Pei Xingche propped his long legs against the ground, staring unblinkingly at the girl standing obediently a few steps ahead at the crosswalk.
The girl wore an oversized, baggy blue-and-white school uniform, her hair tied in a low ponytail. She was a small, quiet figure with her eyes lowered, her naturally curled lashes like two fluffy little brushes.
They itched at Pei Xingche’s heart.
He had always felt that Yun Xiang possessed some kind of magical power—one that made people want to pull her out from the corner, stroke her soft fur, and knead her gentle, pliable belly.
Yun Xiang, who was currently receiving Pei Xingche’s inner voice: …
Mom, there seems to be a pervert here.
The light turned green, and Yun Xiang flowed with the crowd to the other side of the crosswalk.
But the voice that had accompanied her the entire way remained where it was.
Pei Xingche actually really liked this intersection. He often stopped here, watching Yun Xiang carry her sky-blue backpack through the narrow entrance of the residential complex.
This was the final step of him walking her home.
Only when the figure was completely out of sight did Pei Xingche turn his bike around and ride off in the other direction.
His home was very close to where Yun Xiang lived—only two streets apart.
As the saying goes, “A waterfront pavilion gets the moonlight first.” But when would he ever get to touch this cloud?
The girl’s petite figure disappeared into the entrance, her blue backpack growing dimmer and dimmer.
This was an old residential building located on the most bustling street of the First Ring Road.
It was called the Eighty-Four Complex, with over sixty years of history. These old buildings couldn’t be demolished, only renovated.
Not long ago, it had just undergone a major facelift—a grand affair with scaffolding torn down, green netting set up, courtyards tidied, and the gray, crumbling walls painted in a uniform red-and-gray scheme.
At first glance, it looked decent enough. But only those who actually lived there would know what it meant to be “gold on the outside, rotten silk within.”
In the dim stairwell, the long-neglected sound-activated lights were covered in cobwebs, and the stench of dampness and rotting garbage lingered in the air.
The stairs in old buildings were generally a bit taller than those in newer ones, and Yun Xiang climbed them one step at a time.
Reaching the fourth floor, she slowly slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the cold key.
The last ray of sunlight fell, passing through the irregular cracks in the wall, sweeping across the girl’s fair face.
There was not a trace of joy on her delicate, beautiful face at returning home. If anything, her expression was colder than the copper and iron in her palm.
“Oh, the burden’s back.”
The moment she pushed open the door, a woman’s sharp, shrill voice rang out.
Yun Xiang sniffed. Sure enough, she smelled alcohol.
Hu Yan always liked to drink heavily whenever she had free time. It seemed that as long as she was drunk, she could shake off this burden of a daughter and live freely in the life she dreamed of, without having to face the mess of reality.
Yun Xiang kept her face lowered, set her backpack on the small bed by the window, and began cleaning up the bottles on the floor. Some had been smashed by Hu Yan and weren’t easy to deal with.
Hu Yan lounged sideways on the sofa, looking down at her with a condescending gaze, then suddenly let out a sneering laugh.
“One more year. One more year of raising you, and I’ll be free.”
The girl said nothing. Her jet-black ponytail lay softly against her shoulder, her face the size of a palm, with thick lashes framing a pair of clear, bright doe eyes. Paired with a delicate, refined nose and small mouth, she was pure and beautiful.
She crouched half-hidden in the dim chaos, as if filtered through a soft-focus lens, stirring an involuntary pang of pity in anyone who saw her.
“With looks like that, you took after that dead father of yours a bit,” Hu Yan’s eyes brightened slightly, a hint of amusement curling at the corners of her lips. “Plenty of boys at your school must be chasing you, right?”
Sss.
The sting at her fingertip, along with the image of Pei Xingche’s cold, narrow eyes carrying a gentle smile, scattered together across Yun Xiang’s heart—a heart that should have long gone numb.
How strange.
Why would she suddenly think of him?
Seeing her expression, Hu Yan abruptly sat bolt upright, hurled the beer bottle in her hand to the ground, and lunged at Yun Xiang in a frenzy, reaching out to yank her hair.
“You have someone you like, don’t you? There’s a boy at school you like?”
Her pupils dilated as she stared dead at Yun Xiang, her face twisted and terrifying.
But Yun Xiang seemed used to it. She gently shook her head, her expression still calm and composed—a stark contrast to Hu Yan’s hysteria.
Yet few knew that even still, silent waters could be on the verge of collapse.
Hu Yan looked at her like that, her expression going blank for a moment, a dull ache in her heart.
She let go of Yun Xiang’s hair. So pretty—so black and thick.
Actually, she was wrong. Yun Xiang’s looks took after her more.
Looking at her, Hu Yan would sometimes be reminded of her own youthful, beautiful self.
Hu Yan collapsed onto Yun Xiang’s shoulder, large teardrops soaking through the girl’s thin school uniform as she wrapped both arms tightly around Yun Xiang’s slender neck.
She murmured endlessly into her ear: “Xiangxiang, men can never be relied on.”
“Mom only has you. You can’t leave Mom…”
But wasn’t it you who wanted to drive me away?
Yun Xiang tilted her face up, numbly and quietly staring at the blackened, cracked ceiling.
The wound cut by the glass shards silently bled bright red blood. Whether it fell to the ground or seeped into her eyes, no one cared.
Yun Xiang had once thought—let it just bleed out, dry up, and leave behind nothing but a withered husk of a body.
But she couldn’t.
The clotting function in the human body helps stop bleeding,
and there were many people in her life helping her as well.
The back-to-school exam was scheduled for Tuesday morning.
This was a tradition at No. 9 High School, and the tradition in the key classes was to use exam rankings to select seats in the classroom.
The top five students in the class could not only choose their seats but also pick their own deskmates.
There were four key classes in the second year of high school, and Class 5 was one of them.
Although this sort of thing was never discussed openly, the key classes were indeed different from the regular ones—the students in them were all serious about studying and competing for rankings, fiercely competitive.
Back then, when Pei Xingche submitted his transfer application to the homeroom teacher, it stunned a large number of people.
Just as shocked as they had been when they learned that Pei Xingche was participating in the physics competition.
Because before that, everyone knew that Young Master Pei was not someone who loved studying at all.
During his first year of high school, he often skipped class, handed in blank papers, and ranked at the bottom. Nobody knew what had gotten into him last semester, but in one monthly exam, his grades suddenly jumped into the top hundred of the grade, and he even went to participate in the physics competition.
It moved the Class 9 homeroom teacher to tears, who proclaimed it an educational miracle.
On the day Pei Xingche won first place in the competition, the teacher, being a math instructor, wrote a three-thousand-word educational reflection titled “Xingche’s Brilliance Shines Vast, a Promising Future Ahead.”
He even presented it in front of the entire school, leaving the usually aloof and proud Pei Xingche unable to hold his head up for three days at school.
Yun Xiang knew about this too.
Once, when she went into the office to turn in physics homework, she overheard the physics teacher saying triumphantly, “The math department begged Pei Xingche to join the math competition, but he wouldn’t agree.”
“And for the physics competition, it was the kid himself who came to me to sign up.”
The middle-aged man’s face was nearly splitting with a grin as he hummed, “See, I told you—the choice of a smart person is always physics. The principles of the world are written by physics, and the end of cosmic exploration is also physics!”
Yun Xiang didn’t understand many of the teachers’ strange competitive urges, but when she heard Pei Xingche’s name linked to the competition back then, she just thought he was very smart.
The teacher had specially given them the competition problems to try, and Yun Xiang couldn’t solve a single one.