Xiao Yan had assumed Director Wu would at least express some delight at seeing a former student return so soon after graduation. He hadn’t expected the director’s impression of the two of them to be so deeply ingrained.
“Um…” Xiao Yan said politely. “Director, I’m not here to fight with Luo Zhiyu.”
I’m here to wait for my boyfriend to finish class.
Director Wu grew even more vigilant. “Arguing isn’t allowed either! Absolutely not! You start by arguing, and before you know it, you’ll be fighting. And look at you—you climbed over the wall to get in, and you even deliberately put on a No. 1 High School uniform. It’s obvious you have ulterior motives.”
Xiao Yan: “?”
“You’re already in university. Wouldn’t it be better to make some new friends?” The director was practically pleading with him. “Stop thinking about Luo Zhiyu all the time. Stop keeping your eyes on him.”
“That’s not going to happen.” Xiao Yan refused outright.
His boyfriend was still here studying in his final year of high school. How could he possibly stop thinking about him?
Director Wu failed to persuade him and was so anxious that his head hurt. He was practically losing his hair from worry.
Meanwhile, in Class Three of Senior Year, someone taking the exam heard the commotion outside the window. They turned to glance outside, caught sight of a familiar figure, and immediately remembered the post Luo Zhiyu had shared on his Moments a few days earlier.
“Luo Zhiyu, run! Someone’s here to beat you up!” the student in front of him whispered.
Luo Zhiyu, who had just stood up to hand in his paper: “?”
After handing in his exam, Luo Zhiyu stepped out of the classroom and saw Xiao Yan waiting there, with a deeply worried Director Wu standing beside him. He immediately understood what had happened.
“Don’t worry, Teacher.” Luo Zhiyu draped himself over Xiao Yan’s shoulder. “You have to look at us with a developmental perspective. I’m not the Luo Zhiyu I used to be. We really aren’t going to fight.”
“Don’t worry, Director.” Xiao Yan waved and led Luo Zhiyu toward the stairs. “I guarantee I’ll return Luo Zhiyu to you in one piece.”
“Who’s that?” a first-year high-school student in a red-and-white uniform asked, pointing at Xiao Yan.
“Luo Zhiyu and Xiao Yan. They’re legendary figures at No. 1 High School,” a second-year student explained. “Their pheromone compatibility is zero, and they’ve been at each other’s throats since the day they enrolled. Once they start fighting, nobody can separate them. Look at them now. One of them has graduated, and he’s still climbing over the wall to come back and stir up trouble.”
Luo Zhiyu: “…”
Compared with the public opinion at No. 1 High School, Luo Zhiyu much preferred U University. After all, the news about their zero pheromone compatibility hadn’t spread there yet, and all Xiao Yan’s new friends thought the two of them couldn’t possibly be more suited to each other.
U University Campus Forum
[The Most Alpha First-Year Student This Year Is Xiao Yan. Disagree? Come Debate Me.]
Post 1: A female senior here! I’ve noticed that this year’s first-year students are all really good-looking. My friends and I walked around the sports field several times and asked for the names of all the handsome guys we spotted. Xiao Yan from the School of Economics and Management—is anyone interested in pursuing him?
Post 2: I agree. Xiao Yan is seriously attractive. I’m interested, too. I’d like to know what his personality is like and what his hobbies are.
Post 3: Don’t bother! I’m in his class. Xiao Yan already has a boyfriend. It’s that high-school omega boy who brought ice-cold watermelon and cola to the sports field the other day and even made it into our school newspaper. Xiao Yan said it himself. That’s his boyfriend.
Post 4: Yeah, that’s the little boyfriend he’s been dating since high school. A really good-looking high-school student. He’s in his final year now.
Post 5: Well, if I may be honest, his boyfriend is kind of a little shit. (I mean that literally. No offense intended.)
Post 6: I suggest you give up. Looking at those two, they’ve probably temporarily marked each other more than once.
Post 7: I can practically hear a whole crowd of hearts breaking. But I’m from this city, and I think I once heard a rumor that Xiao Yan and Luo Zhiyu from the city’s No. 1 High School have zero pheromone compatibility. I wonder if it’s true.
Post 8: I missed them during military training. What a pity! I really wanted to see what his high-school boyfriend looked like, hahaha!
Post 9: He’s probably busy preparing for the college entrance examination. He is in his final year, after all.
Xiao Yan had bought an apartment near the university. He usually lived in the dormitory, but on some weekends he would sneak Luo Zhiyu out of school and bring him over. Luo Zhiyu would do his homework while Xiao Yan worked on course project presentations on his laptop.
Wrapped in his school uniform jacket, Luo Zhiyu lay across the desk and halfheartedly worked on his assignments. The only sound beside him was the intermittent tapping of keys.
The feeling was rather peculiar. He was still a high-school student, still working through what seemed like an endless supply of exam papers, while Xiao Yan had already begun a life with a completely different rhythm. Their relationship had become one between a university student and a high-school student.
University student Xiao Yan played games with his headphones on while working on his assignments, doing both at once. High-school student Luo Zhiyu listlessly worked through math problems on his scratch paper.
As a candidate sitting for the college entrance examination that year, Luo Zhiyu had decided not to go out and fool around this weekend. Instead, he would stay at Xiao Yan’s apartment and study properly.
“Cicada.” Xiao Yan closed his laptop. “Are you free on Sunday?”
“What do you want?” Luo Zhiyu pushed over the exam paper he had finished, asking Xiao Yan to check his answers. “I can be free, or I can be busy. Depends on what you’re planning.”
“Attend a class for me. I have an extracurricular activity on Sunday, and the university scheduled one of my classes for the weekend.”
Xiao Yan carried Luo Zhiyu’s exam paper over. He circled a number in the final question with his pencil, then took Luo Zhiyu’s right hand and gently tapped his palm with the eraser end.
“You read the number wrong, didn’t you? Such a basic mistake.”
“Ah… yeah.”
That morning, Luo Zhiyu had been bored during class and used his pencil to turn the number 3 in the final question into an 8. When he worked on the problem that evening, he naturally calculated it using an 8 instead, producing a string of completely nonsensical numbers.
Luo Zhiyu corrected the number and rewrote his solution. Only then did he remember the first part of what Xiao Yan had said.
“You want me to attend your class?” Luo Zhiyu asked. “That’s what you meant, right?”
“Yeah.”
Xiao Yan pulled another assignment from Luo Zhiyu’s backpack and helped check it. “It’s a lecture with more than two hundred students. The teacher doesn’t know any of them personally. If he calls my name, all you have to do is answer. The odds of him calling on me are very low.”
“You could just fill in the answer sheet properly.” Xiao Yan tossed the assignment back to Luo Zhiyu. He thoroughly enjoyed tutoring a high-school student, but since Luo Zhiyu didn’t really need help with his homework, he could only pick on little details to satisfy his urge to bully him. “Why do you insist on filling in the bubbles so evenly? I think you spend more time shading in your answer sheet than answering the questions.”
“You’re quite something, university student.” Luo Zhiyu reached back and grabbed Xiao Yan’s trouser leg. “Making a college entrance exam candidate attend your class for you. Have some shame!”
Twenty minutes earlier, Luo Zhiyu had decided to stay home and study properly that weekend.
“You’re quite something yourself. Let go.” Xiao Yan knocked his hand away.
In the end, the high-school student really did go to class for the university student.
On Sunday, Luo Zhiyu didn’t wear his school uniform. He borrowed one of Xiao Yan’s jackets and swaggered into the university lecture hall.
Large lecture halls were wonderful. Nobody knew anybody, and Luo Zhiyu was having a great time pretending to be a university student.
“Hey there!” He found a seat toward the back of the classroom and enthusiastically greeted the student beside him. “Which school are you from?”
“C-Computer Science and Software Engineering.” The student was flattered by the attention. “Are you a first-year student, junior? I’m a second-year student retaking a general education course.”
[Cicada]: [Photo] Yan-Yan, I’ve successfully infiltrated the target location. Currently carrying out the mission.
[Tangerine]: Fairy frowning.jpg
[Tangerine]: What did you just call me?
[Cicada]: I’ve already made friends with the people around me. Nobody knows I’m an undercover actor. Go ahead without worrying.
[Tangerine]: Okay, I’m counting on you. Just sit there and make up the numbers. Do your homework.
[Cicada]: I just heard them say there might be an in-class assignment. I’ll make something up for you.
[Tangerine]: Sure.
Luo Zhiyu also posted the photo to his Moments.
[Cicada]: [Photo] Someone skipped class, so I’m graciously experiencing a university lecture in advance.
[Location: U University, Teaching Building 3]
[Luo Sixue] — Comment: I thought your school wouldn’t let you go home this weekend, so you went to the university district again. Angry.jpg Whose class are you attending for them? Why are you so enthusiastic?
[Tangyuan Hides from Cats] — Comment: Shameless! He actually made you go to class for him.
[Fan Yue] — Comment: …He really knows how to push his luck.
[Director Wu] — Comment: I’m tired of saying this. Don’t fight.
[Cicada] replies to [Director Wu]: Oh dear, Director, sorry! I forgot to hide this post from you.
The class bell rang, and the teacher for the general education course entered the large lecture hall and began teaching.
The second-year student sitting to Luo Zhiyu’s right watched as the supposed first-year student beside him rummaged through his backpack, pulled out a set of standardized college entrance examination papers, and began solving them.
Second-year student: “?”
“You’re… doing what?” The second-year student was deeply confused.
“Oh…” Luo Zhiyu glanced at the exam paper pinned beneath his hand. “I’m reminiscing about high school.”
Meanwhile, in an office at U University’s Student Activities Center, Xiao Yan was chatting with someone.
“Don’t you have class?” asked Qian Shuyu, Xiao Yan’s new friend from the School of Life Sciences. “Did you skip it? Hardly anyone came to help with the activities today, and you actually showed up to lend a hand.”
“I sent my boyfriend in my place.” Xiao Yan opened the office computer and typed in a password. “He’s already in the classroom.”
“Your little boyfriend in his final year of high school?” Qian Shuyu laughed. “Not bad. Aren’t you worried you’ll interfere with his college entrance exam preparations?”
“He’ll be fine.” Xiao Yan shook his head. He and Luo Zhiyu understood each other well enough.
“You two really are close. I saw you pin him against a wall in the teaching building last time.” Qian Shuyu sounded envious. “Anyway, you can just ignore those rumors on the campus forum.”
“What rumors?”
“The stuff about pheromone compatibility. People are saying you have zero compatibility. You don’t need to pay attention to them. The angles they come up with to be jealous are pretty creative.” Qian Shuyu closed the forum.
“It’s true. I don’t mind them talking about it.” Xiao Yan had long since gotten used to it. The pheromone compatibility results said they were impossible, yet Luo Zhiyu, wearing Xiao Yan’s jacket and carrying the scent of his pheromones, was sitting in his classroom attending a lecture for him.
“The test really showed zero?” Qian Shuyu frowned. “That doesn’t seem right. You two don’t look like a zero-compatibility pair at all. Speaking from personal experience, I’ve seen an alpha and an omega with 11.3% compatibility fight so viciously that they pulled knives on each other. So don’t blame the school for being nervous. It’s not absolute, but sometimes low compatibility is the root of a lot of trouble. You and your high-school boyfriend haven’t done anything like that, have you?”
“…No.”
The worst they’d ever done was swing a broom around a couple of times. All of Luo Zhiyu and Xiao Yan’s fights had stayed at the level of two fourth-graders squabbling.
“You should get tested again. I mean a blood test, the kind they do for premarital examinations. A compatibility result of 0% wouldn’t explain you pinning him against a wall and kissing him like that. Besides, if your compatibility is too low, you can’t complete a final mark.” Qian Shuyu made the suggestion.
They had actually undergone a blood test before, and the result had still been close to zero. But Luo Zhiyu was both blood-phobic and needle-phobic, and Xiao Yan didn’t want to put him through another test.
“Let’s wait until after the college entrance exams. It doesn’t matter if we can’t get a number. It won’t affect us.” Xiao Yan and Luo Zhiyu had long stopped caring about pheromones.
Back in the lecture hall, the teacher had finished more than half the lecture and decided to leave the remaining time for students to complete an in-class assignment. The sheets were passed from row to row toward the back of the room.
Luo Zhiyu wrote Xiao Yan’s name on the assignment sheet.
“Oh, you’re from the School of Economics and Management,” the student beside him remarked again. “That’s a difficult school to get into. You need really high scores. You look pretty young, junior, but you’re impressive.”
“Something like that.” Drawing on what he’d picked up from occasionally listening to the lecture, Luo Zhiyu began answering the questions. “‘I’ am pretty impressive, actually. It’s not that difficult. I got in with hardly any effort.”
It was a novel feeling, using Xiao Yan’s name as an excuse to brag about his boyfriend.
The second-year student retaking the course was clearly caught off guard by this unusual way of praising oneself and didn’t dare say anything more.
“Having to come to class on the weekend during military training is tough for all of you,” the teacher said from the podium. “Let’s take attendance.”
[Cicada]: Yan-Yan, they’re taking attendance!
[Tangerine]: It’s fine. There are so many people. It’s a matter of probability. Don’t worry.
[Cicada]: Okay. A matter of probability.
“Xiao Yan?” The teacher looked down at the attendance list. “Is Xiao Yan here?”
Luo Zhiyu put down his pen and raised a hand at the back of the classroom.
“Present, Teacher! I’m Xiao Yan.”
“Oh.” The teacher didn’t know Xiao Yan and continued calling other names.
But the classroom erupted.
General education courses were attended by several classes together, and there were definitely students from Xiao Yan’s class in the room. Everyone from his class had seen Luo Zhiyu during military training the previous week. They even remembered him vividly.
“Where’s Xiao Yan? Isn’t that his boyfriend?”
“He probably went off to help with student union activities. He actually got his high-school boyfriend to attend class for him. What a flirt.”
“Keep your voice down. Don’t embarrass us university students.”
Luo Zhiyu, who was concentrating on his questions, suddenly found himself the recipient of a whole series of glances. The second-year student beside him finally realized, belatedly, that a high-school student had infiltrated the lecture hall.
[Cicada]: Yan-Yan, I think your classmates have figured me out.
[Tangerine]: It’s fine. They’re our people.
[Cicada]: They keep staring at me. I feel like I’m about to be exposed.
[Cicada]: People here are so nice. They all believe we’re really together.
His phone vibrated again. After seeing Luo Zhiyu’s Moments, his older sister finally couldn’t resist asking him about it.
[Luo Sixue]: You keep going to U University. What’s so special about it?
[Cicada]: My boyfriend.
[Luo Sixue]: I knew it! You’re dating behind our backs. You don’t even come home anymore.
[Luo Sixue]: Send me a photo of your boyfriend. I’ll read his face and judge whether he’s a scumbag.
[Cicada]: Huh? You want a photo?
[Cicada]: It’s not the right time yet. Given the unresolved issues inherited from the past, this could trigger a battle between our two families.
[Luo Sixue]: ?
[Luo Sixue]: Look, no matter whether he’s round or flat, our family can accept him.
[Cicada]: How about I show you a post-bath picture of my boyfriend?
[Luo Sixue]: ?
[Cicada]: [Picture]
“What kind of boyfriend is he, that you have to keep him such a secret?” Sister Luo said. “As long as he’s not from that rival family we’ve been at odds with, who would stop you?”
“Exactly, exactly.”
Back at the Luo family home, his parents, older sister, and older brother anxiously received a picture from Luo Zhiyu. They nervously tapped it open.
The picture Luo Zhiyu had sent them was a plate of freshly washed tangerines.