After the morning reading session ended, Ah Jie was slumped over his desk, bored out of his mind.
The English reading had already drained all his morning energy.
He desperately needed a break.
But clearly, Shen Yuan wasn't about to let Ah Jie off the hook.
"Ah Jie, show me how to solve this problem!"
Zhou Shaojie lifted his head, annoyed. "If you're asking for help, you could at least be a little more polite!"
"Ah Jie, *please* show me how to solve this problem!"
You couldn't say he wasn't polite; Shen Yuan had said please.
But you couldn't say he *was* polite either; Shen Yuan's attitude was the same as ever.
Zhou Shaojie rolled his eyes and looked down at the paper Shen Yuan handed him.
The moment he saw the paper, Ah Jie knew something was up.
"Wait a minute, you two are sitting apart now. Why is Li Zhi still giving you problems?"
Shen Yuan looked at him as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Is there a problem?"
Ah Jie's eyes turned green with envy.
"Then go ask Li Zhi. This king is tired."
With that, Zhou Shaojie lowered his head.
Shen Yuan raised a hand to point, about to say something, when his new deskmate spoke up.
"Can I take a look?"
Sweet Sister Peipei smiled as she looked at the paper in Shen Yuan's hands. "My math isn't as amazing as Zhou Shaojie's, but it's still pretty good. I got a 136 on this week's quiz, you know."
Before Ah Jie could even feel the blow, Shen Yuan's own defenses were shattered.
'Wait, is everyone in this class that good at math?'
'Is Old Zhou trying to use this year's college entrance exams to get himself promoted to Master Teacher or something?'
Shen Yuan still handed the math problems to Zhuo Peipei.
Then he propped his arms on Ah Jie's desk and leaned his head over toward Zhuo Peipei.
"Hey, haven't we done these problems before?"
Shen Yuan nodded. "Li Zhi said she copied them from old test papers."
Zhuo Peipei blinked.
'Yes! More shipping fuel!'
The two were childhood friends. One was a top student, the other was... at the bottom of the honors class.
While the gap wasn't ridiculously huge, it was definitely there.
There might even be a gap of over 100 points between them!
A 100-point difference on the college entrance exams would put them in completely different worlds.
So when Zhuo Peipei saw Shen Yuan studying math so hard during morning reading today, her mind immediately went there.
'He's working hard to catch up to Li Zhi!'
And now, learning that the math problems Shen Yuan was doing were actually provided by Li Zhi, Zhuo Peipei felt a deep sense of satisfaction.
Seeing Zhuo Peipei's delighted expression, Shen Yuan was completely confused. "What's up?"
"Just got my shipping fix."
Ah Jie raised one hand and said in a muffled voice, "Let me introduce you. The president of the honors class's Kissing Association, Zhuo Peipei."
"Her masterpiece that made her president is 'Love in the Era of Lecterns,' starring the red and blue chalk."
Shen Yuan froze.
"What about the white chalk?"
"That's their final destination," Zhuo Peipei said, pushing up her glasses with a devout expression. "When the student on duty erases the blackboard, all traces of romance return to a white void."
'What kind of weird ship is this?!'
'Wait, the honors class has a bizarre club like this?'
As everyone knows, these shippers will ship literally anything!
The phenomenon of shippers shipping indiscriminately is actually a projection of modern loneliness and a longing for ideal relationships.
To put it bluntly, they don't care about the feelings of the people being shipped.
And for high school students, this kind of abstract shipping is probably just a way to entertain themselves amidst the dreary life of a senior.
They don't just ship their classmates; they'll even ship some truly bizarre things.
To put it simply, they're just looking for some fun.
The most classic example is the subject-personification rhapsody.
A tragic physics romance: The left-hand rule and the right-hand rule can never hold hands, just like the head teacher and the gym teacher on the class schedule.
When "Five-Year Gaokao, Three-Year Simulation" tries to format their souls into standardized test-taking machines, the boys and girls install a crack patch on the world with their abstract shipping.
In the blind spots of the dean's surveillance, even the chalk dust acts out its own "Love in the Time of Cholera."
Between a sea of practice problems and a storm of hormones, the students cultivate a unique, absurd symbiosis—a teenage version of "One Hundred Years of Solitude," you could say.
But what did that make him and Li Zhi?
Just simple childhood friends?
Or some combination of exam hell and romanticism?
The quantum entanglement of the class's top student and its bottom-ranked one—the problems you practice on are my discarded scratch paper.
Shen Yuan thought about his various interactions with Li Zhi. It seemed they were, in fact, pretty shippable.
Take the claw machines, for example. That was prime shipping material.
After all, filling a girl's bedroom with dolls you've won for her—isn't that a form of possessiveness?
Even if he and Li Zhi didn't end up together in the future.
When Li Zhi came home, walked into her room, and saw all those dolls, she would naturally think of him.
Especially when she saw that cat doll, a certain phrase would automatically ring in her ears—"I am the Claw Machine King of Jiyang!"
Isn't that a kind of psychological invasion?
Ship away, ship away.
It's all good.
Shen Yuan saw his classmates as vessels for his own abstract behavior, so he didn't mind becoming a vessel for theirs.
Besides, it wasn't really offensive to him and Li Zhi.
It's not like they were spreading nasty rumors.
After getting the steps to solve the math problems from the head shipper, Shen Yuan contentedly imagined himself making a Dragon King-style comeback on the next exam.
Then reality dealt him a heavy blow.
Before the first period, physics class, started, Zhou Shaojie waved a perfect-score test paper in front of Shen Yuan.
"Oh my, how did I get a perfect score? This physics test was clearly pretty hard."
Shen Yuan had the urge to shut Ah Jie's stupid mouth with violence.
But before Shen Yuan could say anything, Zhuo Peipei spoke up.
"Is this the fated bond between a science student and physics?"
Ah Jie immediately broke into a wide, triumphant grin.
But Ah Jie's smile quickly vanished.
"Zhou Shaojie, your grades are actually pretty good. You just need to improve your English. But why are you so uninterested in doing that?"
"Is it because your heart is loyal to the sciences?"
Shipper Peipei's glasses flashed with a dazzling light as she tried to uncover the hidden love in Ah Jie's heart.
"Or is it because your unrequited love for English has led you to pour your entire heart into the sciences? What a tragic romance! This is a tragic romance!"
When a pro makes a move, you know they're the real deal.
Shen Yuan was dumbfounded.
'She can ship that, too?'
As expected of the woman who could become president of the honors class's Kissing Association!
But Ah Jie was clearly not one to be easily defeated by the art of shipping.
The boy tugged at his school uniform. Beneath the school emblem, the original "Jiyang Middle School" text had been blacked out and replaced with "Early Love Prohibition Association"!
'A school uniform modding revolution?'
'What kind of renaissance is this?!'
Shen Yuan glanced at his own uniform. It was terrifyingly plain.
'Fuck, why do I want to join this club so bad?!'
'But if I did that, my mom would probably chew me out for ages, and I'd "happily unlock" the glorious achievement of 'Do Your Own Laundry.''
'Better not.'
Upon seeing the "Early Love Prohibition Association," Shipper Peipei's brow furrowed. "A stooge of the dean!"
"Hmph! Shipper-ism has no place in high school!"
Ah Jie said coldly, "Tomorrow, I'm going to snap all the chalk in the honors class!"
"Then tonight, 'Zhou Shaojie and the ABCs' will start its serialization on the school's confession wall!"
Seeing that the situation was about to spiral out of control, Shen Yuan promptly brandished a divine artifact.
"The Memory-Wiper... Eraser!"