[Great job, baby! Extracurricular study task successfully completed. Reward: Height +0.1 cm. Current height: 173.5 cm.]
After more than two hours of watching and learning, the system once again sent a prompt confirming task completion and his reward.
YAWN.
Chen Jingle yawned, stood up, and stretched lazily. Seeing that it was almost bedtime, he quickly picked up the water cup from the table, took a sip, and went to the bathroom to take a leak. Peeing before bed was a good habit; it effectively prevented the dreaded dream of frantically searching for a toilet.
"System, for today’s bedtime lullaby, can I request a song?" Chen Jingle asked, lying spread-eagle on his bed.
[What song would the baby like to hear?]
"I really can? Then I’d like to hear... hmm, ’The Song of the Grassland.’"
[Of course.]
"Ah, thank you!" Chen Jingle quickly pulled a thin blanket over his belly button, getting ready to sleep.
[My heart walks with heaven and earth, my thoughts are led by cattle and sheep~]
[The lone smoke of the desert embraces the round setting sun~]
[At the edge of the sky, chatting with the moon~]
[The bonfire reflects on faces, intoxicating the lasso pole~]
Logically, since this was a folk song, it should be sung with a traditional ethnic or bel canto style. However, the system discarded all vocal techniques, relying entirely on its natural voice—that same gentle, water-like tone.
Although it lacked a wild and ethereal quality, it didn’t sound bad at all. In fact, it gave off the comforting feeling of a wanderer returning home or a baby swallow diving into a warm embrace. It was pure emotion! One could only say it was truly worthy of being the system.
At this moment, Chen Jingle felt as if he were wrapped in layers of affection. His eyelids grew heavy, and he soon succumbed to a deep sleep. Without realizing it, his body shifted from a spread-eagle posture into a curled-up ball. In less than a minute, he entered a state of deep sleep.
[Good night.]
***
A new day arrived, and he was once again woken up by the system’s alarm.
"When will I ever get to sleep in and wake up naturally?" Chen Jingle grumbled, yawning as he crawled out of bed.
This system was great in every aspect, except that it forced him to get up at six in the morning to exercise. For a baby who was five years and three hundred months old, eight hours of sleep was simply not enough! Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
Dawdling as he got up, he pulled open the curtains. Well, the weather today was nice. The temperature on his phone showed that it was two degrees lower than yesterday, so it wasn’t quite as hot. The morning even offered a rare hint of coolness.
"Should I go for a run?" Chen Jingle felt tempted.
He wanted to breathe in some fresh air. Over the past few days, he had been doing anaerobic exercises at home. It would be nice to switch things up and do some cardio for a change. It wasn’t that he couldn’t run in his home village, provided he wasn’t afraid of becoming the post-meal gossip topic for the local aunties and grandmas. In rural villages, there might be a lack of many things, but wagging tongues were never in short supply.
During the first few months after Chen Jingle returned, rumors spread that he was doing nothing but playing on his computer all day instead of going out to work.
UGH.
In the eyes of those people, as long as you were sitting in front of a computer, you were playing around! Later, when his house was built and renovated, the behind-the-back gossip lessened. After all, their houses didn’t look nearly as nice as his.
"Maybe I should go to Teacher College," Chen Jingle decided after some thought.
That college campus wasn’t far from his home; it only took a few minutes on his electric scooter. Plus, it was a new campus, meaning the sports field and facilities were brand new.
As for whether he could get in... he probably could.
From what he remembered, Teacher College wasn’t very strict about campus access. Besides, Chen Jingle thought he looked quite like a student. As long as he wasn’t caught red-handed, he should be able to blend in.
"Worst case scenario, I just have to register my name and ID."
It wasn’t like he was going there to do anything bad. He just wanted to borrow the track for a run.
***
The electric scooter breezed brazenly through the front gate of the new Teacher College campus. The security guard at the entrance only glanced at Chen Jingle and didn’t bother to stop him. Although there was a boom barrier at the gate, it only recorded the license plates of cars; it completely ignored scooters.
Hehe!
Chen Jingle felt absolutely thrilled. There weren’t many people on campus at this hour. After all, they were college students. If classes started at eight, managing to wake up at ten to eight was already a miracle. Anyone who could wake up past six was either a freshman, a postgraduate hopeful, or one of those rare self-discipline freaks.
Chen Jingle first took his scooter for a spin around the school to roughly figure out the layout of the academic buildings, dormitories, sports field, and gymnasium. Then, he parked his scooter next to the sports field.
After a simple warm-up, he began to jog.
Since it had been a long time since his last run, he didn’t dare to speed up right away, focusing instead on adapting to the intensity. Chen Jingle was an endurance runner. During his college sports meets, he had participated in the 1,500-meter race several times and even placed. His explosive power for sprinting, however, was somewhat lacking; in that regard, he belonged at the kids’ table.
It was just that he hadn’t run in quite a while. Back when he worked in the provincial capital, he used to occasionally run a few kilometers around his apartment complex.
After finishing the first four-hundred-meter lap, he started to sweat, and his calves felt a bit sore.
If he had sprinted fiercely right out of the gate, he would probably be lying on the ground by now, panting heavily and suffering from severe cramps. Scanning his surroundings, he noticed that besides himself, there were other students running on the track. There were both boys and girls, though not many. Some were lone wolves like him, while others had come in pairs or groups.
"It’s great to be young!" Chen Jingle felt a touch of envy.
Although the appearance of the system had given his decaying body a chance to rejuvenate from the inside out, his true age remained unchanged. Reality told him that there was a stark difference between being thirty and being eighteen or twenty. Age was an objective, undeniable fact, even if one looked young.
Flowers may bloom again, but a person’s youth never returns.
***
Chen Jingle ran in intervals, stopping to rest after every two laps. In the end, he managed a total of eight laps before he couldn’t hold on any longer.
He was exhausted! So exhausted that he leaned against the nearby parallel bars, gasping for air! Just then, a female student suddenly approached him.
"Hello there. Excuse me, do you come to the track to run every morning?"
Chen Jingle subconsciously looked up. Seeing the girl’s shy expression, he snapped out of his daze and grew flustered. "Huh? Sorry, I’m not a student at your school. Plus, I’m already thirty years old."
"Holy crap, did I just get hit on by a female college student?" he thought.
His first reaction wasn’t pleasant surprise, but sheer terror. Faced with this young girl who looked no older than eighteen or nineteen, Chen Jingle fled in panic.
He left the girl standing there, stomping her feet in anger. "Thirty years old? Who are you kidding?! If you’re going to make an excuse, at least find a better one! Am I that ugly or something? How infuriating!"
Only after riding his electric scooter far away did Chen Jingle finally stop, his heart still pounding rapidly. Looking into the scooter’s rearview mirror, he finally realized what was wrong.
He seemed to have underestimated his own transformation. Even without carefully grooming his appearance, he could definitely be called a handsome guy now. Just after his run, his face was flushed, and sweat had soaked through his thin T-shirt. The perspiration trailed down his neck and pooled in the hollows of his collarbones, causing his entire body to radiate a strong, masculine appeal.
No wonder that girl’s eyes had been so wide. Sigh, he had been too careless.
But then again, who had nothing better to do than stare at a mirror all day? He spent most of his time indoors, so it wasn’t like flowers were going to bloom on his face. Even if his hair was a bird’s nest, it didn’t matter much; the system would naturally remind him if things got too out of hand.
He never expected this...
[Great job, baby! Exercise task successfully completed. Reward: Removal of one facial mole.]
"Mole?"
Chen Jingle checked the mirror, inspecting his face from left to right. Okay, there were indeed two faint moles, barely noticeable unless one looked closely.
"It’s good to have them removed. Going to the hospital for mole removal is actually quite a hassle," he murmured.