Chapter 102

Outside, thunder roared, and rain poured down.

Jiang Zhihuo turned over in bed, his brow tightly furrowed.

“Want your son back? One million—one cent less and no deal.”

The man lounged on the sofa in their home, one leg crossed, his filthy fingers idly touching the tea set.

“Call the police? Fine. Then I’ll post these photos—your son’s nude pictures. Plenty of people would want them, right? On those kinds of websites?”

“I’m not afraid of getting caught. What do I have to lose? What do you have? I remember a saying, don’t fight a desperate, poor bastard who’s got nothing left. Isn’t that how it goes?”

His voice sounded like sand ground into sand, every word rasping and making your skin crawl.

Jiang Zhihuo hid behind the door, but it was as if the man could see him anyway. He turned his head, their eyes met, and a savage, greedy smile spread across his face.

He slammed the door shut, and the scene abruptly shifted.

In a cramped, crowded room, liquor bottles and trash littered the floor. Heat seemed to steam up from the ground itself, stifling and damp.

A man reeking of alcohol threw a bottle at him.

Jiang Zhihuo twisted aside and dodged.

The bottle struck the wall with a sharp crack, shattering glass across the floor.

Outside, thunder rumbled. A flash of lightning lit up half the sky, and through the wobbling, half-collapsing window, it threw into relief the grotesque scar on the left side of the man’s face.

—Like a vicious ghost.

Jiang Zhihuo jolted awake, his back drenched with sweat.

The bedside lamp came on. Yan Mu had the remote in hand and was about to turn on the air conditioner.

Jiang Zhihuo froze for a moment, as if trying to confirm something. He stared at Yan Mu for a while before finally letting out a slow breath. “Yan-ge?”

“It’s a bit hot tonight.” The air conditioner beeped, and the room gradually cooled. Yan Mu sat back down on the bed and gently rubbed Jiang Zhihuo’s back. “Looks like you had a pretty bad dream, Xiao Zhou.”

“Mhm.” Jiang Zhihuo picked up the cup on the nightstand, took a sip of water, and rubbed his temples.

No wonder it felt so warm—April was almost here.

He lay down quietly beside Yan Mu, wrapped his arms around him, then shifted a little lower and pressed his cheek to Yan Mu’s chest.

The sound of Yan Mu’s heartbeat made Jiang Zhihuo feel steady and grounded.

Yan Mu turned off the light, and the room sank back into darkness.

In the pitch-blackness, Jiang Zhihuo tilted his head up and inched closer, little by little, toward Yan Mu’s lips.

They kissed. Whenever they woke in the middle of the night, their hearts always raced, and they traded a kiss wrapped in the sound of pounding heartbeats.

Jiang Zhihuo pulled back a little. Once their eyes adjusted, they could make out each other’s gaze in the dark.

“Want to?” Jiang Zhihuo asked softly.

“Lately, whenever you’re in a bad mood, you always want to.” Yan Mu didn’t answer directly.

Jiang Zhihuo asked again, “So… no?”

“You should tell me what’s going on,” Yan Mu said. “It’s a bad habit.”

Jiang Zhihuo moved even closer, their lips nearly touching, his breath warming the seam of Yan Mu’s mouth. “If I tell you… Then we do it?”

Yan Mu let out a soft sigh and held himself back. “You have class.”

Jiang Zhihuo thought for a moment. “My stamina’s pretty good.”

As he spoke, he leaned in and kissed him again.

Afterward, the two of them went to shower again together.

They “worked out” for over an hour. He was so exhausted that Jiang Zhihuo actually fell into a deep sleep while applying ointment.

Yan Mu turned the air conditioner up a little warmer, then bent down and kissed the side of his face.

Feeling the touch, Jiang Zhihuo turned his head slightly, as if half-asleep.

“Yan-ge,” he called again.

“Mhm. I’m here,” Yan Mu said.

“That person… seems like he’s about to come out.”

“Who?”

“Mhm…” Jiang Zhihuo didn’t say anything else and fell asleep.

More than a week had passed, and No. 1 High School still hadn’t fully recovered from the shock of Jiang Zhihuo scoring 743 on the citywide examination. Luckily, Long Hui had reported it directly at the time, and the authorities investigated, so Jiang Zhihuo didn’t have to explain himself over and over, saving him a lot of trouble.

On the forum, someone dug up the video from back then of Jiang Zhihuo and Yan Mu appearing together on Pick U.

[Ah, I thought they looked familiar back then. I didn’t expect it to really be God Yan and Huo-ge. Huo-ge‘s reflexes are way too fast—this is unreal.]

[Too strong. I tried the 2019 national competition paper too, and I couldn’t solve a single question.]

[I heard Huo-ge got his meridians unblocked after getting hit by a car, hahaha!]

[Seriously? What brand of car was it—can I try it too? starry_eyes.jpg]

Shocked as they were, they had no choice but to accept reality.

But some people still refused to believe it and kept testing him with problems, like the second-to-last rank.

In any other school, being second-to-last could still count as “pretty good”—he’d at least be around 30th or 40th in the grade. But at No. 1 High School, where there were freakish top students everywhere, his scores put him firmly at the very bottom. Fortunately, Jiang Zhihuo used to score 100–200 points below him every time, which gave him tremendous motivation to study.

However, after the senior year started, Jiang Zhihuo’s grades kept climbing. The gap shrank from 200 points to 100, and then to just 30 points on the last final assessment.

The second-to-last-ranked student felt a crushing sense of crisis and studied like crazy. Brother Huo was improving way too fast! He didn’t have lofty dreams—he just wanted to hold on to his spot as second-to-last!

But when the new citywide assessment results came out, he was dumbfounded.

743??

More than a hundred points higher than him??

“Huo-ge, can you explain this one to me again?”

These past few days, whenever he had free time, the second-to-last-ranked student would rush to Class 1 to ask Jiang Zhihuo questions.

And every single time, Jiang Zhihuo’s clear thinking and ultra-efficient solutions would completely overturn his understanding of reality.

Is this really the school bully Jiang who always ranked behind me on every exam?

After finishing one problem, Jiang Zhihuo turned back and flipped through the stack of test papers he’d bound together.

“Your fundamentals are solid, but you’re using them in the wrong direction,” Jiang Zhihuo said. “Out of ten papers, you’ll mess up the easy questions on one of them, so you’re losing points you should be locking down. Meanwhile, you keep obsessing over the very last, hardest problems. That’s not ideal. It’s better to raise your accuracy on the easy questions first, then go study the toughest ones.”

The second-to-last-ranked student blinked. He still wasn’t used to this, and he felt a little dazed.

Behind him, Chang Luo patted his shoulder and said calmly, “You’ll get used to it. If you have questions later, you can come find Huo-ge again.”

The second-to-last-ranked student stumbled out of Class 1 in a fog.

On Saturday, there was another test. Before heading to the exam room, Jiang Zhihuo got surrounded by a crowd.

“Huo-ge, let me shake your hand!”

“Exam God, do you have an extra black pen? Or can you cut me off a piece of your eraser?”

“Ahhh, hurry, we’re going to the exam room! Huo-ge, bless me, give me a hit of your luck!!”

Jiang Zhihuo didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “There are too many of you; I can’t ‘bless’ everyone. Why not share the workload with Yan-ge?”

Recently, Yan Mu had been taking early-admission exams at various top universities. Because he was worried Jiang Zhihuo might have another sudden estrus episode like last time, he basically made the trip there and back the same day.

The exams for the schools he wanted were already over. While waiting for the results, Yan Mu chose to return to school, and he was taking this weekly test as well.

“I… don’t really dare,” the boy said. “The God of Learning Yan is so cold and untouchable. Just seeing him from afar is enough for me.”

Cold and untouchable?

Thinking of how Yan Mu usually acted around him, Jiang Zhihuo couldn’t help smiling.

How was that anything like “cold”?

“Hey, Huo-ge—what’s with that expression? Are you about to show off your relationship?”

Jiang Zhihuo: “?”

The boy asked again, “By the way, you two never really went head-to-head before. Between you and God Yan, who scores higher?”

“No idea.”

“You’re both close to full marks. Why don’t you two compete?”

“Yeah, I’m curious too, which one of you is stronger?”

“No,” Jiang Zhihuo refused decisively. “Don’t even think about trying to drive a wedge between Yan-ge and me!”

That night, Jiang Zhihuo opened Pick U on his desktop. This episode featured the third-stage performance.

After having just rejected the boy’s suggestion in the classroom, Jiang Zhihuo flipped through some printed materials while chatting casually with Yan Mu. “How’d you do this time? Want to compete? Whoever scores lower has to agree to one thing the higher scorer asks.”

Yan Mu shook his head. “No.”

Jiang Zhihuo: “Why?”

Yan Mu: “Even if we don’t compete, I’d still agree to whatever you ask, Xiao Zhou.”

“Really?” Jiang Zhihuo leaned in close and whispered in his ear, “Next time, you lie underneath?”

Yan Mu lowered his gaze. Jiang Zhihuo was looking at an activity-tracking report from the past week. Yan Mu didn’t ask any questions; he simply replied evenly, “If you can make me lie down, that is.”

Jiang Zhihuo rolled up the papers and tapped Yan Mu lightly on the back of the head.

Make him lie down? No chance. This topic couldn’t even be expanded on, because the moment he caught a whiff of Yan-ge‘s pheromones, he’d be the one lying down first.

Yun Xiaoxu’s third-stage performance was outstanding. He won the center position in his group purely on skill, worked perfectly with the guest performer, and with a great song choice, the whole venue went wild. His mid-stage solo was downright god-tier.

Meanwhile, a certain “privileged contestant” made major mistakes on stage and crashed hard; their group ended up dead last in support votes.

The marketing accounts that had spread rumors online about Yun Xiaoxu stealing were thoroughly exposed by netizens. Those accounts were run by the management company that the privileged contestant was signed to. During the show’s broadcast, they didn’t only go after Yun Xiaoxu, they also stirred up drama around other contestants, just without drawing as much attention as the Yun Xiaoxu incident.

It was clearly a malicious attack. For a time, the privileged contestant and their company became the laughingstock of the entire internet.

After reading through the activity trail, Jiang Zhihuo thought for a moment, set the papers aside, and started working on his test sheets.

At the end of the episode, there was a short preview: next Saturday, there would be an offline fan meet-and-greet. The top fifteen contestants could attend, and Yun Xiaoxu was ranked twelfth.

“An offline fan meet on Saturday!”

“It’s in Lincheng, I wonder if there’s any chance we can go!”

“I really want to go! It’s my first time following a survival show, and I actually get to run into an offline fan meet!!”

On Monday, the moment the girls met up, all they talked about was this Saturday’s fan meet.

“I heard it’s at Five Star Plaza! It’s pretty close to our school!” a girl said.

“But you can’t go.” A boy who’d been listening nearby added dryly, “You have an exam on Saturday!”

The girls: “…”

Over the next few days, the girls’ number-one topic was the Pick U offline fan meet. In the blink of an eye, Saturday came again, No. 1 High School’s routine weekly test day.

At lunch break, Jiang Zhihuo and Yan Mu didn’t go home. Traveling back and forth was a hassle, so they stayed in the classroom to rest.

There were other people in the classroom, too. Since the girls couldn’t go in person, they could only watch the livestream.

Today’s fan-meet livestream started at 1 p.m. and ran until the event ended.

“Yun Xiaoxu!”

“Yun Xiaoxu is so cute!”

Holding the livestream device, Yun Xiaoxu walked past the flower wall his fans had prepared, bursting with energy. “Thank you so much, everyone! Isn’t the flower wall gorgeous?! Now I’m heading out to meet you all!!”

While the girls watched the livestream, Jiang Zhihuo pulled out a newly received weekly activity-tracking report and frowned slightly.

“What’s wrong?” Yan Mu asked.

“Something’s not right,” Jiang Zhihuo murmured. He circled several places on the report—a car rental shop, a hardware store, the outskirts of the city… He shouldn’t be going to places like this.”

Before Yan Mu could ask what he meant, the girls watching the livestream suddenly screamed, and a phone went flying off a desk.

Students who were napping were jolted awake by the shriek.

“Even if Yun Xiaoxu is cute, you don’t have to scream like that,” the boy who’d been woken up grumbled.

“Sorry!!” The girl covered her mouth and scrambled to pick up her phone.

Yun Xiaoxu.

A bad feeling hit Jiang Zhihuo. He asked, “What happened to Yun Xiaoxu?”

The girl handed him her phone. In just a few seconds, the livestream had paused, but it could still replay what had just happened—

Fans lined both sides of the road, separated by barriers. On camera, Yun Xiaoxu waved to them.

But then the screen started shaking violently.

—A van charged into the crowd, smashing through the barriers. Excited screams turned into terrified shrieks as fans scattered in every direction. The scene was pure chaos.

Security personnel were pushed apart by the surge of people. With panicked fans everywhere, they couldn’t get into the scene immediately.

In the confusion, a man jumped out of the van and swung a stick, knocking down a nearby guard. Before the other guards could reach them, he clamped a cloth over Yun Xiaoxu’s mouth and nose. Yun Xiaoxu struggled only a few times before going limp, and the man dragged him into the vehicle by force.

The livestream device hadn’t been fully shut off. The man looked back toward the camera.

His face was partially covered, but you could still see a vicious scar running down from his temple.