The office door closed softly behind them.
The hallway was empty and quiet, with the distant sound of a whistle from a physical education class on the playground.
Yuan Su walked ahead, taking long strides, his back radiating an icy aloofness that kept others at a distance.
Pu Yu had to jog slightly to keep up with his pace, trailing half a step behind him.
“Yuan Su,” she called softly.
The boy in front didn’t stop walking, only his Adam’s apple bobbed slightly. His voice drifted back with the wind, devoid of emotion. “Who told you to meddle?”
Pu Yu had originally intended to ask if he needed help with the letter of self-criticism.
She paused, then earnestly corrected him, “This isn’t meddling. It’s the truth. Teacher Cheng needed to know what really happened, and that boy needed to be dealt with.”
“I didn’t need it,” his voice grew even colder.
“I did,” Pu Yu blurted out almost without thinking.
“What do you need?” The irritation Yuan Su had forcibly suppressed earlier began to resurface faintly. “To prove you’re a kind-hearted transfer student? Or to make me owe you a favor?”
Pu Yu was left bewildered by his sharp retort. “But I’m the one who owes you favors.”
Wind Chime Alley, the repair shop, the exam hall.
In his own awkward and aloof way, he had helped her time and again.
Yuan Su finally stopped and turned around.
His height forced Pu Yu to tilt her head back slightly to look at him.
Backlit, the boy’s silhouette was edged in gold, but his eyes and brows remained hidden in shadow, indistinct.
“Don’t interfere anymore.”
“There’s no such thing as that much fairness in this world.”
So-called fairness was nothing more than a fairy tale crafted by the strong for the weak to see.
In this school, in this town, bad students doing bad things were simply following their nature, while good students making mistakes were momentary lapses in judgment. As for him, ever since the day his father became a compulsive gambler and his mother was hospitalized due to illness, he was destined to be the most extreme among the bad students, the one everyone avoided most.
Explanations were useless, and proof held no meaning.
Pu Yu didn’t shy away from his gaze.
Her amber eyes were as clear as a pool of warm, untainted water, reflecting the boy’s defensive and prickly demeanor.
“I don’t see it that way.”
“Just because you’ve accepted this unfairness doesn’t mean you should be treated unfairly.”
Her voice was soft, like the breeze of a Jiangnan March, yet it carried a resilient strength that gently pushed against the high walls he had built.
“As long as I’m here, I won’t stand by and watch you be misunderstood.”
Yuan Su stared at her for a long time.
The girl’s gaze was frank and pure—so pure that it made his earlier sharp and bitter words feel utterly contemptible.
It was like someone who had spent too long in a dark cave, grown accustomed to the damp and decaying smells, when suddenly someone held up a small, warm lamp, stubbornly determined to light the path at his feet.
That glaring brightness made him instinctively want to flee, to destroy it.
He pressed his lips together tightly.
A sense of restless irritation surged within him once more.
“Naive.”
In the end, he only managed to force out those two cold words from his throat.
Then he turned and walked toward the classroom without looking back.
Evening self-study.
Outside the window, the sky had darkened completely.
Cheng Siyi walked in carrying a stack of photocopied papers, a gentle smile on her face.
“Taking up ten minutes of everyone’s time.” She clapped her hands. “For this monthly exam, Pu Yu’s Chinese essay from our class has been selected by the grade group as a model essay. Copies have been made, one for each person. Everyone can study its structure and ideas.”
The papers were passed from the first row to the back.
Cheng Siyi had just started discussing the essay’s opening when she was called away by the department head.
The quiet atmosphere in the classroom was immediately replaced by noise.
“Oh my god, Pu Yu really scored 141 in Chinese!”
“Her essay actually got a perfect score! What kind of genius is she?!”
“What’s the use of being good at liberal arts? We’re in a science class. Things like essays are too subjective. She just got lucky and happened to match the grader’s taste.”
The sourness in those words was almost overflowing.
Xu Suiran was admiring Xiao Yu’s perfect-scoring essay with bright eyes.
Hearing this, she suddenly turned her head and retorted crisply, “Oh, listen to our study committee member. Then why didn’t you get first place in Chinese? Is it because you didn’t want to? Or because you disdained getting that perfect essay score?”
“Besides, Xiao Yu just transferred here from City No.1 High School. The textbook versions and progress are different. Being able to rank twentieth in the grade is already amazing, okay?”
“Unlike some people who struggled to become study committee member but still hover outside the top twenty?”
Zhou Tingting was choked, her face turning pale, and she said angrily, “Xu Suiran, what do you mean by that?!”
“Nothing much,” Xu Suiran curved her eyes and said with a smile, “I just think our Xiao Yu is too awesome. Next time, keep getting perfect scores and let certain people keep being jealous, okay?”
Pu Yu felt warmth in her heart but also a bit embarrassed.
She gently tugged on Sui Sui’s school uniform. When Sui Sui turned around, she slightly shook her head and gave her a “it’s okay” look.
Xu Suiran was still fuming, “Xiao Yu, you’re just too nice, too much of a pushover! The more you stay silent, the more they think you’re easy to bully. They’ll keep pushing further in the future!”
“Then do you want to eat steamed buns? I’ll bring you some tomorrow, okay?”
“No! I’m too angry!”
Xu Suiran grumbled a bunch more before finally being coaxed by Pu Yu.
Actually, it wasn’t that Pu Yu’s personality was too much of a pushover. It was that after experiencing those things at home, these kinds of words couldn’t affect her much anymore.
Her uncompetitive, gentle, and quiet demeanor instead made Zhou Tingting, who was full of pent-up anger, feel like she had punched cotton, gaining nothing but awkwardness.
“By the way, Sui Sui, do you have my Chinese test paper?”
“Ah! Yes! I was copying your answers this morning!”
Xu Suiran rummaged through the desk and pulled out Pu Yu’s beautifully handwritten test paper.
Just as she turned around to hand it to her—
A hand with distinct knuckles suddenly reached out from nowhere.
“Whoosh”—it snatched away that light, fluttering test paper.
Pu Yu looked up, stunned.
Xu Suiran in the front row also jumped in fright, almost blurting out, “What ghost dares to scare your grandma!”
Turning around to look, she pursed her lips tightly and didn’t dare make a sound.
Yuan Su had somehow sat up straight, his face bearing the weariness of just waking up.
His slender fingers pinched that thin test paper, his eyelids lowered, his gaze falling on the neat, elegant handwriting in the essay grid.
The essay topic was “Light in the Cracks.”
The article described a seed that had fallen into a crevice on a cliff, without sunlight or rain, only endless darkness and oppression. Yet it did not wither. Instead, it desperately used its roots to shatter the rocks, drawing every drop of moisture that might exist, and ultimately bloomed a flower in the barren soil.
In truth, Yuan Su rarely read such so-called “model essays.”
In his view, they were nothing more than castles in the air, built with pretty words.
Rigid and precise, but also dull.
Pu Yu’s writing was calm, lacking the polished conventions, yet every word and sentence carried a force of survival against all odds.
Yuan Su’s gaze lingered on those words for a long time.
【A seed unwilling to admit defeat, in an unseen place, trades pain for growth. It accepts the existence of the crack but refuses to rot within it. This is not an inspirational story; it is the instinct for survival.】
【We often praise suffering, yet forget that suffering itself is not worthy of praise. What is worthy of praise are the souls that maintain their dignity amidst suffering.】
…