Qi Han wasn't the only one whose worldview had been seriously overturned.
During problem-solving time, he slipped out of the classroom to take a call on the stairwell. Mid-sentence, he suddenly saw Han Yiyi's classmate from last Friday at the internet café entrance appear half a floor below. Qi Han's eyes widened. Convinced it wasn't a hallucination, he hadn't even managed to hang up and say hello before the girl's shout—"Delinquent pervert thief stalker!"—scared him into turning and running.
One ran for no clear reason; the other chased for no clear reason. Qi Han took a while to come to his senses, braked in time at the boys' restroom door, turned around, and asked the girl, already out of breath and stopped several meters away: "Why are you chasing me?"
"You—you stole my—my phone charm!"
"This one?" Qi Han raised his phone. The blue charm swung back and forth like a pendulum from the motion. "I picked it up."
"It's mine. Give it back." Recovered now, the girl held out her hand with perfect seriousness.
The boy started to detach it without a word—then thought better of it. You tell me to return it and I return it? Too unlike my style! He stopped, smiled, and tilted his head: "Didn't you watch cartoons when you were little?"
"Huh?"
"'Find a treasure on the ground, ask heaven and earth—you can't have it.' Never heard that?"
Mai Mang had another revelation: "So you're a delinquent pervert thief deadbeat stalker." She thought it over a moment, then looked up righteously and proposed: "Fine. Don't give it back then—date me instead."
Who could explain the connection between those two things?
Qi Han petrified for several dozen seconds, then still refused flatly: "No."
"Why?"
"I don't like you."
"So you're a delinquent pervert thief deadbeat gay stalker!" Mai Mang had yet another revelation.
Too many modifiers—the person involved completely missed the point. "N-no, that's not—"
"If you're not gay, how can you not like me?" Mai Mang was exceptionally righteous.
"…"
"Are you being shy?"
"…"
"If you're not gay, hurry up and date me." It was Mai Mang who lost patience first. This world really had no standards.
Finally recovering from shock with difficulty, Qi Han struggled internally. Loss of virtue is a small matter; dying of embarrassment is a big one. "Uh… I was wrong. I'll give back your phone charm."
Jingyuan soon noticed that ever since Qi Han returned from his phone call, he'd been spacing out repeatedly. The last problem took a full half hour—but not being the meddling type, Jingyuan waited until after school for the other boy to volunteer an explanation on his own.
"Sure enough, the older you get, the more anything can happen to you," Qi Han said with the air of a sage, shaking his head.
Jingyuan, eyes lowered, texting Mai Mang, reminded him: "I think you're younger than me."
"Have you ever been cornered at a restroom door and confessed to by a girl?"
Jingyuan's hand paused. He looked up. "Why did she…" Have to choose that place?
Qi Han misunderstood, answered proudly: "Because I'm handsome."
In an instant, Jingyuan felt he'd seen that expression somewhere before. Thinking back—oh, Mai Mang. The night before, when Mai Mang said "so someone must have a crush on me," she'd looked exactly like this.
Truly a "because-so" pair with astonishing compatibility.
Jingyuan pressed send, shouldered his bag, and walked out of the classroom with Qi Han: "This must be the so-called 'generation gap between post-80s and post-90s.' Sorry—I can't relate."
On Mai Mang's end, a text came back quickly: "We got out too early—we're already home."
On Qi Han's end, curious, he doubled back to Jingyuan, who had stopped to read his message, and peeked at the phone: "What is it?"
Jingyuan put the phone back in his uniform pocket. "Nothing. My sister's school and ours have a baseball game. She came by. I was going to go home with her, but she already left."
Yangming and Shenghua had a game? Oh—so that explained the miraculous creature's appearance.
Qi Han asked: "Your cousin?"
"Mm."
"Huh? You live together?"
"Mm… Since middle school. But she boarded at school for a while last semester. This semester she's back—her reason for applying to commute was 'there's a giant monster in the dorm.' I can't stand her." Jingyuan smiled helplessly. As far as he knew, the legendary "giant monster" was nothing but a slightly large gecko.
The other boy, uncharacteristically, hadn't caught the point of his question. Qi Han had to ask again: "But how do you end up living with your cousin?"
"…Special reasons."
Jingyuan said nothing more. He seemed expressionless, yet a trace of something subtle remained—not any kind of joy. Like a film of mist too thin to see, draped over his face. Eyes fixed on the distance, something seeping from deep inside surfaced again.