Summer homework differed from the monthly exams—it was lighter in volume and easier in difficulty, mere child’s play. To prevent students from slacking off and giving up, the questions weren’t overly challenging.
With Chi Mo, this strict teacher, by his side, Li Ran couldn’t sneakily skip any. Every time he tried, Chi Mo caught him like a surveillance camera, forcing him to rewrite it. It was utter torment.
Unexpectedly, after the summer break, things got even worse.
High school seniors weren’t human; they simulated entering society as 007 workhorses ahead of time. New test papers were handed out daily, fluttering down like snowflakes.
When Li Ran tackled problems on his own, he always felt uncertain.
This question looked familiar, but he couldn’t recall it for the life of him; that one seemed to have appeared in the error notebook, but he wasn’t sure; this word he’d just reviewed—what did it mean again…
The harder the questions got, the more Li Ran worked through them, and the chillier his heart grew at the approaching monthly exam.
But Chi Mo had gone mad for some reason. He didn’t find Li Ran annoying or chase him away. On weekends, he even brought Li Ran to the company and supervised his studies closely. Dream on if Li Ran thought he could join the gaming crowd downstairs in their chaos—no way. Besides weekends, Chi Mo picked him up punctually after evening self-study in the company car—nothing flashy—and once home, he forced Li Ran to do test papers. Begging didn’t help.
“Damn, A’Dai, why do you look so lifeless, like life’s not worth living?” Zhang Si twisted himself into a pretzel, one arm draped over Li Ran’s desk, the other extended to his deskmate Zhang Youde for fifty cents. “A bet’s a bet. A’Dai actually came to class early today—such a good boy.”
Zhang Youde slapped his hand. “You bastard, last semester you prepaid me for all your losses, spent the money, then conveniently forgot. Now you’re pulling this crap again?”
Good boy Li Ran slammed his backpack onto the desk, propped his elbows on it, cradled his face, and pondered life’s philosophies. “So sleepy.”
“Aaaah, spare me, Daddy, spare me…!” Zhang Youde physically reminded Zhang Si whether he’d ever actually paid up, pressing his neck down. Zhang Si crouched low, then suddenly lunged toward Li Ran’s desk, nearly knocking off his backpack.
Normally, Li Ran would have grabbed his bag and jumped away first to avoid the fallout. But today, he kept cradling his face, his eyes too full of philosophy to accommodate their scuffle.
“When you’re sleepy, what do you get? You get sleepy.”
Then he just narrowed his eyes and dozed off like that.
There were still thirty minutes until class—plenty of time for a nap. Zhang Si and Zhang Youde stared wide-eyed, too scared to move.
Zhang Si shrugged off Zhang Youde’s grip on his uniform and sat up, mouthing silently, “Is he possessed by a ghost?”
“No idea…” Zhang Youde shrugged, shaking his head, replying just as silently.
Actually, Chi Mo strictly forbade Li Ran from staying up late; early to bed, early to rise. But after doing the same thing repeatedly for so long, it invaded his dreams uncontrollably, especially disruptive.
This was what they called “thoughts by night, dreams by day.”
This week, Li Ran’s dreams were filled with test papers and Chi Mo’s piercing gaze. Test papers were fine—they didn’t bite. If he didn’t know, he didn’t know; Li Ran wasn’t the type to grind himself to death over them.
But he couldn’t fathom where that look came from, as if Chi Mo wanted to strip him bare and devour him whole. It vaguely terrified him.
Every time that plundering chill hit his back, his hairs stood on end. But when Li Ran turned around, Chi Mo was always focused on work—for efficiency, every evening after school, Li Ran had to do his test papers in the study with Chi Mo, nowhere else allowed.
The study had become their shared space now.
There were two math classes at noon.
Ban Wei shuffled in wearing slippers, yawning nonstop, yesterday’s test papers tucked under his arm. Today, they were going over errors.
As soon as he stood at the podium, Ban Wei sensed a deeply resentful gaze shooting toward him, like a “yuan” bullet aimed to blast him to bits, leaving him shattered, overgrown with weeds, soul scattered, unable to reincarnate.
What grudge could be this deep?
Ban Wei braced his hands on the podium, pressing down the papers with his palms, and swept his sharp gaze below.
He caught that glare at the teacher.
Caught red-handed, Li Ran didn’t dodge, but he didn’t lift his head too high either. His arms crossed horizontally in his lap like an elementary school kid, eyes lifting to glare while keeping his face down.
“Classmate Li Ran, were you just rolling your eyes at me?” Ban Wei tsked.
“I wasn’t.” Li Ran mumbled defiantly in a small voice. “Don’t falsely accuse people.”
Ban Wei cooed, “Long time no see, and now you’re talking back? Keep it up.”
If not for this culprit Ban Wei, how had he ended up like this? Chi Mo forcing him to study was for his own good—he couldn’t glare at his bro.
So Li Ran secretly glared at Ban Wei instead. He’d been doing it for days.
He had reasons to glare!
A perfectly completed summer assignment had briefly delighted Ban Wei, but Li Ran’s two years of barely scraping by had ingrained deep skepticism. Old Ban got excited for a moment, bragged in the office, but subconsciously didn’t believe Li Ran had truly turned over a new leaf.
Ban Wei projected his own experience: At the start of senior year, he’d sworn to be a model teacher, not to bring the “you teach this crap class, these crap kids” attitude into the room.
No matter how poorly the students studied, he had to show teacherly love and not give up.
He lasted three days. Looking at the sixty dog heads below who had no clue about senior year’s importance, frustration built, and he slacked off again.
If even he, an adult, was like that, what about playful bear cubs?
The class’s bottom-feeders—study slacker dogs that barked for some joy—heard Li Ran was a traitor and mobbed him noisily.
After the fuss, they realized even this go-with-the-flow A’Dai was tutoring up. Did they have to wait until he got into Tsinghua or Peking University to wake up? Terrifying.
People are cheap like that. With a natural genius like Qi Zhi, they took it for granted, no rush, no chase. With peers of equal IQ, they banded together against studying, laughing it off—plenty of losers, one more wouldn’t hurt. But when one loser suddenly buckled down secretly, it changed everything: collective anxiety, turning into bitter enmity!
So even for group harmony, they couldn’t last a few days.
Genius Qi Zhi commented, “You lot can persist three days max. My deskmate hates studying even more—two days would be impressive.”
Those days, Class 3-10 was pumped like they’d been injected with chicken blood, competing to be the best behaved. Everyone sneaked peeks at Li Ran after studying: happy if he wasn’t, gritted teeth and kept scribbling if he was.
With no foundation from first two years, they couldn’t solve a problem to save their lives—crying for mom and dad didn’t help. Scribbling furiously? They just drew turtles. Indeed, they didn’t last three days.
Meanwhile, Li Ran drew turtles too.
He even bragged, “Mine’s the cutest. Yours isn’t as good as mine.”
He wasn’t good at studying, but he followed class rules, as always in first two years. After Class 3-10 persisted a few days, they couldn’t tell if Li Ran was trying or not—it looked exactly the same as before.
Qi Zhi insisted Li Ran hadn’t changed from the past two years. If anything, he’d grown more tolerant of his bisexual deskmate.
Maybe one day if he told Li Ran he was purely gay, Li Ran wouldn’t be shocked but would frown and choose respect.
Then Class 3-10’s three-minute wonders, emulating Ban Wei, slacked off again, flying free in play.
Li Ran finished a little turtle.
One big problem stumped him. Before, he’d skip it, but now, Chi Mo-trained, he hugged his head and thought for five minutes. No ideas? Move on.
Five minutes passed, still clueless. He wrote every formula he could recall in the blank space, and with room left, his hand idly outlined a turtle.
After finishing, he wrote “Bro” on the turtle’s shell.
Wishing to “curse” him into becoming a slow little turtle—nice and leisurely pace.
That evening, Chi Mo saw the turtle and raised one eyebrow. “Turtles have strong attack power when eating meat.”
He added, “Their heads extend very quickly.”
“Oh…” Li Ran had never kept turtles or seen real ones much, so he didn’t get it.
He stepped forward proficiently, undid Chi Mo’s tie, then the cufflinks with ease—not tossing them casually on the coffee table like Chi Mo might, but carefully putting them away to avoid loss.
“I wasn’t cursing you…” Li Ran said guiltily, placing the cufflinks in their box.
The tie knot was one he’d tied himself that morning before Chi Mo left for work. Undoing it felt like undressing himself. Li Ran never wondered why after helping Chi Mo once, he’d mastered so many skills. It felt perfectly natural.
Chi Mo said, “Curse me all you want. It’s fine.”
He chuckled lightly, sincerity unclear. “I’m not a good person anyway.”
Li Ran protested, “Why say that about yourself…”
Chi Mo: “Am I a good person?”
Near the weekend, Li Ang messaged Li Ran, asking if he could come for dinner—Pei He Yu was away on a business trip.
Pei He Yu was Li Ang’s current partner.
A man.
