Page 3

Mother Tang had always doted on her son, who had lost his father at an early age, and could not bear to discipline him too harshly. She was afraid of seeing any sadness or grievance on that face so much like his father's. It would make her feel that she had not done enough, that she had failed to give her son the very best of everything. And so, through day after day of tolerance and concession, Tang Shi's grades gradually slipped until he ultimately failed to get into a good university.

All Mother Tang could do was work even harder to earn money—saving up for her son to buy a home, saving up money for him to find a job, saving up money for him to get married. She even encouraged her son, after he quit his job, to devote himself wholeheartedly to writing novels. Ignoring the mockery from relatives and friends about him "living off his parents," she eventually watched her son finally persist in finishing something he loved doing, even managing to support himself with that hobby.

Yet whenever she saw her son sitting before the computer from morning until night, his back aching, legs sore, feet swollen, and even fingers hurting after he finished typing, Mother Tang could not help but feel distressed. So she spent money on a traditional Chinese medicine massage membership for Tang Shi, or dragged him along to dance in the square with her, or urged him to go out and have fun with classmates and friends.

Back then, Mother Tang always regretted that if she had hardened her heart enough to beat Tang Shi a few times in high school, perhaps she could have corrected his habit of reading extracurricular books, made him study properly, get into a good university, and find a good job, so he would not be struggling as hard as he was now.

Whenever that happened, Tang Shi would always grin cheekily and tell Mother Tang that he simply was not cut out for studying. In math class, he would practically want to fall asleep on the spot. Someone who scored barely over sixty points on the college entrance exam's math section simply did not have the talent. No matter how hard he tried, he would never learn it well.

But Mother Tang never believed him. She stubbornly believed that her indulgence and doting had harmed her son. Then, after reflecting on it, she treated Tang Shi with even more indulgence and affection, calling it "making up for her past mistakes."

So from childhood to adulthood, Tang Shi had never experienced the saying that filial sons came from beneath the rod, nor had he ever shared the complaints of his classmates whose lives were arranged and controlled by their parents. Still, many years later, when the increasingly mature Tang Shi looked back on his nearly wasted youth, he occasionally felt a little regret.

Especially a few years later, under the influence of the flood of rebirth and transmigration novels online, Tang Shi would sometimes fantasize: if he were lucky enough to return to his childhood, could he steel himself to study properly and live a different life?

The answer was unknown. Fortunately, Tang Shi had been given a chance to try again.

Setting down his bowl and chopsticks, Tang Shi looked solemnly at Mother Tang and swore, "Mom, don't worry. From now on, I won't read extracurricular books anymore. I'll definitely study hard and get into a good university in the future."

Perhaps Tang Shi had answered too quickly and obediently, making Mother Tang think he had grown impatient with her and was merely brushing her off. Tang Shi had always been so gentle and well-behaved. He never openly talked back to Mother Tang. After readily agreeing to something, he would always quietly fiddle with his little hobbies behind her back. He was the perfect example of someone who admitted his mistakes but never corrected them.

Thus, Mother Tang was somewhat annoyed, and even more helplessly sighed. Setting down her bowl and chopsticks, she repeated the closing words she had said for years, "Forget it. I can't be bothered to care about you. It's your own road—walk it yourself."

What followed was even more routine. Mother Tang silently cleared the table, then sent Tang Shi back to his room to do his homework. Ten or so minutes later, Tang Shi, sitting at his desk, would see Mother Tang enter with a plate of washed and sliced fruit, silently set it beside his desk, then quietly leave.

Soon after, clattering sounds would come from the kitchen. Mother Tang was preparing the buns, corn grits porridge, and accompanying cold mixed vegetables she would sell the next day. Because Mother Tang's snack stall was so popular, she had to prepare even more ingredients. Usually, she would stay busy until midnight, then get up after four the next morning to steam buns and cook porridge. She would prepare Tang Shi's breakfast, wake him up, and only after personally seeing him get up, wash, and eat would she push the tricycle piled with insulated food containers and bamboo steamers out of the house.

Tang Shi sat at his desk beneath the warm yellow glow of the incandescent bulb. The light was rather dim, and Tang Shi, accustomed to brighter surroundings, found it uncomfortable. The faint sounds coming from the kitchen made him even more restless.

Once again, Tang Shi clearly realized that he truly had returned to more than ten years ago, to his high school days. His father had only recently passed away then. He and Mother Tang had moved out of their newly rented apartment. They had no house, no money, and could only rely on the small pension left after Father Tang's death to support their tiny family.

This was the poorest and most difficult period their family had ever faced. Yet the innocent and simple Tang Shi, sheltered almost completely by Mother Tang, had failed to emerge from those hardships transformed into a dependable, grounded man who could hold up the sky. Instead, he had remained muddleheaded as ever, squandering his precious youth and failing even to fulfill his most basic responsibilities.

Tang Shi rubbed his face in embarrassment. His gaze remained fixed on the open textbook before him. Sets, functions, sine and cosine... He recognized every Chinese character and letter in front of him, so why did they become so difficult when put together?

Having always been bad at math, Tang Shi eventually set down his high school textbook in defeat. He consoled himself—

Maybe it was his first day back in the past, and his thoughts were too chaotic. That was why he could not settle down and do his homework at all. Thus, Tang Shi calmly ignored the other textbooks on his desk and turned to look at the martial arts novel lying quietly to one side. He picked it up and flipped through a few pages, but the familiar words and trite plot—where he could practically guess the ending from the beginning—made it impossible to keep reading. There was no cultivation, much less fantasy. A supposedly profound martial arts strike that could not even split a mountain left Tang Shi, accustomed to later webnovels where every other scene involved destroying planets or moving mountains and filling seas, utterly uninspired. He casually tossed the novel onto the bed and sat there in silence.

His habit of reading extracurricular books had actually begun in second grade. Father Tang had been healthy then, working outside with Mother Tang all day and having no energy to watch over him. They often left Tang Shi at his grandmother's or younger aunt's home. At the time, Tang Shi's younger aunt was obsessed with novels. Boys of seven or eight were at their most mischievous, restless, and troublesome, so in order to make Tang Shi sit quietly for a while, she pulled him into reading novels with her—Jin Yong, Gu Long, Liang Yusheng, Wen Rui'an, even melodramatic romance novels. She stuffed them all into his hands.

The result was disastrous. Tang Shi instantly became engrossed, as though possessed. During his free time, he stopped fighting and fooling around with the other children. He held a novel all day and read without end, continuing through middle school and high school. He secretly read in class, buried his head in books after class, and even sneaked a few glances while doing homework at home. He was most obsessed during his senior year's review period. While his classmates were busy taking notes and memorizing outlines, he still kept a leisure book on his desk every day, covered with a Chinese or history textbook, reading it with complete concentration.

Thus, when Tang Shi took the college entrance exam, he naturally failed to earn high scores and did not get into a good university. Since he had no money and did not want to attend a third-tier university, he eventually enrolled in a vocational college with a score just short of five hundred, majoring in computer science. After graduation, he found a job that did not quite match his field. He worked for two years, then simply went home to write novels. Perhaps because he had read so many extracurricular books, his writing was fairly smooth, and he had a decent grasp of marketable hooks and readers' tastes. Tang Shi's results were quite good. At the very least, his monthly income from typing was several times his salary from work. It also kept him out of the wind and rain, with flexible and leisurely hours—perfect for a lazy person like him who could not get up in the morning.

Put that way, all those extracurricular books he had read back then had eventually been put to use.

But after all these years, did he truly not regret wasting the youth when he should have devoted all his energy to studying?

Unable to calm his thoughts, and unable to focus on his textbooks at all, Tang Shi followed the work habits of his previous life. He casually tore a page from the back of his homework notebook to use as scratch paper, picked up his pen, and wrote—Prosperous Tang Strategy.

This was the novel Tang Shi had serialized online under the pen name Tang Shi Caomu before he died. The male protagonist had originally been a modern graduate student in history. While accompanying his professor overseas for a lecture, he encountered a plane crash and was transmigrated into the early Great Tang, shortly after the realm had been unified. Since he had transmigrated bodily, the first thing that happened to the male protagonist as an unregistered person was that the authorities mistook him for a fugitive, arrested him, and sent him to the border to serve in the army. During his military service, the male protagonist unleashed all his cheat abilities, using knowledge and experience a thousand years ahead of everyone else, along with every sort of protagonist halo, to prove how extraordinary he was. He plagiarized all kinds of military works from later generations, copied poetry and songs from every dynasty, made glass and gunpowder, created perfume and soap, conquered every man and woman in the novel except the villains, and even tried to help his buddy Li Chengqian reverse his tragic fate.

It was a very standard, shamelessly self-indulgent, melodramatic wish-fulfillment novel. But because later readers had such picky tastes, Tang Shi had researched a great deal of historical material while writing it, striving to avoid too many glaring inaccuracies. Yet during the writing process, he would occasionally get carried away. As a result, some plot points inevitably contradicted one another and were difficult to justify logically, drawing plenty of complaints from readers. Now that his soul had returned to the past and he had taken up his pen again, Tang Shi naturally had to start from the beginning. But as he wrote, he discovered that his thoughts flowed much more smoothly.

There was one difficulty, though. Before, he had the internet, and he could simply look up whatever information he needed online. Now he was writing everything from scratch, and he could not even remember the climactic scenes. Fortunately, today's main task was to recall the outline and straighten out the logic. Tang Shi planned to list all the specialized knowledge he would need while drafting the outline, then visit the city library on Sunday to look up materials.

Just as Tang Shi was writing furiously, he suddenly heard approaching footsteps with his sharp ears. His whole body jolted, and he hurriedly grabbed the open math textbook on his desk and covered the scratch paper. Sure enough, Mother Tang entered the room with a cup of chilled watermelon juice just as he finished. Seeing the extracurricular book tossed far away, she nodded in satisfaction. Mother Tang placed the watermelon juice on the desk, casually stroked Tang Shi's head as he lowered it obediently over his problems, then took the extracurricular book beside him out of the room.

Only after he heard the bedroom door close did Tang Shi finally straighten up with a sigh of relief. Looking at the page of scratch paper beneath the math textbook, he could not help shaking his head with a bitter smile.

Back then, he had secretly read novels. Now, he was secretly writing them too. His youth really could not be separated from sneaking around!

That night, Tang Shi's hands itched so badly that he wrote nearly ten thousand characters of the novel outline, almost turning his hand into a chicken claw before he finally sorted out his thoughts. He put down his pen and rubbed his brow, then tiredly rolled his neck and looked at the alarm clock on his desk. It was almost midnight. Yet Tang Shi remained bright-eyed and completely un-sleepy.

He got up and twisted his waist and hips a few times in the cramped inner room, then sat back down and took out the Chinese textbook he was more familiar with to do his homework. After so many years, he had long forgotten the poems and passages he had memorized back then. He flipped through the book while making blind guesses, stumbling through all his homework until it was nearly one in the morning. Mother Tang, who had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, saw the light in his room and came in to urge Tang Shi to sleep. Tang Shi, already accustomed to staying up late online, strongly objected and prepared to continue fighting under the banner of studying hard. But Mother Tang ruthlessly suppressed him. Without giving him a chance to argue, she pushed Tang Shi into the kitchen to wash up, then forced him back to bed.

Tang Shi tossed and turned in bed, thinking he would be unable to sleep. Who would have thought that after only three or five minutes, a wave of drowsiness swept over him? When he opened his eyes again, Mother Tang was shaking him fiercely awake.

"Get up already! You'll be late for school."

Tang Shi blearily glanced at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It was barely past five. He let out a miserable groan, curled up, and shoved his head beneath the pillow, truly unwilling to get up.

After failing to move him with a round of pushing and shoving, Mother Tang impatiently yanked away the towel blanket covering Tang Shi, grabbed his arm, and hauled him out of bed. Then she tossed over the school uniform from his desk and said, "Hurry up and brush your teeth and wash your face. Breakfast is ready. Mom's going to set up the stall first. Finish eating and get to school quickly. Make sure you've packed all the books you need, and don't leave things behind."