[ATM Alcove, Jiangcheng Commercial Bank — September 15, 12:14 PM]
The Jiangcheng Commercial Bank branch on the East Gate of Qinghua University had two ATMs in an alcove off the main lobby. At 12:14 PM both of them were empty. The lunch rush had pulled the alcove clean twenty minutes earlier.
The fluorescent above the second machine was flickering. The bell on the lobby door rang.
Long Tian stepped into the alcove. The door swung shut behind him.
He stood for a moment looking at the two ATMs. Then he chose the one with the steady light.
The card came out of his back pocket. Plastic worn pale at the corners.
The numbers on the front had gone faint enough that he had to know them by feel — sixteen digits he had memorized when he was still sixteen. Long Tian could still remember the first time he opened an account when the welfare bureau required people of his age to have a bank account.
The bank account was meant by the state as mandatory destination for his welfare benefits that barely covered his rent and his month's supply of instant noodles. Ever since he got his card, he had never seen it show anything more than three digits.
Long Tian finally inserted the card into the machine.
The machine took a moment to register. Then the keypad lit.
Before he typed in his PIN, he looked around. There was no one there.
His thumb found the PIN without him having to look. Then he typed one-nine-two-eight. Four digits. After typing it in, the machine loaded for a moment, and then an interface appeared on the screen.
He tapped the button on the touchscreen. CHECK BALANCE.
The processing wheel turned.
¥8,130.00
He looked at the number.
Then he looked at it again.
His thumb hovered above the screen for a beat. Then he pressed WITHDRAW. Then ¥100.
The machine whirred.
Five 20-yuan notes slid out of the slot. Crisp. Unfolded. The kind of fresh notes that came in from the central branch every morning.
Long Tian quickly took the banknotes from the dispenser with both hands.
He first counted them once. He counted them a second time. He counted them a third.
After the third count, he placed them carefully in the main mouth of his wallet.
Then the machine spit out the receipt. There, it was printed:
NEW BALANCE: ¥8,030.00
Long Tian took the receipt. He then folded the receipt and put it in one of his wallet's pockets.
Finally, he pulled the card and just stood there, his face filled with a myriad of emotions.
Then, he placed his card back in his wallet.
"This is real."
The words came out into the empty alcove.
"This is actually real."
A laugh pushed out of him before he had decided to let it — short, half-surprised, the kind of laugh he had not known he had until it was already in the air.
Long Tian laughed hard. For a moment, he kept laughing. "I'm not poor anymore! I'm not poor anymore! I can eat whatever I want! Buy new socks… no, I can even buy new clothes!"
The fluorescent stuttered.
He looked at his wallet again and the cash inside it. Took them out and counted them again.
"One hundred yuan." He held the bills up to the flickering light. "Ha… Hahaha!"
"About time. I should've had this years ago."
Feeling elated, he finally put the cash back in the wallet, folded the wallet and placed it in one of his pockets.
He pushed the door open and the bell rang shut behind him.
"Well, it doesn't matter. It's here now, and I could finally live a life meant for me."
-------------------
[East Gate Street — 12:22 PM]
The stall was at the end of the row, where the sidewalk narrowed past the bicycle racks — a blue tarpaulin canopy held up by two bent poles, three plastic stools faded from red to pink by the sun, and a wok older than its owner. The smell of pork crackling in dark oil wafted through the air.
An old man was at the burner with a long-handled basket, fishing out a portion of noodles from the boiling pot. The noodles then went into a paper bowl. He then placed the noodles on the counter for passersby to see.
After that, he wiped his hands on the cloth tied to his apron string and looked up.
"Xiao Tian! You're here!"
The old man looked at him and waved his hand enthusiastically.
Long Tian stopped mid-step. He then looked behind him to see if there was anyone behind him that could be 'Xiao Tian'. When he looked back, all he saw were tables filled with students and workers eating lunch.
"Uhmm… hi, Uncle Qiang."
Long Tian said slowly, careful not to embarrass himself. He slowly came up to the stall and took his usual stool.
"Sit, sit! Eat! You look thin today, Xiao Tian. Studying too hard, eh?"
The old man was already reaching for the better noodles — the bundle on the right side of the prep board, the kind he saved for the customers who tipped properly.
Seeing him work there, Long Tian couldn't help but wonder. What's wrong with this old man? I've been eating here for a long time already and he's barely said anything to me. Did this old man win the lottery or something?
"Uhmm… the usual please," Long Tian said, and his voice came out level. "And add an extra skewer today. Iced tea instead of water."
Long Tian waited for the look. The pause when this street food vendor would weigh whether he could afford the extra two yuan, the resigned shrug as he gave it anyway out of pity for him.
It did not come.
"Of course, of course! Celebrating something?"
The old man was already cracking eggs into the wok. Two of them. He had never gotten two before.
"Something like that."
The food came down in a bowl that held fifteen yuan worth of food charged at ten. Four skewers instead of three. Extra noodles. The iced tea had been opened for him. Uncle Qiang set the chopsticks across the rim and stood there for a beat, beaming, as if Long Tian were a returning son.
"Eat well, Xiao Tian. A young man needs his strength."
Long Tian looked at the abundant food before him and picked up the chopsticks.
"Uncle, this is too much—"
"Nonsense! You're a good customer." The old man's chest rose. "A good boy. You remind me of my son."
He stirred what was in the wok once.
"He's a manager now. In a textile factory in Beiyuan. He sends money home every month."
Long Tian chewed.
The noodles were better than they had been yesterday. The eggs were soft enough to break when his chopsticks touched them. The iced tea was cold.
"You must be proud," he said.
"Very proud!" Uncle Qiang pointed at him with a greasy spatula. "And you — you'll do well too, Xiao Tian. I can tell. There's something special about you. I've always thought so."
The chopsticks paused in Long Tian's hand. For a moment, he did not move. Then he lifted another bite. Chewed. Swallowed.
"That's… that's kind of you to say, Uncle."
A group of students passed the stall — three of them, in the kind of clean shirts that meant somebody at home was doing the laundry. One of them looked at Long Tian. There was no judgment on those looks, only admiration and recognition.
Long Tian returned the nod and held the smile in place.
Though buried inside the smiles and the nods and the stuttering, deep resentment and bitterness swirled from the depths of his chest.
It was slow, familiar but ever present.
Where were you all when I was hungry. Where was the smile. Where was the nod. Where were any of you when I had thirty yuan to last a week.
He just sat there, remembering how he had to work from one construction site to another just to have an additional few more yuan so he could buy a little more food.
How he abandoned his passions and dreams just to have something to eat.
How the world, despite his unusually handsome visage, seemingly had forgotten about him.
He swallowed it down with the noodles.
It does not matter. The past is past. What matters is that they see me now.
They just didn't realize who I was before. Now, with the system, they will finally see who I am.
I forgive all of them. It's good that they recognized me now as who I should be.
He finished the bowl. He drank the iced tea to the bottom of the cup. He set the cup down on the counter and stood.
He took a 20-yuan note from his right pocket — one of the five that were still warm from the alcove — and laid it on the counter.
"Keep it, Uncle. For next time."
Uncle Qiang's eyes went to the bill. His mouth opened. The weathered face crumpled and the eyes shone wet at the corners.
"Xiao Tian — that's too — "
"For next time," Long Tian said again, giving the old man a warm smile.
He turned and walked.
Behind him, Uncle Qiang stood with the 20-yuan note in his open hand. The mouth was working at something the air had not yet shaped into a word.
By the time Long Tian was past the bicycle racks, Uncle Qiang had let out a deep sigh, smiled at the spot where the boy had disappeared, and turned back to his cooking.
-------------------
[12:36 PM]
The street between the stall and the campus gate had not changed since yesterday. The pavement, the advertising on the wall, the bicycle bell somewhere up the block.
Long Tian walked through it like he had just won the lottery, his every stride full of confidence.
The system folded the target list out into the air at the edge of his vision.
His eyes went to the other panel that he had opened earlier but hadn't had time to read after he parted ways with Su Qingxue that morning.
-------------------
[Zhang Yuting]
[Class president. Economics.]
[Lower middle-class family. Under scholarship.]
[Personality: diligent, perfectionist, secretly romantic.]
[Most likely present location: Economics Building, Study Room 3.]
[Recommended approach: academic connection.]
-------------------
He read it twice as he walked.
"So she has the same major as me." He spoke it into the street and the street did not care. "Not only that, she is also a scholarship student like me."
He smiled.
"I wonder what Zhang Yuting is like. I hope she is not hard to deal with."
The Economics Building rose at the end of the path — glass, steel, three stories. Long Tian looked up at it and let the sun hit his face.
He then pushed through the doors and entered the building.
Study Room 3 had glass walls on three sides and one solid wall on the fourth where the whiteboard was.
The midday sun came through the south wall in slanted gold beams that caught on the chalk dust and made the dust visible. The air conditioner hummed. The room smelled of dry-erase marker and old paper.
The room was occupied by one student.
She sat at the table closest to the south window. White blouse. Dark slacks. Posture that did not relax when she thought no one was looking.
Six highlighters lined the top of her notebook — yellow, pink, green, blue, orange, red — equally spaced, as if she'd measured them. A textbook lay open at the spine with a pen resting in the gutter.
Her shoulder bag sat on the chair beside her with a folded blazer on top, the class-representative pin still on its collar.
Her hand moved between the highlighters without her eyes leaving the page. Yellow — uncapped, one stroke, capped, back to its slot. Pink for the next line. Green. Each color returned to the same position it came from.
Her brow stayed furrowed while she searched the page, only to relax once she'd written the next note down.
Long Tian watched her for a beat through the glass.
[Target: Zhang Yuting — present.]
[Affection: 61.]
He pushed the door open.
The hinge didn't make a sound. Zhang Yuting looked up before the door had finished opening, her pen frozen above the page. She'd heard it anyway — or felt the air move, or something else entirely.
"The other rooms are full..." Long Tian gave her the smile he had been wearing on the walk over. "Would you mind if I join you here?"
Zhang Yuting looked at the nearby study rooms. The other rooms were not full. Some were even empty. She then looked back at him; her eyebrow registered the not-full and let it pass.
"Uhmm… Sure." She gestured at the chair across from her. "Go ahead."
Long Tian took the chair and sat on it. He soon pulled his textbook from the bag and set it on the table without hurry, like he had all the time in the world.
Finally, he opened it to a chapter and didn't say anything.
A minute passed. Two.
He soon turned to a page.
Zhang Yuting glanced at him. Then she looked down and went back to her page. Not long after, she glanced up at him again.
Long Tian pretended not to notice and continued on reading.
When she dropped her eyes back to her highlighters, he closed his book a finger's width and said, "So… what do the colors mean?"
She blinked. The crease between her brows loosened, and a smile came through — the kind that showed her teeth and made her eyes smaller.
"Of course. Yellow is key concepts. Pink is formulas. Green is examples. Blue is —"
She stopped. Laughed at herself, small, embarrassed.
"Sorry. I don't usually get to talk about this."
"Blue is what?"
For a moment, Zhang Yuting looked at him; then a small restrained sound left her lips.
"Pfft! Hehehe!"
She let the laugh finish. Then they talked about what the colors meant. When she had explained all the colors to him, they continued on with macroeconomic theory.
She knew it better than he did.
The system had given him fluency in the morning's purchase, but it was only enough for a specific topic, not for the whole discipline.
Long Tian listened. He matched her on the things he could match her on. He asked questions on the things he could not.
Twenty minutes in, she was leaning forward.
She made a joke about her professor's lectures — about the man's habit of rephrasing simple concepts until they became obscure. Long Tian laughed before he could stop himself.
"You really get this stuff," she said, seeing how they were having a good time there. "Most people would just memorize the formula and pray."
"You're the one with six highlighters."
"Six is restraint. I had seven before I gave up purple."
He laughed again.
[Zhang Yuting Affection: 61 → 62]
Then the laugh faded. She soon went quiet for a moment — not awkward, just thinking — and set the pen down.
"Six hours a day," she said.
"What?"
"That's how long I study. You looked like you were going to ask."
"Well… I was indeed going to ask."
She nodded slowly and looked at her hands. The nails were bitten short. The knuckles were dry from washing too often.
"I have to keep the scholarship. I need to study hard. Use all the time I have for it."
"Wow, that's a lot."
"I can't help it. That's just what I need to do."
She did not say more. Long Tian thought she was going to leave it there.
Then she said, "My cousin and I are practically sisters. We were inseparable. We even went to the same schools. We grew up next door. And when they moved into a bigger house, I'd still go over, visit her and stay the night."
A pause.
"Actually, she's the reason I'm here."
"How."
"She — "
She stopped. She put a hand flat on the table for a beat, as if checking the table was still there.
"I don't usually talk about this."
"You don't have to."
"No, I — "
Another pause. Shorter.
"You know, I really loved my cousin. She is the sister I never had. But in the last four years, we began to drift apart. She suddenly had a lot of money for herself. They even went to buy a bigger house in the city."
She was looking at her hands again.
"She has her best friend and her work… I only have my family and myself."
The crease was back at her brows. Not the studying one.
"And because I only have myself, I have no choice but to study hard, pass the examinations and become someone who can stand beside her."
"So that's why six hours."
He waited.
"I don't want to be left behind by her. We grew up together, we were from the same family. So, I don't think I am that different from her."
She looked up at him. Her fingers were pulling at the corner of her notebook. Her eyes searched his face for a moment, like she was trying to figure out if she'd made a mistake by telling him all that.
"I sound stupid, don't I?" Zhang Yuting asked softly, looking at him, worried that she just said a little too much.
"You don't."
She held his eyes for a moment. Then she looked away.
"To be honest, I don't know why I said all of that out…"
[Zhang Yuting Affection: 62 → 63]
The system ticked up one point. However, Long Tian barely noticed it.
He continued, "And how was it?"
Zhang Yuting let out a sigh. "To be honest, I'm not so sure about a lot of things. I don't even know if economics is right for me."
She said it without performance then continued.
"My cousin... she's always been like that. Good with people. Everyone goes to her when they need something. She has her best friend, she has her work, she has people around her all the time. And I'm just here with my textbooks and my highlighters, studying at least six hours a day so I can even keep a little bit of pace with her."
She paused.
"You know, sometimes I wonder what it's like to be the person people come to, instead of the person who's always trying to catch up."
-------------------
Long Tian did not speak for a while. There was only silence between them. A few moments later, Zhang Yuting waved her hand and dispelled the quiet away.
"Anyway, enough about me," she said, looking at Long Tian as if she wanted to know him. "What about you?"
"Me?"
"Why economics."
He did not answer right away.
[Recommended response — purchase: 20 CP?]
He let the prompt fade without using it.
"I want to understand why people make the choices they make. Money is just the cleanest way to measure what they actually value."
"That's..." Zhang Yuting's eyes widened in surprise, not expecting his answer. "That's… actually philosophical."
"Well, I'm not all spreadsheets."
Zhang Yuting laughed softly at that. For a moment she didn't say anything. She just sat there looking at him like she was deciding whether to say what she was about to say.
"I want to start a company someday," she said. "Something that helps people. Not just makes money."
"Most guys would call that naive."
"They have."
"Well, most guys are idiots."
Her smile widened.
She picked the pen up. Set it down. Picked it up again. Then she leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling for a beat.
"What about you? What was it like back home?"
Long Tian then told Zhang Yuting everything.
He told her that he lived in a room that had an area of only four square meters. He told her about the foam, the laundry line strung above his head, the vent that piped the next unit's alarm into his sleep. He did not perform the poverty.
He did not soften it either. He said it all out without any attempts to embellish his story.
She listened the way he had listened to her earlier. The crease was back. The hand had stopped moving on the highlighters.
When he finished she was quiet for a long time.
"That's… that's inhumane..." she said finally. "You shouldn't have had to live like that."
He shrugged.
"Maybe."
Yes, he thought. I shouldn't have. None of us should have. Why should men live like worthless pigs devoid of any purpose?
The thought arrived in a single fragment. Yet, he did not chase it. He let it sit in the corner of his mind where the system text lived, and he turned back to her.
"To tell you the truth, Long Tian, being with you right now feels nice," she said as she relaxed on her chair, stretching her back and arms up into a yawn, her curves showing through her clothing.
"Umm… Yeah." Long Tian said, looking away from her as he scratched the side of his cheek.
However, Zhang Yuting was oblivious to it.
Between them, the afternoon sun had shifted across the table by a knuckle's width.
The air conditioner cycled off and the room went quieter for it. Somewhere through the glass a chair scraped in another study room and resumed its place.
Zhang Yuting went back to her work and opened her textbook to the next chapter. Long Tian opened his.
They worked.
Once in a while, Long Tian would glance at her — briefly — when she was not looking. Inside his head, the system was quiet. His thoughts were quiet. The afternoon was simple.
"This is what it should be like..." he murmured in a voice only he could hear.
"You said something?" Zhang Yuting looked up, only to see that Long Tian was busy reading his book. Long Tian, pretending to read, did not look up at her.
She went back to her work.
Then —
[Ding.]
He did not look up.
[Su Qingxue Affection: 0 → -1.]
Long Tian blinked. Then he blinked again.
[Ding.]
[Su Qingxue Affection: -1 → -5.]
His pen paused.
Did something happen to Su Qingxue?
"Long Tian?" Zhang Yuting was looking up at him. "You okay?"
"Yeah, I —"
[Ding. Ding. Ding.]
[Su Qingxue Affection: -5 → -12.]
His grip on the pen tightened.
Seven points? Hey, wasn't Su Qingxue at 65 earlier? How come she's at -12 now?
[Ding. Ding.]
[Su Qingxue Affection: -12 → -19.]
The color went out of his face. He could feel it go. Zhang Yuting was watching him and he could feel that too.
"Long Tian?"
[Ding. Ding. Ding.]
[Su Qingxue Affection: -19 → -30.]
His knuckles whitened on the edge of the table.
Su Qingxue's affection points were dropping like a rock on freefall right in front of him. The air conditioner went away. So did the crease between Zhang Yuting's brows. So did the afternoon sun across the table. There was just the number.
The number sat in the air in front of him.
-30
Who the fuck out there is ruining my good deeds?
Zhang Yuting's hand came across the table.
She set it on his arm.
"Long Tian, talk to me." Her voice came from very far away. "What's wrong?"
-------------------
[End of Chapter]