Chapter 32: It Means a Lot to You, Doesn't It?

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“Hey, what did you do during National Day?” Jiang Nian prompted.

It had already been two days since they had moved up to the next grade, though those two days had been followed almost immediately by a three-day National Day holiday. Yet you still had not made any friends in your new class. You were, frankly, far too socially anxious.

What was the matter? Were there relatives from your family group chat in the class? Or was your homeroom teacher your cousin?

Zhang Ningzhi was a textbook case of social anxiety. Whenever she walked alone, she had to be playing with her phone, repeatedly opening different apps and pretending to be terribly busy.

That way, she could avoid making eye contact with anyone. If she could send a message instead of making a voice call, she absolutely would.

If she wanted to order something but the waiter failed to notice her, she could stand there for ten minutes building up her courage. Finally, she would summon enough bravery to murmur, “Hello… excuse me…”

And when she went to the bathroom, if there was even one person in the stalls, she simply could not pee.

“I went to Dali with my parents. We saw Erhai Lake.” At last, Zhang Ningzhi had found someone familiar to talk to, and the young lady looked exceptionally excited.

“What about you?”

Jiang Nian was not an introvert, nor was he socially anxious, but he still hesitated for a second at such a straightforward question.

You went to Dali. I stayed home for three days. What can I say?

Should he tell her, I stayed home for three days and successfully conquered lust. There wasn’t even a Taoist temple involved. Isn’t that amazing? Congratulations—you’ve unlocked the achievement: Purity of Mind Surpassing Ninety-Nine Percent of All High-School Boys!

After thinking it over, he tossed out a single sentence.

“I studied.”

The atmosphere instantly froze. Zhang Ningzhi awkwardly changed the subject.

“Which middle school did you attend? Number One or Number Two?”

“Number Two.” Jiang Nian thought, With my grades, do I look like someone who came from Number One?

“Yay, me too! Who was your homeroom teacher?”

Zhang Ningzhi was delighted that the conversation could continue and failed to notice the strange look on Jiang Nian’s face.

“Hey, you’ve almost extracted the entire answer set for my QQ verification questions.”

Oh, so you’re trying to steal my account, are you?

“Ah! I’m sorry… That’s not what I meant.” Zhang Ningzhi’s face reddened as she apologized in a small voice. “My QQ verification question isn’t like that, so it didn’t occur to me.”

Jiang Nian lay on his desk, propping up his head with one hand as he watched her, the corners of his mouth curling upward.

Baby Zhizhi really can’t take a joke. She’s already blushing? If I said something suggestive right now, she probably wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.

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“Jiang Nian, stop bullying her.” A girl with a babyish face came over and stood beside Zhang Ningzhi. “Even I can’t bear to watch anymore.”

Every class had girls like that—shy beyond belief when speaking in front of everyone, yet online they posted as if possessed by a pervert. Heh-heh, heaven gives me the finger, so I sit down on it.

And they still giggled sweetly, while saying things in private that made people’s hearts turn filthy.

Yao Beibei was one of those girls. Thanks to her unique bubble-gum-blowing abilities, Jiang Nian had risked public condemnation and pulled out his phone to add her on QQ in the classroom.

When chatting with a girl like that, the first one or two sentences would generally be normal. By the third, you had to disregard all danger and keep listening.

“Jiang Nian is like that. Give him three sentences and you’ll have no idea which way is north,” said his deskmate, Li Huazhong.

Li Huazhong was the very definition of ordinary: good grades, but otherwise utterly unremarkable. In short, he had come with the default factory settings.

In the class register, he listed watching movies and listening to music as his hobbies—Jay Chou was the undisputed king. Puppy love existed only in his imagination. His ideal girl was a quiet, fair-skinned girl from middle school.

His only distinctive trait was that he was particularly neurotic. He was the sort of person who, after watching a horror film, would lie awake worrying that someone was hiding beneath his bed. So he would simply sleep underneath it to eliminate the possibility altogether.

“Exactly. Jiang Nian is a damn menace.” The fat boy in the row behind them, Ma Guojun, turned around. He looked like Baymax in the flesh, wore black-rimmed glasses, and had an oily nose bridge that forced him to adjust his glasses every day.

“Damn him. A few days ago, he asked me that if my hands and feet got into a fight, which side I’d support. I said I’d obviously support my hands. Feet aren’t that important.”

“Then this bastard said, ‘If your hands win, that must be pretty important to you, huh?’”

“Damn it!” Ma Guojun adjusted his glasses and cursed. “That was when I realized this son of a bitch’s heart had to be completely black.”

Zhang Ningzhi looked confused and curious.

“What’s wrong with the hands winning? He’s right.”

The moment she finished speaking, Jiang Nian, Yao Beibei, Li Huazhong, and Ma Guojun all froze. In perfect unison, they turned to stare at Zhang Ningzhi, their faces awkward and strange.

“Huh? Why are you all looking at me?”

“Hahahaha!”

Li Huazhong, Ma Guojun, and Jiang Nian laughed until they could barely breathe.

Yao Beibei leaned close to Zhang Ningzhi’s ear and whispered a few words. Zhang Ningzhi’s pupils instantly contracted. In less than three seconds, her face had turned bright red, and the flush spread down her neck.

“Hmph!” She glared at Jiang Nian, then abruptly turned around, buried her face in her arms on the desk, and refused to get up.

“Hahaha, holy crap, Jiang Nian, you’re a real bastard!” Ma Guojun was laughing so hard he could barely catch his breath. “Oh, damn, I’m dying!”

Li Huazhong was laughing just as hard. “I told you. Jiang Nian’s full of wicked ideas.”

“Exactly. Zhizhi, don’t hang around with someone like him.” Yao Beibei put her hands on her hips and displayed the confidence of a yellow-skinned woman. “Stay away from Jiang Nian. Play with me instead.”

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Jiang Nian listened to them trade remarks back and forth before turning to Yao Beibei.

“Play with you? The moment you open your mouth, I know our class is guaranteed to win the mobile Yellow Flag for the month. Other people’s depression is NetEase Cloud Music. Your depression is E-very day wanting to make me moan?”

“I honestly don’t know how you manage to say things like that out loud.”

Afterward, Jiang Nian turned to Li Huazhong.

“When the Chinese teacher asked you for the answers to the multiple-choice questions, I told you C-C-B-C-C. And you actually shouted in class, ‘Mulan weaving by the window!’”

“And you, Ma Guojun.” He pointed at them one by one. “During break, I snuck you out of school to buy steamed buns. At the gate, a few girls from the vocational school happened to walk past.”

“And you said, ‘The girls from the brothel are gorgeous.’ Good thing I ran fast, or we’d have been beaten half to death.”

“Tsk, tsk. The pot calling the kettle black, huh?” Jiang Nian crossed his arms and sneered. “Every one of you is a refined elite of society, a glorious pillar of the nation’s future.”

“Holy crap, listen to this guy!” Ma Guojun adjusted his glasses and launched into a torrent of sweet-talking insults, while Li Huazhong joined in and helped turn it into a full-blown attack. The two of them traded barbs back and forth.

Yao Beibei fanned the flames from the side, even dragging Zhang Ningzhi into the fight against Jiang Nian.

“Zhizhi, don’t you think he’s secretly rotten to the core?”

Zhang Ningzhi’s face was flushed. After hesitating for a moment, she still nodded.

“Mm.”

Jiang Nian remained completely unruffled even while fighting four against one, firing back at each of them in turn. Caught in the middle, Zhang Ningzhi looked small, pitiful, and helpless, as though she were saying, “Stop fighting, stop fighting! Please, enough already!”

The bell rang for self-study, but the group continued trading insults.

The very foundations of civilization had been erased.

Just then, while Jiang Nian was taking a sip of water, a thin figure slipped in through the classroom’s front door. Black-rimmed glasses, thinning hair—it was their homeroom teacher, Liu Liangsong.

Liu Liangsong stood on the platform with a dark expression and shouted angrily.

“What’s there to talk about? Did you all do wonderfully on the placement exam? Your class is the only one in the entire building making noise. I could hear you from the corridor. Whoever was just talking—”

“Stand up!”