A Junior College Student in the Nineties

Wen Ying was reborn.

Being reborn didn't seem to send her straight to the pinnacle of life. The timing was rather awkward: she had been reborn on the night before the gaokao.

Who hasn't imagined taking the college entrance exam one more time in this life, aiming for Tsinghua or Peking University, or at least getting into a 985 university?

Even if you don't dream of topping the rankings, everyone has some attachment to prestigious schools.

The problem was, her academic knowledge wasn't enough to take the gaokao again.

This time, she couldn't even get into a regular four-year university. She went straight to some lousy vocational college.

-

A vocational college was a vocational college. So be it.

At least she could part ways with her ex-husband. The qualification wasn't impressive, but in the 1990s, degrees hadn't started losing their value yet. She believed she could make a living somehow.

Wen Ying thought being able to study at all was already pretty good.

But at some point, a rumor, half-believed and half-dismissed, began making the rounds in her class. It grew more and more outrageous. They said she had deliberately flunked her exams.

And why? Just so she could stay in Xicheng and attend school with Zheng Guangyao, the class's notorious troublemaker.

What?

No. She and Zheng Guangyao barely had anything to do with each other. In her previous life, around the time she retired, she had asked Zheng Guangyao for help, and an old classmate had done her a favor. But that connection had come much later.

There was absolutely nothing romantic between them at this point.

She had no idea where these absurd rumors had come from.

-

Yet Zheng Guangyao, dressed in a floral shirt, really did come looking for her. Usually so unserious, he pulled up a chair beside the lectern. He wasn't even chewing on a foxtail grass stem as he usually did. With great solemnity, he sighed. "I know you like me, but giving up your bright future to do this isn't worth it."

[Trope recorded on 2023.9.1, blurb recorded on 10.12]

Theme: The spirit of striving for oneself