It was like a dream, a silent reconciliation.

Xie Lan suddenly felt a sense of relief—the kind where he could even wear headphones and listen to an anime opening theme while writing an essay.

Before the Sunday evening self-study session, the classroom was in its usual state of chaos.

Yu Fei, his foot wrapped in a bandage the size of a basketball, was being supported on either side by Che Ziming and Dai You as they hobbled back to his seat. Che Ziming leaned against Xie Lan’s desk to catch his breath, whispering, “I just passed the front row and saw Liu Yixuan’s eyes were all red. Looks like she was crying.”

Yu Fei, having just sat down, frowned at this. “Where do you find the energy to observe other people?”

“I observe you too, okay?!” Che Ziming roared, his face flushing red. “I’ve noticed your irritability has multiplied exponentially as spring turns into summer, but do you ever talk to me about it? No, you don’t!”

Yu Fei sneered. “And what could she possibly say to you?”

Che Ziming froze.

Xie Lan, getting a headache from the noise, put down his halfway-written argumentative essay titled Pursuit and glanced toward the front of the room.

Liu Yixuan was discussing something with Dong Shuijing. Her expression seemed normal enough, but the rims of her eyes were indeed a bit red.

Dai You lowered his voice. “She got hated on pretty badly a couple of days ago.”

Xie Lan asked, “Hated on?”

“Cyberbullying. People chasing her down and cursing her out for no reason. Last week, one of her springtime dance covers made the homepage and she gained nearly a hundred thousand followers. I guess it made people jealous.” Dai You paused. “But the issue was resolved ridiculously smoothly. First, a huge number of random passersby stood up for her, and then the person hating on her the hardest apologized directly. I actually suspected for a moment she paid for PR control.”

Xie Lan barely understood. “Then why is she still crying?”

Dai You thought for a moment. “The little girl probably just has a weak mental constitution. She’s not like Dou*—she’s just a content creator doing this for passion. She can’t handle too much drama. I saw her status update today saying she’s going on an indefinite hiatus to adjust her mindset.”

Yu Fei turned his head and snapped impatiently at Dai You, “Since when are you this much of a gossip?”

“This counts as gossip?” Dai You was stunned. “Your temper really has been explosive lately, hasn’t it?”

Yu Fei flipped through his book rapidly, annoyed. “Just don’t stand there blocking the light. You’re affecting my foot’s recovery.”

Dai You: “?”

Once everyone had quieted down, Xie Lan finally pulled out his notebook for video planning.

[Submission #1: Early Summer Sycamore Concert, Livestream + Video]

In the performer list below, Liu Yixuan was listed for the bamboo flute, with “Pending Invitation” written in brackets.

He was a bit speechless. He had been working on this proposal for days—location and arrangement were done, and he was just waiting to invite the classmates who played instruments. Now Liu Yixuan was going on an indefinite hiatus.

Dou Sheng suddenly poked him from the side.

Xie Lan closed the notebook. “What?”

“I found out the fans have twisted the meaning of ‘dm’ and ’em’. They actually say we are ‘Da Mao’ (Big Cat) and ‘Er Mao’ (Second Cat).” Dou Sheng held out his phone for him to see. “I, the Indifferent One (Dan Mo), am very unconvinced. Demon (E Mo), what do you say?”

Xie Lan: “…”

In the comment section of their persona video, someone had asked what “em” meant.

A reply in the thread hesitated not one bit, first explaining that Dou Sheng had called Xie Lan “Er Mao” during Xie Lan’s first livestream, and then offering a link to a video long since renamed The Thousand Layers of Tricks Big Cat Uses to Abduct Second Cat. Their secret identities had been stripped completely bare.

Perhaps due to knowing Dou Sheng for a long time now, the thickness of Xie Lan’s face had increased day by day.

He withdrew his gaze expressionlessly. “Don’t mention it, it actually fits perfectly with Big Cat and Second Cat. Your fans have quite the imagination.”

Dou Sheng: “…”

Xie Lan buried his head and went back to his essay. “Anyway, I’m just a law-abiding Demon. What about you?”

Dou Sheng was silent for a moment. “Then I can only continue to be unwillingly Indifferent.”

Xie Lan fit his clumsy handwriting into the tiny grid of the manuscript paper, unconsciously curling the corners of his lips.

The moment the bell rang for evening self-study, someone at the back door suddenly shouted, “The math placement results are out!”

The metaphorical oil pan instantly exploded.

“Holy sh*t!!”

“Didn’t they say they’d be released Monday?”

“So sudden!”

“Someone has grabbed me by the scruff of my destiny!!”

The moment Old Ma stepped into the classroom, the owls all scrambled back to their seats, neatly folding their wings.

Xie Lan glanced at the podium, grabbed the copy of Detailed Solutions for National Math Olympiad from Dou Sheng’s desk, stacked it with his own, and used them to block his essay-writing hand.

Old Ma was holding a thin, light stack of papers, palm-sized, clipped with a paperclip.

He stepped onto the podium and enunciated clearly, “The math placement rankings are out. In my hand are seven tickets to the provincial training camp.”

“Seven.” Che Ziming whispered, “Deskmate, quick, calculate—is that a lot or a little?”

Herring curled his lips. “Five schools competing for thirty spots. You do the math.”

Dong Shuijing raised her hand. “Are all seven for our class? There are twenty participants from the straight-A class too.”

Old Ma smiled. “The straight-A class got two tickets. Yinghua High got nine in total.”

The class exploded again. Che Ziming raised his arms and shouted, “We are so f*cking awesome!!”

Old Ma was also beaming with pride. “First, let me report on the overall situation. This year, 250 people took the exam. The total score was 360. The average was 237, the median was 202. The top thirty cut off at 281. Students above this line really did quite well.”

Xie Lan quickly did the mental math.

The average was more than thirty points higher than the median, which meant the high-percentile scores had pulled open a significant gap.

“Classification, classification… the purpose of the test design is to widen the gap between levels. So, students who didn’t test well shouldn’t be negative. There are still opportunities in the physics competition, autonomous recruitment, and so on.” Old Ma smiled. “Just these seven tickets. I’ll read them out directly, I won’t keep you hanging.”

The discussion in the classroom ceased. The owls didn’t dare breathe loud enough to be heard; the room was so quiet it made one doubt their own ears.

The sound of a pen tip scratching on paper suddenly seemed a bit obtrusive. Xie Lan silently put down his pen, looking with regret at the exquisite parallel sentence he had just written—Pursuit is the writer’s handwriting, the musician’s score, the UP owner’s ‘like, subscribe, and share’.

Old Ma said, “I’ll read them in reverse order.”

“Dong Shuijing, 282, 29th in the city. Yu Fei, 294, 23rd in the city. Dai You, 294, tied for 23rd. Che Ziming, 299, 19th in the city…”

Those whose names were called sighed in relief. Che Ziming said with heartache, “Just one point away from 300!”

Old Ma smiled. “That’s already very high. In the last placement exam, first place in the city was only 320, and tenth place cut off at 300.”

“Wang Gou, 318, 6th in the city.”

Che Ziming turned his head and whispered, “Awesome, Dog!”

Wang Gou was a bit embarrassed and scratched his buzz cut. “Thanks, teacher.”

“You earned it.” Old Ma smiled. He had the last two pieces of paper in his hand. He staggered the two sheets, looked at them one by one, and sighed with a smile.

Dai You said, “There’s still Dou Sheng and Xie Lan.”

Old Ma laughed. “Right, there’s still the two of them.”

The classroom returned to a deathly silence.

Xie Lan discovered that this group of owls all possessed a breath-holding kung fu; whenever news was announced, they could hold their breath ten times in a minute.

Old Ma looked at one of the tickets for a long time. “Sigh, Dou Sheng.”

Dou Sheng twirled his ballpoint pen between his index and middle fingers. “Just be direct, Teacher. I didn’t beat Xie Lan in math, I know.”

Xie Lan was stunned hearing this. His pen, which had been sneakily perfecting his parallel sentence, paused on the essay paper.

He was a little surprised Dou Sheng would say that.

Old Ma fell silent for a moment, then swapped the positions of the two tickets, looking back and forth.

After a good while, he finally said to Dou Sheng, “In the past, I would have been overjoyed with your score… sigh, it’s not bad, actually. It’s already a qualitative leap ahead of last year’s first place. Dou Sheng, second in the city, 348. You proved one theorem wrong.”

As soon as the words fell, Dou Sheng just hooked the corner of his lip, while the class group chat exploded instantly.

The owls looked well-behaved on the surface, but their hands were all typing on phones under their desks.

– 348 is second???

– Did I take the same placement exam as them?

– Getting nearly a full score on this kind of test is insane!

– So what did Xie Lan get…

– I’m already starting to feel numb…

Old Ma took a deep breath. “Xie Lan, 354. You got half a calculation wrong. First in the city.”

Silence filled the room. Old Ma added, “That part you got wrong? No one else in our class got it wrong.”

Xie Lan said faintly, “That ‘X-X’ measurement problem was over three hundred words long. It simply shouldn’t exist on a math paper.”

Che Ziming turned around with his mouth gaping stupidly. “What is ‘X-X’?”

Xie Lan sighed.

Dou Sheng twirled his pen next to him and thought for a while. “Cliff (Xuan Ya)?”

Xie Lan: “Maybe.”

Truth be told, for that question, he had used his pen to draw vertical lines to break up the sentences one by one. Even after breaking it down to the end, it still didn’t make sense. In a fit of rage, he had written five words in the blank space: I cannot read the question.

Old Ma nodded, looked at the camp admission slip for a long time, and said, “I don’t care how you do in other subjects, but you must attend the provincial training camp. Take the competition in October seriously. You can have whatever you want, understand?”

Xie Lan just gave a hum of acknowledgement.

Throughout the evening self-study, the class group chat never stopped.

Owl emojis spammed the screen to the point of mental toxicity. Xie Lan eventually just muted the group and continued burying his head in writing his Chinese essay.

By the time school let out, he had barely reached six hundred words out of the required eight hundred. He had exhausted every argument accumulated in his entire life; his gloomy face practically had the word DOOMED written on it.

The classroom was still fiercely discussing the placement results. Just as Xie Lan grabbed his backpack and stood up, Che Ziming turned around, dusted off his sleeves in front of him, and said in a strange voice, “Your servant—Little Che!”

Wang Gou threw down a seat cushion and dropped to his knees with a thud. “Your servant, Little Dog!”

The two chorused, “Greetings to the Math King!”

Xie Lan: “?”

The girls on the side laughed so hard they almost flipped their desks. Even Liu Yixuan hooked the corner of her mouth.

Che Ziming stood up and said, “After so many years, tsk tsk tsk, I’ve finally seen someone who can thrash Dou Sheng. Although I’ll have to treat you to a Top Scorer BBQ Feast, honestly speaking, do you know how refreshing my mood is right now? This is the feeling of freedom! This is the sound of happiness! These are the glory days!”

Xie Lan paused for a moment, poked open the notes app on his phone, and said, “That last parallel sentence, can you say it again?”

Che Ziming tripped over his tongue. “Huh?”

Dou Sheng chuckled twice from behind. “No need to copy that sentence. It’s utter bullshit.”

Che Ziming stared wide-eyed. “Hey, you got destroyed and you’re not even angry? You’re actually happy?”

Dou Sheng wasn’t just not angry; he was positively cheerful. He even whistled a couple of times as he walked out.

The group walked along the small path back to the dorms. As they walked, Dai You turned back and lamented, “Xie Lan’s score is truly terrifying. It’s scary if you think about it. Only missing half a question because he couldn’t read it—what does that mean? This placement exam didn’t even touch his upper limit.”

Dou Sheng had his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets, a faint smile held in his dark eyes. “Yeah, I knew he was strong, but I didn’t expect him to be at this level. To tell the truth, missing only one proof on this paper… I think that’s my limit at this current stage. I lost fair and square.”

He glanced at Xie Lan as he said the last sentence. Xie Lan returned a ghostly glance, feeling that there must be a conspiracy behind this guy’s decisive admission of defeat.

Sure enough, as the group turned past the side of the school building, he suddenly felt a weight on his back. Dou Sheng draped an arm around him, pressing his head onto Xie Lan’s shoulder, his chin resting right near the collarbone where the violin usually rested.

The sky was dark and heavy, the streetlights dim and yellow, stretching the two overlapping shadows on the ground into long shapes.

Dou Sheng turned his head slightly and whispered in his ear, “So amazing, Er Mao. Teach me how you tested.”

As he spoke, his breath hit Xie Lan’s collar. Xie Lan suddenly went stiff.

A numb, tingly sensation crawled up his spine all the way to the top of his head, like an electric shock.