. “Can’t you tell?”

Kang Kai: “??” Looked like a pretty normal girl to me.

Xu Sheng never gave people false illusions. Giving someone hope only to reject them later was a form of harm no matter how you looked at it.

—Bro, you fucking have something going on!

With both hands behind his head, Xu Sheng replayed that sentence in his mind.

At this time, Xu Sheng had no idea that those two days over the weekend were his only lighthearted days. Had he known earlier, he definitely wouldn’t have wasted time in the dorm. He would have gone out more, experienced the outside world, breathed fresh air… experienced what it meant to be “alive.”

After the weekend, Xu Sheng opened his eyes and woke up, lifting his hand to find he was still “Shao Zhan,” and tests followed one after another.

The competition meetings were indeed endless.

Before Monday’s flag-raising ceremony, Xu Sheng was called out of the main group by Meng Guowei: “Shao Zhan, come over for a second.”

Xu Sheng stopped in his tracks and sauntered over: “Teacher Meng.”

Meng Guowei still needed to join the class for morning exercise, so he instructed briefly: “Go to the meeting room. Director Gu is holding a meeting for you all. Quick, quick, what are you standing there for?”

A meeting was just a meeting. Through Friday’s competition meeting, Xu Sheng felt he had already mastered the process.

Zero difficulty.

Wasn’t it just attending a meeting, then finding a way to swipe a practice test paper from someone else to copy?

Before going to the meeting room, Xu Sheng genuinely thought so.

The sports field.

The host gave a speech on the flag-raising platform, specifically summarizing the sophomore grade’s performance at Lüzhou Base two weeks prior.

The speech content was divided into five main sections, with Xu Sheng single-handedly monopolizing one of them.

“Xu Sheng of Class 7, for fighting and causing trouble at Lüzhou Base, maliciously injuring seven students from Honghai Fourth High,” the host announced, “and demonstrating an extremely atrocious attitude in his self-reflection, is hereby given a special public reprimand!”

“Teacher Meng.” Someone called him.

Meng Guowei acted as if he hadn’t heard.

He was pondering how to escape this speech; a moment like this was practically slapping his face as homeroom teacher! Meng Guowei didn’t know how many times he had suffered this kind of professional career torture because of Xu Sheng.

“Teacher Meng.” The voice was cold, calling out once more.

Meng Guowei looked up and saw that standing before him was the main culprit.

Shao Zhan, currently acting as “Xu Sheng,” couldn’t get a good look from teachers of any subject. Meng Guowei said: “Why aren’t you lining up properly in the back? Running up to the front to embarrass us?”

Although competition students had many meetings, there were usually fixed times. Hurriedly summoning someone over during Monday morning exercises: no matter how one thought about it, it wasn’t simple.

Shao Zhan: “I’m looking for Shao Zhan… for something. Is he not here?”

“He went to a meeting. The Four Schools Joint Competition was moved forward this year, so Director Gu has to brief them on the tournament. This Four Schools Joint Competition…” Halfway through, Meng Guowei pivoted: “Forget it, why am I telling you this? What do you know about the competition?”

“Four Schools Joint Competition?”

Shao Zhan suspected he had misheard.

In an instant, what the speaker on the flag-raising platform was saying became gradually inaudible. In the scorching summer heat, all sounds receded far into the distance.

“The Four Schools Joint Competition—” Inside the meeting room, Director Gu was beaming with smiles as he showcased this year’s competition to the students below. “I believe everyone is no stranger to it. Since there are also new freshmen joining us this time, I’ll briefly introduce it. The Four Schools, simply put, refer to the four key high schools in our district.”

The PPT flipped to the next page.

Four middle/high schools were neatly listed above.

“Linjiang Sixth High, Songye Auxiliary High, Yinghua Experimental High, Xingjian High.”

Xu Sheng found a seat farthest from King of Hell Gu to sit down.

These four schools were not unfamiliar; when filling out high school entrance exam applications back then, they were the dream schools of countless students.

Xu Sheng listened absentmindedly, still failing to understand what this Four Schools Joint Competition actually meant just from these few lines.

“Every year, our four schools showcase our students’ elegance to one another, maintaining healthy competition with the aim of progress together. Therefore, every year we hold a four-school joint contest, assembling outstanding competition students to compete together on competition problems: shortened to the Four Schools Joint Competition!”

Hearing this, Xu Sheng’s expression began to crack.

As a qualified academic slacker, he had never heard of this league in his life.

Director Gu continued, flipping the PPT to another page, declaring with boundless pride: “First place in last year’s Four Schools Joint Competition was our Linjiang: no, to be precise, this honor was brought to us by Student Shao Zhan!”

The illustration on the PPT slide was none other than the scene of Shao Zhan taking the championship!

The teenager’s face bore no expression, dressed in school uniform. He lowered his head slightly, an angle that highlighted his particularly high nose bridge. From his hair down to the fingers holding his pen, everything exuded an aura of ‘keep out,’ set apart from the bustling scene around him.

The moment Director Gu uttered those words, gazes swept in from all directions, converging onto Xu Sheng.

Faced with this kind of inter-school rivalry, no teacher could remain calm. Director Gu raised his hand into a tight fist, pumping it high into the air: “We must create glory once more this year! Keep the championship in Linjiang!”

Led by Director Gu, the competition students below were also ignited with passion, shouting along: “Keep the championship in Linjiang!”

“…”

The words “Four Schools Joint Competition” were no different from another clap of thunder, invisibly striking everyone speechless. Xu Sheng’s world collapsed with a crash.

He had only one word he wanted to say.

Fuck.