Before Jian Yue could even unleash his big move, a new customer arrived.
Closing time was just within reach, and considering his persona as the breadwinner supporting his family, no amount of effort could overcome the fate of a corporate workhorse.
He grumbled inwardly about why this person also had to show up at exactly this time, secretly hoping they were just a passerby and not the second batch of resident NPCs for the milk tea shop.
But as he thought this, he unexpectedly saw a very familiar face.
A pure black trench coat over a light-colored turtleneck.
Tall and slender, with a cold, aloof air that kept people a thousand miles away.
Pale skin, sharply defined features, brows and eyes full of cold severity and solemnity, and gray-blue eyes that seemed even more frost-chilled.
With just one glance, this man’s bearing set him apart from those rich playboys who claimed they weren’t the same kind of people, giving ordinary civilian Jian Yue a genuine shock of “truly, truly not the same kind of people.”
Li Cheng’s gaze swept over those few, then finally settled on Jian Yue.
After a moment, he looked at the young man’s outfit, casually glanced at the time on his watch, and reminded him: “It’s almost 11.”
Jian Yue’s face was flat. His lips moved, producing a completely toneless sentence: “Mm, I know.”
It was the tone of someone so speechless they no longer had the energy to express emotion, carrying an almost naked resentment.
Only then did Li Cheng spare the four men an extra look.
Ever since Li Cheng had appeared, their faces had been ugly. But ugly as they were, not one of them made a sound, like a flock of quails too afraid to speak up despite their anger.
Jian Yue almost wanted to laugh.
What was the point of glaring their eyes out? These guys only dared to show such blatant hostility when Li Cheng wasn’t looking at them.
“Let’s go. The dorm supervisor’s about to lock up,” Li Cheng said, standing in place as if he’d made up his mind to wait for the young man to get off work and leave together.
Given the way out, Jian Yue moved with impressive efficiency, already putting on the jacket he’d left at the ordering counter. But as he shut down the machines, he said, seemingly offhandedly: “The floor I just mopped got stepped on.”
The footprints, left blatantly while the floor was still wet, stood out in neat rows on the tiles under the lights.
The four men’s expressions twisted for an instant.
Apparently, even with the lowest EQ, one could still read something from his hasty packing-up motions.
Not to mention that unsubtle hint, and those footprints still glaring on the glossy tiles… no matter how good they felt about themselves, surely they’d noticed something was wrong?
Since Jian Yue showed no intention whatsoever of going to clean the floor, the four men stayed glued to their seats as if their butts were superglued down. Until that cold-faced King of Hell looked their way, gestured at the footprints in front of them, and said: “Go wipe them clean.”
The few of them jumped up on the spot as if their tails had been stepped on, springing up like coiled springs and shouting: “Are you picking a fight?”
“You wipe up your own footprints. Otherwise, I’m going to wonder exactly which aspect of ‘proper upbringing’ your elders were so good at.”
Among peers of equal standing, an exceptionally gifted contemporary has always been a topic used to crush their confidence. But at some point, when that person rises to stand on equal footing with their elders, when even the usual comparisons cease to appear, as if merely placing their names side by side would be an exaggeration, that lingering resentment and self-consolation gets ground to pieces between their teeth and swallowed down in bitter humiliation.
Such a suddenly widened gap produces an absolute, glaring psychological suppression.
What’s more, they are mediocre in their foolishness, yet not wicked enough to reach the extreme.
A middling social position, ignored and left entirely to their own devices. Faced with someone genuinely standing at the very peak of the pyramid, they are like loess that crumbles at a touch, only outsiders would point at their haphazardly piled heap of sand and call it a pyramid.
Li Cheng paid no further attention to this crowd’s clamoring. Only when Jian Yue came out did he take a step toward the door as if nothing had happened.
Jian Yue clocked out, shut down the machine, then walked to the shop entrance and turned off the lights.
He never once glanced at the four of them the entire time, yet was still stopped by their voices.
An undisguised display of class and status, playing out in this tiny bubble tea shop.
Faces stiff, they said to Jian Yue: “Jian Yue, you go wipe it up. Aren’t you the one working here?”
Just look at that. Just look.
They valued that useless face of theirs more than anyone. One second they were sweet-talking him, greasy little expressions one after another. The next second, the face-saving project was tossed straight to him to repair the whole point being: your face doesn’t matter; right now the priority is that you preserve mine first.
Jian Yue said nothing, which said everything. His gaze swept over the four of them, seated there like four great Buddhas, from bottom to top, then looked at Li Cheng standing outside the door, and gave an undisguised assessment:
“You really aren’t the same kind of people.”
He pointed at the crossbody bag on his shoulder: “I’m off the clock. Customers right now, I’m your classmate. So I’ll speak using the principles they’ve long since been teaching in rural kindergartens.”
“Your own business, you handle yourself. Is that so hard to understand?”
Besides, you’re not even customers. You only came here to shui/ me.
Rarely, the young man showed a smile as he said these words, a smile seldom seen from him.
But that smile carried a trace of hostility, along with a lingering disgust.
That seemingly cold, aloof face rarely revealed such intense, undisguised emotion.
After all, in their lives, even those who looked down on them most always maintained a certain hypocritical decorum.
Yet the person before them wore this expression so openly and somehow it looked vivid, even striking.
The four of them went blank for a brief instant, unconsciously showing a stunned look.
But seeing the young man standing outside with Li Cheng, apparently about to lock up, one of the four gritted his teeth, took the mop handle by the door, and wiped the floor clean.
After that, the four of them said nothing more and hurriedly left the scene. So well-behaved that Jian Yue was quite surprised, and credited it entirely to Li Cheng’s presence at his side.
On the way back, Jian Yue thanked him for stepping in.
Unexpectedly, after Jian Yue said this, he received a promise he had never imagined: “From now on, I’ll come by every night. Consider it on my way.”
It really was on the way.
After all, Jian Yue knew that Li Cheng had been busy lately, yet still insisted on returning to his on-campus dorm around ten o’clock like clockwork.
It was hard for Jian Yue to refuse such a convenience of riding on someone’s coattails. So he closed out the conversation with a thank-you that was a little less flat than usual.
The two walked side by side, neither hurrying nor dawdling.
The silence between them felt less like that of roommates and more like two strangers or perhaps fellow students, who’d happened to collide on the same route walking at exactly the same pace.
Jian Yue was perfectly content with that. At least until he and Li Cheng arrived downstairs together and saw yesterday’s group of guys locked in a seemingly endless back-and-forth with the dorm supervisor.
Jian Yue could tell, comparing yesterday’s cozy scene with today’s awkward exchange, whether Shen Yu had any part in it.
Clearly, the situation before him was not Shen Yu’s doing.
Jian Yue figured that with Shen Yu’s personality, he’d never run the same trick twice, so what exactly were these guys up to…?
“All right, you lot, hurry on upstairs! There are other students resting down here on the first floor!”
Heaven only knew how long these guys had been pestering the poor, innocent dorm supervisor to wear such a helpless, speechless expression.
And as Jian Yue and Li Cheng drew near, they could hear the group rambling on at the supervisor, chattering about one pointless topic after another.
“Come on, Uncle, didn’t we just talk about your daughter yesterday? She”
Mid-sentence, they spotted Jian Yue and Li Cheng walking up to the entrance.
The three parties exchanged looks, momentarily at a loss for words.
The dorm supervisor squinted, looked at Li Cheng, then at Jian Yue, and asked, “Which one of you is Jian Yue?”
Once he’d confirmed it was Jian Yue himself, he explained that the student council had informed the teachers of his special circumstances, so he’d be granted an extra half hour to get into the dorm.
Well, then. Student council president Shen Yu was well-connected and knew plenty of teachers, came from an educated, scholarly family… So getting the dorm supervisor to turn a blind eye and cut some slack for a poor overworked student by half an hour did seem like a perfectly plausible and effective form of help.
As for Li Cheng, he’d probably already communicated with the school administration long ago. So even though he’d rarely gone past curfew this time, the supervisor didn’t say another word about it.
Only the few guys left standing there seemed to fall silent, pausing as if at a loss for what to do. Against the backdrop of Jian Yue offering a greeting and a nod before heading inside, they shuffled off awkwardly, without another word.