Green Banyan

"Have you ever seen a newly sprouted banyan tree?" Yan Xuan looked up at the ancient banyan before him, its tangled branches towering into the clouds. Sunlight danced among the lush boughs, dappling his silhouette. In the boy's eyes, light flickered alongside boundless hope.

"What?" Sui Er clearly hadn't heard him. His gaze followed the face before him, then turned with him toward the ancient banyan.

"A young banyan, just budding."

"Now that I think about it, I don't think I have."

"That's right, because they've lived through far too many years." He murmured to himself, but his words drifted into another boy's ears.

Campus romance x equally matched leads

Brash, decisive, never looks before he leaps, insufferably smug young heir to a ruthless capitalist

vs.

Quick to anger and quicker to cool down, gets angry but never sad, carefree rich kid, the child everyone else's parents wish they had

Yan Xuan had always left everyone else in the dust, miles ahead of the competition. Then he found himself up against Sui Er, a once utterly unremarkable student who'd hovered around the middle of the pack, only to emerge overnight as a top student. The reason was simple: Sui Er refused to accept the class assignments, so he decided to study like Yan Xuan and earn a place in the advanced class as soon as possible, so he could knock Yan Xuan off his first-place throne.

Their classmates had this to say: "The world of top students really is something else. We're just not cut out for it."

So the teachers and students at No. 1 High School gradually went from being startled whenever the two appeared together to thinking nothing of it. The forum's most popular posts proved that some people were serious, discussing study methods and learning from top students, while others were just as serious about shipping the pair until the end of time.

"Hey, Yan Xuan, look at what they're saying on the forum. Aren't you going to clear things up?" Sui Er swiped furiously across the screen, shaking his head in disbelief as he tugged at Yan Xuan's sleeve.

"Hm? You should have thought of that when you first started clinging to me." Yan Xuan set down his pen, leaned closer to Sui Er's phone with a smile, then lifted his eyes to look at him.

"?!" Sui Er immediately threw in the towel, but then he thought about it.

"I guess that's true?"

Theme: Study hard and keep improving every day.