After Zhao Youyue finished copying the self-reflection, she realized it was already close to six o'clock. The sky outside was a pale, pre-dawn grey, and the morning air felt thin and cool against her skin. While copying, she had read through the text carefully and found that Han Leng's professional standard was genuinely solid. There was no pointless fluff or nonsense to be found in his prose. It was an extremely sincere self-reflection, the kind of heartfelt confession that would make Lao Qiu firmly believe she would never play with her phone during morning reading again.
To be safe, she casually picked a few sentences and searched them online. Sure enough, Han Leng hadn't taken the lazy route of copying something ready-made from the internet. In other words, those three thousand characters hadn't all been typed out on a phone, one word at a time, during a long, sleepless night.
She had to admit the guy was decent. If it were her, anything that couldn't be copied online definitely would be. Thinking was out of the question. In fact, even copying from the internet felt like a hassle, since you couldn't copy everything wholesale and had to stitch bits together here and there. She had already assumed Han Leng would copy, yet he had written it all himself. No wonder he wrote web novels; his filler skills were truly profound and his dedication to his craft was clear.
Back when Lao Qiu said she had to write a three-thousand-character self-reflection, she would rather have given up her phone than write it herself.
What made her especially grateful was that during Chinese morning reading that day, Lao Qiu did indeed remember confiscating her phone and ordering her to write the essay. The classroom was filled with the rhythmic, discordant hum of dozens of students reciting different texts, a wall of sound that usually provided perfect cover.
Ever since her phone had been confiscated once, Zhao Youyue's alertness had been cranked way up. She was basically a human radar. So even when Lao Qiu sneakily slipped in through the back door again without making a sound, she had already neatly put away her new phone. She put on a look of serious concentration and pretended to be reciting Encouragement to Learning. Sitting bolt upright, her expression solemn and composed, she closed the book upside down on her desk and recited smoothly, her voice clear and steady:
"A gentleman says: learning must not cease. Indigo is taken from the indigo plant, yet it's bluer than indigo. Ice is formed from water, yet it's colder than water. Wood straightened by the plumb line can be bent into a wheel, its curve fitting the compass. Even if it dries out, it won't return to straightness, because it was shaped that way. Thus, wood subjected to the line becomes straight; metal taken to the whetstone becomes sharp. When a gentleman learns broadly and examines himself daily, his understanding becomes clear and his conduct free of fault…"
Her desk mate, Zhou Fang, couldn't help shooting Zhao Youyue a stunned look. She was thinking that this girl, who played with her phone whenever she had free time and never voluntarily read during Chinese or English morning reading as long as the teacher was not around, had suddenly changed her ways. What Zhou Fang found even harder to believe was that Zhao Youyue could recite a text that hadn't even been taught yet so fluently, while she herself still stumbled over the archaic phrasing.
This made no sense at all to her.
With the comparison right there, and with Qiu Yingchun watching from the side, Zhou Fang's face burned a deep red. She wanted nothing more than to find a hole in the ground and crawl into it.
Zhou Fang had already come to regard Zhao Youyue as a friend. That's because Zhao Youyue's personality was genuinely likable. She was not petty like many girls, she was very easygoing, and she was also quite cute, possessing graceful manners that felt natural rather than practiced. From time to time she would press her lips together in a faint smile, and just seeing that soothing expression could lift anyone's mood.
However, Zhou Fang absolutely couldn't agree with her attitude toward studying. It was not that she didn't study at all, but that casual, leisurely way of hers—solving one problem and then playing with her phone for a while—really rubbed Zhou Fang the wrong way.
What annoyed her just as much was that whenever class ended, the two irritating boys in front who liked reading random magazines and talking about games would always turn around to chat with Zhao Youyue. They would clown around and crack lame jokes in front of her. That was all because she gave them a friendly response. Or rather, she treated everyone with the same gentle attitude. If it were Zhou Fang, she wouldn't bother dealing with boys who were neither handsome nor academically impressive. She simply couldn't understand how Zhao Youyue managed to stay so calm and mild all the time.
Fine.
Zhou Fang had to admit that deep down, she was quite envious of Zhao Youyue's almost saint-like composure and jealous of her effortless popularity. But she really couldn't learn to be that way. She was even afraid that talking too much with boys would spark rumors. In truth, that fear was completely unfounded. She just was not pretty. Unfortunately, no one had ever pointed out that cruel fact to her.
Zhou Fang was a girl who studied extremely hard, and her grades were naturally very good. Perhaps because she knew her looks were average, she had no special talents, and her family background was ordinary, she had pinned everything on her studies. Valuing academics like this allowed her to maintain a sense of superiority over Zhao Youyue in that one area.
But now she felt genuinely awful, because she felt she had been outdone by Zhao Youyue in the one field where she excelled. Even though it was very likely just an accident, a purely special circumstance, the sting remained.
Qiu Yingchun waited until Zhao Youyue had smoothly finished reciting Encouragement to Learning before gently tapping her desk and calling her out for a talk. He opened with praise as they stepped into the quiet hallway. "Zhao Youyue, you have been performing really well during morning reading lately. You have put in the effort. You can even recite the entire Encouragement to Learning so fluently. I knew you were a good kid."
Zhao Youyue smiled lightly and accepted the praise. After all, she really did work hard inside the Dimension Gate.
Only then did Qiu Yingchun finally bring up the self-reflection. His tone was not harsh at all, because her performance just now had left him very satisfied.
Zhao Youyue put on a look of sudden realization and said with an embarrassed expression, "Teacher Qiu, I finished my self-reflection a long time ago. I just accidentally forgot to hand it in to you."
She quickly returned to her seat, took out the self-reflection she had kept ready at all times, and handed the neat stack of papers to Qiu Yingchun outside the classroom. During the process, she couldn't help glancing toward Han Leng's seat. Only then did she notice that Han Leng had somehow achieved the bizarre state of sitting with his eyes open, holding a book, and still sleeping. His head bobbed slightly as he hovered between sleep and wakefulness, yet he could effectively evade the teacher's patrols. It was truly the classic technique of a "sleep god."
When Qiu Yingchun saw Zhao Youyue's neat, elegant handwriting and the clean, orderly self-reflection, he felt he didn't even need to read the content to be sure she had sincerely reflected on her mistakes. Skimming the three thousand words briefly, he couldn't help clicking his tongue in approval. The writing was plain, sincere, and heartfelt. Very good, very good.
Lao Qiu praised her a few more times, returned her confiscated phone with peace of mind, and sent her back to her seat. He planned to head back to the office first and come back to pull another sneaky check just before morning reading ended.
Zhao Youyue smiled slyly as she happily returned to her seat. She casually stuffed the old phone into her Colory bag, worth over six thousand yuan, and took out her new phone. She swept the room with her human radar, her eyes sharp. Seeing that Lao Qiu had already left the vicinity, she freely started playing with her phone. Based on her recent observations, he would come back again about seven minutes before the end of morning reading. So she would put the phone away again nine minutes before class ended and put on another serious reciting act.
That way, everything was absolutely steady.