A Certain Someone ( The On1y One ) Chapter 024 – Awakening of Insects in Summer’s End

Sheng Wang’s Heart Skipped A Beat.

Last time around, it was Jiang Tian who knocked first, it should be his turn this time. Gifts should be reciprocated, everyone understood this norm.
I’m not being shameless, I’m just polite, Sheng Wang internally chanted two times, before righteously knocking on the door.

Footsteps shuffled in the bedroom, with a light creak, Jiang Tian appeared behind the door.
The words Sheng Wang prepared tumbled around in his mouth, and when it left it became, “My room’s air con’s spoilt!”
Jiang Tian was stunned.

……What’s wrong with you???
Sheng Wang cursed himself internally.

He had such a good excuse to go with but he had to drag in something so stupid like the air con? Great, now he couldn’t take it back. This level of falsehood, all Jiang Tian needed to do was to go over to expose it, he basically offered his face to the other for slapping.
Sheng Wang imagined that scenario, and almost passed away on the spot.

Still, his mental fortitude was generally quite fine, he wilted for two seconds before he was bold again. He looked at Jiang Tian, internally saying: If you really dare to go check, I’ll jump from the second floor window.

Fortunately Jiang Tian had both intelligence and humanity.
His eyes lowered, scanned around, and spotted the bag in Sheng Wang’s hands. He didn’t ask any further questions, and side-stepped to open up a path.
Sheng Wang silently let out a sigh of relief, and entered the bedroom.

Upon his first step, he subconsciously paused a bit. That was his reaction only when entering other people’s territory, just like when acting as a guest, a person would scan around first before putting on the slippers. Sheng Wang never would have thought that he would have this reaction in this bedroom.

Teenagers always were quick to feel, a single line was all it took to stir a fight, a single line was also enough to bury the hatchet. The first second they might be quarreling and fighting, the next second they could also be inseparable, the turning point could be everything simple —
A note, a can of drinks, or maybe a set of homework.

Not long ago, he was still grumbling about his house being taken over by a certain grandson to Crab, but now he had silently acknowledged this room as Jiang Tian’s territory.
The world sure is strange.
Sheng Wang thought internally.

He was similar to Jiang Tian, he did not like poking his head here and there in other people’s bedrooms. First was out of courtesy, the second was……that behaviour was uncool. Still, he couldn’t help it when the room was too simple, he didn’t need to particularly look around in order to take everything in at once.

This bedroom was side by side to Sheng Wang’s, their orientation and decor were both similar. Both bedrooms had a desk by the window, with the bed opposite. The wall the two rooms shared was a wardrobe, the difference being that Sheng Wang had an additional independent bathroom next to his wardrobe.

Sheng Wang stared at the wall for ages, before quietly asking, “You can hear it from here when I turn on the taps, right?”
“Hm?” Jiang Tian closed the door after him.
Sheng Wang turned around, discovering that Jiang Tian’s ears were still stuffed with a wireless earpiece, the white ends lightly pressing against his thin lobes.
“What did you say again? I couldn’t hear anything, you’re too soft.” Jiang Tian removed an earpiece with a tilt of his head.
“I said—” The cogs turned in Sheng Wang’s head, what if the moment he asked, this person would say “I didn’t notice, if you’re worried we can go over and test it out”, then the embarrassed one would still be him! His air con was still hanging there, perfectly fine after all.

“Whatever, it isn’t important.” Sheng Wang was holding his bag as he said, “Lemme mooch on your aircon for a while, I still have four pages left in my topical exercise.”

Upon hearing that, Jiang Tian went past him to go clear his table.
There was a stack of test papers on his table, next to it was an exercise book, a black pen, and a red pen. This was all there was, the table was simple to the point of being nearly empty, it was drastically different from Sheng Wang’s own street-vendor style clutter.

“Eh? Don’t need to tidy it, I’m ok without a chair too.” Sheng Wang followed over.
“Where would you sit without a chair, on the table?” Jiang Tian said.
Sheng Wang’s leg was already lifted before he sheepishly put it down, his entire face spoke of the guilt of being caught red handed. “I didn’t say that I’m sitting on the table, I can stand too.”

This was clearly nonsense. Jiang Tian shot him a glance, capped his two pens, and tossed it into the pencil case in his bag.
“You can just sit on the chair, I don’t need it.” He kept the paper in his bag, and sat at the spacious window sill. His back was facing a wall at the side of the window sill, a leg half-bent, and an exercise book in his lap. His other leg dangled from the window sill, touching the floor.

“You really don’t need it?” Sheng Wang asked.
“It’s long finished.”
“Even Jing-jie’s paper?” Sheng Wang was a little confused, “I just saw your empty paper.”
Jiang Tian lifted the exercise book in his lap, “The anwer’s in here.”

Sheng Wang stretched his neck to look, and indeed spotted the answers to the English homework in the notebook. There were five in a row, from afar the handwriting was powerful and clear, from proximity however all his words were written with a single stroke. He couldn’t be bothered to even cross out his wrong answers, a cross needed two strokes, he used a red pen to mark it with a single slash instead.

Next to the slash was the correction, for some there was only a clause, for others the correction went on for several lines. What he was looking at was these.
“Why don’t you just write it on the paper?” Sheng Wang asked.
Jiang Tian said, “Saves effort.”
“There may be some slight differences between our idea of ‘save effort’.”

Jiang Tian was stumped, probably because nobody would ask him about the logic behind his actions before. His fingers played with a page before putting it down, and said in resignation, “Jing-jie is good at picking questions, the papers she compiled are all quintessential, one question is as good as ten. Doing it once on the notebook, and marking the ones you get wrong on the paper, you just need to do the question you made a mistake on the second time you do the paper, and not get affected by the original answer. Roughly two rounds is enough, you wouldn’t need to do an endless amount of questions like this.”

He paused, and stated the thesis albeit speechless, “Efficient, saves effort. Got it?”
“Got it.” Sheng Wang raised his left hand, only to see his three fingers miming a ‘seven’, saying, “This is the most I’ve ever heard you talk, there’s 87 words.”
Jiang Tian: “……”
The window sill was right next to the table, where Jiang Tian sat. It wasn’t too far from Sheng Wang, he was within his range of attack.

Upon seeing the other person straighten up, Sheng Wang quickly shielded his face as he nudged the chair to the other end, only to see Jiang Tian helping him switch on the table lamp with the aid of his long arms, and ruthlessly said, “Shut up if you’re not done.”
Sheng Wang side-eyed him, and tutted, “You sure are bossy.”
Jiang Tian looked up coldly, Sheng Wang immediately made a cross in front of his lips with two pointer fingers, indicating a cease fire.

Sheng Wang was fidgety when he did his homework, a proper sitting position would cause his brain juices to not flow. Back in his own bedroom, he could go from the table, to the window sill, to the bed and carpet all while doing his questions.
Motion is the mode of existence for the matter. So was Sheng Wang when he studied.

While he’s over at Jiang Tian’s, he still exercised some restraint at the start. As he progressed, the mood to fidget around increased, with both feet on the horizontal bar beneath the chair seat, two out of four of the chair’s legs were thus lifted off the ground. With a stretch and a crook of his legs, the chair began rocking.

After rocking for roughly 10 minutes straight, he abruptly recalled Gao Tianyang’s reminder that when he was in front of Jiang Tian, he should do anything but rock his chair like this, Jiang Tian would get irritated.

Sheng Wang reflexively kept his leg back. There was a round carpet in front of the desk, when the chair landed on the carpet it barely made a noise. He ruefully sneaked a glance at Jiang Tian, only to see the thin end of the corner of Jiang Tian’s eyes also lightly twitched.

His pupils were pale beneath the light, as though there was a thin layer of crystals on top of it. When he casually scanned around, that gaze of his was much like a careless glance.

Nearby, a car passed by the exit of the alley, the headlights shone in through the windows from afar, sliding from left to right.

Maybe he was startled by the sudden glow or perhaps it was something else, Sheng Wang swiftly retracted his gaze, lowered his eyes and started reading.
He unhurriedly fiddled with the corner of the page for a good while before he could truly absorb that line of words. After what seemed like ages, he finally grabbed his pen and started calculating.

The questions after that was as if an invisible force was helping him, it was incredibly smooth sailing, much faster than usual. Sheng Wang took an hour to finish four pages of questions, and Jiang Tian actually managed to take an hour to look through the exercise book too.
He was even still flipping through the exercise book after Sheng Wang closed his book, and was stretching around.

“You’re not done yet?” Sheng Wang asked.
“Still a bit more.” Jiang Tian finally could bear to close the book, and looked up. He asked, “You’re done?”
“All done.” Sheng Wang dug out his phone to check the time, “It’s not even 1.30am yet, I seriously finished it.”
“Any questions?” Jiang Tian asked.
“Nope.” The young master draped himself over the chair with the excuse of stretching around, pride hanging on his face.

He thought that there would be questions at first, if not he wouldn’t have tried to come over to Jiang Tian’s with an excuse. However, he was truly in good condition today, giving him enough face. Questions that were usually a hot potato became especially well-behaved today, the rate of accuracy was shockingly high.

Sheng Wang pondered by himself for a while, and concluded, “The feng shui here is kinda good, it nurtures the brain.”

With this nonsensical reason alone, he mooched Jiang Tian’s air con in his bedroom for two days straight.
Everytime Sheng Wang knocked it would be already midnight, barely past 12. Jiang Ou who was downstairs would long be asleep. Half the house was completely silent, their rooms were the only ones with the lights still turned on, and words were occasionally exchanged.

At the start, they did not realise anything was amiss.
Until Friday that day, an accident disrupted the pattern — Sheng Mingyang finally squeezed out some free time out of his heavy workload, and made a trip back home.
The chauffeur, Xiao-Chen, went to fetch him at the airport. By the time he reached home it was past 12. With the mindset of not wanting to disrupt his family’s sleep and study, Sheng Mingyang didn’t inform anyone at all.

This weekend was the first monthly test. Sheng Wang did not attempt any new questions tonight, and instead circled out the challenging points in his notes and topical exercises, preparing to go through it and discuss with Jiang Tian.
When he knocked on the door next door over, there was suddenly a beep that came from the unlocking of the password guarded door downstairs, next was a light click from the keys turning in the second door.

Sheng Mingyang often smoked while he’s out, and would occasionally dry cough. Sheng Wang had heard this for more than 10 years, he was way too familiar with it, he could tell from even a door away.
When Sheng Wang heard his dad’s dry cough, he froze. He tunneled inside the room like a fish, and closed the door in a panic.

He kept an ear out for the sounds of activity downstairs with his back against the doors, when he looked up again, he was met with a towel hanging on Jiang Tian’s neck, his fingers holding a glass of water by its rim, standing a step away from him.

He showered a little later than usual today, his hair was still moist, droplets quietly crystalised at the ends of his hair, and slid down along the curve of his neck, dampening the edges of the collar of his grey t-shirt.

He darted a look in the direction of the door.
Sheng Wang said in a low voice, “When I entered, my dad just came back.”
Jiang Tian retracted his gaze from the door, and instead shifted it to Sheng Wang. He was quiet for a moment, before suddenly asking, “Why were you panicking?”

The night was still and quiet. A cicada on a random tree abruptly dragged its call. It was clearly summer’s end, but it was like the awakening of insects in spring.
Sheng Wang’s heart suddenly skipped a beat.

TO BE CONTINUED.