Chapter 8

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Chapter 7 | 😮 Contents 😮 | Chapter 9

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Food Snack of the Day: Wangzai Milk & Bear Biscuits

I know, these eyes shall forever haunt me.

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Translator: Silvery

PR: Decadence

Yu Sheng is sure of it. This guy must be sick in the head.

How else can there be a person who acts so overly familiar, the urge to sock his face is irresistible to this extent?

The palm resting atop his head still hasn’t removed itself yet. Yu Sheng’s arm twitches but strangely enough, he does not raise it against him.

Yu Sheng shuts his eyes and takes a long deep breath:

“Remove your hand.”

He looks as if he’s been picked up by the scruff and held at gunpoint. Intrigued by his reaction, Black Blouse rises to the challenge and curiously rubs the top of his head again.

In a flash of light, he leans back and narrowly dodges the fist Yu Sheng throws at him by a hair’s width. A light breeze is sent whipping past him by that punch.

Black Blouse tips back on his stool, unsteadily propping himself up by the top of the desk. He looks up, looking as though he still has words to say.

The peeling coat of the wooden stool latches onto the ground where the stool balances on two legs. Due to years without maintenance, the furniture creaks along with his movements.

Yu Sheng turns and opens the door for him.

The somewhat ancient door slams onto the metal wardrobe beside it. In the corridor where only a handful of people are wandering past, the clamour causes a resounding echo.

Black Blouse opens his mouth, but not a sound comes out.

Due to the difficulty of his original position, he rests his back against the desk’s edge and tilts his stool backwards, jutting his elbow out on the desk for support.

Yu Sheng opens the door even wider.

Sensing his firm intent to see him out the door, Black Blouse raises his brows and pushes down lightly on the desk in preparation to get up.

……

In the next second, the stool finally reaches the limit of its tolerance and creaks.

–And it crashes down to the ground in pieces.

Black Blouse: “……”

Yu Sheng: “……”

Yu Sheng grips onto the doorframe, looking at the dumbfounded Black Blouse sitting in a splay of stool parts. After a few seconds of silence, he lifts his hand to his face and his shoulders shake twice.

“It’s not me. It is the stool’s doing.”

Black Blouse has fallen for real this time. He couldn’t even bother with his glasses when he fell. Snapping back to himself shortly after being stupefied, he pulls himself back up with a hand on his back:

“Can I compensate for this? Honestly speaking, I think it is still salvageable. You just need a few tools… Friend, can you wait till I leave to laugh?”

Yu Sheng doesn’t remotely listen to his request. He leans against the door, his shoulders shaking vigorously.

Black Blouse heaves a light sigh and dusts off his pants before squatting down. He gathers up the mess of scattered stool parts.

Since he is tall and long-limbed, this half-squatting posture inexplicably makes him seem rough around the edges. The clean wrinkles of his shirt stretch and fold along with his movements, highlighting the curve of his back.

It’s only a pity he isn’t slightly aware of his own looks. Squatting on the ground as before, he thoughtfully engages in a stare down with the littered stool parts.

“It’s fine.”

Yu Sheng has gotten his fill of snickering. Rubbing a hand over his eyes, his tone lightens up for once:

“It’s just a matter of 10 dollars. You can forget about it.”

The stool is provided by the dormitory and is technically school property. By right, he will have to reimburse them once it is broken.

But with that said, this thing was also used for quite the number of purposes. Having been used by generation after generation of Central Third students to smash countless things – of which includes but is not limited to: windows, iron doors, human skulls – it’s really only a matter of time before it breaks down. In any case, it’s not like the compensation costs that much. No one has ever haggled over it before.

But Black Blouse obviously doesn’t think the same. He picks up two wooden parts and tries piecing them together:

“It’s 10 dollars. That is a lot.”

Yu Sheng pointedly eyes that black button-up which must have cost at least 200 stools:

“So you’re not going back to your exam – You’re just staying here to repair the stool?”

“I’ve already completed it using the method you taught me. After submitting the paper, I lost my way in your school, so I was about to ask someone politely. It’s then I was picked up against my will and thrown mercilessly to the ground.”

Black Blouse finally manages to assemble the pieces. Holding them together precariously with one hand, he doesn’t turn back. A long arm snakes back as though it has grown an eye of its own:

“Do you have a hammer? Otherwise, an Oxford dictionary will also do.”

Yu Sheng: “……”

Yu Sheng decides to let this lost child carry on being lost. Wasting no time on his bullshit, he scours around and hands him a spanner. He flops onto his bed, gropes around the bottom, and he smoothly extracts a book to cover his eyes with.

The fan drones on with its buzzing, sending a cooling wave of wind.

At some point throughout all this, the ridiculous fire which had invaded his chest seems to have died off slowly.

“Seeing as if you don’t like your shoulder patted, shall we get to know each other’s names?”

Black Blouse squats on the ground and taps away with his manual labour. He’s unexpectedly quite well-versed with what he is doing:

“My name is Jin Linkun. The Kun from ‘presenting a beautiful jade ring and belt’, written with the King character. Not the Kun from Kunming Prefecture.”

Yu Sheng murmurs at heart, ‘who the hell cares which Kun you are’. He muses his hair impatiently:

“Yu Sheng.”

His pause is quite long. So long in fact, Black Blouse thought this must be the end of their self-introduction and he rebegan his stool reparation. Only thereafter does Yu Sheng continue:

“…The Sheng from ‘Nights filled with partying’.”

The youth’s voice slips out from underneath the book. Though a bit muffled, his naturally silvery voice still can’t be blocked off completely.

Clear and melodious. Like the tinkling of ice cubes against fine glass in a cup of summertime plum soup.

Black Blouse: “A good name.”

Yu Sheng ignores him, covering his forehead with the book.

Like hell it is.

He nearly couldn’t come up with an idiom containing Sheng.

With sounds of life coming filling the room, the dorm is alas no longer the hollow, dead silence it once was. Yu Sheng closes his eyes and lies back for a bit. Listening to the consistent rapping coming off from his side, his sleepiness gradually surges back up.

Right before he drifts off, his last faint thought is how ‘Jin Linkun’ sounds vaguely familiar. Nonetheless, coming up with zero despite his long musings, he yawns and completely shuts his eyes off to the world.

His sleep deprivation from the night before is quite severe. When Yu Sheng next blinks open his eyes, the skies are already dark outside.

Yu Sheng pushes himself up. The uniform which had been laid over him at some point of time slips down with the action, pooling on the ground.

A little muddled, he bends down to pick up the uniform and he looks about the dorm.

The room is quiet and still. There is no one else here. The door is closed.

The stool has already been repaired. Propped unsteadily against the table legs in a high-level manoeuvre with just two legs on the ground, all in all, it’s been returned to the state it was in right when it fell apart.

A clear display of its repairer’s childish revenge, he’s sure, it highlights – quite meaninglessly – its repairer’s rather unsubtle and ironic trademark of being extremely vexing.

Yu Sheng thinks his reading comprehension has never been any more accurate.

His headache has gotten a lot better after a rest. All that’s left now is the lethargy clinging strongly to him. Yu Sheng yawns and makes to get up to switch on the lights when his attention’s drawn by the items on the table.

Two cans of milk and a packet of biscuits.

The two cans are bright red. On them, there is even a large-eyed boy staring intently just waiting to see him drink it.

The light green packet of biscuits has cartoon bears doodled all over.

……

Yu Sheng thinks this person is seriously asking for way too much of a beating.

It’s okay for a problem teen to not violate the rules, but problem teens most definitely do not drink Wangzai milk paired with bear biscuits. Yu Sheng lightly puts the stool back on all fours with his leg, grimly dumping the milk and biscuits in his drawer. Then, he scrolls through a list of missed calls and casually picks one to call back to.

“SHENG! GĒ! AH!!!”

Duan Lei’s loud voice instantly booms out, hurtling out of the phone thunderously:

“ARE YOU AWAKE?! LOOK AT YOUR PHONE NOW! SOMETHING HUGE HAS HAPPENED!”

Yu Sheng did not put the phone against his ear right from the beginning. Rubbing his forehead, he dresses and he gets up:

“What happened? Did the school get blown up?”

“No! Quick! Take a look at your phone! The exam rankings are out! You can check it on the site!”

Duan Lei has already gotten all too used to his bleak outlook. He runs his mouth off, feeding him the gossip:

“I hear God Kun’s not the first! According to the rumours, two people got the same score, so the system decided to label them both as 2nd and leave the 1st spot empty. Nobody knows which dark horse out there is so goddamn badass…”

Totally not getting why this bunch of people are all about these specious rumours, Yu Sheng makes another yawn and pulls open his pantry for some instant noodles,

“And so? Are you switching idols again?”

“Absolutely not.”

Duan Lei outright rejects:

“God Kun is still a god. That dark horse must have gotten lucky. He must have made tonnes of lucky guesses.”

The instant noodles in the pantry have been devoured by that bunch of animals before vacation began. No thanks to them, his search turns out fruitless. Yu Sheng turns around to scour the drawers this time.

Duan Lei is still rattling off non-stop and speculating about that mysterious dark horse. Yu Sheng seizes the chance when he takes a breath and asks about the only point he is slightly interested in:

“Have they said it? What sort of exam is this, to make them pull out all stops for a ranking?”

“Nope. I heard it’s for some provincial interhigh summer camp.”

This matter is so far out of their reach, Duan Lei is hardly interested. He ridicules derisively:

“They’re scooping up just the top 100 in the city. Said they wanted to ensure it’d be a fair selection, so they gave garbage schools like ours a chance to compete.”

He changes topic at the speed of light:

“…But our school still insists on holding some crappy ‘summer camp’ for our top 300 rankers! The truth is, it is just a cram session before we return as third-years – Those unlucky bastards have to return to school half a month earlier! And summer vacation’s just 40 days long too! I’m stuck right in the 301st place! Sheng Gē, you really saved my life!”

Yu Sheng stands still for a while and scrunches his brows:

“How many questions did you answer?”

Duan Lei is still lost in the euphoria of not heading back to school early:

“472!”

Yu Sheng: “……”

A sense of foreboding suddenly rises in him.

He knows very well where Duan Lei stands academically. He has more or less the same likelihood of being correct when he puts in effort and when he guesses blindly. Occasionally, if he’s down on his luck and runs into a tough paper, the latter even stands a better chance of being correct.

But Yu Sheng had guessed a whopping 1000 questions.

If you’re looking at the probability…

……

Yu Sheng never learnt his probabilities right, but he can still tell instinctively: This time, his score will probably be better than Duan Lei’s.

His heart sinks. After retrieving the site link from Duan Lei, he pulls out a laptop from under the pillow and turns it on:

“Say, if I were to jinx myself at this point, do you think it will work?”

“I don’t think so. The marks are out already, so…”

Duan Lei retains quite a bit of faith in this mouth of his nonetheless. After faltering for a bit, he exercises what limited brain cells he has and he reasons unsurely:

“Unless… you said something before the exam – Sheng Gē, you didn’t say anything before the exam, right?”

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Next Time on DTTM!

Chapter 9: <The Summer Camp. What’s it like?>

The author has something to say:

Yu Sheng: ……………………………………

Silvery: Shit just got real.

*knock knock*

YS: Who is it?

X: It’s Crow!

At this moment, chills go up and down Yu Sheng’s spine. But! BUt! BUT! The joke must continue. He sees everything through to the end. He gulps audibly.

YS: W-which Crow?

X: Your Crow Mouth, sucker! You’ve got debts to pay! *creepy crow teeth smile*

YS is K.O.

Brought to you by: Miss Decadence

(*For anyone interested in actual phonics of their names, you can run these through Google Translate to hear how they’re meant to be pronounced:

靳林琨 Jìn Línkūn | 于笙 Yú Shēng)

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Chapter 7 | 😮 Contents 😮 | Chapter 9

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