When he said that, his tone was light, no different from usual, carrying no particular emotion.

Yet for no reason at all, Tao Zhi’s heart stumbled twice.

The boy leaned his upper body against the desk. The half-pulled metal zipper of his school jacket knocked against the wooden edge of the table, making a faint sound.

It was mid-October; the autumn wind outside carried a chill as it rustled through golden leaves. The classroom was warm with the air conditioner on.

Holding up her paper, Tao Zhi leaned closer. At such a short distance, she could see the faint color contained within the boy’s peach blossom eyes.

Jiang Qihuai had a pair of affectionate eyes — the ends of his lashes long and slightly upturned, the curve of his eyelids subtly arched. When he focused his gaze on someone, it easily gave a person the delicate illusion of gentleness.

But the sharp, cold edges of his features, as well as his entire temperament and character, were the complete opposite of those eyes.

Behind the paper, the corners of Tao Zhi’s lips pursed unnaturally.

“Then… will you help me look at it?” she asked softly.

Jiang Qihuai extended a hand, palm upward, his long fingers moving slightly. “Give it here.”

Tao Zhi handed him the composition in her hand.

Jiang Qihuai took it, flipped a page, and started reading from the short essay. His eyes lowered, expression focused.

Tao Zhi rested both her arms on his desk, chin propped up, waiting eagerly.

After finishing the short essay, Jiang Qihuai commented blandly, “I stopped using this kind of grammar back in elementary school.”

“……”

Tao Zhi didn’t want to listen to his sarcasm and rolled her eyes. “Don’t act pretentious. This is at least middle school grammar.”

“Your foundation’s fine, not many grammatical errors, but your vocabulary and syntax are too simple. If you want a high score, just narrating correctly isn’t enough.” Jiang Qihuai lifted his head, his fingertip bending slightly to flick her paper. “You have no novel viewpoint, no advanced vocabulary or sentence patterns, no highlight.”

Tao Zhi decided to take back what she’d thought earlier — this person had absolutely nothing to do with the word gentle.

He’d crushed her from start to finish, leaving her somewhat deflated. “You might as well just say I wrote crap.”

“Not exactly. This composition would still pass for middle school,” Jiang Qihuai paused, then added, “First year.”

Tao Zhi: “……”

Who are you trying to humiliate!!!

I’m in my second year of high school!!!

Tao Zhi scrunched her nose unhappily at him. After being half-praised and half-critiqued into exhaustion, she no longer bothered to keep up appearances and said arrogantly, “Then fix it for me.”

Jiang Qihuai, amused and annoyed by her commanding tone, said, “Two hundred for the lesson.”

Tao Zhi choked, staring at him in disbelief. “Are you addicted to tutoring? You’ll take anyone’s money?”

“Friendship price,” Jiang Qihuai said lazily. “On regular weekdays, it’d cost more.”

Tao Zhi said nothing, but in her mind she rolled the words friendship price back and forth several times, lingering particularly on the word friendship. Suddenly, it didn’t feel quite as pleasant.

As they were bickering back and forth, the classroom door was suddenly pushed open—

Li Sijia burst in.

Tao Zhi lifted her head and looked over.

Li Sijia also seemed surprised to see someone in the classroom. She stood there frozen, eyes red, tears still clinging to the corners of her eyes.

Tao Zhi looked back at her, gaze calm.

Jiang Qihuai didn’t even glance at her—not even once. He didn’t lift his head, didn’t care whether she had entered or not. He simply drew out a red pen, marked a line on Tao Zhi’s paper, and helped her revise her composition.

“The first paragraph is too flat,” he said.

As if Li Sijia were someone entirely insignificant.

And indeed, she was—someone entirely insignificant.

Jiang Qihuai was proud and aloof, possessing a self-confidence and arrogance strong enough to match his own ability. He stood at the peak of the mountain; therefore, those below him were simply invisible to him.

That was the natural order of things.

Someone like him was meant to have only the best.

So she studied hard, over and over again. She scored seven hundred points; she made it into the top few of the grade’s ranking. The fluttering heartbeat of a girl’s first love pushed her to improve herself—hoping that one day, he would see her.

But he couldn’t see her.

He didn’t care about her existence or her progress. Yet he was willing to help someone else—someone who wasn’t even worthy of his attention—study.

He corrected her compositions, highlighted key points for her, brought her yogurt, played basketball with her, chatted with her between classes. Sometimes, he even smiled at her.

Even when Tao Zhi pestered him unreasonably, in those moments when Li Sijia thought he would finally grow impatient, he only sighed, a little helplessly.

As if—to Jiang Qihuai, Tao Zhi was an exception.

Even though she wasn’t standing at the mountaintop, even though she was only at the foot of the mountain, she could still push her way into his sight, bright and stubborn, demanding all of his attention.

Li Sijia admitted she had selfish motives. She had never once done something like reporting a student to a teacher, but when the one under suspicion was that exception, she couldn’t help the unwillingness that surged up in her heart.

Clearly, she was someone who only scored fifty or sixty on every test. Clearly, she either slept or played on her phone during class every day. Clearly, she had never made any effort.

Li Sijia remembered vividly—the moment the teacher announced on the podium that Tao Zhi had scored 118 in English, Jiang Qihuai had smiled.

He had hooked the corner of his lips ever so slightly, slowly—and that tiny motion had also stirred the darkness she had never known existed in the depths of her own heart.

She bit her lip, and the tears gathered at the corners of her eyes fell all at once, uncontrollably.

Tao Zhi looked at her crying and let out a soft, “Hey.”

Only then did Jiang Qihuai finally raise his head.

Li Sijia rubbed her eyes hard, took a deep breath, and walked over to stand before them.

The girl was crying like a pear blossom bathed in rain, the tip of her nose red, her voice trembling with sobs. “I misunderstood you.”

Tao Zhi didn’t quite react in time.

“I kept thinking you never worked hard, that your grades weren’t real, that your scores were copied,” Li Sijia sniffed, her eyes red as she looked at her. “I just… at that time I just…”

She couldn’t finish. The tears started falling again.

Tao Zhi turned around, rummaged inside the desk for a while, and finally found a packet of tissues, which she handed to her.

Li Sijia took it, murmured a quiet “thank you,” her face burning red with shame. Unable to stay any longer, she clutched the tissues and ran out of the classroom.

Tao Zhi was a little dumbfounded. “Hey, I just wanted her to take one. Why’d she take the whole pack?”

Jiang Qihuai: “……”

Tao Zhi turned back around and watched as Jiang Qihuai continued correcting her composition.

He read quickly. The tip of the red pen moved swiftly across the page—crossing out sentences that were too simple, circling grammatical errors, and marking words that could be replaced.

The entire page, once filled with black ink, was soon covered in red. Nearly the whole essay was bleeding with corrections.

Propping her chin up, Tao Zhi thought of how pitiful Li Sijia had looked crying just now and sighed. “Consort Li apologized to me.”

Jiang Qihuai said nothing.

“Consort Li even cried,” Tao Zhi went on.

“You still have the time to care about other people,” Jiang Qihuai said without looking up, swiftly fixing another error in her writing. “This lousy essay.”

Tao Zhi wanted to roll her eyes again. “Well, I just didn’t expect her to apologize.”

Jiang Qihuai finally raised his eyes. “So, are we still keeping that bet or not?”

“Of course,” Tao Zhi said. “Once a word is spoken, even four horses can’t chase it back. But—no need to apologize over the school broadcast.”

After thinking for a moment, she added, “But the 800-word self-reflection, you still have to write it.”

Jiang Qihuai had no idea where this princess got her confidence, thinking she was bound to win. Just a few days ago, she had been slumped over her desk, moaning about how she regretted it.

He started reading the ending of her essay. It was so awful he couldn’t bear it anymore, so he simply wrote her a new conclusion himself on the blank space at the bottom.

When he finished, he pushed the paper toward her and jerked his chin.

—Take it.

Tao Zhi took the composition, glanced at the time on her phone just as the dismissal bell rang.

The students from Class One began trickling back into the classroom, but Tao Zhi didn’t turn around. She kept reading the essay on his desk, her own black handwriting now drowned in a sea of red ink.

“Your vocabulary’s weak,” Jiang Qihuai said, picking up the book he’d been reading halfway through. “Take it slow.”

“I’m memorizing three hundred words a day now,” Tao Zhi said while looking at the new ending he’d written, “plus reviewing the old ones.”

Jiang Qihuai looked at her. “You can actually memorize that much?”