When the third period began, Lu Ran glanced behind him and noticed that Shen Rong, who sat diagonally behind him, was not at his seat.
To be precise, Shen Rong had already been absent during the between-class running exercise.
The homeroom teacher was also not there.
During morning reading, the teacher had told everyone that in the third period there would be twenty-five minutes set aside for a dictation of Pipa Song. Whether people felt fully confident or were cramming at the last minute, everyone had made thorough preparations for it.
What no one expected was that she had only told them that the last twenty-five minutes would be used to dictate Pipa Song. She had not mentioned that the first twenty minutes would also require a dictation of Meng.
When the class monitor announced this news with a smile, most people were a little dumbfounded, including Lu Luoluo.
She had only been trying to improve herself for a few days, and most of her time had gone into science subjects. That morning, upon hearing there would be a dictation of Pipa Song, she had hurriedly memorized it more or less well enough. Who would have thought another piece, Meng, would be added?
What was the line after “Mang zhi chi chi” again?
What did the male protagonist use to exchange for what?
Barter?
The concept of commodities?
That seemed more like something from politics.
Lu Luoluo gripped her pen, the things she had skimmed through in a hurry spinning around in her head and tangling into a mess. She could not recall a single sentence of what she was supposed to be thinking about.
“The two new classmates only arrived today. Have you memorized these two texts before?” The class monitor walked over to Lu Ran and Ming Bei and asked about their situation. “If you haven’t, that’s fine. Just come with me to the office during Wednesday afternoon self-study and do the dictation there.”
Ming Bei smiled at him and nodded. “I’ve memorized them.”
The middle school he had attended before transferring was also quite good. They used the same textbooks as No. 1 High School, and the overall progress was more or less the same.
Lu Ran had memorized them as well, and knew them by heart.
Even more than twenty years later, these two texts were still mandatory memorization for the National college entrance exam, and it had been less than half a year since Lu Ran finished that exam.
But after hesitating for a moment, he said softly, “I haven’t.”
Using going to the restroom as an excuse, Lu Ran left the classroom and headed in the completely opposite direction.
The door to the homeroom teacher’s office was tightly shut, and faintly, the teacher’s voice and that of an unfamiliar, mature woman could be heard from inside.
The homeroom teacher’s voice sounded helpless, while the unfamiliar mature woman was speaking ingratiatingly. She seemed to be saying that after the divorce, the child was not under her care, then mentioned that the child’s father was busy with work, and so on. The name “Shen Rong” was vaguely mentioned among her words.
Lu Ran stopped and listened for a while, but never once heard Shen Rong’s voice.
All of a sudden, a warm, fuzzy sensation appeared against his leg.
Lu Ran lowered his head and saw a flash of orange, freezing on the spot.
In the next instant, he scooped up the “orange” by his leg and left the office doorway with light, swift steps.
“Da Ju?” Reaching a secluded corner, Lu Ran looked down at what he was holding.
The fluffy orange cat’s amber eyes were filled with capital-letter confusion, yet its body automatically adjusted itself into a comfortable position.
One paw even came to rest on the young man’s shoulder.
Thinking that Da Ju might not be an ordinary cat, Lu Ran felt that this seemingly secluded corner was not actually safe.
After some thought, he decided to go up to the rooftop.
More than twenty years later, Lu Ran grew up in City A, and the high school he attended was also his mother’s alma mater, No. 1 High School.
When the old teaching building was demolished, he vaguely heard people lamenting that one of the campus’s three great dating holy grounds was headed toward extinction.
Since it was a dating holy ground, its safety and privacy should be relatively strong, right?
The lock on the rooftop door hung loosely, like a silent invitation, yet also like a trap waiting to be sprung.
Without thinking much, Lu Ran held the cat in one arm and pushed open the iron door with the other.
After confirming that no one was around, the first thing Lu Ran did was lift the orange cat’s hind leg. The movement was so practiced it was as if he had rehearsed it thousands of times.
After a single glance, Lu Ran finally let out a breath of relief. There was a bell.
The orange cat, however, completely lost its composure. With a loud “meow,” it kicked itself out of Lu Ran’s arms. In a burst of speed, it dashed three to five meters away, its fur standing on end, fear evident in its eyes as it stared at Lu Ran as though he were some kind of pervert.
“Da Ju? Is that you?” Lu Ran asked softly. “It’s me, Lu Ran.”
The orange cat stared at the person in front of it, wary and confused.
Lu Ran also examined the cat carefully.
The eyes were amber, the fur color and face shape seemed slightly different but not in any obvious way. Its size was that of an ordinary adult orange cat, not particularly large.
But cats could grow, and their fur color and face shape could change along with their build. Coupled with that familiar, instinctive movement of climbing onto his shoulder earlier…
The more Lu Ran looked, the more he felt that the orange cat in front of him really was Da Ju.
After thinking for a moment, Lu Ran reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out Da Ju’s favorite food, a packet of dried little fish.
He tore open the packet of dried little fish, set it down in front of the orange cat, then retreated two meters.
The orange cat squatted where it was, its amber eyes fixed on Lu Ran without moving, its gaze cautious and suspicious.
Lu Ran crouched down on the spot, doing his best to put on the most gentle expression he could manage.
A minute later, the orange cat began to move forward, stepping lightly on its paws, testing the distance one step at a time.
As it advanced, it kept glancing sideways at Lu Ran.
Lu Ran stayed where he was, completely still.
At last, the orange cat reached the dried little fish. It lowered its head and lightly sniffed the packet.
Lu Ran did not move.
The orange cat lowered its head to lick its paw, then lifted its amber eyes to glance at Lu Ran again.
Lu Ran still did not move.
The orange cat gently caught the packet of dried little fish between its teeth.
Before Lu Ran could show even the slightest hint of happiness, the cat, fish packet in its mouth, darted off with a light, agile body, running straight down the stairs.
It ran.
Away.
A cool breeze brushed against his face.
Lu Ran crouched in place, thinking. So was that orange cat actually Da Ju or not?
Three minutes later, the director of the first-year grade pushed open the rooftop iron door with a stern expression and swiftly scanned the entire rooftop.
Seeing only one person, his expression softened halfway into friendliness, mixed with hesitation. “Everyone is in class. Why is this student here?”
Lu Ran said, “Going to the restroom…”
The grade director frowned earnestly. “The rooftop is not a place to go to the restroom.”
“…On the way to the restroom, I saw a cat,” Lu Ran said. “So I followed it over.”
The grade director asked, “Where’s the cat?”
Lu Ran replied, “…It ran off.”
Three minutes later, Lu Ran ended up with an eight-hundred-word self-criticism and an on-the-spot phone call to his home.
At the club, where she was doing a spa with her sisters, Madam Lu Mingzhu received the call completely baffled. “Director? What happened to my child? Skipping class? Luoluo would never do that. No matter what, she can’t skip class. When she gets back, I’ll definitely give her a proper talking-to.”
“Ah, it’s Lu Ran. This… a cat?”
After hanging up the phone, Madam Lu Mingzhu looked thoroughly confused.
When he returned to the classroom, everyone was still in the middle of the dictation.
Lu Ran noticed that Shen Rong was back at his seat, head lowered, his expression impossible to make out.
The homeroom teacher had also returned. When she saw Lu Ran come in, she gave him a gentle smile.
Lu Ran took out a sheet of essay paper from his desk and neatly wrote the three characters “Self-Criticism” at the top.
His deskmate, Lu Qingjia, had just finished the dictation of both classical texts and happened to glance over absentmindedly.
Lu Qingjia looked at Lu Ran with a puzzled expression.
He had only stepped out of the classroom. How had he come back with a self-criticism?
Lu Ran lifted his gaze and met Lu Qingjia’s eyes for three seconds.
Three seconds later, both of them looked away at the same time.
Lu Ran wrote his self-criticism. Lu Qingjia took out his comic book, the one that used to belong to Lu Luoluo and now belonged to Lu Qingjia.
In eighteen years of schooling, Lu Ran had never written a self-criticism. Now he had. He had also never experienced a teacher reporting him to his family. Now he had experienced that too, and the report had gone straight to his grandmother.
On his very first day back in the past, starting school again, he unlocked two achievements.
Lu Ran felt dejected for a moment, then regained his usual composure.
At least there was finally some lead on Da Ju, wasn’t there?
The fourth and fifth periods were chemistry and physics respectively. When the two subject teachers noticed the new faces in class, they briefly mentioned it and expressed their welcome, then proceeded with the lessons as usual.
By the end of the morning, the tightly wound string in Lu Luoluo’s heart gradually loosened.
She had not managed to write out Meng during the dictation, but Lu Ran did not know that. Ms. Xie had the desk mates exchange papers to correct and mark mistakes, and the papers were not collected.
The new material was generally understandable. The parts involving earlier knowledge were not very clear, but reviewing the textbook and doing some exercises during evening self-study should solve the problem.
Intense studying brought double the hunger. Fortunately, No. 1 High School’s cafeteria had always been decent, with the clay pot rice and pork bone noodles on the third floor being especially popular. On the first day, Lu Luoluo planned to take her son to try the clay pot rice.
Wherever there was good food, there was always a long line, and having good looks or a good family background did not grant any privilege to cut in.
The group obediently went to the end of the line.
In sharp contrast to the clay pot rice next door were the dumplings.
“Thick skins, little filling, too much salt. Either undercooked or split open while boiling,” Lu Luoluo commented while waiting in line. “Only an idiot would eat the cafeteria’s dumplings.”
An idiot named Shen Rong entered the third floor of the cafeteria. He frowned as he scanned every line, then, among all the long queues, chose the shortest one and stopped there.
When he saw the group in the neighboring line, he paused for a moment and nodded to Lu Luoluo in greeting. Without waiting for her to say anything, he turned his head away.
At this moment, his usually somewhat unruly brows and eyes looked listless, and he appeared a bit withdrawn.
After thinking for a moment, Lu Ran stepped forward and patted his shoulder. “That one is really hard to eat.”
The auntie boiling dumplings shot Lu Ran an angry glare.
Lu Ran: …
Shen Rong glanced at him and said stubbornly, “I like food that tastes bad. The worse it is, the more I like it.”
Lu Ran returned to Lu Luoluo’s side, fluttered his eyelashes slightly, and said, “I warned him.”
Lu Luoluo, Ming Nan, and Ming Bei: “…”
In the end, Shen Rong got dumplings with thick wrappers, little filling, overly salty, and slightly broken skins from being boiled too long.
Beside him, Lu Ran, Lu Luoluo, Ming Nan, and Ming Bei were eating fragrant lap cheong clay pot rice.
Empty seats in the cafeteria were hard to come by. A huge space had been left open next to Shen Rong, so obvious that it would be a waste not to sit there.
“Isn’t it bad?” Lu Luoluo asked curiously as she watched her cousin Shen Rong eat one dumpling after another.
“Bad.” Shen Rong said expressionlessly as he swallowed the last dumpling in one gulp.
Way too bad.
Shen Rong disliked the Lu family junior who had just returned even more.
Lu Ran silently ate his lap cheong rice without saying a word.
At the same time, the orange cats on campus were also having their lunch.
In a corner of the school grounds, an orange cat with amber-colored eyes carried a packet of dried fish in its mouth and went over to a pretty little cat with the same eye color that was lying in the sun. It set the dried fish down and gave a soft meow.
It nudged the dried fish toward the little cat, then licked its own paw.
The pretty little cat glanced at the orange cat, stood up, turned around to face away from it, and lay down again.
The orange cat picked up the dried fish, moved around to the front of the little cat, and set it down once more.
“Meow meow meow!” the orange cat let out urging cries.
The little cat twitched its ears and replied sternly, “Meow!”
How many times had he said it already, that he was not an ordinary cat, that he only needed to bask in the sun and did not need to eat!
And also, stop always fantasizing about being his father!
He was a spirit cat born of heaven and earth. He had no father. He did not acknowledge a godfather. An adopted older brother was not acceptable either!
The orange cat persisted. “Meow meow meow!”
There was no helping it. Different cat breeds, no shared language.
Zhao Jin felt, today once again, that a cat’s life was full of hardship.
Maybe he should go watch the misfortune of some other students instead?