Yi Zhe found a summer job. It was at a skewers shop and he worked together with Zhao Weifan. The boss was a very nice person and would gather everyone at the end of work every day to have a casual meal, drink some beer and chat. However, while Yi Zhe and Zhao Weifan had stayed back at the start, after a few days, they said that they would not be eating. In the skewers shop, the smoke was heavy and the flames were hot. Even if it was an open-air shop, the two of them ended up with the smell all over their bodies every day and just a whiff was enough to make them gag. They wanted nothing more than to rush home every day after work and take a shower.

Zhao Weifan took off her apron and hung it on the clothes rack in the room. She looked down, frowning as she checked her clothes. Thanks to a small child running around today, she had overturned a tray and the sauce-covered skewers had all landed on her. The boss's wife was very considerate and had immediately found an apron for her to hide the stains. But now that it was after work, she looked at the stains and fretted. She happened to be wearing a light yellow shirt today which made the mess over her chest stand out even more.

She probably had stayed in the room for too long. Someone knocked on the door.

"Not done yet?"

Zhao Weifan again sighed internally over her misfortune. She opened the door in resignation and walked out.

When he saw her clothes, the person who had been tinkering with his phone was stunned. "What happened to your clothes?"

"A kid crashed into me." Having a large stain right on her chest made Zhao Weifan rather discomfited. She tugged at her clothes, her brows furrowed, and said, "Ai, so annoying. How am I going to go out like this?"

Yi Zhe put his phone away and thought for a while. "I'll go buy you something to wear over it."

Seeing that he had started walking out, Zhao Weifan called out hurriedly, "Where can you go at this hour?"

"There are stalls on the next street."

In a short time, Yi Zhe bought a garment back. Meanwhile, the boss and his family had already dragged Zhao Weifan into chatting with them for a while.

"Oh, that's right. The gaokao scores will be released today. You can check it after twelve, right?"

"Mm, yeah," Zhao Weifan replied while taking the plastic bag from Yi Zhe's hands.

Yi Zhe had bought a short-sleeved denim shirt. It was large and wide and didn't seem to be a women's style shirt. Zhao Weifan held it up for a look, then loosened the row of buttons and directly put it on. The shirt had a collar and was loose. What she was wearing inside couldn't be seen at all and wearing it this way also didn't look strange.

"Aiyo, this lad is really considerate." The boss's wife felt that the two of them looked quite the pair and couldn't help teasing. "Kids like you nowadays know how to make the moves better than we did when we were young."

"What was that about me when I was young?" The boss lifted his glass half-filled with beer, unwilling to concede. "Did I not buy clothes for you? Back then, I even-"

"All right, all right," the wife interrupted. "No one wants to hear your stories."

Zhao Weifan had already gotten used to hearing them argue in these few days. Standing at the side, she smoothed out her clothes and smiled.

"Ai, that's right. My son said that I shouldn't keep asking students how they did in the exams, that's why I haven't asked the two of you all this while." The boss's wife looked at them and smiled widely. "So, how was it? The scores will be out today anyway, it should be all right for me to ask, right?"

The boss also became interested. "Did you estimate your marks? My nephew also took the gaokao this year, he told me that his estimated score is 380. I told him that in that case, he's set for life."

Zhao Weifan hesitated a while, but still said in the end. "Probably above 700."

As expected, the boss and his wife seemed to be both stunned. They looked at her and blinked.

With the sudden silence and the few of them staring at each other, the atmosphere turned awkward at once.

Zhao Weifan let out a sigh in her heart.

This was exactly why she was never willing to bring up the topic of exam scores. Every time she met her parents' friends or her relatives, when they asked and she told them her estimated score, they would always look at her doubtfully like she was muddle-headed.

But it was truly above 700, as long as her essay was not judged to have gone off-topic.

"700? Isn't the total score only 750?"

"Mm…" Zhao Weifan answered vaguely.

"So high? Amazing, amazing." The boss and his wife exchanged a look. Who knew whether or not they believed her. After a long delay, they finally covered up with a couple of rather stiff laughs.

"What about you?" The boss's wife probably felt that they had made the young lady feel awkward just now, so she hurriedly tried to liven up the atmosphere and asked Yi Zhe eagerly.

"695."

The black plastic bag that had contained the shirt just now was crumpled into a ball. A perfect arc and it landed in the trash can by the door.

"Let's go." Yi Zhe jerked his head to signal at Zhao Weifan, then opened the glass entrance door.

Cheng Xu had recently been so busy that he was barely around. He usually showed his face at the lab early in the morning then left immediately. By the time he came back to the dorm, it was almost always past midnight and there had been times when it was one or two in the morning before he quietly slipped back. Even though Xu Tangcheng could sense that Cheng Xu was purposely keeping his movements quiet, he still woke up immediately the moment the door opened and Cheng Xu entered. He knew his roommate and knew that he must be busy with some urgent matters to leave early and return late like this. Afraid that Cheng Xu would feel bad for disturbing him, Xu Tangcheng always pretended not to hear the noise he made and stayed in bed with his eyes closed, pretending to be asleep.

However, when Cheng Xu came back today, to his surprise he saw that Xu Tangcheng was not yet sleeping. He was watching a movie in bed with his earphones in.

Cheng Xu shuffled over and glanced at the screen. Xu Tangcheng noticed him and took out his earphones and looked at him.

"Back so early today?" He glanced at the time at the bottom right of the screen. It wasn't twelve yet.

"Yeah." Cheng Xu yawned and sat down beside him. "I won't be back very late in the future."

A slight pause. Then, he continued and asked, "I woke you up previously, didn't I? Sorry."

"You didn't." Xu Tangcheng shook his head with a smile. From a bag at his side, he took out a small packet of flavoured fried broad beans, tore it open and passed it to Cheng Xu. Then, he pulled out a tissue and laid it out in front of him for the broad bean skins.

"What is it that you've been busy with lately? Just look at how thin you've become."

"Mm…" Cheng Xu took a bean and put it in his mouth, peeling off the skin. After that mumble, he finally said, "I found an internship."

Xu Tangcheng was rather surprised. "You found an internship so early?"

Cheng Xu clutched at his naturally curly hair. "I'm actually helping out someone from my hometown. He registered a company and is setting up a website. I'm just helping out."

Perhaps people really did have a very sensitive intuition when it came to certain things. Immediately, Xu Tangcheng thought of a person.

"Was it that person from the last time…" He recalled for a bit and said a name. "Fu Daiqing?"

Xu Tangcheng had taken off his earphones just now. In the movie that was playing on speaker, the male and female leads were at the moment sharing their feelings for each other, deeply impassioned. Cheng Xu seemed to be staring at the screen the whole time but when he heard those three words, his eyes started to wander around.

Xu Tangcheng was trying to remember Fu Daiqing and didn't notice the rather strange look in Cheng Xu's eyes.

"Yeah." Cheng Xu's answering voice didn't sound very natural. He turned and saw Xu Tangcheng looking thoughtful and for some unknown reason, he suddenly felt so guilty that his face blushed. He coughed softly and asked, "Why aren't you asleep yet today?"

"I'm waiting for the gaokao results." After saying that, Xu Tangcheng suddenly realised that he had been occupied with talking to Cheng Xu just now and had completely forgotten that he was waiting for midnight. When he realised it, he quickly moved the mouse to look at the time.

"Gaokao results?" Cheng Xu first muttered to himself, then very quickly understood. "You have a relative taking the gaokao?"

"Mm."

Clothes sold at the stalls in the night market were all very cheap. Accordingly, the tailoring was also more shoddy. Walking on the street, Zhao Weifan broke out in a light sweat and the area around her neck was so prickly that it made her itch. She kept lifting her hand to brush at that spot. Naturally, Yi Zhe noticed it.

"The clothes there are all like this. There aren't better ones."

Zhao Weifan nodded. "I know. It's just that the collar is rather prickly."

She covered her neck and walked another couple of steps, then asked suddenly. "What time is it now?"

Yi Zhe looked at his phone. "10.30."

"There's still one and a half hours to go."

In actual fact, even now, Yi Zhe did not feel nervous about his results. He was the one who took the exams so, of course, no one knew better than himself how well he did.

"Your estimated score is really 695?"

"I didn't estimate," Yi Zhe said. "I only checked the answers for the English fill-in-the-blanks questions."

Zhao Weifan asked curiously, "Then why did you say 695 just now?"

Yi Zhe shot her a look, then lowered his head. His feet kicked a pebble on the ground. "Just a random number."

The suddenly rising night wind lifted the hem of his top.

After sending Zhao Weifan home, Yi Zhe took a wandering walk on his own, going wherever his feet took him without a destination in mind. The public square that was always lively no longer had people dancing there and the streets were also devoid of the various small stalls and vendors. At this hour, most of the people in the small city were already asleep and among those not yet sleeping, a large proportion were likely huddled in front of their computers, waiting for that one number.

When he encountered a half-flattened mineral water bottle, Yi Zhe changed directions and let out a swift kick. The bottle hit the wall and fell into a dirty trash can.

When he finally wandered his way to the downstairs of his apartment building, Yi Zhe looked up and saw that the lights in his house were bright.

Xiang Xiyi was back?

At once, he turned and walked out.

It was at this moment that his phone chimed.

Asleep yet? Will you be checking your score later?

Yi Zhe looked at the ink-black road ahead of him, then turned his head towards the lights of his own home. He replied: Yes.

Because of that one word, he ended up going upstairs.

When he headed up unwillingly, he hoped in his heart that Xiang Xiyi was already asleep and that the bright lights were because she had forgotten to switch them off. Or, if she was not yet asleep, he hoped that she couldn't be bothered with him. If that also did not work, he warned himself not to argue with her. After all, it would be midnight very soon. The important thing was to check his scores, everything else could be endured.

But he never thought that after he mentally prepared himself and went up, he would see a man sitting on his doorstep. The man looked to be getting on in years, yet he wore clothes covered in rivets, had a full-face beard and his hair was even tied in dreadlocks that looked very stiff.

He sat with his back against the wall. Hearing a noise in the corridor, he cracked his eyes open a sliver to look at the person coming. But he only opened his eyes very briefly; before Yi Zhe could see him clearly, the man had already closed his eyes again and continued to sleep.

Seeing that this person had no self-awareness at all and wasn't moving out of the way, Yi Zhe frowned and turned his head to the side.

Perhaps he sensed that the person in front of him wasn't moving. The man leaning against the wall folded his legs, leaving enough space for a person to pass through.

Yi Zhe ran out of patience and knocked his house key against the staircase railing a couple of times.

"Move aside. You're blocking my door."

The sound of metal clanging against each other was not soft. The man on the ground roused and muttered a sound. He turned his head to the side like he wanted to continue sleeping but less than two seconds later, his eyes shot open. He stared at Yi Zhe for a few seconds, then jumped up.

"Who are you?"

Yi Zhe was stunned by his convulsive movements. He took another look at the wariness on the man's face and immediately understood what he was thinking.

He cursed the man in his heart. Could Xiang Xiyi hook up with a normal human for once?

"Move aside." Yi Zhe looked at the time and said rather impatiently.

But the man still had an arm stretched out and blocking the door, wariness on every inch of his body. "Who the hell are you!"

His voice had a touch of anger and the volume rose quite a bit, turning on the lights on a few floors.

Yi Zhe subconsciously glanced at the door behind him, then said furiously to the man in a low voice, "Can you keep your voice down? Other people are sleeping!"

"You must tell me who you are, as well as your relationship with my muse."

Yi Zhe had never heard someone put on such an exaggerated fake accent to talk in real life. The single word was dragged through several twists and turns before ending in a way that was just asking for a beating.

Where on earth had Xiang Xiyi picked up such a weirdo?

Yi Zhe was afraid of this unpredictable creature really causing a ruckus here so he said frankly, "She's my mum."

The man was dumbstruck. Yi Zhe pushed him aside and opened the door.

In the end, the man suddenly seemed to get one of his reflexes working and threw himself at Yi Zhe's back unexpectedly.

"Fuck!"

"Duan Xiqiao, get lost."

Before Yi Zhe could swing his fist, Xiang Xiyi spoke from the inside of the house where she was putting on a facial mask and watching a comedy.

"Oh! My muse, you cannot do this…"

"Fuck off." Xiang Xiyi again spoke amidst the sound of exaggerated laughter.

The man stopped two steps away from Xiang Xiyi. "For the sake of looking for you, I have crossed thousands of miles."

"Fuck off."

"I don't have money and I also didn't bring my I.D. with me. There's nowhere I can go."

"Fuck off." Xiang Xiyi only repeated the line.

"Oh! My muse, look yonder!" The man called Duan Xiqiao pointed out the window. "It is cold and frozen outside, the heavy snow a meter thick on the ground. If I go out like this, will I not be heading to my death?"

It was motherfucking June.

"Crazy." Xiang Xiyi finally lost the pitifully miniscule amount of patience she had. She narrowed her eyes at the man. "If you continue to speak like that to me, believe it or not, I'll castrate you right now."

"Oh!"

As he watched the man clutch his chest and sink to his knees, Yi Zhe genuinely felt that this man probably had some issues with his brain and might really be a mad man.

It was quite strange. This was the first time he could stand on the same side as Xiang Xiyi.

Yi Zhe had no interest in watching this over-the-top performance and shook off the two people in the living room to enter his room. He checked his watch again; it was already 11.58 p.m. He quickly turned on his computer but this old computer was really very laggy and the process of turning on took more than two minutes. Yi Zhe rested a hand on his desk, his fingers rapping on the surface rather anxiously.

He had not been nervous at all just now but at this moment, his heart was beating faster and faster. The desktop finally appeared on the screen but the cursor kept spinning. Meanwhile, the time on the screen waited for no one and had already jumped to two minutes past midnight.

There were too many people checking their results. When Yi Zhe finally opened the webpage, the site kept hanging and could not be refreshed.

Have you checked it? After his umpteenth attempt to refresh, Yi Zhe received a text from Xu Tangcheng.

Because of this question from Xu Tangcheng, Yi Zhe became even more anxious. Right then, someone knocked on his door at this inappropriate timing, increasing the impatience in his heart. He didn't want to bother with the person outside the door so he pretended not to have heard and continued to click on the mouse.

But the person outside the door didn't seem to have any intention of stopping. From a pause after every three knocks, it turned to a pause after every five knocks. Finally, it even turned into an incessant knocking at a steady beat, pressuring him like it was coming for his life.

"Fuck."

Yi Zhe finally pressed harshly on the mouse, then abandoned the frozen screen and went to open the door.

Outside the door was Duan Xiqiao. He flashed Yi Zhe an incandescent smile, then bowed formally at him.

"Hello, please allow me to introduce myself. I am Duan Xiqiao, an indie musician. Of course, to me, my more important identity is that I am a faithful admirer of your mother, Xiang Xiyi. Oh," Duan Xiqiao pressed his palms together, holding them up in front of him, then bringing them down. "I have offended you just now. I am very, very sorry."

After saying that, he took a step back and again bowed deeply to Yi Zhe.

Yi Zhe looked at him expressionlessly.

"Then…" Duan Xiqiao suddenly broke into an even wider smile. "May I invite you to watch my upcoming solo concert?"

The reply he got was a loud slam of the door.

After slamming the door shut, Yi Zhe still felt as though the anger suppressed in his chest was about to explode. He kicked the door viciously to vent his emotions, scaring Duan Xiqiao outside into wrapping his arms around himself and retreating a couple of steps.

In his heart, Yi Zhe recited a few times, Don't lower yourself to argue with someone abnormal, before walking back to his computer, preparing to continue refreshing for his results.

Unexpectedly, when he returned, the computer screen was no longer a white blank. There was a table and a few numbers.

Even though he roughly had an idea what his results would be like, when he saw the total score, his brain still blanked out for a while.

Something that was real would still bring more joy than something that was a question of judgment or a prediction.

He slowly sat on the chair, his legs slightly opened, hands resting in between and eyes staring at the computer. The lights in the room were not switched on and only the screen was emitting light, a bright square shining on his face.

After a long while, the corners of his mouth that had been tense the whole while finally stretched out, just the tiniest bit.

Xu Tangcheng held his phone and waited. Cheng Xu was initially just freeloading on the movie but he was now the main viewer.

"Has he not checked it yet…" Xu Tangcheng muttered, knocking his silent and still phone against the surface of the desk.

"It's definitely not easy to check right now. The site is probably overloaded."

Cheng Xu had just finished speaking when the phone that was warm from Xu Tangcheng's grip rang. Xu Tangcheng quivered and immediately accepted the call.

"You checked it?"

After asking this, Xu Tangcheng finally realised how incredibly nervous he was. He curled his fingers into a fist but his hand was cold, making him even more tense. Cheng Xu very perceptively paused the movie and looked at the person on the phone beside him, similarly waiting with bated breath. Xu Tangcheng exchanged a look with him. Without realising it, he had reached out to grip Cheng Xu's arm.

"What's your score?"

The other side said a number. Cheng Xu didn't hear it clearly but he could see Xu Tangcheng immediately relax and drop his shoulders, smiling until his eyes were curved.