After Cheng Che got home, he told his parents every detail about his match with Qin Lie and his wish to compete in the National Youth Games.
If he didn't tell anyone about something this badass, wouldn't all that showing off have been for nothing?
After hearing him out, Cheng Jianguo swallowed his tea and slapped his thigh.
"Excellent! My son's an all-rounder! A scholar and a warrior, just like me!"
Jiang Xue rolled her eyes at him, then turned to Cheng Che, a little worry on her face.
"Won't that tennis tournament take up a lot of time? The college entrance exam is almost here..."
"Mom, the tournament's after the exam," Cheng Che said with a smile. "For this next month, I won't touch a racket. I'll put everything into exam prep."
"That's more like it." Jiang Xue breathed a sigh of relief.
Cheng Che genuinely meant it, too.
His training packs were emptied out, his attributes were locked, and further training wouldn't earn him any rewards.
Rather than sweat it out on the court, he might as well pour every minute into practice papers.
For the next month, Cheng Che's life became as simple as it could possibly be.
School and home, a straight line between two points.
Up at six in the morning, asleep at ten thirty at night.
In between, he was either in class or grinding through problems. Even while eating, he went over question types in his head.
Guo Xin said he had been reciting his textbooks even while walking lately, like a human reading pen.
Meanwhile, the love letters in his cabinet at home kept piling up.
Some were tucked into his exercise books, some slipped into his desk drawer, and others passed along through Guo Xin.
Cheng Che couldn't be bothered to open them or throw them away, so he collected them all in a paper bag.
Jiang Xue found it while cleaning. She took it out and counted nearly twenty letters.
"My son's about to open a post office," Jiang Xue remarked.
Seated at his desk, Cheng Che didn't even turn around. "Just throw them away for me."
"What a waste that would be." Jiang Xue put the paper bag back. "Keep them. Once you're married, you can take them out and look back on them."
Cheng Che's pen never stopped. "Who looks at these after getting married?"
And so the days ground on, one after another.
On the night before the college entrance exam, Cheng Che took a rare break from practice questions.
He showered, lay on his bed, and kept checking his phone.
It was almost ten.
That pig-head avatar still hadn't lit up.
Cheng Che stared at the WeChat screen for a few seconds, then tossed his phone onto the bedside table.
"Time to sleep." He rolled over and closed his eyes.
Tomorrow was the final hurdle.
The three days of the college entrance exam were neither particularly long nor particularly short.
Cheng Che was in remarkably good form.
In the first subject, Chinese, he still had fifteen minutes left after writing the final word of his essay.
For the second subject, math, he finished the multiple-choice and fill-in-the-blank questions in under forty minutes, then worked through every long-answer question without getting stuck once.
The combined sciences and English went just as smoothly.
Once he activated Total Concentration, carelessness was strangled in its cradle.
He could replay the problems he had finished in his head like a movie, every step perfectly clear.
The instant he set down his pen after the final subject, a breeze happened to blow through the window.
Cheng Che sat in his seat and briefly closed his eyes.
It was over.
Some students in the exam room were already cheering, unable to hold back. Some tossed their pencil cases into the air, while others hugged their deskmates, laughing and shouting.
The invigilator smiled too and didn't stop them, only reminding them, "Don't fall and hurt yourselves."
Carrying his schoolbag, Cheng Che slowly left the exam room.
Outside the classroom building, the sunlight was fierce.
As he walked out of the school gates, he spotted that old BYD from a distance.
Cheng Jianguo stood beside the car with a bottle of water in his hand, while Jiang Xue held a sun umbrella and waved him over.
"How did it go?" Jiang Xue asked.
Before Cheng Che could answer, a woman holding a microphone rushed over from beside them.
"Student! Hello there! We're from Spring City Television Station. Could we ask you a couple of questions?"
The female reporter was in her thirties, dressed in a sharp business outfit, with a burly man carrying a camera following behind her.
She had been interviewing another student, but the moment she caught sight of Cheng Che out of the corner of her eye, her eyes lit right up.
This boy stood out far too much.
At one hundred eighty centimeters tall, in a white T-shirt and black shorts, he looked as fresh and clean as a superstar idol who had just stepped off a plane.
He had casually swept his sweat-dampened bangs back, revealing his smooth forehead. As he stood in the crowd, all the surrounding clamor seemed to have been muted.
It was as though the whole world's attention rested on him.
Almost instinctively, the reporter raised her microphone.
"You've just finished the exam. How do you feel? Was it difficult?"
Cheng Che paused, then quickly caught on and smiled. "It was all right. I performed about as usual."
He knew [Stars Surrounding the Moon] was working its magic again. Countless eyes were now turned toward him.
His voice was clear and bright, as though it held a breeze.
The reporter's eyes shone even brighter, and she held the microphone a little closer. "Then... do you have a target university?"
"Tsinghua or Peking University." Cheng Che thought for a moment. "Shouldn't be much of a problem."
The reporter: "..."
Her hand trembled slightly around the microphone.
"Are-are you serious?" she pressed, her voice rising a little.
"Serious." Cheng Che nodded.
Quite a few students and parents had already gathered around. Hearing this, someone chuckled quietly. "Tsinghua or Peking? These days, anyone really dares to say anything."
"Exactly. You'd think his family owned the universities."
"He's handsome enough, but why does he have to brag so much?"
Cheng Che had good hearing and caught every word.
He paused, then gave a helpless smile.
He really wasn't showing off.
He simply thought getting into Tsinghua or Peking wouldn't be much of a problem.
The reporter, however, thought otherwise.
Her eyes were frighteningly bright, and that "journalist" nerve in her mind was twitching wildly.
A handsome top student leaving the exam venue, declaring he would get into Tsinghua or Peking. Put those keywords together, and wasn't tomorrow's traffic practically guaranteed?
"Then would you mind telling us your name?" she pressed.
"Cheng Che," Cheng Che said.
"All right! Cheng Che! May your name make the golden list!" The reporter stepped aside, thoroughly satisfied.
Cheng Che nodded to her and walked toward his parents.
After just two steps, he instinctively glanced across the road.
Across the street, a black sedan was parked beneath a plane tree.
Its window wasn't fully closed.
A woman sat in the driver's seat, wearing oversized aviator sunglasses that left her delicate chin and lips exposed.
Looking at Cheng Che, she curved her lips into a smile, raised her hand, and gave him a gentle wave.
The wind blew over from across the street.
Standing where he was, Cheng Che suddenly smiled.
It was his happiest smile in the past month.
He raised his hand too and waved in her direction.
Across a road, a boy and a woman exchanged a secret signal that belonged only to them in the June breeze.
"Who are you waving to?" Jiang Xue walked over and followed his gaze.
The black sedan had already rolled up its window and was slowly merging into traffic.
"No one." Cheng Che looked away. "A friend."
"Oh," Jiang Xue said without giving it much thought. "Now that the exam's over, what do you want to eat? Your dad said he'd take you out for hot pot."
"Anything's fine." Cheng Che opened the car door and climbed into the back seat.
He picked up the phone he had left on the back seat. The moment he switched it on, messages flooded in.
From Guo Xin, Lin Xiao, the class group chat, and Qin Lie.
He opened Qin Lie's message.
[Qin Lie: Congrats on finishing your exams. Come see me on June 27. The qualifiers start on the 30th. Don't go too wild having fun. Stay in shape.]
Looking at the message, Cheng Che slowly smiled.
"Mom." He looked up.
"Hmm?"
"I might need to go out of town at the end of the month."
Jiang Xue turned around from the passenger seat. "Where to?"
"To play tennis." After saying that, Cheng Che looked out at the azure sky.
Jiang Xue and Cheng Jianguo exchanged a glance.
"All right," Jiang Xue said. "Whatever you want to do, go do it. You have my support."
"Your dad's support too." Cheng Jianguo looked at him in the rearview mirror. "But if you want money, I've got none. If you want manpower, you've got me."
Cheng Che laughed, rocking back and forth.
Outside the window, the June sky over Spring City was impossibly blue.