Watching Jiang Wei’s performance, Wang Shiyu couldn’t help but murmur admiringly, “Senior Jiang Wei’s stage presence is so solid.”

Yang Fei, ever loyal, offered encouragement. “You were great just now too.”

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

For Yang Fei, Jiang Wei might as well have been on another planet. So as far as he was concerned, Wang Shiyu’s performance earlier had been equally spectacular. One was cute and energetic; the other cool and commanding. Each had their appeal, as far as he was concerned.

Zhang Xinzhou and Xu Ye stayed out of the exchange. About halfway through the performance, Zhang Xinzhou nudged Xu Ye’s arm with a sly grin. “You going to weigh in?”

“What’s there to weigh in on?”

“Honestly speaking — she’s pretty well-endowed up top.” Zhang Xinzhou mimed a cupping gesture and laughed.

Xu Ye sighed, with the measured tone of someone drawing on hard-won expertise. “Very little muscle in the upper arm or lower abdomen, and yet the shape is a perfect hemisphere — the kind you only get with a muscular base. Outer arc full and prominent, but when it drops, the oscillation is less than half what you’d expect from actual adipose tissue. She’s wearing padding.”

Zhang Xinzhou gave him a firm thumbs-up. “I don’t know how you know that, but respect.”

“Stay calm.”

Once the performance ended, most of the audience’s excitement evaporated. But by the schedule’s math, there were at most two more acts before the whole thing wrapped up, and the general sentiment had settled into we’re here anyway, might as well stay to the end.

Backstage, the male MC paused before heading out and gave Zhang Kai a quick pat on the shoulder. “You’re up after me, Zhang Kai. The moment I come back down, you go up.”

He didn’t wait for a response and hustled onto the stage.

Zhang Kai stood at the foot of the steps, watching the restless audience, already half-paralyzed with fear. His whole body was trembling. Sweat had broken out across his forehead.

“…Next up, please welcome Zhang Kai of Applied Statistics, Class 1, School of Statistics and Mathematics, Class of 2014, for a guitar performance! Put your hands together!”

The MC came back down. Zhang Kai stood frozen at the steps, unable to take a single step forward.

“Zhang Kai, get up there!”

“Zhang Kai, what are you waiting for?!”

The stage stayed empty. The audience started murmuring. Which only made Zhang Kai more paralyzed.

Zhang Xinzhou watched him shaking from head to foot, draped an arm over Xu Ye’s shoulder, and said with a wicked grin, “Hey, Xu Ye — why don’t you bail him out? You said you play guitar, right?”

“Can’t. I perform tonight, I wake up tomorrow as the Finance School’s biggest celebrity.”

Yang Fei was about to fire something back.

Zhang Xinzhou grinned. “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? If you’re a celebrity, do we really need to worry about foot traffic at the fruit shop?”

“!!!”

Xu Ye’s head snapped toward Zhang Xinzhou. “…That’s actually a great point. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Zhang Xinzhou had only said it offhandedly, but watching Xu Ye genuinely run with it, he couldn’t resist pushing further. “Then what are you waiting for? Get up there.”

“Fine! For the money! I’m doing this!”

Xu Ye walked up beside Zhang Kai, cut off the MC who’d been trying to shepherd him back on stage, and turned to Zhang Kai with an easy smile. “If you don’t want to go up, you can just lend me the guitar.”

Zhang Kai stared at him, frozen for two whole seconds — then yanked the guitar off his shoulder and shoved it into Xu Ye’s hands without a word.

Xu Ye took it and walked straight out onto the stage.

“Wait — we have procedures to follow!” the MC called out, but Xu Ye was already at center stage.

He moved the microphone stand into position, settled onto the bar stool, cleared his throat, and announced, with the casual gravity of a man delivering important news:

“Just a quick correction — Zhang Kai was originally scheduled to perform but is unable to due to health reasons. I’m Xu Ye from Financial Economics Class 1, and I’ll be performing a song for you all… Drunk at Red Cliff by JJ Lin.” [TL: a 2007 song by Singaporean Mandopop artist JJ Lin (林俊杰), inspired by the famous Tang dynasty poem and the legendary Battle of Red Cliff. The song blends wuxia imagery with romantic longing and is widely considered one of JJ Lin’s most distinctive works]

Over at the stage entrance, Tang Peng — the Arts Division head — came rushing over, staring in disbelief. “Who is that? I thought it was Zhang Kai? How is it Xu Ye now?”

The MC scrambled to explain, sweating through his shirt.

“You just let him go up because he felt like it?! We had a schedule, we had procedures — what is wrong with you?!”

Tang Peng was furious.

Wang Shiyu hurried over. “Senior, it’s not really a problem, is it? He’s a freshman either way.”

“Shiyu, it’s not that simple, what if he—”

Tang Peng didn’t get to finish.

Up on stage, Xu Ye had already started playing.

The intro was long, the melody slow and unhurried — but the moment he struck the first notes, something shifted in the room. The noise ebbed. The audience grew quiet almost without noticing it.

He sat on the bar stool, fully absorbed, the guitar the only thing that existed for him right now. Everything else had become backdrop.

This was the song he’d practiced most in college the first time around. A song he would never forget for as long as he lived.

“He can actually play?!”

Yang Fei’s eyes went wide. He stood there gaping at the stage, completely dumbfounded.

Zhang Xinzhou was equally stunned.

Wang Shiyu immediately raised one finger to her lips — shh.

Under the spell of that opening melody, the venue had gone almost completely silent. Every eye in the room drifted to the young man in the center of the stage.

And then he opened his mouth and sang.

“Fallen leaves have piled in layers
and I have walked through youth.”
“I can hear, across lifetimes — someone weeping in the rain.”

His voice was low and full of feeling.

A single verse in, half the audience had already pulled out their phones to record.

On the other side of the stage, the upperclasswomen who’d just performed alongside Jiang Wei began murmuring among themselves.

“Who is this freshman?”

“What department is he in?”

“He sounds incredible.”

“And he’s pretty good-looking too~”

“Jiang Wei, what do you think?”

Jiang Wei said nothing. She watched the stage, her expression unreadable.

“I looked into your eyes
and found the one who was meant for me.”
“I raise my sword and turn —
and blood runs red as lips.”
“Memories of a dynasty past, crossing through the mortal world.”
“What wounds is not the blade —
it is the soul you carried back from another life…”

Xu Ye finished the song quietly, then stood, and bowed to a sea of eyes.

By the time he’d walked off the stage, the applause finally found its footing — cheers and clapping rolling across the audience. It wasn’t as thunderous as what Jiang Wei and Wang Shiyu had gotten, because half the room still hadn’t quite come back to itself.

But the moment he disappeared offstage, the whole venue erupted into chatter.

The vast majority of the girls in the audience were trying to find out who he was.

“Xu Ye, right? That’s his name?”

“Finance department?”

“Does he have a girlfriend?”

“…”

Xu Ye handed the guitar back to Zhang Kai, looked at his two roommates — both standing there with their mouths in perfect O shapes — and said, half-amused, half-exasperated, “Stop gaping. Let’s go.”

He walked out just like that.

Wang Shiyu watched the three of them disappear into the crowd, a slow, dreamy smile spreading across her face.

With that one song, Xu Ye had just secured himself something that would follow him through his entire university career — a pick-of-the-litter advantage that half the men on campus would spend the next four years envying.

“Jiang Wei, Jiang Wei — what are you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“Hehe. Don’t tell me you’ve got your eye on this little freshman too?”

“No.” Jiang Wei shook her head, then smiled.

“Just think… this freshman’s got something.”

(End of Chapter)