“Ouch!”
Amidst the overlapping chatter and discussions, the fellow closest to Li Xingchuan took a solid, heavy knock right on the head.
Li Xingchuan’s voice carried an icy-shard-like, frigid fury as it crashed down:
“What kind of daydreams are you spouting?”
“Whoever dares touch a single hair on my brother’s head, I’ll cripple him.”
The crowd looked at each other in dismay, their expressions turning somewhat suspicious, unable to tell whether Li Xingchuan’s words were meant seriously or if he was speaking in reverse.
After all, the rumor that “Li Xingchuan has an unseen illegitimate younger brother” had been circulating secretly around the campus all along.
Moreover, given Li Xingchuan’s notoriously fiery temper and solitary nature… no matter how one looked at it, he didn’t seem like the type who could stage a deep sibling-love scene with any sort of “cheap younger brother.”
Half-believing and half-doubtful, the group didn’t dare to gossip anymore.
Quick-Witted remembered his proper business, plastered on a smiling face, and asked: “Li Brother, the match is this afternoon, and everyone is waiting. Over on your side… about when will you be done? The training time has already arrived.”
Li Xingchuan turned his face, raised an eyebrow, and retorted: “Who scheduled today’s match? Did I agree?”
Quick-Witted stared in a daze for a moment, then hurriedly flipped open his mobile phone and held up the chat history right in front of Li Xingchuan: “I-It’s the time set by the opponents over there. Look, you even replied with a question mark at the time…”
Li Xingchuan glanced at it and said as a matter of course: “When I put a question mark, it means ‘to be discussed again’.”
He even felt a bit strange and retorted: “Is this your first day knowing me?”
Quick-Witted instantly petrified.
——Of course they knew that Li Xingchuan was always stingy with words in text messages; maybe out of laziness, maybe out of impatience. If he could use a short sentence, he would never use a long one; if a single punctuation mark could resolve it, he would never type an extra character… But this was a match after all! Although it was an unofficial wild match… this was still way too casual!
Staring wide-eyed, he watched Li Xingchuan jump back into the trunk to continue organizing those damned boxes and floral arrangements. His lips trembled as he asked: “Then, then how am I supposed to reply to everyone now?”
Li Xingchuan fished his phone out of his trouser pocket, his fingers tapping swiftly across the screen.
Without lifting his head, he said: “Just say Li Xingchuan broke the appointment today, time ‘to be discussed again’.”
He tossed the phone back into his pocket, but everyone else’s phones chimed with notification alerts almost simultaneously.
Pulling out their phones to check one after another, they saw that inside the temporarily established match group chat—
Li Xingchuan had sent out a massive group red packet!
They were all students relying on their families’ living allowances to get by, and who wasn’t calculating every penny. Seeing the red packet now, they looked practically like starving wolves spotting meat.
“Crap, I grabbed thirty-seven!”
“Oh lord I opened ninety-nine!”
“Really or fake, that big?”
“My goodness, whose luck is so good, they grabbed a hundred and sixty!”
……
The group chat instantly blew up.
For these junior high students, getting five or ten yuan from a red packet usually counted as a surprise; when had they ever seen this kind of battle array—someone casually tossing a red packet into the group, and clicking it open to find the amount terrifyingly large.
Someone quickly calculated and concluded that the total amount of the red packet Li Xingchuan sent this time was one thousand yuan.
My lord, just casually throwing out a thousand yuan like that?
This exceeded a hefty chunk of many of their monthly living expenses…
They knew Li Xingchuan’s family was wealthy—which was one of the reasons many were willing to hang around with him.
But they hadn’t expected him to be wealthy to this degree. A wave of the little hand, and it truly was “scattering a thousand gold without a blink.”
Of course.
If they had witnessed how Li Xingchuan spent money on Su棠, by comparison, they probably wouldn’t feel this way anymore. They might even think Li Xingchuan was… quite “stingy” toward them.
Because Li Xingchuan had developed a habit since childhood of economizing and saving on himself. His money had to be spent on the “cutting edge.” “Generosity” was reserved solely for Su棠.
——This thousand yuan might not even count as a fraction of the cost of one of Su棠’s clothes. Yet it was already the maximum sincerity Li Xingchuan could “squeeze” out in that instant from his budget, which was already accustomed to restraint, to give to them…
Some were screen-spammed with “Thanks Brother Li for the generosity,” while others chattered away asking what was going on.
Quick-Witted hastily seized the opportunity to send a message—”Li Brother has something temporary come up on this side, the match time will be rescheduled another day!”
Having received the hefty red packets, everyone was glowing with excitement in the group chat; who would still bicker over minor trifles like rescheduling a time?
Anyway, they gathered to play ball every day; whether there was a match or not was originally just an excuse anyway.
If breaking an appointment once meant receiving such a large red packet…
They would wish Brother Li had “something come up” every single day!
Collecting the money, everyone’s morale was even higher than if they were truly playing a match in the afternoon, and they proactively chimed in:
“Don’t just stand there, why aren’t you guys hurrying up and helping Li Brother?”
“That’s right, that’s right, Li Brother is organizing the trunk, come give a hand!”
Yet a minute later, before several guys could squeeze over, they were chased away by Li Xingchuan.
——The trunk was such a tiny space, yet each of them insisted on crowding over. Not only could they not squeeze in, but someone lacked a sense of proportion underfoot, and with a crisp, snapping “crack,” actually stepped flat on a box of chocolates…
Li Xingchuan’s look at that moment was as if he wanted to bury them all right on the spot.
In the afternoon, Su棠 sat inside the Li family’s sedan, listlessly curled up in the corner of the back seat, speaking not a single word while letting Li Xingchuan take him to school.
Brother had talked to him the whole way, but he either hummed and hawed or refused to engage.
School had already started, yet Brother still refused to loosen his stance, stubbornly declining to let him live in the dorms.
He was truly at his wit’s end.
That was why he purposely disobeyed Brother, failed to answer properly, and even occasionally pretended not to hear.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t scared inside.
——Weren’t those words Brother said before, that he didn’t have to be so obedient? Even if Brother really bickered with him now, he could still quibble and say: it was precisely because of being “obedient” that he was being “disobedient”…
Grievance and panic twisted into a thin string, transforming into a stubborn unease hanging rigidly in his chest.
On one hand, he tested cautiously, terrified of truly provoking Brother’s anger.
On the other hand, he couldn’t help secretly hoping—
Hoping Brother could soften his heart just like countless times before and nod his head in agreement.
Su棠 kept his head lowered the entire way, following behind Li Xingchuan.
Reporting in, recognizing the classroom, recognizing the cafeteria… Li Xingchuan even led him to recognize the restrooms.
Everything a newcomer should be cared for, Li Xingchuan took care of, even executing it more thoroughly than anyone else.
Yet precisely—
He simply refused to bring up the matter of letting him live in the dorms.
No. 1 High School’s playground was very spacious.
As long as one’s eyes weren’t blinded, standing on campus always allowed a glance at it.
Yet Li Xingchuan still insisted on taking Su棠 to “recognize” it.
Keeping his head down, Su棠 obediently followed him toward the playground.
Along the tree-lined avenue, cicadas chirped one after another.
Su棠 suddenly stopped in his tracks, his slender arms weakly tugging at the corner of Li Xingchuan’s shirt as he made one last whispered struggle: “Brother… really, really can’t?”
Standing in front of Li Xingchuan, the top of his head only reached the other’s shoulder.
Such a tiny person.
Lifting his face, his eyelashes wet as if he had just cried. Sunlight happened to fall right into his pupils, watery and gleaming with fine, shattered light.
Li Xingchuan desperately wanted these eyes to laugh immediately.
Yet he couldn’t say “yes.”
Bending over slightly, he gently swept his palm across Su棠’s cheek, wiping away the tear tracks at the corners of his eyes: “Did you want to go that badly?”
It would have been better if he hadn’t asked.
When asked, Su棠 felt even more aggrieved, his voice carrying a sob: “I really wanted to go…”
“They all say that middle schools without dorms are incomplete… wails…”
With a low, deep voice, Li Xingchuan spoke as if he had seriously considered it before opening his mouth: “Build up your health a bit more.”
“Wait until university to live in them, alright?”
“I’ll strive to test into the same university as you.”
Su棠 didn’t immediately say “Alright.”
He merely sniffled, quietly rubbing his cheek against the palm of Li Xingchuan’s hand.
After rubbing, he pushed the other’s hand away, gave a low “hmph,” and turned his face aside.
Unbeknownst to Su棠, from the moment they stepped onto the campus, people had been craning their necks to look at them all along the way.
But Li Xingchuan noticed.
He didn’t care—from elementary school to junior high, because of his solitary personality and habit of doing eye-catching things, curious and prying gazes had never been lacking behind his back.
Yet this time, the prying people were somewhat different.
The contents of their whispers were no longer about the school bully beating someone up again, or which death-defying soul had stuffed a love letter into his desk drawer again. Instead, they were:
“Is that really Li Xingchuan’s ‘cheap younger brother’? He looks so good-looking…”
“Did Li Xingchuan slap him across the face just now? Oh god, I didn’t see clearly, did he slap him or not?”
“Slapped, slapped, the sound was so loud!”
“Really or fake? You could hear that from so far away?”
“I didn’t hear it, but wasn’t his younger brother crying from being slapped? Didn’t you guys see?”
“Anyone in the Junior High Class 1 Rocket Class? Secretly take care of this little pity on the side normally…”
“Yeah, so pitiful… Heard that right when getting out of the car, Li Xingchuan dragged him over to the trunk—the trunk had a messy pile of glittering trash, plus several large boxes of test papers…”
“Oh god, truly pitiful, got scared to tears on the spot right?”
“Mhm… cried on the spot.”
Therefore, when official classes started the next day, Su棠 suddenly felt a “solicitude” completely different from elementary school.
The matter of living in the dorms was already as nailed down and hopeless as an ironclad fact.
Coupled with the fact that his deskmate in the same class, Li Qian, had asked for three days of leave starting from the first day of school and hadn’t shown up yet.
Sitting alone at his desk early in the morning, Su棠 as a whole still looked somewhat listless.
Classmates arrived one after another, all unfamiliar faces.
The admission rate of Qinghe into No. 1 High School was pitifully low. Su棠 had originally thought he would only know Li Qian here.
Yet some classmates walking past him looked at him with somewhat different expressions—
Carrying exploration, carrying curiosity, as if they had known him for a long time already.
Even two overly familiar classmates actively leaned over the empty deskmate spot beside him, accompanying him to chat for a bit:
“Wow, Student Su, you look even better-looking than in the television interviews!”
“Su棠, you look so pretty… Want some bread? This is my breakfast, can share a bit with you. Did you… eat this morning? Are you hungry?”
Su棠 blinked his eyes.
If it were when he was little, he probably would have been at a loss.
But nowadays, regarding the matter of “being cared for,” he was gradually getting the hang of it. Such goodwill no longer panicked his heart, nor made him feel unworthy of possessing it……
It was just still somewhat nervous and pleasantly surprised.
“I-I ate, thank you… You look very pretty too.” Su棠 lowered his eyelashes, a faint bashfulness rising along his cheeks.
Su棠 was born too pretty.
With fair skin, bright eyes, and white teeth, he looked as exquisitely dressed up as a youthful star, yet carried a natural cleanliness and freshness. It was just that his frame was slender, making his figure appear exceptionally delicate.
Looking submissive with lowered brows, he was both obedient and pitiful.
Especially—
Underneath his desk was still jammed a damned “box of test papers.”
That box was wider than his slender shoulders!
Textbooks hadn’t even been distributed yet, but a pile of test papers had already been impatiently crushed down by that older brother of his. It seemed yesterday’s rumors were actually true.
Kind-hearted classmates automatically brainstormed the picture in their minds—how the irritable, vindictive school bully bullied this pretty younger brother at home.
Their gazes involuntarily turned even more sympathetic: “Su棠, with grades as good as yours, the teachers will definitely like you very much.”
“That’s right Su棠, classmates with difficulties at home can all tell the teachers, especially for outstanding students like you, teachers will definitely help.”
Su棠 was deeply moved, thinking that upon reaching junior high, everyone truly grew from children into “adults.”
So harmonious on the very first day of school, unreserved toward him.
Teaching him methods, sharing breakfast.
He should also share his favorite chocolates with everyone!
Thus, amidst everyone’s sympathetic and compassionate gazes, he fished out the chocolates his brother had stuffed into his hands when dropping him off from the drawer.
A full three boxes, the flavors were all different.
“Thank you, thank you… But I-I don’t have anything I need help with for now.” Blushing, his voice small, yet speaking as if mustering up courage, “However, I have chocolates here, does everyone like eating them? D-Do you want to eat some together?”
At this moment, the classmates’ gazes could already be described as loving—
Already this pitiful, yet still so innocent……
At home he probably lacked food and clothing, which was why he had thinned down to this extent.
A little bit of chocolate was probably a rare sweetness in his life, yet he was actually willing to take it out to share.
However, when they lowered their heads and saw that packaging clearly, they froze in place one by one—
Wait!
This box, this imprint… isn’t this the master-handcrafted chocolate from a certain luxury brand’s centennial celebration that made the news a while ago—which had to be acquired through auction?
Even the lowest transaction price for a box was ten thousand RMB.
Some black truffle flavors were even bid up by rich tycoons to thirty thousand yuan a box…
Precisely because it was too absurd, too flamboyant, hard for ordinary people to understand, let alone touch, it had surged onto the trending search headlines overnight.
That “heavenly priced chocolate” so distant from them—how could it appear right here at this moment?
What made pupils earthquake even more was—
This legendary “illegitimate younger brother, little pitiful thing” rumored to be secretly abused by his wealthy school-bully brother…
Turned out to be their owner, and he pulled out three boxes at once? Like handing out steamed buns, placing them on the table and asking everyone “Do you want to eat some?!”
Without knowing who it was, someone asked in a dry, sleepwalking voice: “…Where’d you get these?”
Su棠’s pretty outer eye corners curved gently, his voice soft and glutinous: “My brother bought them for me~”
Following a dead silence of petrification.
The entire class exploded.