“Of course I remember.”
Jiang Ran filled the cup with wine.
How could he possibly forget?
High school had only just started a few days earlier, and no one knew one another very well. Jiang Ran and Qin Feng hadn’t even spoken a word to each other.
But during a PE class, some of Qin Feng’s former middle school classmates—the ones who had bullied him before—came looking for trouble again, shouting from afar, “A kid with no dad!”
Jiang Ran couldn’t stand it and went up to argue with them. As they argued, it turned into a fight.
Afterward, of course, there was no avoiding the teacher’s criticism and writing self-reflections.
But it was precisely because of that incident that Qin Feng came to know Jiang Ran and Cheng Mengxue, and the three of them gradually became a close-knit trio.
Sometimes, fate was just like that.
A beautiful encounter came without warning; a sudden parting gave no sign at all.
“That was just a small thing.”
Jiang Ran looked at his wineglass.
“You don’t have to keep bringing it up again and again.”
Qin Feng also picked up the bottle and poured wine into his cup.
“To the two of you, maybe it really was just a small thing.”
Beer gurgled down, foam rising, burying a layer of unspoken thoughts over his memories.
“You and Xiao Xue have been warmhearted and kind since you were little. You must have helped a lot of people and done a lot of good deeds.”
“But to me, from my perspective… after being bullied for so many years, only you two stood up for me. After so many years, only you two protected me and defended my dignity.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Jiang Ran grumbled.
“Not at all.”
Qin Feng shook his head.
“Before I met you two, there were even more people who bullied me, and what they did was even worse.”
“In order not to cause trouble for my mom, I always swallowed my grievances. In the end, I was always the one apologizing.”
“Because I was afraid the teacher would call our parents. Their parents all lived in the city and could arrive quickly by car. But my mom was back in our hometown, working multiple jobs. To make money and support the family, she could barely bear to sleep… How could I dare let her come to school?”
“Of course, my mom doted on me too. If she knew I was being bullied, she would definitely drop all her work and come to school to back me up.”
“But…”
He smiled helplessly and shook his head, his eyes filled with the powerlessness of facing the past.
That was right.
The current him could earn millions with a single text message;
With the positron cannon in hand, the future was infinitely bright;
He couldn’t exactly say all his wishes came true, but ninety-nine percent of them could be realized;
And yet.
In the face of his mother, who had once shouldered an entire family alone in the past… what use were the glories of the present and the future?
“But if she came to school to back me up, what then?”
Qin Feng continued,
“After she went back, she would still have to face a whole series of messes, a pile of endless tasks, and might even lose the hard-won job she had finally found because of it.”
“Not to mention my hometown is very far from the city. My mom definitely wouldn’t be willing to pay for a chartered ride. She would definitely sway back and forth on the bus for a long time, suffering through the whole round trip.”
“So, many times—many times before—I was just like that time in high school. I humbly apologized to them, turned major matters into minor ones and minor matters into nothing, just to prevent the teacher from calling my parent too.”
…
Jiang Ran listened silently without speaking.
In fact, Qin Feng had already said these words many times over the years.
This was also why Jiang Ran had felt so guilty these past few days.
The miserable life of the mother and son had begun precisely with the death of the pillar of their family.
A mother worked herself to exhaustion for her son; the son felt sorry for his mother. She didn’t want him to suffer; he didn’t want her to tire herself out… and thus an unsolvable loop was formed.
In truth, before he met them in high school, Qin Feng’s grades had not been especially outstanding.
With a mind as brilliant as his, he could of course easily score full marks and take first place.
But… for the same reasons of “not causing trouble,” “not standing out,” and “not adding extra pressure on his mother,” Qin Feng deliberately controlled his scores in every exam, keeping his ranking precisely in the middle of the class.
This was also something the young Jiang Ran back then had found very hard to understand.
If Qin Feng took first place, wouldn’t the teacher treat him like a favored son of heaven, a pearl in the palm? Why control his scores?
But later, Jiang Ran gradually understood.
【Children from unfortunate families do everything carefully.】
After his father passed away, every experience Qin Feng went through warned him… better to have one less thing than one more.
“So, back to that question you asked earlier.”
Qin Feng’s voice interrupted Jiang Ran’s thoughts.
He picked up his full glass of beer and looked at him.
“How could I ever hate you?”
Qin Feng’s gaze was clear.
“Never.”
“From the moment you two stood in front of me and protected me, from the moment you two helped me pick my dignity back up… I decided on you two.”
“【You two are friends I would protect even with my life.】”
…
Clink.
The glass cups collided.
After clinking glasses with Qin Feng, Jiang Ran downed a large mouthful of beer.
A bone-deep chill in his throat.
A speechless bitterness in his heart.
Jiang Ran felt that being human was truly difficult.
If he didn’t bring up the matter of Qin Feng’s father, his heart was full of guilt, and he felt he had wronged Qin Feng.
But if he did bring it up, he felt like he truly wasn’t worth a damn, unwilling even to save his good friend’s father.
Emotion and reason always clashed fiercely, refusing to yield to each other, unable to coexist.
But.
In the end.
It was still good to say what was in their hearts.
After a few glasses of alcohol, two brothers opened up to each other honestly. This matter could be considered completely turned over.
“Wang Hao is really slow…”
The empty bottles on the ground gradually increased, while on WeChat, Wang Hao was forever saying, “Almost there,” “Right away,” “There’s a bit of traffic,” and “The bus is too bulky.”
“Looks like Wang Hao’s financial situation during this period really isn’t looking good.”
While urging him on WeChat, Jiang Ran grumbled,
“Thinking about it this way, haven’t we been a little too extravagant lately?”
Each of them had hundreds of thousands in their pockets.
In university life, if you didn’t buy a car, a house, or luxury goods… this money really wasn’t easy to spend, giving people the illusion that no matter how they spent it, they would never run out.
Other classmates went out by subway or bus, while they had already formed the habit of taking a taxi whenever they went out.
“This bit of extravagance doesn’t count for much, does it?”
Qin Feng didn’t think much of it.
“After all… we are gods, aren’t we?”
He was obviously playing with a meme.
A meme from the lines they had used during that day’s performance.
“You’re getting a little carried away with that.”
As the scriptwriter, Jiang Ran felt a wave of awkwardness.
“You used this meme on the cruise ship last time, and now you’re using it again… just how much do you like that script I wrote?”
“I told you long ago. I like it very much.”
Qin Feng was quite interested.
“Because I feel the settings you wrote are actually all pretty realistic.”
“Especially now that we have spacetime text messages. It really does feel like we can manipulate history and sway fate.”
Heh.
Jiang Ran let out two dry laughs.
“I’m afraid you’re the only one who would praise me like that. I vaguely remember that the settings collection I wrote back then brought me plenty of ridicule from my classmates. They all said I was daydreaming and obsessed to the point of losing my mind.”
“I really wish you could have been my middle school classmate… If you had encouraged me more back then, maybe I would have gone down the path of writing web novels, and by now I’d already be a platinum-level god.”
“I wish I could have, too.”
Qin Feng leaned back against the chair.
“To be honest with you, in my free time recently, I’ve read the script you wrote for the film club several times.”
“You really are free.”
“Don’t say that. After all, that was also the first movie I acted in. Not only did I read the script several times, I also watched the finished cut Xu Yan gave us several times.”
“Oh, that. I still haven’t watched it.”
Jiang Ran remembered.
Back then on the sports field, Xu Yan had indeed given them a USB drive, saying that it contained the edited finished film and asking them to watch it and give some feedback.
But this period had been so busy. How could he have had time to watch it?
“How was it? Was it well shot?”
Jiang Ran took a sip of beer.
“I still haven’t had the chance to watch it. Or maybe I did watch it, but because I don’t have the memories from after the worldline changed, even if I did, I don’t remember.”
“It was pretty good.”
Qin Feng agreed.
“The two of us acted well, and the camera work was good too. I feel like it won’t be a problem for it to win an award at the university student film festival.”
“But… while I was watching, there was one question I kept having.”
“When you first named this story Genius Playground, you also said it was a game involving eleven geniuses.”
“But in the film script, there isn’t any direct depiction of the game itself.”
“I’ve always been very curious. How is this game played? And what is its ultimate goal?”
He raised his head and looked at Jiang Ran.
“So, can you tell me…”
“【Just what kind of game is Genius Playground?】”