The Old Shadow Is Gone

Zuo Lingyang and Yanhe were assigned to the same class (Grade 1 and Class 2). They were separated by an aisle, which made the two feel familiar inexplicably. This familiarity stems from the three-day science training camp before the high school entrance examination - they used to answer questions and listen to lectures in the classroom under the leadership of the same teacher. At that time, Zuo Lingyang was already a top student in science, with clear ideas for solving problems. He would occasionally be called upon by the teacher to share his methods, and he would be gentle but a little distant when he spoke. Yanhe was sitting in the corner of the classroom, with average grades, and did not like to talk. He would only lower his head and calculate silently. Occasionally, he would raise his head, and his eyes would inadvertently fall on her profile when she was explaining a problem. They didn't say a few words, or even asked each other's names, but they remembered each other's small details: she remembered that he always curled up his little finger when holding a pen, and always wrote neatly and orderly on the calculation draft paper; he remembered that she would bite her lower lip lightly when she frowned and thought, and the flying handwriting on the draft paper. After school started, they approached quietly under the guise of being "classmates": she would give him a "casual glance" and then gently tap on the wrong place he had written; he would quietly pick up scraps of paper from under her desk when she was on duty. Those heartbeats hidden in "déjà vu" fermented in careful trials again and again, until after a physics quiz, she casually mentioned the training camp teacher's unique problem-solving ideas, and Yanhe suddenly whispered, "He also said that 'the steps are more important than the answers.'" The two were stunned at the same time - it turned out that the rush to get along in the training camp had already left a mark on each other's hearts, and this two-way secret love had planted the seeds of fate from the first meeting.