MM | Chapter 21

Correction Notebook

Sheng Wang was a bit dumbfounded.

He really just wanted to know what time Jiang Tian went to sleep, but he never expected such a response. The situation developed so unexpectedly that the young master was caught off guard.

Even more surprising, there was a knock on the door shortly after. Sheng Wang stood in a daze for two seconds, then hurriedly shuffled to open it in his slippers.

Jiang Tian stood outside, holding a loose-leaf notebook in one hand and scrolling through his phone with the other.

In the middle of the night, he seemed quite busy with work, Sheng Wang thought absentmindedly.

Just like last time, Jiang Tian entered without looking around. He was talking to someone on his phone, typing as he walked straight to the desk.

Sheng Wang followed behind him.

Jiang Tian finished typing a few words, locked his phone, tossed it into his pocket, and turned to Sheng Wang’s correction notebook, asking, “Where are you stuck?”

Sheng Wang chuckled awkwardly, “I’m not stuck.”

Jiang Tian glanced at the clock, “Not stuck, and you were up until 2:30?”

“What kind of expression is that?” Sheng Wang felt like hitting him. Embarrassed, he tapped the notebook with his fingers, “I was self-studying. This speed isn’t slow.”

Jiang Tian casually flipped through a few pages of the correction notebook and said, “So what do you want to ask?”

Sheng Wang couldn’t come up with a question.

He wanted to say, “I didn’t mean it like that.” But if he really said that, Jiang Tian would probably turn around and leave without expression, and he wouldn’t have this patience in the future.

Then he’d have to go back to WeChat and pester him again.

Considering the consequences, Sheng Wang thought he might as well go along with “this meaning.”

“How about—” He rubbed his neck, swallowing his pride, “How about you organize it for me? What’s the usual difficulty of the school’s weekly exams? I’ve only taken one, so I can’t quite gauge it.”

Once upon a time, others said this to him. He never expected there would be a day when it was the other way around.

He thought Jiang Tian, as the lucky recipient of this statement, should buy a lottery ticket. After all, this was a one-time thing; he wouldn’t say it again.

Sheng Wang thought smugly.

There was only one chair in the bedroom, which he generously offered to Jiang Tian. He himself sat familiarly on the edge of the desk. He reached for an empty notebook from the other side of the table and twirled a pen, saying to Jiang Tian, “Alright, you can start explaining.”

Jiang Tian glanced at his informal sitting posture and asked, “Can I draw on the correction notebook?”

“Go ahead,” Sheng Wang said, “I’ll tear it up later anyway.”

“Tear it up?”

Sheng Wang explained, “Once I’ve gone through the questions twice without any doubts, I cross them out. Once I’ve crossed out a page, I tear it out to save time next time.”

Since Sheng Wang was so casual, Jiang Tian didn’t hold back either. He quickly flipped through the correction notebook, pressed down with a blue pen, and decisively drew several large brackets.

As he marked, he said, “These pages are key.”

“These two pages, don’t bother with the big questions.”

He unceremoniously crossed out several pages and said, “This part is useless.”

“The rest, glance over if you have time, but it won’t matter much if you don’t.”

He said only four sentences, marked five pages out of more than twenty in the correction notebook, and highlighted six key questions. Then he handed the notebook back to Sheng Wang, “Got it?”

Sheng Wang: “…”

He actually did understand. With his outstanding self-study ability and comprehension, he grasped it immediately. When Jiang Tian was marking, he realized that the six key questions were the most comprehensive. Mastering them meant not fearing any exam questions.

As for the remaining questions, they mostly repeated parts of these six, so there was no need to spend extra time on them.

The objective questions Jiang Tian picked were tricky. Regular questions in exams were no problem, and if he could handle these odd ones, he’d be fine.

Understanding aside, Sheng Wang still wanted to laugh.

He reached for the notebook, raised two fingers jokingly, and said, “I have a question.”

As he spoke, his two long legs dangled carelessly at the edge of the desk, clearly up to no good.

“Go ahead,” Jiang Tian paused with the notebook.

“Have you ever been hit for explaining questions like this?” Sheng Wang started laughing halfway through.

Jiang Tian knew he wouldn’t have anything nice to say and immediately pulled the notebook back.

Sheng Wang missed it and quickly became serious, “Hey, my bad, don’t take it away. It’s my notebook.”

Earlier, he hadn’t even dried his hair after showering to save time, and now it was completely dry. It was already unkempt, and the two movements made it messier.

Sheng Wang reached for his correction notebook and sat back on the desk. He ran his fingers through his hair a few times and blew at his bangs before lowering his head to look at the questions.

With no one speaking, the room suddenly became quiet. The late-night silence of Baima Lane rose like a slow tide, quietly engulfing them. Behind Sheng Wang was a large glass window, and outside, some insects were chirping faintly from the bushes.

In his peripheral vision, Jiang Tian hadn’t left. He picked up the loose-leaf notebook he brought and leaned back in the chair to read. Sheng Wang glanced at him and then looked away, neither urging him to return to his own room nor asking how much he had left to read. He just pulled out another pen from his pencil case and started calculating on scratch paper.

With Jiang Tian’s drastic cuts, the correction notebook was much quicker to go through, taking only about ten minutes. Even so, it was nearly three o’clock.

Neither of them had stayed up like this before, and by the end, they were both fighting sleep, barely managing to put away their pens and notebooks. After Jiang Tian returned to his room, Sheng Wang collapsed onto his bed, lying half-dead under the covers. Suddenly, he remembered something and reached for his phone.

He pried open his eyelids with his fingers, mustered the energy to open Jiang Tian’s chat, hesitated, and finally sent a “Thanks.” Then he locked the screen, tossed the phone aside, and lay back down.

He almost immediately drifted into a haze, and before he fell completely asleep, he didn’t hear his phone vibrate, guessing Jiang Tian fell asleep even faster than he did.

The next morning, Jiang Ou and Auntie Sun were bustling in and out of the kitchen as usual. Around 6:20, Sheng Wang groggily made his way downstairs, right on time.

Jiang Ou placed a bowl of chicken congee on the table and called Sheng Wang over, instinctively saying, “Xiao Tian, wait for him.”

Sheng Wang followed her voice to the living room and saw the sofa was empty. He looked toward the entrance, and the space by the shoe cabinet was also empty.

He paused, about to ask, when Jiang Ou patted her forehead and said, “Oh, my mind, Xiao Tian hasn’t come down yet.”

She pushed the bowl of congee toward Sheng Wang and couldn’t help but mutter, “It’s strange, he never sleeps in. What’s special about today?”

At that moment, Sheng Wang felt inexplicably guilty, like he had done something wrong.

Jiang Tian eventually came down two minutes later than him. Sheng Wang glanced at the stairs as he heard footsteps, then buried his head in his congee amid Jiang Ou’s muttering, almost hiding his face in it.

*

The exam proctors had stayed late the previous night to stick seat numbers on the desks for classes A and B. When Sheng Wang and Jiang Tian entered the classroom this morning, they found unfamiliar faces in their seats.

Their seats were in the back row, numbers 44 and 45, both occupied by students from other classes.

The guy sitting at desk 45 realized it was Jiang Tian’s seat and immediately rubbed his hands, saying, “This is the seat of the Exam God. If I touch it, will I do better?”

Jiang Tian was bending down to get his exam materials from the desk. Hearing this, he straightened up and glanced at the guy’s hand, his face saying, “Why are you so dramatic?”

When he wasn’t smiling, he looked like a cold winter, exuding an air of arrogance.

The guy immediately withdrew his hand, but while he didn’t dare touch it, someone else did. Gao Tianyang, holding his pencil case, pushed Sheng Wang over without hesitation, saying, “Come on, let’s each touch it once. Maybe next time we won’t be exiled to the lower floor.”

Sheng Wang praised, “Good idea.”

Gao Tianyang said, “You first, I’ll go after.”

Sheng Wang was just joking with Gao Tianyang and didn’t really intend to touch it. But when he looked up, he met Jiang Tian’s indescribable gaze. For some reason, he suddenly felt like teasing him and reached out to touch it, then ran away.

Gao Tianyang chased after him, laughing, “Oh, you should’ve seen Tian-ge’s face…”

These two were partners in misfortune, both having to go down a floor. Gao Tianyang’s seat was the second in Class 3, while Sheng Wang’s was the eighth in Class 5.

Although Sheng Wang hadn’t been at the school long, his face was already quite well-known. Entering Class 5 caused a bit of a stir, not just because he was handsome, but because everyone knew he had come from Class A.

The reason for his ranking was known in Class A, but not in other classes. As soon as he sat down, he overheard two people in front of him whispering, “With scores like this, how did he transfer to Class A?”

“Does transferring from another school come with perks?”

“If I’d known, I wouldn’t have taken the entrance exam for the Affiliated High School. I could’ve gone to No. 2 High School, gotten into an intensive class, and then transferred. Maybe I’d be in Class A now.”

Sheng Wang pulled out his pencil case and listened to these comments as if they were jokes.

He wasn’t the humble type. While listening, he mentally wrote critiques for them and even said, “Could you speak a little quieter? Otherwise, it’s awkward if I hear everything.”

Two girls next to him burst out laughing, and those gossiping turned red and snapped, “Who’s awkward?”

Sheng Wang replied, “Not me.”

“Damn.” They were annoyed but knew they were in the wrong, so they just sulked.

“You’re so funny,” the two girls giggled.

Sheng Wang thought they looked familiar, but being face-blind, he couldn’t recall where he’d seen them.

The girl closest to him suddenly covered her mouth, pointing at the gossipers and whispering, “Those guys are notorious slackers. They do all sorts of stupid stuff. If you meet them in the exam hall again, stay away to avoid trouble.”

Sheng Wang smiled and whispered back, “I won’t be in the same exam hall with them next time.”

“You’re so not humble.”

As they spoke, the other girl suddenly started tapping her friend’s arm excitedly, “Outside, outside!”

“What’s outside?”

Sheng Wang and the girl looked up to see Jiang Tian’s figure passing by the classroom door.

“Jiang Tian?!”

“What’s Jiang Tian doing here?” the two girls wondered.

Sheng Wang suddenly remembered why they seemed familiar. These two had tried to give Jiang Tian gifts and notes during P.E. class, but were rejected.

A boy who had just entered ran over, holding a familiar loose-leaf notebook.

Sheng Wang looked closely and thought, isn’t that my correction notebook?

Sure enough, the boy placed the notebook on his desk and said, “Jiang Tian asked me to give this to you. He said you left it in his bag.”

The two girls and other classmates who heard this immediately turned their heads.

Sheng Wang was even more confused than they were.