After My Top Student Image Crumbled, I Finally Embraced Youth

[School Life] [No System] [One Female Lead]

Before entering the gates of Fu Middle School, Qi Yichen thought he had reached the first peak of his life. Reality hit him head-on: the grades he had once been proud of were crushed to nothing here, and even his class monitor position was in jeopardy after the monthly exams.

As a first-year student, Qi Yichen struggled miserably in the whirlpool of grades. But at the oath-taking platform during the choir festival and on the green fields where the three major ball sports were played, he unexpectedly began to glimpse the person he was beyond the pages of his textbooks.

Was there something more than childhood-friend affection in the care and companionship he received? What kind of person was hidden behind the student council president's cool, distant image? Did the lively, straightforward girl with all that energy also harbor the worries of youth?

One by one, paths of growth that had once run parallel began to intersect with his. What sparks would fly at the turns where their paths needed defining?

The journey from the foot of the mountain to its summit was no more than moving from one school building to another. But when the boy finally stood in the senior-year campus hallway and looked back, he realized that far more than desks and books had been moved over those three years.

This is a candid letter to youth. It is about the ordinary and the restless, about the thoughts that quietly took root in the back rows of classrooms, during late-night talks after lights-out, and amid the rising steam in the cafeteria at dawn.

Some answers would not come until many years later. At seventeen, they could only stumble forward, full of passion, on the road to becoming themselves.