Playtime [Campus]

[Print edition preorder: June 1, 7:30 p.m.]

That math prodigy who was insanely good at competitions has finally studied herself crazy. She's throwing in the towel!

Two strong leads / school life / rational, sharp-tongued girl / cheerful, sunny puppy

In the second semester of her first year of high school, Ming Li transferred schools on a whim.

Her new school was two thousand kilometers from Haicheng.

There was no glassy, jelly-clear sea or white-sand beach here, and nobody knew about her glorious competition record.

At this top high school, while everyone else took exams, she slept; while everyone else worked hard, she took it easy.

She lost herself in Peter Pan's Neverland, innocent of the ways of the world.

But at some point, a gaze began landing on her back again and again.

Hot, direct, impossible to ignore.

Annoyed, she turned around. The top student in the last row was watching her quietly.

Sunlight fell across the boy's handsome, lean profile. The moment their eyes met, he curled his lips into a smile.

Ming Li: ?

·

The top student, You Can, was said to be brilliant without being arrogant, dazzling without being blinding, and easygoing despite his excellent grades.

Too bad he was a math competition student. Ming Li couldn't stand the sight of him.

He seemed sunny and cheerful on the surface. Only she, who lived downstairs from him, had seen his true colors.

A smug, despicable show-off who couldn't say a decent thing.

Yet everyone else was taken in by him.

Ming Li hated everything about You Can's hypocrisy. In the middle of the night, she hacked into the school forum and edited his photo into a crying doge meme. She even secretly swapped his sunflower seeds for cilantro.

She thought she could stay in the shadows forever, coming and going by night without anyone noticing, until that evening

In the dimly flickering hallway, You Can leaned against her doorframe, waiting for her like a hunter lying in wait.

"Ming, look at this." He took out her exam paper, covered in red X's, and raised an eyebrow. "Sixty-six in math? Rank 499?"

"Give it back!"

Ming Li lunged for it, furious, but he caught her wrist with one hand and pinned her against the wall.

He suddenly leaned close to her ear, his tone meaningful. "Tell me, are you planning to keep your score this low for the next three years?"

Ming Li froze.

"Someone who gets a sixty-six in math couldn't solve this final problem."

"You've given yourself away again."

·

After the college entrance exams, she sorted through her diary. The wind slipped by and turned to the last page.

There lay a confession from her lowest point.

I request permission to become invisible and quietly make it through a thousand days.

Sunlight spilled in at an angle through the window, lighting the fingers holding her book.

Her gaze dropped. At some point, someone had gently added a line in pencil at the end.

Request denied.

Because I see you.

"I see you" comes from the movie Avatar.

See the author's note in Chapter One for content warnings.

*HE. The male and female leads have no intimate contact before adulthood.

*Many elements are fictionalized, including but not limited to the competition system, timeline, and locations. Everything serves the story, so please don't compare it to real life.

Theme: Study hard and always strive to be number one.