Chapter 64: The Sun Beneath the Water (Part Two)

Wen Xiao seemed momentarily blinded by the sunlight streaming through the window. He squinted slightly, let out a sudden chuckle, and then frankly extended his hand toward Leng Shucheng.

Before Leng Shucheng could react, he heard Wen Xiao say, "Together."

These two words seemed to possess a magic spell, causing Leng Shucheng's body to stiffen slightly, subtle emotions flickering within his emerald-green eyes.

"The splashes from here should belong to the both of us." Rather than belonging solely to him.

Asking himself in his heart, Wen Xiao did not have the habit of hogging all the food to himself.

"You don't want to?" he asked.

Leng Shucheng did not speak, but instead firmly grasped Wen Xiao's hand, using his actions to tell him that he did.

The two of them plunged into the swimming pool together.

Immediately afterward, a massive splash bloomed in mid-air, the sound of hitting the water exceptionally loud in the empty indoor space.

After sinking into the water and taking a moment to adjust in the depths, the two of them slowly surfaced.

Wen Xiao raised a hand to wipe the water from his face, then leaned against the edge of the pool, swam slowly for a bit, and climbed ashore, sitting down on a nearby bamboo chair.

"Do you have any good friends in Western Country? Won't you feel very reluctant to leave them?" After sitting down, Wen Xiao began to chat idly with Leng Shucheng.

Leng Shucheng shook his head, unwilling to dwell much on his experiences in Western Country. There, his life had primarily consisted of receiving an education arranged by the Hild family, alongside individuals from other families.

He held no deep impressions of those people.

Nor did he wish for any unrelated matters to interfere with the time he spent alone with Wen Xiao.

"Xiaoxiao, do you know about underwater swimming?" Leng Shucheng walked over to the edge of the pool, gazed at the water surface that was gradually returning to calm, and suddenly turned his head to look at Wen Xiao.

The mottled sunlight streaming in through the window fell upon his golden hair and back, bright and dazzling. It was like facing a luminous body directly—so dazzling and striking that Wen Xiao instinctively squinted his eyes.

Clearly autumn had already arrived, yet it gave Wen Xiao the feeling of being right in the middle of midsummer.

The next second, the person standing by the pool jumped into the water. Water splashed everywhere in an instant, and Wen Xiao felt warm and cool droplets fly up and land on his legs.

Like raindrops.

Wen Xiao's gaze shifted toward the swimming pool. Just as he was looking around to see where Leng Shucheng had gone, he saw a figure burst forth from the ripples churned up by the entry, though it did not break the surface.

Instead, floating underwater like a fish born beneath the waves, the figure surged toward the other end of the pool at an extreme speed.

The pool water was very clear; aside from the shattered splashes at the initial entry and the ripples spreading around the edges, the situation underwater was completely unobstructed.

Wen Xiao stood up, watching as Leng Shucheng truly drifted through the water like a merman.

The pool was about thirty meters long, and its bottom was paved with custom-made tiles resembling a giant underwater carpet patterned with the image of the sky.

As Leng Shucheng swam underwater, he seemed to be floating through the open air, reminding Wen Xiao of the phrase, "all drifting in the empty void with nothing to lean upon."

When he swam back, Wen Xiao crouched by the side of the pool and gave him a pull to make it easier for him to climb up.

"How can you hold your breath for so long?" Wen Xiao asked curiously.

"Practice." Leng Shucheng panted slightly, lowering his gaze a fraction.

Water droplets still clung to his eyelashes, falling away at the slightest flutter, glistening like diamonds in the sunlight.

Wen Xiao recalled the first time he had ever seen Leng Shucheng; the other person had been submerged at the very bottom of the pool, and he had even thought someone was drowning.

"Since I was little, I've... always liked it this way." Leng Shucheng curled his hand into a fist, pressed it against his lips, and gave a light cough.

Taking the initiative to bring up his childhood with Wen Xiao still stirred a somewhat indescribable sense of awkwardness within him.

The Hild family crest was the peacock, and he felt as though he had just been like a male peacock displaying its tail feathers to a potential mate.

"Xiaoxiao, I just sent you a message..."

Wen Xiao spread his hands and chuckled, "But I didn't bring my phone."

"Mm, I saw your auto-reply."

The auto-reply Wen Xiao had set was: Phone left behind, messages will not be answered.

Leng Shucheng found this auto-reply unbearably cute. He felt that whenever it came to matters concerning Wen Xiao, his brain always lost its usual composure.

Making him unlike himself.

Suddenly, the phone Leng Shucheng had left on the nearby table began to vibrate. He picked it up, and his expression darkened slightly.

He signaled to Wen Xiao with a glance, then walked off to the side to take the call.

Wen Xiao could faintly catch snatches of the conversation.

"I don't need it, send... back." Leng Shucheng's tone was very cold, yet he still didn't hang up the phone.

Thinking about it, the only person who could make Leng Shucheng this displeased and yet still manage to keep him on the line was Leng Shucheng's father, Leng Yan.

Eventually, feeling that sitting right there wasn't entirely appropriate since he could hear bits of their conversation—almost as if eavesdropping—he decided against it.

Having no interest in prying into other people's privacy, he took the initiative to jump into the pool and slowly sank down.

Once underwater, every sound vanished from his ears, as if he had truly entered a world cut off from the rest of reality.

Wen Xiao surfaced to take a deep breath, then sank back down to the bottom, lying flat on his back facing the sunlight refracting through the water surface, and slowly opened his eyes.

Opening one's eyes underwater yielded a very blurred view, roughly equivalent to the clarity of a person with ten diopters of myopia.

In Wen Xiao's field of vision, the light casting down onto the water became much softer, as if brushed out by gentle currents. There was also the green glow refracted by the leaves, astonishingly beautiful.

Realizing he couldn't hold his breath at the bottom for much longer and preparing to head up, he spotted a blurred figure swimming toward him.

The other person moved freely underwater, their dazzling golden hair spreading out like an underwater sun.

Everything visible underwater was far too hazy, and in a daze, Wen Xiao half-believed that a genuine merman was swimming toward him.

As they drew closer, Wen Xiao caught sight of a pair of emerald eyes which, down in the depths, truly resembled a piece of flowing jade.

The other person closed the distance and hooked an arm firmly around his waist. The two of them spun around in the water, inverting their positions entirely.

They drifted slowly through the water together, finally ascending side by side.

Breaking the surface, Wen Xiao took a breath first, wiped the water from his face, and said to Leng Shucheng beside him, "The feeling underwater is really quite different."

He could more or less understand why Leng Shucheng liked lingering beneath the surface.

***

Inside the gymnasium's surveillance room, the administrator wiped away a bead of sweat while lowering his head to speak to the person beside him, "The surveillance outside the classroom really was broken yesterday."

Song Jingbai sat on a chair in the surveillance room with a smile, asking, "Really broken?"

"Yes, yes..."

"Yet I don't believe it." A gentle, spring-breeze-like smile remained plastered across Song Jingbai's face, yet it only made the administrator dare not relax in the slightest, the cold sweat breaking out on his forehead left unspotted.

He had seen interviews of Song Kaisen on television as well. Never had he expected that Song Kaisen's son, despite his young age, would carry such an overwhelming sense of pressure—truly a chip off the old block.

Huo Zhanyan dug at his ear nearby, impatiently slammed a hand down on the table, bared a row of white teeth at the people in charge of the surveillance room, and smiled with a somewhat ferocious expression, his shock of red hair wildly aggressive.

"You're making my ears ring with your chatter! If something's broken on your end and you're incompetent and unable to fix it, then pack your bags and get lost! This job naturally belongs to someone capable! Do you understand what I'm saying?"

The mere thought that the pervert who had been writing harassment cards to Xiaoxiao was still loose in the school put him completely on edge.

"My two ancestors, please stop pushing me..." The man looked on the verge of tears, startled even further by Huo Zhanyan's table-slamming.

Whether he spoke or not, these two seemed completely convinced that he knew the truth, determined not to leave without extracting an answer.

Song Jingbai watched his expression, tapping his finger lightly against his knee before suddenly offering a hint of a smile. Only, this smile lacked even a shred of warmth.

"I might already know who it is."

"Song Jingbai, what the hell would you know? There you go again, acting like you know everything when the man hasn't even said a word yet."

Song Jingbai raised a hand to tap his own head, then smiled, "Up here—do you have one?"

"Song Jingbai, you—!"

Huo Zhanyan had rushed over in a flurry after finding out which surveillance footage Wen Xiao had requested to review, never expecting to run directly into Song Jingbai—someone he particularly despised.

He could only look away and try to ignore him.

Suddenly, the administrator's phone rang. Upon answering, he heard a cold, freezing male voice issuing an order from the receiver.

"Send them up to the rooftop terrace."

The administrator relayed the contents of the call he had just received, then added in a quiet voice, "They probably want to explain things to you face-to-face..."

"Explain my ass, what's there to explain? This is plain as day a provocation! When I get my hands on that damn pervert up there, I'm going to beat him to a pulp!"

Huo Zhanyan wore a shirt underneath with a simple black uniform jacket thrown casually over top. Dressed in this laid-back manner, the hems of his jacket fluttered slightly as he strode forward with an imposing momentum.

Song Jingbai also stood up and walked toward the door.

Waiting for the elevator, Song Jingbai adjusted his gemstone cufflinks—a gesture that, in Huo Zhanyan's eyes, looked entirely like warming up one's wrists.

Crossing his arms, Huo Zhanyan shot him a sidelong glance and scoffed, "Disciplinary committee member, can't resist the urge to throw punches yourself?"

Song Jingbai offered no retort.

Standing inside the elevator, watching the floor numbers tick steadily upward, Huo Zhanyan spoke again, "That guy invited the two of us straight up there. Could it be a trap?"

"If you're scared, don't go." Song Jingbai glanced at him, his eyes entirely devoid of a smile at that moment, calm as a surface of water without a single ripple.

The corners of his lips curved slightly as he spoke, carrying a trace of mockery.

"Me, scared? What a joke! Just wait, I'm gonna beat him so hard he won't even recognize his own dad!"

The rooftop terrace of the gymnasium functioned as a small garden divided into two levels with a semi-open structure, featuring an external staircase leading up to the second tier.

To make better use of the rooftop space and provide students with additional areas for rest during their breaks, the school had converted it into a garden.

Stepping out first through the door, Huo Zhanyan was greeted by a flurry of purple cards fluttering down from above, scattering all over the ground.

Casually pinching one of the cards between his fingers, he recognized it immediately—it was the exact same kind he had seen with Wen Xiao.

Flipping it over to find it completely blank, Huo Zhanyan felt as though he were being toyed with. He tossed the card aside, grabbed the railing, and charged up to the upper level.

Spotting the figure standing with his back to him, he recognized the person at a single glance.

The youth wore a tailored black uniform, the Windsor knot at his collar tied to absolute perfection, and half-long hair resting against the back of his shoulders. Just as he turned his head, he was met by another rush of wind as a fist hurtled straight toward him.

Almost instinctively, the youth raised a hand, opened his palm, and caught Huo Zhanyan's punch dead in its tracks. However, forgetting that Huo Zhanyan had another hand, he took a solid strike directly to the other side of his face.