When the Wild Grass Turns Toward the Sun

(One female lead, fictional story, alternate world, please don't apply it to real life. One female lead, not a wish-fulfillment novel, no System. I remember selecting the one-female-lead tag. No idea why it changed to no female lead.)

“We've all been sharpened by fate, yet we still love this world clumsily.”

Chen Ye is a wild weed growing in a crack.

After failing the high school entrance exam, he entered a vocational school bristling with thorns, using bleached hair, earrings, and a careless sneer to defy the world. He mocked hard work, hated rules, and blamed every failure on society's injustice, as if anger could hide the emptiness inside him. Then he met Shen Yuqing, a girl who had given up the entrance exam to care for her gravely ill grandmother. She was a quiet beam of light shining into his desolate world.

She studied pharmacy, with a faded red string tied around her wrist. He studied computers, keeping an unopened textbook beneath his keyboard. She believed that mastering a practical skill could change one's fate, while he thought life had long since been written as an absurdity.

When an early admission letter sent her to a prestigious university, when the blue glow of an internet cafe became the only hue in his life, and when an invitation to a formal banquet landed on the table beside expired instant noodles, the collision of their two worlds taught the once-fierce boy how to change in silence for the first time.

“When you look at me, I don't see the kind of fawning you get from those lapdogs.”

“Some debts can't be paid off with a roast duck.”

This is a coming-of-age story about how growth happens quietly. It's about a boy finding his direction amid the chaos, a wild weed learning to grow toward the sun, and the legend of a young man named Chen Ye.