The rain made the chill in the air all the more palpable.
Zhou Xiaqing took a deep breath, hoping to soothe her mood, only to end up coughing from the sting of the cold air, looking thoroughly disheveled.
Absolutely nothing was going her way.
Compared to her concentration, her memory had degraded even more severely.
She had clearly looked over those advanced, beautifully translated sentence structures countless times, yet her brain would still completely freeze when doing practice problems.
It was as if those things had vanished into thin air.
I don’t want to just miss this opportunity.
She had always been a competitive and ambitious person by nature, taking after her father.
Her father had lost both of his parents at a very young age.
With no one to help him, no background, and no connections, he had carved out a path for himself in the political arena entirely alone.
Relying on his sharp wits and smooth interpersonal skills, he had managed to work his way all the way up to a vice-ministerial rank.
Her distinctive personality traits were already prominent back in her first year of primary school.
At that time, her father was at a critical juncture in his career, and her mother was busy running a side business alongside Auntie Yu.
Consequently, during every winter and summer break, her parents would send her to the countryside to stay with her maternal grandparents.
It wasn’t just because they were too busy to look after her; perhaps they also wanted her to experience a peaceful, leisurely life in the countryside to ease her tightly wound nerves.
Removed from the fiercely competitive big city, she did indeed undergo a massive change.
She still remembered how she used to follow her little playmates into the ridges of the fields to play, laughing, fooling around, and chasing one another, everyone smelling strongly like a bunch of little chicks.
When the weather turned sour and it occasionally rained, they would each head back to their respective homes.
Whenever that happened, her grandfather would carry a massive umbrella and quickly walk down the long, narrow path to pick her up.
She would change into the little yellow rain boots her grandfather had prepared for her, slip into a transparent raincoat, and follow right behind his heels.
She would intentionally stomp in the puddles for fun, giggling away, having the absolute time of her life.
Her grandfather would stand beside her holding the umbrella, looking down at her silently, his eyes brimming with tender affection.
He would reach out with his rough, calloused large hand and grasp her tiny hand.
And take her home.
Her gaze drifted back to the misty drizzle floating outside the balcony.
It had been just this kind of drizzling rain back then.
It felt as though she had stepped right into a memory, her soul forever lingering in those rainy days.
She felt as if she were eternally stomping in the water on that countryside path, eternally waiting for her grandfather to come and pick her up with his umbrella.
The more she thought about it, the more her nose tingled with a sour ache, and her rims grew warm.
The emotions she had accumulated for so long were on the verge of bursting forth.
She shook her head, forcefully suppressing the sadness welling up from the depths of her heart.
Stirred by the moment, she pulled out her phone, intending to record the curtain of rain before her.
Opening her camera, she began filming the rainy scenery outside the balcony, moving from right to left, and then downward.
The lens froze.
Standing right next to a lamppost was a dark, shadowy silhouette.
He looked very tall at a glance, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt and washed-blue jeans, with the hoodie pulled over his head and a black backpack slung across his shoulder.
He looked exactly like a ghost.
“Where did this male ghost come from?” Zhou Xiaqing muttered to herself.
The moment the words left her mouth, the male ghost lifted his head and looked directly up toward her direction.
The lens clearly illuminated his face, rendered stark white under the glow of the streetlamp.
Caught completely off guard, her hand jerked violently, and her phone clattered onto the floor.
An expletive instantly slipped from her lips.
She hurriedly knelt down to inspect the device.
Fortunately, the internal screen wasn’t broken, and the phone still operated normally.
Unfortunately, several hideous cracks had marred the outer glass.
The phantom image of Chen Jinshan’s face still lingered in her mind, making Zhou Xiaqing’s teeth itch with sheer rage: “Damn that Chen Jinshan, he’s absolutely everywhere!”
Down below, Chen Jinshan let out a perfectly timed sneeze.
He rubbed his nose, his gaze still lingering around the female dormitory’s balconies, looking remarkably like a creep.
Separated by the light rain, he couldn’t actually make out the figures on the balconies clearly.
He didn’t even know which floor Zhou Xiaqing lived on, yet he had come anyway.
He didn’t have any particular motives; his heart just felt hollow, as if a hole had been punctured through the window of his soul, allowing the wind to howl relentlessly inside.
He only felt that his heart was cold and empty.
He convinced himself that he had only come over for a run.
Yet, he had willingly bypassed the massive athletic field near the South Gate, braving the light rain to cross half the campus just to reach the small sports field outside her dormitory, running five laps in one go.
After finishing his run, he wanted to leave but found himself reluctant to go.
He was truly out of his mind.
He was sick, and he had been suffering from this sickness ever since their second year of junior high.
He furiously berated himself in his mind for three minutes.
Then, standing beneath the streetlamp like a wooden post, he quietly waited.
He didn’t even know what he wanted to achieve.
Pretend to bump into her by chance?
Then what would he say after the “accidental” encounter?
There didn’t seem to be much left for them to say to each other.
To her, their relationship was probably nothing more than having slept together twice and putting a timely stop to it.
After a jumble of messy thoughts, Chen Jinshan raised his hand to check the time, pulled out his phone again, and tapped into his chat history with her.
His fingers typed and deleted, deleted and typed on the keyboard, but in the end, he cleared it all out completely.
Ultimately, he turned around and walked away.
After navigating another half of the campus to return to his dorm, he found that the door wasn’t locked.
Surprisingly, the room inside was entirely empty.
“Don’t even know where they’ve gone to enjoy themselves on a rainy day, leaving the door unlocked.”
Muttering his complaints, he shut the door, tossed his bag onto the desk carelessly, and sank into the hanging chair as if entirely drained of strength, closing his eyes to rest.
Zhou Xiaqing’s face materialized in his mind once again.
He couldn’t even count how many times this had happened.
She had been very beautiful and incredibly popular since she was a child.
On their very first day of kindergarten, while the other children were making a chaotic mess, she was the only one wide-eyed with bright, sparkling eyes, listening intently to the teacher and nodding obediently.
In the second grade of primary school, when a mischievous boy yanked her ponytail, she didn’t cry, scream, or tattle to the teacher.
Instead, the next time before that boy could even make a move, she took the initiative to strike first, grabbing his hair.
If she couldn’t reach his hair, she grabbed his clothes, refusing to let go, her face written entirely with stubborn defiance.
By junior high, she had grown increasingly elegant and graceful, and her grades consistently ranked first in their year.
Coupled with her frequent participation in various school events, practically no one in the entire grade didn’t know her.
Naturally, plenty of boys chased her, all of whom she ignored without exception.
In high school, she was even more single-mindedly devoted to her studies.
They attended a school filled with many wealthy families.
While others focused on dressing up and occasionally indulging in vanity, she was the only one who went completely bare-faced, tying her hair into a simple ponytail, spending her entire day solving problems and memorizing texts at her desk.
During breaks, she would also chat about amusing things with her deskmate, her eyes curving into beautiful, smiling crescents.
She was very beautiful.
Zhou Xiaqing at every single stage of her life was incredibly beautiful.
He pulled up the photo of the four of them taken under the roller coaster last time.
Moving his fingers, he zoomed in on her figure.
Staring unblinkingly at her exquisite facial features, a familiar signal traveled from his lower abdomen straight to his brain.
“Fuck.”
He cursed under his breath.
He was getting a reaction.