Chapter 493: Qiao Mu Private High School

It's been a year since Bai Liu had a nightcap of beef noodles for eight dollars.

There were three of them, but they only ordered one bowl of noodles, which was rightfully placed in front of Bai Liu, who paused, without taking his chopsticks: "Don't you want to eat?"

"We usually eat very well, the dormitory building above us provides food at night." Fang Dian sighed regretfully, "Eh, it's just that today is Sunday, the kitchen in our dormitory is closed, otherwise we could steal food and feed you."

"Keep your voice down." Lu Yizhan was helpless and laughed, "If someone hears us again, Bai Liu won't get a midnight snack."

"OK OK." Fang Dian gestured OK with little concern as she excitedly shoved her chopsticks into Bai Liu's hands, "Eat up! If you don't eat, the noodles will get lumpy!"

Fang Dian and Lu Yizhan look eagerly at Bai Liu, and they are really happy for him.

After Bai Liu's absence, Fang Dian and Lu Yizhan never went back to the canteen despite receiving a daily allowance of $50 for a midnight snack.

It was also a year since they had set foot in the cafeteria again, but they hadn't eaten anything.

He asked Fang Dian and Lu Yizhan why they didn't go, as they had been given a grant.

Fang Dian just laughed and rubbed Bai Liu's head, saying, "It's not nice to eat with one less person, so we won't go.

Bai Liu was quiet for a long time before he finally picked up his chopsticks and slowly ate the bowl of beef noodles.

What does it mean to have one less person?

At the time, Bai Liu did not ask, but now, he seems to understand what Fang Dian meant.

After eating, Lu Yizhan rambled on and on about many things with Bai Liu, to the point where Fang Dian began to urge him on: "Mr. Lu, it's almost ten o'clock, we have to go up."

"Got it." Lu Yizhan looked at Bai Liu with extremely complicated eyes, he eventually just smiled in relief and patted Bai Liu's shoulder, "Don't be stressed, 351 is good enough."

"I can see that you're trying, you're really a good kid."

"Okay, you're the only one who talks too much, I still have something to say to Bai Liu, go away!" Fang Dian pushed Lu Yizhan away as she pulled Bai Liu aside, her eyes smiling as if she had seen through everything, and asked, "Found what you want in life?"

Bai Liu was quiet: "A bit of an idea."

"So soon? That doesn't make sense, I thought with your screwed up nature, you wouldn't have figured it out until at least after your senior year." Fang Dian stroked her chin and she sardonically asked rhetorically, "Did you ...... meet someone you wanted to spend time with?"

Bai Liu paused, he did not answer.

"Forget it if you don't want to talk to me." Fang Dian waved her hand, she generously ignored it, and then pulled the book bag from behind her, took out the teaching aid and notebooks from inside one by one, methodically explained, "Last time Mr. Lu gave you those notes made a bit rushed, your foundation is weak, afraid you can't understand, after going back, I, the first in the grade, personally helped you the whole senior year's I'm the first in my grade to help you sort through the entire senior year's knowledge and exam questions!"

"Read it to guarantee you'll get 400 points on the test!"

The heavy notebooks and teaching aids were dropped into Fang Dian Bai Liu's hands and she smiled, with a clearly visible green and black under her eyes: "No, this is the weight of knowledge, read it well!"

Bai Liu took the notebook and was quiet for a long time: "Did you stay up late to do this?"

"It didn't last long." Fang Dian smiled, "Idle anyway."

How can you be idle?

Bai Liu was aware that she and Lu Yizhan had to prepare for various competitions in addition to the entrance exams, so to speak, and that they would not be able to find time to help him sort out the knowledge.

But Fang Dian made it anyway.

Bai Liu paused for a moment, he hmmed and took the well-worn teaching aids and notebooks, "Count me as owing you a favour."

"That doesn't count." Fang Dian arched her eyebrows and flicked Bai Liu's forehead, "A favour is something you owe when you ask for it, you didn't ask for it, I did it willingly for you, it's not a favour."

With his head bowed, Bai Liu looked at the heavy, battered Fang Dian schoolbag he couldn't hold in his two hands and asked calmly, "I don't really understand."

Fang Dian asks, "Don't understand what?"

"You and Lu Yizhan this work spent on any of the people on the mountain, you make friends with any of the people on the mountain." Bai Liu looked up, "Both can get far more than me in return, they will give you many things, money, status, social intercourse, a smooth future."

"Why are you spending this totally unworthy effort on me?"

"That's easy." Fang Dian replied bluntly, "It's not like we want to be friends with them."

"It's not like we like them, but we like you a lot and just want to be friends with you."

"But you are very good and very valuable." Bai Liu looked straight at Fang Dian with dark eyes, "It's a bad deal for you to work so hard to be first and second in your age, to be the most valuable student in this school, only to waste that value on me."

Fang Dian's amber eyes curved up and she suddenly smiled gently, "Remember what I told you before Bai Liu ?"

"I say one studies hard in order to choose the life one likes."

"We strive to be first and second in age, not to go for more value, but to choose the life I like for myself."

The moonlight fell on Fang Dian's face and she smiled softly and brightly: "Choosing to be friends with you is the life we like, and neither Mr. Lu nor I feel we are wasting my own values."

"It's almost ten o'clock, bye!" Fang Dian said, turning her head and pulling Lu Yizhan up the hill in a rush, her voice still laughing, "I'll see you next time, Bai Liu!"

Bai Liu watched Fang Dian's ponytail bounce as he ran, and a humanoid mass of black threads appeared on his side, which was attached to Bai Liu's body the moment it appeared.

"Why did you just suddenly disappear?" Bai Liu inquired in a flat tone.

Spades lay on Bai Liu's back, his chin resting on Bai Liu's head, his voice depressed, "I can only be there when you're alone."

"Show up when you're alone?" Bai Liu asked rhetorically, "But before I was in the dorm and in the classroom, you could exist too."

"It's not about how many people there are specifically." Spades says, "It's when you feel like you're in a state [of being alone] that I can exist, but when you don't feel like you're alone, I don't exist."

"When you're in the classroom and the dorm, you feel like you're alone so I can show up, but just now when they're eating beef noodles with you, you don't feel like you're alone and I can't exist anymore."

Bai Liu paused: "You and Lu Yizhan, they can't co-exist?"

"You could say that." Spades embraced Bai Liu and buried his head in the crook of Bai Liu's shoulder, his voice muffled, "I'm the monster that exists to keep you from being alone."

"When there are other human beings who make you feel that you are no longer alone, there is no point in me existing."

"Are you this type of monster?" Bai Liu took Spades' hand on his shoulder in his left hand and spoke calmly, "Then you should be around for a long time yet, as I prefer to be alone."

His left hand clutched the packet of notebooks Fang Dian had given him, then let go.

The big exam is immediately followed by the parents' meeting.

Lu Yizhan and Bai Liu, two students from special families, do not have parents to help with parent-teacher conferences.

Neither did Fang Dian.

Bai Liu has no intention of prying into other people's home upbringings and has never asked why Fang Dian has never had a parent come to a parent-teacher conference, but humans have always had a hidden desire to pry into the good and maverick people in the group, as if the more you know about each other, the closer you are to where they are.

Bai Liu heard about Fang Dian through the gossip of his flatmates.

Fang Dian was top of her grade in junior high school. Her parents are very nice people who love her very much and her family is also quite well-off, so it can be said that Fang Dian's first 15 years of life were "smooth sailing" and "happy and fulfilling".

As if God would not allow her to remain so happy, when Fang Dian was fifteen years old, there was a big change in her family.

Fang Dian's mother is seriously ill and her father spends a lot of money to cure her, but it is still not enough. In order to raise the money, her father is deliberately lured to the gambling table by someone who is interested.

Overnight, he lost all his money and ran up a lot of gambling debts.

It seemed like an extremely difficult life should follow for Fang Dian, but it didn't, and the woman had the heart and ability to wield the knife extremely strongly to cut down barriers as she yanked her dad off the table, tied her shoulder-length hair up, and went to the table empty-handed.

In another night, Fang Dian won back everything her father had exported and then stopped.

Her father broke down hysterically and grabbed her by the shoulders and yelled, "You keep gambling! You're such a good gambler! You win back all your mother's medical bills!"

"Why don't you go and gamble if you've got the power!"

Her father looked at Fang Dian, who shook her head firmly and fell to his knees in a trance, looking at his daughter with tears in his eyes, "Will you please, Daddy?"

"I won by cheating, I can't gamble anymore." Fang Dian said softly, "Dad, in a game like gambling, besides the money, people export themselves."

"I don't want to see you tormented by bad things outside of mum too."

Fang Dian's father could not understand his daughter's choice. He left all the money to Fang Dian and then ran away, leaving Fang Dian to deal with the mess alone.

Fang Dian also took care of it.

She was at the top of the city in her secondary school exams, and was offered generous offers from a number of schools, including some public schools with good learning environments and atmospheres. Fang Dian had been prepared to go to a public school close to her home, but in the end she chose Qiao Mu, which offered the highest bonus, and barely managed to scrape together the money for her mother's medical treatment.

Still, her mother pined away rapidly and passed away within six months of her treatment.

Fang Dian managed her mother's funeral on her own, with prize money from various competitions, plus the generous annual special merit allowance from Qiao Mu, the money left over from her mother's treatment, and a large sum of money that suddenly came into her account after her mother's death - presumably from her father who had gone off somewhere. where her father had called.

With this sum of money, Fang Dian redeemed the old house that her family had sold for medical treatment, and she finally had a place to live away from school again.

--This was the place where Bai Liu and Lu Yizhan lived most often when they were away from school.

It's like ...... a very small home.

It's rather strange that no one at the top of the year or second in the grade has a parent-teacher conference, but Qiao Mu treats the exceptionally gifted students ridiculously well - the school gives Lu Yizhan and Fang Dian permission to hold their own parent-teacher conferences.

The reason is that good students can manage their own learning and life without parental supervision; they are their own parents.

In contrast, Bai Liu does not have this privilege and his seat is always empty once the parents' meeting is held.

Lu Yizhan and Fang Dian would have liked to come, but Qiao Mu's parent-teacher meetings are usually held for all classes, so Lu Yizhan and his class would have been at the meeting when Bai Liu was having his parent-teacher meeting.

It is worth mentioning that Lu Yizhan, for some reason, has a special obsession with holding parent-teacher conferences for Bai Liu, and has tried to skip his own to help him on several occasions, only to be caught by the teacher in his class.

"Why do you want to open it for me so badly?" Bai Liu asked Lu Yizhan curiously.

"You don't understand." Lu Yizhan looked at Bai Liu with a sly look in his eyes, "Being able to give you parent-teacher conferences and be your father is something that everyone around me harboured strong expectations for at first."

Who in the Heretics Authority didn't call Bai six names and try to be Bai six's dad back in the day ......

Bai Liu, slowly: "?"

This was also the case at the parents' meeting, where Bai Liu's seat was still empty.

The class was full of people and noise, parents of students dressed up in their most expensive outfits, wearing their most expensive watches, necklaces, rings and bags, dressed to the nines, and every now and then my pigeon-blooded ruby ring brushed your freshly done hair, sorry, my handmade bespoke mechanical watch touched your calfskin leather bag, I'm so sorry.

Like a rooster and hen in the air, showing their feathers.

The students had long since been forgotten as the parents exchanged fake smiles and pleasantries in loud, hypocritical voices, the whole scene looking less like a parent-teacher conference at school and more like a big social gathering at some hotel: the

"Eh, what kind of car did you drive in here today? I drove my BMW in today and I couldn't find a parking space, Qiao Mu really needs to expand, otherwise it's not easy to park for a parents' meeting."

"Did your family get another flat in the newly opened Sunnyside development?"

"There's been a recent move up the corporate ladder and a position may be opening up."

"On Double Eleven Lan's cream is 10% off, just over $4,000! Do you want to buy it together?"

In short, although it was a parents' meeting, it didn't seem to have much to do with the students.

Bai Liu's participation in these parent-teacher meetings has always been zero, but he really has no need to participate either, because after all, there are only two monotonous and boring subjects for the whole occasion.

One, parents are climbing over each other, and two, students are climbing over each other.

Whereas the bickering of adults has a cover of worldliness, the bickering of 17 and 18 year olds is much more straightforward.

"My mum just bought me the latest shoes." Bai Liu, the boy next to him, waved the shoes on his feet with a smug look on his face, "Bring them to the parents' meeting today for me to try on."

"Wow, these pairs cost over three thousand, I think."

The boy wiggled his fingers in a staged manner, "Nono."

"Wow shit, you have a baller's signature on this pair!"

"Holy shit, this is a two year old limited edition, how did you get it?"

"How else could I get it?" The boy shrugged, smiling dismissively as he waved his foot in front of Bai Liu's face, "Money, I got it for a high price, plus the postage cost of nearly six grand."

"Six thousand, what a bargain, I want it too!"

"Go back and ask my mum to look for me too, my sister-in-law is abroad and should be able to poke around."

Bao Kangle, who was listening with a grim and jealous look, stared at the six-thousand-plus pair of sneakers with lust in his eyes.

Bai Liu, who had heard a thousand or eight hundred such words, turned his head away and leaned out of one of the windows at the back of the classroom corridor, his eyes falling on the inside of the window.

Through the window, one can see that his seat is empty, filled to the front and back with wealthy parents who, as if taking their own seats were not enough, casually place their expensive handbags on Bai Liu's desk.

It's as if the place belonging to Bai Liu's family was born to be empty.

The boys next to Bai Liu, who were discussing the sneakers with great enthusiasm, saw that Bai Liu didn't give any reaction, their faces sank and they looked at each other and gathered around.

The guy at the head of the group nudged Bai Liu's shoulder, "Hey."

Bai Liu turned back to him with a cold glance, "Yes?"

"Yo yo yo yo, making a face." The boy cheekily stuck his head in front of Bai Liu, "What were you looking at?"

The boy pretended to look over Bai Liu's shoulder into the classroom and tsked, "Looking for your parents?"

"But you don't have any parents!" The boy pretended to show his hands in regret, "Tell you what, I got my new sneakers today and I'm in a good mood."

"How about you call me Dad and I'll come in and help you with the parent-teacher conference?"

Several of the other boys stifled their laughter, and Bao Kangle, who had been grim-faced, also smoothed his expression, looking at the besieged Bai Liu with a look of disgusted excitement, as if he were looking at some inferior person.

As long as there is Bai Liu in the class, he is not the worst off.

"It's not like I'm bullying you, either." The boy gave Bai Liu's shoulder a firm squeeze in a fake manner, "It's because you're poor and have no parents."

"My parents have been so good to me again, I should do good deeds to people like you coming out of the orphanage and kind of give back to the community, right?"

"Look." The boy smiled playfully and forcefully held Bai Liu's shoulders down and made him look out the window at the classroom, "My parents are sitting in front of you, their bags are in your place, your place is blessed with my parents' luck, I'm good to you, aren't I, call me dad?"

Bai Liu was just about to open his mouth when his words paused on the edge and through the window glass he saw a human-sized mass of black lines sitting on his otherwise empty seat.

The black mass studied Bai Liu's seat curiously and raised its hand to sweep down the two handbags placed on Bai Liu's seat that were blocking it from sitting down.

A man and a woman sitting in front of Bai Liu's seat in the classroom heard the sound of a bag falling and turned their heads over to look, frowning and asking.

"Who swept our bag down?"

"Isn't this spot dedicated to bags?"

Someone next to me kindly reminded, "No, this is the seat of one of their classmates, Bai Liu, but he doesn't have any parents coming to the meeting, so it's empty."

The man and woman waved their hands in disbelief, their faces showing obvious boredom.

"The one you're talking about, Bai Liu, I know, from the orphanage, dirty and cheap, and I heard that she steals food from her classmates' lockers, which our cubs especially hate."

"I didn't even know our son was sitting in front of this person before, so I'll go and talk to Mr. Xu after the meeting and move him to a different position, otherwise he won't be able to study well if he's sitting in front of this kind of person all day, and it will affect his mood."

With that, the two men picked up the handbag and, without patting it, put it back on Bai Liu's desk in an arrogant and natural manner.

The humanoid black line slowly raised its head, and Bai Liu, who had been held down by the rowdy boys outside the window, stood still for a moment as he clearly saw the black line suddenly change from a black line to a man with a faint outline when the man and woman called him dirty and cheap.

The man had very fine, perfect features, was erect, very insistent on tucking his tall, long body into Bai Liu's small seat, had no expression on his face, looked no more than eighteen or nineteen years old, and had very eye-catching silver-blue eyes.

Is this what ...... the ball of puppy lines, Spades, really looks like?

It seems his vision has not declined in the future either.

Spades looked up indifferently, his silvery blue eyes locking with the two men and women who were just about to place their handbags on their desks.

The man and woman's expressions were stunned for a long moment, and they seemed to see in the air a silver-blue door slowly opening towards them.

In the next moment, their expressions twisted.

By the window, the boy was still mocking arrogantly, "Why don't you resist? See how envious my parents look?"

A sudden panicked scream came from inside the window: the

" Mr. Wang, Mrs. Wang, what are you doing?!"

The boy moved to loosen Bai Liu's collar and looked in the window in confusion.

Inside the classroom, his parents were like two dogs, eyes up and parted to the sides, sticking out their downward-dripping tongues and lying on Bai Liu's desk licking frantically as if they were eating something extremely sweet, with that strange grin on their faces.

"Smells so good ...... hehehe ...... smells so good ......"

I can't say it was a total loss of image, only that it stunned a classroom full of people.

The people next to them were screaming and trying to tear them away from Bai Liu's desk, but the two would actually bite menacingly.

After biting two parents who tried to go up and rip them off in quick succession, the boy, also confused, pushed open the window and shouted, "Mum and Dad, what are you doing?"

His parents slowly bent their necks and looked out at their own children, the look sending a chill down the boy's back and he took two steps back.

But before he could turn and run, the parents darted out of the desk and out the window, their eyes fierce as they held their child dead to the ground.

The boy was held down by his own parents and fell to the ground with a buzzing jolt to his brain and a few dry heaves with a blank expression, but his parents didn't stop there, instead showing their sharp teeth and starting to sniff the boy carefully.

The boy was scared shitless, struggling frantically on the ground and shouting in desperation, "Help me!"

The only one left around him was Bai Liu, who was being held down and sniffed by his parents.

"Get them out of here!!!"

Bai Liu looked indifferently at the boy who was tugging at his trouser leg for help, "Want me to save you?"

The boy nodded frantically, snotting.

"Yes." Bai Liu said faintly, "Call me Dad."

The boy was dumbfounded, and he was just about to curse, "Who's going to call you Daddy, when his parents started to smile that strange smile that scared him so much that he broke down and immediately shouted out, "Daddy, Daddy! Help my dad!"

As if this "Daddy" had triggered something in the parents, they began to crouch down, their eyes blank, their faces wearing strange, ingratiating smiles, and leaned down to stick their tongues out, pressing the back of their tongues against the child's shoes and licking them carefully, one by one.

The parents actually started licking their own kid's sneakers.

"Hey, hey, father in charge, hey." The man looked fawningly at his son whose expression had been completely dumbfounded, his eyes full of empty and desperate desire, "I've licked your shoes properly and sent you a million and six hundred thousand dollars before, that position that was vacated before, do you think it's my turn?"

The woman was also licking seriously and diligently, she licked with an extremely delicate expression and had to shake her shoulders to pamper herself, "Honey, honey, daddy-husband, look at how well I'm doing, give a little more for next month's living expenses~"

"People want to buy a two hundred thousand dollar emerald bracelet."

"If you buy it for me, I can always call you daddy~"

The boy's expression had been shocked into a blank, and even if he was one of those dudes who knew nothing, he knew what his parents were doing with this gesture.

The onlookers next to me had a look of disbelief.

Halfway through their licking, the man and woman suddenly shook their heads off, the lust-filled expression on their faces all but fading, as if snapping out of some sort of bewitched state, and, covering their violently headache, they slowly looked over at their son, who was sitting on the floor with a dazed look on his face.

They lowered their heads and looked again in a trance at their son's sneakers.

The name of the player on the sneakers was newly signed and had just been bragged about by their son as having been signed by the player specifically.

But now, because they had just licked it so hard, the signature was only a blurred half-form.

Their tongues tingled hotly, leaving dark marker stained clumps on the surface of their tongues.

Shortly afterwards, the security guards, who had been urgently called over by the other parents, arrived and the two parents were helped up by the guards, who walked past the watching crowd with their heads bowed and their faces ugly to the core.

The man suddenly grabbed his son by the hair and slapped him twice, cursing angrily, "You little brat! Damn it! You got such a small score! You're driving me and your mother crazy!"

"Spending so much money on you and providing you with such good conditions, and taking such a little test, you are so angry that your old man and mother are sick!"

The boy was already baffled by the beating and he was just about to argue when his dad came down with two more hard slaps, instantly swelling his face, and the man warned viciously, "I'll settle the score with you when I get back!"

The boy was slapped hard all the way around and no one stopped him. He was practically dragged back by his own dad, his mouth was drooling from the beating and his dad didn't even stop, as if he was taking out some kind of grievance on him.

Those followers who had walked behind the boy earlier pretended not to see the boy's pleading gaze, and uncharacteristically kept their heads down and backed away from the boy.

Bai Liu looks to Spades in the window, who meets him through it, and he raises his jaw faintly, gesturing for the guy to come out and explain what's going on.

The parents who suddenly went crazy must have been the work of this guy.

Spades put his head back in his hands, pretending not to see Bai Liu's eyes as he gestured for him to come out, and sat demurely in Bai Liu's place, imitating the other parents as they looked earnestly at Bai Liu's exam papers on the table, with the look of [I'm giving you a parent-teacher conference so don't disturb me].

Bai Liu: "......"

Can you read the paper right there ......

In this.

After a short and scary hiccup, the parents' meeting of Senior 37 went smoothly

Xu Wei came up to the stage and summarised the key points of the exam, the top and bottom 10 students, and the parents of each student she had summarised stood up to receive her comments.

Parents of students at the top of the results table are honoured, those at the bottom are more embarrassed.

Bai Liu is usually ranked at the back of the table, but this time he was a rare break from the bottom ten and was not in the group of poor students being reviewed.

He was in the middle of another wave of students being summarised this time.

"Next, we will summarise the students who have made great progress in this exam." Xu Wei looked down at the roster he was holding, "All of these students have made great progress recently and it is worthwhile for parents to learn from each other and each other's education methods, it's senior year and I hope we all pay a little attention to our children."

One by one, she reads them out, and the parents of each student she reads out to stand up and receive praise with an air of subtlety and dejection, as if it is not their child but themselves who have improved their grades.

"One hundred and twenty grade improvement, Hou Tong." Xu Wei looked with appreciation at Hou Tong's father who stood up, "Your child is very good and has improved in his grades several times in a row."

"Can you not make progress?" Papa Hou Tong, an easy going looking middle aged man, smiled helplessly, "It's all down, down to the valley floor, anywhere you go is progress."

The class laughed amiably.

"You may sit down." Xu Wei gestured for the other person to sit down as she looked at the roster again, her face cold, "The last one to progress was a special student from our class, I won't mention it here, his parents didn't come."

Hou Tong's father couldn't help but say, "Teacher, you still have to say that people's parents didn't come, right?"

"People's parents didn't come, but they've made progress, so there's no reason not to talk about it, right?"

Xu Wei's face instantly became embarrassed beyond belief as she sought to make up for it, "It was something that just came up and things were a bit tight for this meeting, so it was ......"

" Mr. Xu you continue." Hou Tong's father raised his hand to interrupt Xu Wei's explanation, he looked away and shook his head, muttering in a small voice, "How can this be a teacher, no wonder Xiaotong doesn't like ......"

Xu Wei's face was hard to see as she cleared her throat and managed to squeeze out a smile, "The last student to improve this time, Bai Liu."

She scanned Bai Liu by the window almost with malice and said in a joking tone, " Parent Hou Tong is right, all students should be treated equally, now follow the normal procedure, the parent of Bai Liu who is not here stands up to receive praise."

"A round of applause for Bai Liu's parents."

Everyone turned their heads to the empty seat and applauded.

Bai Liu also looked over at the seat.

Spades rose from his seat, standing up straight to the applause, and gave a slightly reserved nod of his jaw in imitation of the other parents, as if he had received the praise for Bai Liu.

The corners of Bai Liu's lips curled upwards very slightly.

After the parent-teacher conference, the school usually takes a half-day break and students can follow their parents home.

Bai Liu was the last student to leave the classroom because he didn't have to go home, or rather, in his case, the situation was reversed and his 'parent' was on top of him and was going home with him.

The lines of Spades' transformation into human form are noticeably weaker, and he lies motionless on the back of Bai Liu's shoulder.

"Aren't you not allowed to touch other people?" Bai Liu asked in a flat tone as he walked away, "What was that all about? Sweeping handbags and driving people crazy, you seem to have a lot of power."

"It wasn't supposed to be." Spades' tone was muffled, so faint it bordered on airy, "I can't interfere and disrupt your high school life, according to the rules."

Bai Liu paused and asked, "And just now?"

Spades paused, "Because I was so angry, I broke the rules."

"They can't talk about you like that."

"There's a price to pay for breaking the rules, isn't there?" Bai Liu asked calmly in return, "So you're too weak to walk now and you have to rely on me to carry you?"

Spades gave a muffled muffled hmm, and he buried his head in Bai Liu's back as if he knew he had done something wrong.

There was a moment of silence between the two men.

As the sun sets in the west, the warmth of the slowly setting sunlight lengthens, and the light slants through, stretching Bai Liu's shadow.

"Next time, don't do something stupid like breaking the rules." Bai Liu walked towards the dormitory with Spades on his back, his eyes downcast at his feet as he looked at his own drawn out shadow alone, his tone pausing, "It would be fun to play yourself out of it."

The Spades on his back had no shadow, his feet were the only ones under him, but he had the feeling of two people walking together.

The Spades on his back were also weightless, and Bai Liu carried them for such a long time with nothing on his back.

But so heavy, so heavy that Bai Liu couldn't help but lean forward, as if he were actually carrying someone on his back, a doggy ball of string, a monster who had come especially for him and given him a parental meeting.

"Remember?" Bai Liu made sure again, his tone a little colder, "Don't do that next time."

Spades was silent for a long time before he replied, "I can't help it."

"Why can't you control it?" Bai Liu asks.

"Because I like you a lot." Spades hugged Bai Liu tightly as he pressed himself against his back, repeating over and over, "I like you a lot."

"I like you, Bai Liu."

" Bai Liu I like you."

"I especially like you."

Bai Liu was quiet for a long time before he replied, "I know."

"Oh." Spades was quiet for a moment, then - "I like you, Bai Liu ."

"I got it."

"I like ......"

"Got it."

The sunlight stretches Bai Liu's shadow behind him as it shines through the windows of the corridor and shines on the blackboard at the back of the classroom in the Upper Thirty-seventh class on the first floor of the school building behind him.

In the very middle of the board is the honour roll of students who have made progress, a sliver down with the names of many students written in neat and beautiful chalk, the penultimate name written in beautiful chalk is [Hou Tong], while the last name is crooked.

The name is [Bai Liu].

Xu Wei deliberately did not put Bai Liu's name on the honor roll, thinking that no one in the school, in the world, would remember Bai Liu's modest progress in such a single exam and would not care if Bai Liu's name was on the so-called honor roll.

Because Bai Liu has no parents.

But there is a monster who remembers, cares, exists.

Quietly, clumsily, carrying Bai Liu on its back, it drained itself of energy and unskilfully picked up the chalk and wrote his name carefully, stroke by stroke, in the last position on this list of honour.

Because it really felt Bai Liu was glorious.

-- just like the moment it heard Bai Liu's name and stood up for him at the parents' meeting.