A Four-Word Title

"If that's not it, then what is it? Don't tell me you're secretly slipping a love letter into my desk?"

Xia Xu smiled teasingly and reached toward the corner where Tang Youxin had just tucked something away.

"Don't..."

A hint of shyness had only just appeared on Tang Youxin's face when she hurriedly tried to stop him.

But Xia Xu had reached out first, and her embarrassment had distracted her for a moment. Naturally, she was too late to stop him from pulling out what she had hidden in her desk.

It wasn't a love letter or anything else that might invite suggestive thoughts, but a crumpled ten-yuan banknote.

Like a child who had done something wrong, Tang Youxin lowered her head and said timidly, "I... I just wanted to pay you back for lunch..."

Her voice grew weaker as she spoke, but at the end it suddenly regained a little strength. She stammered, "I have money, really. Teacher Liu just gave me my financial aid."

"So? Just because you have money, you get to insult my dignity?"

The smile gradually faded from Xia Xu's face. "Ten yuan? What, are you really planning to buy me lunch? So everyone can know that I, Xia Xu, can't afford a meal and have to force a girl to pay?"

Prices here were still a little lower than on Earth, roughly a few years behind. A bowl of the cheapest shredded pork and wood ear mushroom noodles cost only five yuan.

"I... I didn't..."

At a loss, Tang Youxin apologized over and over. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I didn't think that far. I just didn't want to owe anyone a favor... I..."

She recalled what Teacher Liu had told her earlier: Xia Xu's family circumstances weren't very good either. In some ways, they were even worse than hers.

Putting herself in his shoes, she could readily understand that fierce pride and resistance.

The more someone lacked something, the more they needed it, and the more they wanted to hide that lack to avoid other people's judgmental looks.

It was like calling someone universally acknowledged to be attractive ugly. They would simply shrug it off as a joke. But saying it to someone who really was ugly was a deeply hurtful insult to their face.

The latter would inevitably lash out in humiliation and anger. Even in everyday life, they might try to evade or conceal the issue of their appearance through makeup or by avoiding related topics.

Pity, at its core, was also a kind of judgmental gaze, a form of different treatment that constantly reminded people of certain things, even tearing open bloody wounds again and again to rub salt into them.

Sometimes, needing help didn't mean wanting it. What people wanted might be to be seen, to be respected, to be treated the same.

The more Tang Youxin empathized, the stronger her guilt and self-reproach grew. She lowered her head as though she had committed some terrible crime and was awaiting judgment, repeating "I'm sorry" over and over.

"Then put it away."

Keeping his face stern, Xia Xu pushed the ten-yuan note into Tang Youxin's hand.

"Oh, okay, okay."

It was as though the verdict had been delivered-and an incredibly lenient one at that.

Tang Youxin had no time to feel relieved. Meekly, she hurriedly took out a shabby little black wallet whose surface was already peeling, tucked the ten-yuan note inside, and even made a point of showing Xia Xu.

Though the wallet was worn, it held quite a lot of money: a stack of red banknotes, at least twenty or thirty of them. Anyone who didn't know the circumstances and overlooked the wallet's shabby condition could easily have taken Tang Youxin for a wealthy young girl.

But Xia Xu was clearly someone who knew the circumstances. The money in her wallet was probably the financial aid the school had just given her.

Although Blue Ocean Star was very similar to Earth, there were still some differences. Overall, it also lagged a little behind the Earth he had left in various respects. Scholarship and financial aid payments had yet to be standardized into a system requiring online transfers, and no third-party payment platform had become widely adopted. Cash was still used for many things.

"That's more like it. Put it away properly. If you really feel you owe me for lunch, just let me copy your homework and notes from now on."

Only after seeing that the little innocent had successfully put the money away did Xia Xu's stern expression abruptly relax into a satisfied smile. Clearly, his earlier anger had only been an act.

Admittedly, he couldn't rule out the influence of her good looks, but he really had bought Tang Youxin lunch out of pity and sympathy.

What would accepting her money now amount to? Instead of helping her, wouldn't he have made things worse, forcing a girl who scrimped and saved to take an unexpected financial hit? That would turn it into something downright rotten, so there was no way he could accept the money.

Just as he effortlessly finished bluffing the little innocent, the bell rang for class.

Throughout the afternoon, apart from heading to the school gate during breaks to check on Xue Mingjie, Xia Xu paid close attention in class.

Studying was still very necessary.

After all, he still wanted to experience university. Compared with high school and its pressure to prepare for the college entrance exam, university was where campus life truly became rich, colorful, and leisurely.

Besides, the divisions between vocational colleges, undergraduate universities, and prestigious institutions also sorted people's abilities and talents into different tiers to some extent.

Although it wasn't absolute, being able to adapt to exam-oriented education and achieve better results than others necessarily suggested higher intelligence, stronger learning and adaptability, and greater discipline and self-control.

More intuitive talents such as painting and calligraphy were one thing, but talents grounded in modern science-computer programming, mechanical engineering, chemistry, physics, medicine, and so on-all needed the support of sufficient intelligence and learning ability. Anyone with high-star talents in those fields was bound to be reasonably intelligent.

There might be stories of extraordinary geniuses who were hopelessly lopsided in their subjects or unexpectedly botched their exams and ended up at diploma mills, but those would only be exceedingly rare exceptions.

Getting into a better university basically meant encountering more capable people in greater concentrations, and with his Attribute Viewing ability, he could easily pick them out.

With the connection of being fellow students, he could more easily win them over or even invest in them early and build good relationships. Whatever he did, he could readily assemble a stellar team.

What was more, many top universities had large numbers of famous graduates. Their alumni alone formed a network of connections that couldn't be ignored.

Perhaps they had never met and those connections would be of little use in everyday life, but bringing up that shared background at a critical moment could still earn a little goodwill and warmth. That tiny sliver of goodwill could often prove decisive when it mattered.

Unfortunately, the problem now was that the college entrance exam was only two or three months away. Prestigious universities were out of the question; even getting into an undergraduate program was uncertain.

He had long since forgotten his high school knowledge, and with this being a different world, many facts and details differed as well. The body's original owner had also been a poor student whose mind hadn't been on studying at all.

All he could do now was cram at the last minute, memorize as much as possible, and try to recover some of the knowledge he had forgotten along the way.

Whatever happened, he needed to scrape his way into an undergraduate program. It didn't have to be particularly prestigious; at least it wouldn't be embarrassing to mention.

Riiing~

The bell marking the end of the final class-and the end of the school day-rang out.

To every student, that bell was undoubtedly the most beautiful music in the world. School was over, it was Friday, and two days off awaited them. It was practically release from prison, brimming with the promise of freedom.

Once the bell finished ringing, the students raced out, each faster than the last, as though afraid that leaving too late would earn them more homework from a subject teacher or detention from their homeroom teacher.

Of course, they might also have already arranged to visit an internet café or arcade. After looking forward to it all day, they could hardly wait.

"Come on, come on, let's hit the internet café! Today, this sharpshooting god is going to prove himself!"

"We sit together at the internet café and never win. Quit acting big, you deadweight."

"Xia Xu, coming to the internet café?"

That very scene was playing out in Xia Xu's class. His normally sluggish, laid-back deskmate, Ma Bing, displayed extraordinary briskness and enthusiasm at that moment, packing his schoolbag in a flash before calling his friends together.