“That was more than ten years ago. Xiao Xue and I were both five or six, childhood sweethearts, innocent as could be. Every day, we ran around and played together.”
Jiang Ran looked out at the sea, feeling the ocean breeze gradually turn cold.
“That year, something happened. I nearly died.”
“Or you could say that, at the time, I was already dead. At least 99.99% dead.”
Pfft—
Qin Feng spat out a mouthful.
“Sorry.”
He wiped his mouth, torn between laughter and helplessness.
“I know I shouldn’t laugh at such a serious moment, but that death percentage of yours is just… What kind of impossible-to-keep-a-straight-face quantified metaphor is that?”
However, Jiang Ran shook his head.
“That’s not an exaggeration at all. Under normal circumstances, I absolutely would have died. But I’m still alive, after all. That’s why I say 99.99%.”
“The situation back then was more or less like when I jumped into the river a few days ago to save that drowning child.”
“When I was six, I was that heroic once too. But the person who fell into the water back then wasn’t anyone else. It was… six-year-old Xiao Xue.”
Qin Feng’s expression turned solemn.
He vaguely guessed something.
“At the time, the two of us were running around playing on a hill, and Xiao Xue accidentally slipped and fell into the river.”
“Of course, she didn’t know how to swim then. She immediately started flailing and sank beneath the surface. Of course, six-year-old me didn’t know how to swim either.”
Qin Feng blinked.
“Don’t tell me you…”
“Yes.”
Jiang Ran nodded.
“I didn’t even think about it. I just ran straight to the riverbank and jumped in.”
“To be honest, it really wasn’t courage or anything like that. It was pure ignorance making me fearless. On top of that, when we were in kindergarten, my parents were always telling me to look after Xiao Xue at school and protect her from being bullied.”
“How could a little kid understand much? They said it in my ear every day, so I treated protecting her like it was my responsibility. She fell into the water, so of course I had to jump in.”
“You can imagine what happened. After I jumped in, my feet couldn’t touch the bottom, and I immediately choked on the water. But I still forced my eyes open, used every bit of strength I had, and pushed Xiao Xue toward the shore as hard as I could.”
“We were lucky. Xiao Xue grabbed onto a drainage pipe and climbed up. As for me, I was swept away by the river. Very soon, I suffocated, passed out, and lost consciousness.”
Qin Feng’s brows were tightly furrowed.
He truly hadn’t expected that the two of them had such a past.
No wonder… that day, when Cheng Mengxue saw Jiang Ran jump into the water to save someone, she had reacted with such abnormal madness.
“What happened after that?” he urged.
“What happened after that was all told to me by others.”
Jiang Ran looked out at the sea.
“As I just said, I had already drowned and lost consciousness, so of course I don’t remember what happened next.”
“They said that after Xiao Xue got ashore, she ran madly along the river, shouting for help as she ran.”
“When the adults nearby heard her cries, kindhearted people immediately jumped into the water and pulled me out… but that was already several minutes later.”
“Apparently, by then I was no longer breathing, my face was purple from suffocation, and there was no response from my heartbeat either. The adults immediately gave me artificial respiration and performed chest compressions for CPR, but none of it worked.”
Qin Feng clenched his palm, growing nervous along with the story.
Only now did he truly understand what it meant to be 99.99% dead.
Suffocating in the water, cardiac arrest, CPR failing to revive him, the brain deprived of oxygen for nearly ten minutes… To say that state was 99.99% death was not an exaggeration at all.
“Then…”
He looked at Jiang Ran.
“What was the 0.01%?”
“What kind of 0.01% saved you?”
Jiang Ran smiled.
Facing the sea breeze, he stretched lazily.
“Coincidence.”
“Coincidence?”
“That’s right. The ultimate coincidence.”
Jiang Ran continued,
“Now that I’m talking about it, I kind of want to laugh too. Weren’t those adults giving me CPR? Seeing that I just wouldn’t wake up, they pressed harder and harder on my chest. They even broke my ribs, and the force made my head bounce up and down, smashing against the ground.”
“Then, at that very moment, an elementary school student carrying a schoolbag happened to pass by on the hill. He slipped, his schoolbag fell to the ground and opened, and his stationery popped out. Pencils, erasers, rulers, and the like scattered everywhere.”
“And as luck would have it, one pencil bounced and rolled down from the hill, just happening to land beneath my neck.”
He subconsciously rubbed the back of his neck.
“And the adult doing CPR on me just so happened to be pressing down hard at that exact moment. As a result…”
“Hiss!”
Qin Feng sucked in a cold breath. A bloody image surfaced in his mind, and a phantom pain instantly shot through the back of his neck, as if a sharp pencil tip had been driven in with force.
“The pencil tip stabbed hard into the back of my neck just like that.”
Jiang Ran scratched at the scar on the back of his neck with his fingernail.
“You should know there’s a small dark spot here. You asked me about it before.”
“I remember.”
Qin Feng opened his left palm.
“When I was little, my palm was stabbed by a pencil too. Even now, there’s a tiny bluish-black dot there. It’s more or less the same principle as a tattoo.”
“I do remember asking you why there was a dark spot on the back of your neck. You said it was from being stabbed by a pencil, and I didn’t think much of it. After all, after all these years of school, who hasn’t been stabbed by a pencil?”
“But I really didn’t expect that the little dark spot on the back of your neck had such an origin. So… that pencil that happened to fall there was the 0.01% that saved you?”
“That’s right.”
Jiang Ran gave a soft laugh.
“The pencil stabbed in pretty deep at the time. My whole body went rigid, my legs kicked out, and all at once the water in my lungs sprayed out. Amid violent coughing… my heartbeat returned too.”
“Holy shit.”
Qin Feng was utterly amazed.
Reality truly was more marvelous than fiction.
That pencil must have struck some nerve. Like electroshock therapy, it directly triggered all the muscles in his body to tense, accidentally restoring his heart and lung function.
This kind of internal stimulation was far more effective than external chest compressions.
“After I woke up, I saw that Xiao Xue had shouted herself hoarse. The corners of her mouth were covered in blood, and she was holding me while crying her heart out.”
Jiang Ran turned his head and looked toward the second-floor window.
That was Cheng Mengxue’s room. By now, Sleeping Beauty had long since fallen into dreams.
“After that, she dragged me off to sign up for swimming lessons with her.”
“I went there purely to play in the water, but Xiao Xue trained very seriously every time. Even a little too seriously.”
“So you see, Xiao Xue’s diving does look proper. Probably… what happened when I nearly died left too great a shock on her.”
…
At this point,
Qin Feng finally understood completely.
He had originally thought Cheng Mengxue had lost control so crazily because she was too worried about Jiang Ran, and that she had thereby recognized her feelings for him, which was why she had been about to confess under the influence of alcohol just now…
All wrong.
He had guessed everything wrong.
This wasn’t some melodramatic love story, but a past in which they had nearly been separated by life and death.
For Cheng Mengxue, the matter of falling into the water and saving someone was the greatest psychological shadow, the deepest trauma of her life.
The instant Jiang Ran jumped down from the bridge, what flashed through Cheng Mengxue’s eyes was that scene from more than ten years ago… that little boy who had jumped into the river to save her and had been 99.99% dead.
That was her most terrifying nightmare.
It was also the scene she feared the most.
“All right, I admit I guessed wrong.”
Qin Feng patted Jiang Ran on the shoulder.
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
…
The two fell silent.
The moonlight slipped once more into the dark clouds.
The crowd on the lower deck dispersed, and the lights went out.
The night fell quiet.
Seabirds landed beneath the moon’s shadow to snatch at leftover scraps of food, while the sound of steel cleaving through the water went splash after splash.
Waves struck the ship’s side layer upon layer, washing away the traces of time, washing through the fields of the heart.
“But there’s one thing I wasn’t wrong about.”
Qin Feng turned his head.
“Don’t care how other people see you. Don’t care whether you’ve been ordinary or outstanding all these years. In Xiao Xue’s eyes, you’ve never changed in all this time—”
“From the moment you jumped into the water at six years old, you became the one and only hero in her heart.”
Jiang Ran neither confirmed nor denied it, merely giving a faint smile.
“Why don’t you take Adolescent Psychology as an elective?”
“The three of us can take it together next semester.”
“Forget it.”
Woo————————
A deep, muffled whistle sounded.
This was a signal that had long since lost its meaning in ocean voyages, yet now had become the cruise ship’s hourly chime.
When the whistle sounded, it meant all entertainment activities for the day were over, reminding tourists to return to their rooms and rest safely.
“Let’s go.”
Jiang Ran pushed off with both hands, left the railing, and walked toward the stairs.
“Mm?”
He discovered that Qin Feng had not followed.
“What’s wrong?” Jiang Ran asked in confusion.
Qin Feng still said nothing.
He walked to the dining table.
Picked up a green jujube from the fruit platter.
And threw it at Jiang Ran.
Pa.
Jiang Ran reached out and caught it accurately.
“Jiang Ran.”
Qin Feng narrowed his eyes, looking at the green jujube in Jiang Ran’s palm.
“That pencil…”
“Do you really think it was a coincidence?”