The high-speed train pulled in at two-thirty in the afternoon.
The three of them took the subway from the station. Xu Ye and Qingqing rode six stops before getting off, while Qin Zhiwei switched to Line 12 at a transfer point and headed back to his own school on his own.
Xu Ye walked Qingqing to the entrance of her building and lifted a hand. “I’ll head off then.”
“That, um—”
She started, then caught herself. Her eyes shifted sideways, her lips moved slightly, and it took a long moment before she managed: “Get home safe.”
What she’d actually wanted to say was message me tonight — but when it reached the tip of her tongue, it felt like too much to say out loud, so she swallowed it and offered something more neutral instead.
Xu Ye smiled. “I’ll message you when I’m back. You won’t just not reply like last night, right?”
The memory came back immediately — how about you be my girlfriend? — and a wash of pink swept up her cheeks before she could stop it. She dropped her gaze, turned, and walked into the building.
Xu Ye watched her go, smiled to himself, and headed back to school.
By the time he got there it was already past four in the afternoon, and the thought of buying a car had never felt more urgent.
The fruit shop was doing well. But the pace of earnings still felt slow to him. The shop had stabilized now — run the model as-is and it would basically keep generating income on its own. He was starting to wonder whether he should be developing other revenue streams. Relying on the fruit shop alone, things were going to move at a crawl.
“Li Tongwen, are the others back?”
He greeted Li Tongwen on his way into the shop. Li Tongwen said, “Yang Fei got back this morning. He’s out on a delivery now.”
“What’s gotten into him? He’s actually being useful?”
“The floor attendant’s away for National Holiday. He heard the orders were from the women’s dorm, so he volunteered pretty enthusiastically to handle the door-to-door deliveries personally.”
Xu Ye shook his head, half-laughing. “What an animal.”
Li Tongwen smiled. “Xu Ye, do you want to look over the accounts from the holiday?”
“No need. I trust you.”
Doubt the man, don’t hire him. Hire the man, don’t doubt him. He’d read Li Tongwen’s character clearly from the first day of the semester. Someone like that wasn’t going to cook the books on something like this.
The words landed warmly on Li Tongwen in a way he didn’t show. A single “I trust you” meant more than a dozen sworn declarations of brotherhood ever could.
Life settled back into its rhythms after National Holiday. The freshmen who’d spent weeks finding their footing had by now fully grown into the pace of university life.
Thursday, like Monday, had no early classes. But Xu Ye, who’d gotten used to waking up early, was out of bed before anyone needed to be. Li Tongwen had been awake for a while already, silently mouthing English vocabulary — his Level 4 exam was two months out. Trying not to disturb his roommates, he was going through the list in his head rather than out loud.
Xu Ye noticed, then shook Zhang Xinzhou and Yang Fei awake anyway.
Zhang Xinzhou was up quickly. Yang Fei grumbled from under his blanket: “It’s barely seven. No early class today. What are you waking me for?”
“I was thinking we could go shoot some hoops. We won’t have time in the evenings.”
Zhang Xinzhou: “I’m in.”
Yang Fei, hearing “basketball,” sat up. “Those two of you aren’t going to be any match for me. My high school nickname was the Little Kobe of Second High.”
Xu Ye had played a lot of basketball in high school — not much else to do back then, with no smartphones. Go back far enough and the two main recreational options for middle schoolers were basketball and table tennis. These days the equivalent was PUBG Mobile and Honor of Kings.
In his past life, after university, the grind of work and accumulating stress had worn his body down year by year. Since being reborn, he’d been deliberate about treating it better.
The three of them washed up, threw on athletic shorts, and headed to the campus courts.
Not many people out this early. Some hoops had one or two people practicing shots underneath, not nearly enough for a full game. They hadn’t brought a ball, so they’d need to find others.
“What if they don’t want to play with us? That’d be awkward.”
Xu Ye had already spotted a familiar face across the court before Yang Fei finished the sentence. He led the other two over. “Tang-buzhang, [TL: 部长 (bùzhǎng) — section head or division head; the term used for Student Union officers of that rank, like Arts Division Head. Xu Ye calling Tang Peng by his title rather than his name is a deliberate, slightly flattering choice] mind if we join?”
Tang Peng — the same senior who’d been backstage at the welcome party, and who’d tried to recruit Xu Ye into the Student Union — lit up at being addressed by title. Xu Ye had no obligation to call him that. He could’ve used his name; between students, that was the norm once you got past first-meeting formality. Being called his title by someone outside the Union was a small but unmistakable courtesy.
“Of course,” Tang Peng said warmly. “There are three of you — perfect for a half-court three-on-three.”
They got into it quickly. Xu Ye was rusty at first — it had been too long since he’d touched a ball, and the feel wasn’t there yet — but Zhang Xinzhou turned out to have decent fundamentals, a reasonably accurate shot. Yang Fei, for all his Second-High-Little-Kobe talk, was competent at best.
A passing thought crossed Xu Ye’s mind: if he told Yang Fei right now that Kobe would die in an accident in 2020, what would he do? He let the thought go. He’d never had any intention of rewriting history. Those things stayed inside.
By the second half of the game, something loosened in Xu Ye’s body — muscle memory returning, his eighteen-year-old joints finding the old angles. The fingerroll, the hook, the pull-up — he started moving through them with real ease, and gradually became the most watchable player on the court.
At the edge of the court, a girl suddenly grabbed Wang Shiyu’s arm. “Shiyu, look — it’s Senior Tang Peng, and that Xu Ye from the welcome party!”
Wang Shiyu hadn’t been paying close attention, but she looked over.
Precisely in that moment, Xu Ye was taking three steps toward the basket. He went up in front of his defender and finished with an extended, floating layup — the kind of move that reads as effortless even when it isn’t.
Wang Shiyu stared.
“You guys go to the cafeteria,” she said after a beat. “I’m going to watch for a bit.”
“You’re not eating?”
“I’ve got a bottle of nutritional drink with me, it’s fine.”
Her three roommates headed off, and Wang Shiyu drifted toward the court.
No one would have noticed she was there, if Zhang Xinzhou hadn’t spotted her first and murmured a word. Xu Ye and Yang Fei followed his glance.
Wang Shiyu waved with a bright, easy smile.
Yang Fei came alive immediately.
“Pass it to me, pass it to me.” He started gesturing urgently at Xu Ye and Zhang Xinzhou. Xu Ye played along and fed him several in a row — and Yang Fei, in front of his audience, proceeded to miss five out of six attempts.
After a long while, Zhang Xinzhou called it. “We’ve got class. Should we go clean up?”
Xu Ye nodded. For the last shot, he didn’t feed Yang Fei. He stepped back behind the three-point line, rose, and released.
The ball arced cleanly through the air and hit the bottom of the net without touching the rim.
“That was incredible!” Wang Shiyu was clapping both hands together with the enthusiasm of someone watching their own boyfriend score.
Yang Fei looked like he’d been wronged by the universe.
Zhang Xinzhou kneecapped him lightly from behind. “Don’t sulk. You wouldn’t have made that one either.”
Wang Shiyu trotted over when she saw they were wrapping up. She stopped in front of Xu Ye, smiling. “You’re so good at basketball.”
“It’s nothing special.”
She held out her nutritional drink toward him. “Want some water?”
He waved it off. “That stuff doesn’t really quench your thirst. I’ll grab a mineral water on the way back.”
“Right, yeah, that makes sense.”
Yang Fei watched this exchange and felt something inside him fracture.
Years from now, if someone were to ask him: “What’s the worst injury you ever took on a basketball court?”
He would say: “Watching the girl I liked bring water to my roommate in the middle of a blazing morning sun.”
(End of Chapter 92)