Lin Ting was startled out of his wits and momentarily forgetting that he was still in the rich district, he blurted out a dirty word.
Lin Ting turned around to see the person in front of him with a smirk at the corners of his mouth and slightly upturned outer eye corners carrying a hint of lawlessness. “You like eavesdropping on people?”
“You must be joking.” One glance at the designer brands covering the person from head to toe told Lin Ting this was some spoiled young master from who knows where. “I was just passing by.”
“Passing by?” The person smiled, tilted his head slightly, and then slowly turned back to lock eyes with Lin Ting, the smile gradually fading. “Then why did I see you standing here for ages? Before you lie, you should at least judge your own eavesdropping skills.”
Lin Ting felt that the more he tried to avoid something, the more it would find him. He swore to heaven that he had originally wanted to spend today peacefully.
“It’s just that I saw you were busy with important matters, and I didn’t know whether to advance or retreat, so I accidentally heard the whole thing.” Lin Ting smiled as well. “I’ll be leaving now.”
With that, he didn’t care about the expression on the other person’s face and turned to walk away. But the person behind him, acting like a stubborn sticking plaster that couldn’t be shaken off, grabbed his shoulder with a firm grip. “I’m telling you, buddy, this isn’t cool. If you’re going to eavesdrop, just eavesdrop. I let you watch the whole thing openly, and you refusing to admit it makes me really unhappy…” As he spoke, he reached out the back of his hand and lightly patted Lin Ting’s face twice.
Lin Ting felt a surge of irritation rise from his throat, loop through his stomach, and get exhaled again. “Actually, I…” Lin Ting lowered his voice gradually and playfully hooked his finger at the person opposite him.
The person flashed a look of confusion and leaned his ear closer.
“Actually, I’m doing a social survey.”
“What kind of social survey?” The confusion on the person’s face deepened.
“Animal behavior.” Lin Ting slowly finished saying right in the person’s ear, and before the other could react, he picked up his pace and ran off.
Lin Ting never showed any politeness to people he would only meet once anyway.
.
Lin Ting deeply regretted his actions from half an hour ago.
Right now, he was standing on the platform, his hands resting on his new desk and chair, while the head teacher introduced him to the class as the transfer student. The students below were whispering among themselves, dozens of gazes practically ready to riddle him with holes.
Of course, none of that mattered. The important thing was that the animal behavior observation subject he had encountered on the street half an hour ago was currently sitting in the very last row by the window, stretching his legs out lazily to rest them on his desk. His chair was tilted backward against the wall, and he was chewing on a toothpick or something, looking at Lin Ting with quite a good mood.
His seating arrangement clearly had some thought put into it.
The desks of the other students in the back row, while not exactly cramped, certainly didn’t have the kind of open space he had to stretch his legs out onto the desk. He was even wearing a pair of white slippers, and for some reason, the space to the right of his desk was left wide open while the left side pressed against the window. A quick glance showed an area meant for six people where only he was sitting alone.
This usually fell into one of two categories: either arranged by the teachers, or arranged by himself.
Considering the students at this school all had powerful backgrounds, the first option was quickly ruled out.
Ah, the class bully. Great, Su Li was probably going to be disappointed in him again.
“Lin Ting, just move your desk over there—” Ban Ban—the head teacher, whose head and belly were equally round and who looked to be about fifty years old—pointed toward the class bully.
Wait, was this teacher an airhead? Couldn’t he tell that was the territory the bully had carved out for himself?
The bully looked at Lin Ting, his smile widening, and patted the surface of his desk.
Things were getting interesting, Lin Ting thought. Then he would just grant the bully his wish.
“Yo, desk mate! What a coincidence. If I’d known, I should have asked for your contact info earlier, don’t you think?” The bully pulled his legs down, turned sideways, propped his left foot on his chair, rested his left elbow on his knee, and propped his chin in his hand.
“You can say that again. Brother Wen.” Lin Ting put on a polite, fake smile.
Actually, he couldn’t be entirely sure if the guy was that Brother Wen, but the sudden gloomy look on the other’s face confirmed his guess.
“Being my desk mate is fine, but let’s keep some distance. Don’t crowd our desks too close together. Also, I don’t like being disturbed. Let’s make a three-chapter pact: mutual understanding and mutual tolerance, how about that?”
Lin Ting didn’t want to sit close to him anyway. Fortunately, the space was wide, so he moved his desk a full desk-length away. “Couldn’t agree more.”
“Well aren’t you a regular intellectual. What’s your name?”
“Lin Ting.”
“Listening?” The person laughed. “You might as well change your name to Eavesdropping.”
Lin Ting simply glanced at the book the guy was holding in his hand. “By that logic, you might as well change your surname to Gate.”
“What?”
“Because not only do you lack ears, you’re also a bit cheap—Classmate Gate Jane.”
“Damn it! My name is Wen Lan, do you have any culture at all, you bastard!” Wen Lan threw the book he had just been pretending to read, slamming it down with a loud bang that startled everyone in the room. The previously buzzing beehive instantly turned into Silent Hill.
One second. Two seconds.
Absolute silence. All movement among the students seemed to be slowed down, as if making even the slightest sound would cause them to be swallowed whole by the monster lurking behind.
Only Lin Ting slowly continued organizing his books and textbooks, and unyieldingly shot back, “Right back at you.”
Lin Ting could feel Wen Lan’s gaze landing on him, heavy enough that he could practically hear the creaking sound of eyeballs shifting.
Ban Ban had already left, and the math teacher for the first period arrived belatedly. Startled by the chillingly quiet atmosphere, the teacher coughed. “You guys… today, cough cough, performance is good. Ah, our class has a new student. Transferring in during senior year is quite rare. Ah, let’s start class. If the new student has any math questions they don’t understand, feel free to come to my office, huh.”
Seeming like a new teacher, they hadn’t built up a strong enough heart yet.
Fortunately, Wen Lan didn’t make any major moves after class started. He just pulled out his phone to send a few messages and then flipped it sideways to play a muted game. Lin Ting glanced sideways to see everyone else casually pulling out various phones and tablets to focus on their own business, whether studying or playing—after all, their futures had already been paved for them. The teachers didn’t care, the parents didn’t care, and the students didn’t care either.
This situation was actually quite friendly for Lin Ting. It wouldn’t be like a subpar school where the noise around you drowned out the teacher on stage, almost turning the back row into a mahjong parlor; nor would it be like those elite high schools striving for success, where forget about phones, even bringing a novel unrelated to the college entrance exams into school would get you a parent-teacher conference. Plus, the teaching staff was strong, the teacher’s lectures were logically clear, and the occasional divergent thinking and analogical reasoning were quite interesting.
So Lin Ting pulled out his phone as well.
“Playing on your phone during the very first class after transferring? Not even gonna pretend to study?” Wen Lan’s deeply punchable tone sounded exceptionally loud against the quiet classroom background.
“Back row! Quiet!” The math teacher’s gaze quickly locked onto the two of them, paused for a moment, and then resumed the lecture.
Lin Ting thought for a moment, then leaned back into his chair, relaxed his waist, stretched out his legs, and let his arms hang down naturally. He lifted his chin slightly, angled his face forty-five degrees toward Wen Lan, shifted his gaze upward, swept it across Wen Lan in a circle, and instantly snapped it back to the front, not forgetting to curve the corner of his mouth closest to Wen Lan into a faint smile at the very end.
To anyone else, this sequence of actions might have meant nothing, but to a class bully who liked to carve out his own territory, it was a tiny spark that ignited a powder keg. Lin Ting didn’t turn his head to look, but he could clearly feel the air around him grow tense and boiling.
Sure enough, right as class ended and the math teacher stepped out, Wen Lan slammed his palm down onto Lin Ting’s desk. “Do you know who I am?”
“Wen Lan.” Lin Ting stared upward expressionlessly, following the hand propped on his desk.
“Or should I call you—Brother Wen now?” Lin Ting suddenly flashed a wicked smile, leaning closer as he spoke, his voice dropping lower. Although this class bully had a terrible temper, watching him try to pick a fight was actually quite entertaining.
Lin Ting had originally expected this young master’s next line to either be “My dad is the principal” or “My grandfather is the mayor.”
“This school belongs to me. You better figure things out for yourself.” Wen Lan tapped his hand on the desk and lowered it.
Lin Ting smiled and brushed the dust off the spot where Wen Lan had tapped. “Truly you can’t judge a book by its cover. Not even out of high school yet and you’re already acting like the school board chairman. Looks like our Brother Wen is doing pretty well for himself.”
The man in front of him wore a gloomy expression. Lin Ting felt a tinge of regret; purely based on facial features, the guy was quite handsome, but years of hostility had left their mark, making his eyebrows and mouth carry the sharpness of a blade. Right now, he certainly looked difficult to deal with.
“Lin Ting, we’ll see about that.” These were the last words Wen Lan said to him at school that day.
.
When Lin Ting walked back along his memorized route after school, he noticed something felt off.
Why were there more and more people behind him?
At first, there were just two guys with their arms around each other’s shoulders, then four more joined in, and suddenly a swarm of nearly ten people showed up, trailing along one after another… And now, less than ten minutes after walking out of the school gates, there were easily thirty or forty people trailing in a dense crowd behind him.
Lin Ting changed direction and began walking in the opposite direction of the Gu family residence.
It wasn’t that he wanted to bring trouble to the Gu family—he wasn’t that kind, but he simply didn’t want those upper-class folks to see him getting beaten up.
He remembered seeing an arcade nearby on the map, and judging by the reviews, it seemed pretty crowded.
He would head to a crowded place first and figure things out from there.
Lin Ting secretly quickened his pace, and the large group behind him started jogging along as well. Not a single person spoke in the quiet alley, yet Lin Ting found it deafeningly noisy—the dull thuds of dozens of pairs of shoes hitting the asphalt, the whistling sound of the wind by his ears, the heavy panting from the light jog, and the sound of his own heart pounding against his throat after going so long without exercise.
Lin Ting remembered the parting words Wen Lan had thrown at him.
A school bully really lived up to the title.
The arcade wasn’t far. After a short while, Lin Ting spotted the somewhat aged, tacky black-and-multicolored neon sign from afar—Planet Fun.
Right now, this planet was packed with over twenty people, mostly high school students.
Great, next Lin Ting just needed to blend in—
Lin Ting’s train of thought shattered in the next second.
The rabble that had been trailing right behind him suddenly stopped in their tracks as they caught sight of someone dancing on the dance machine at the entrance of the arcade.
The person seemed to sense the surrounding gazes, ignored the miss flashing on the screen, stepped down from the machine, and turned around—
Well, it was Wen Lan. What was this called? As the saying goes, enemies are bound to cross paths; this was simply the choice of Steins;Gate.