A Certain Someone ( The On1y One ) Chapter 073 – Liar

He Did Not Say Anything, Yet He Managed to Accomplish Everything.

Sheng Wang Sheng Wang stormed to the door like an angry chicken flapping its wings. He only realised that he was being a total dumbass when his hand was already on the door handle—he should have completely disregarded everything and just give his Ge a munch first.
With that, he felt that he totally lost out.

The idiot was still knocking. He opened the door with the expression that said he’s gonna eat someone, and just as he was about to ask “What”, he saw that the ‘idiot’ was the teachers from training camp. It was a group of five teachers with the teacher in charge of logistics leading them, standing at the door as they grinned.
Sheng Wang: “……”

“Oh? What’s with the look on your face? You’re unwell?” Teachers usually are a little biased towards students with outstanding results, these few teachers all quite liked Sheng Wang. They weren’t as strict when they spoke outside of lessons.
Sheng Wang obediently put down his metaphorical butcher knife, and came up with an excuse. “Gastric pain.”

“Why the sudden gastric pain? Ate something wrong or did you catch a cold?” a teacher asked.
Sheng Wang bit the bullet and switched back on the “too weak to fight even a chicken” character setting he had stopped using a long time ago. “Nothin’, I just have a poor constitution, that’s all.”
It was the logistics teacher who answered instead. “A cold, I figure. This school sure loves to joke around, they could have renovated that useless pipeline at any other time, but they choose to do it during training camp? Let’s not talk about them, I myself nearly got doused in cold water when I was showering just now.”

The grammar teacher said, “Oh, I showered at noon after my class ended in the morning, I really didn’t notice. It would be disastrous to shower in cold water in this weather.”
“Yeah, you’ll definitely fall sick.”

They all came into the room one after another, greeted Jiang Tian, and looked around the dorm.
“Teacher, why are you suddenly visiting our dorm?” Sheng Wang asked.
The public speaking teacher scoffed. “Daydreaming in class, I see. It’s obvious that you weren’t listening. I’ve already said this afternoon that we will be visiting tonight. The previous two days, we were busy with all sorts of preparation work, and free time finally came up tonight. We said that we’re here to check up on you guys, see whether you’re okay with your stay here etc, but now that we ran into a water outage, we can’t bring ourselves to say this anymore.”

After he spoke, he pointed at Jiang Tian, “See, Jiang Tian listened in class. He knew that we’re coming, and didn’t ask questions like this.”
Sheng Wang: “……”
He knows jackshit.

Jiang Tian just put down his pen and stood up by the table. When he saw Sheng Wang’s woefully wronged expression, he couldn’t help but want to laugh a little bit. That split second of expression was caught by the public speaking teacher, and he said, “See, your emotions are quite vivid now!”
Jiang Tian: “?”

“I’ve already told you like 800 times for the past two days, your script is very well written, your diction is precise and remarkable.” The teacher said, “It’s just that the emotional tonality in your voice has some issues. A successful orator can stir emotions in a crowd, they can even move them to tears. After you speak, the audience ought to be overwhelmed by a myriad of feelings or be deeply moved or—”

The teacher was really getting into it, and went on and on. It was literally an impromptu “How to make a cold-faced student passionate again” speech.
After he spoke, he took two sips of water from the mineral water bottle in his hands, still wanting to go on. He asked Jiang Tian, “Are you overwhelmed by feelings yet?”
Jiang Tian: “……”
He silently pondered for two seconds, and just as he was about to speak, the teacher raised his hand. “Fine, I get it, don’t need to say it out loud. Your expression is enough.”
He turned to his colleagues, “I’m resigning tomorrow.”
The teachers nearly died from laughter.

The public speaking teacher turned solemn again. “Okay, no more jokes. The public speaking PKs during the training camp are quite important. Think about it, when pros fight each other, the difference between a mark more and a mark less is enormous. With the PKs counted into the total score, it is quite significant.”

“Today, we’re here to talk about this too. We just want to give all the students a reminder when there’s still plenty of days left in the training camp. The final outcome of the competition is a part of it. In our core, we still wish for brilliant students to overcome their shortcomings, and become even more brilliant. Every person has their own personality, you are good and bad at different things. I am not forcing you to be oh super expressive or anything, what you have now is entirely good enough for the competition alone. Still, I would like you to try your best to improve yourself.”

The teacher pointed at Sheng Wang, “See, your roommate is a readily available resource, you can totally have one person speak and the other person be the audience. You can see if you can move him, overwhelm him with feelings and make him cry, right?”

These teachers really did cherish talents. They weren’t in class, yet they still couldn’t help but to teach them various techniques and tricks, and chat like this, one dormitory after the other.
In the end, they held a mini meeting with everyone, and said what they needed to take note of for the final competition before they were completely dispersed.

It was already quite late into the night—the sound of human voices rose and fell like the tide, but also blocked out by the dormitory door.
Sheng Wang yawned twice in a row, and started to feel sleepy.

There was something wrong with all the students, they loved to fight against themselves. They clearly wanted to sleep, but they would still insist on playing games on their phones for a bit. Their eyes were clearly threatening to shut, but they would still insist on uselessly chatting away with people on WeChat; like if they didn’t wring themselves out until they accidentally fall asleep, they would be making a complete waste of time. The ten minutes interclass break was the only time when they had zero qualms falling asleep.

Sheng Wang walked around the dorm for a bit after he brushed his teeth, offhandedly grabbed Jiang Tian’s script, and sat down on the staircase to the upper bunk.
Jiang Tian stood by the basin, the splashing of water as well as the soft buzzing of the electric toothbrush could be heard from Sheng Wang’s end. As Sheng Wang stepped onto the next step, he listened for the other person’s movements and read the script with his head lowered, his fingers gripping the zip.

Jiang Tian came over. He splashed water on his face, tiny beads of water gathered at the tip of the hair before his forehead. Sheng Wang sat a little high up, Jiang Tian’s head was also slightly lowered, so from the angle on the staircase, he could only see his high nose and flat lips.

Young master Sheng stared at that for a few seconds before his gaze quietly darted away. In this age, once the stirring in the heart finds an outlet, one would want more than anything to step on that threshold, all day every day.
Restless and silently reflecting at the same time—

Every time he became restless, his eyes always ended up beneath Jiang Tian’s nose, sometimes not even he himself caught what he was doing. Who knows if Jiang Tian noticed, and who knows what he would think if he did.
And then he would silently reflect, thinking that he was being up to no good.

“Why are you sitting on the stairs again?” Jiang Tian took a piece of tissue along the way.
The moment he spoke, Sheng Wang had the feeling of being caught red handed for thinking impure thoughts. Therefore, he straightened a leg and switched to a more unperturbed position.

He lightly waved the book in his hand. “I’m reading your script. Didn’t the teacher say it’s quite well written? I’m reading it respectfully.”
Jiang Tian remembered the teacher’s teasing remark, and was a little resigned. “Are you done? Return me if you are.”
“Nope.” Sheng Wang did not absorb a single word at all. He casually flipped through two pages, saying, “It’s faster to listen than to read, how about you just perform it now.”
“Not happening.” Jiang Tian refused to show him any face at all.
“The teacher already said so, you can’t let a free audience like me go to waste.”
“I’ll rather waste it.”

“Hurry up, where else are you gonna find such a cooperative audience?” Sheng Wang was really getting into teasing him. He leaned backwards like he was his boss, and his hands splayed open, “Come, more feels in your words, make me cry.”
“……”

The dorm was momentarily quiet. Jiang Tian shook off the water droplets in his hair, blinked and looked up.
Sheng Wang realised that his words were a little misleading after he spoke. He met Jiang Tian’s eyes, and immediately continued, “No—I mean—use your words to make……”

He spoke halfway through and decided to shut up, feeling that this was in no way any better than saying nothing.
The pleasantries he learnt from Sheng Mingyang were all completely useless in this situation—he was suddenly fumbling over his words.

The young master silently kept his audacious leg, and shut himself down on the staircase with his head lowered. Next, he fled to the upper bunk. His actions were pretty composed, but his figure was superimposed with “I’ve freaking embarrassed myself again”.

Jiang Tian’s eyes were still on the stairs, and a long while passed before he blinked and came back to himself. The person on the upper bunk had already buried himself alive. He went back to the basin mechanically, and turned on the tap before he remembered that he was done washing up. Therefore, he washed his hands for the second time while looking perfectly composed, took a second piece of tissue to dry his hands, and finally switched off the lights as he made his way back to bed.

When he lifted the quilt and sat on his bed, a gust of night breeze snuck in through the gap between the balcony door and the floor. He felt a little cold, but he did not take it seriously……and that was how he faced the music on the second day.

Sheng Wang was woken up by the alarm at 7.15am, his eyes blearily opened before he discovered that Jiang Tian’s script was still in his hands. The temperature had fallen again, and the early morning was a little cold.
He grabbed a jacket, wore it, and came down from the upper bunk, wanting to return the script back. However, he found the person in the lower bunk still facing the wall, deep in sleep.

Jiang Tian usually got up early; it was a little abnormal for him to still be sleeping at this time.
Sheng Wang propped himself against the bed and stuck his head in. He softly asked, “Are you awake?”
Jiang Tian’s brows furrowed. He grunted, “Mn.”

Quite a while later, he finally opened his eyes and sat up. “What time is it?”
Sheng Wang did not check the time. Instead, he stared at his complexion for a while, asking, “Are you feeling unwell?”
Jiang Tian knew it damn well himself whether he was unwell or not. He did wake up at around 5+ in the morning, his throat painfully parched, bouts of chills running throughout his entire body. Therefore, he went to the kitchen, poured himself a cup of hot water and downed it.
He thought he would be fine after some sleep, but it ended up worsening in the morning, even his eyes were so dry that they hurt.

It was the first time Sheng Wang ever saw Jiang Tian being like this: his skin changed from a cold white to a ghastly white, his hair messily falling before his forehead, half-covering his eyes when his head was lowered. He could see his tightly knitted brows through the gaps in-between his messy hair.

He suspected that Jiang Tian had gotten a fever, but there wasn’t a thermometer in the dorm. As such, he leaned in, wanting to measure the other person’s temperature with his own forehead.

Jiang Tian likely felt him moving, and his eyes half opened. After a moment of hesitance, he instinctively backed away. He rasped, “Stay further away, you’ll get infected.”
“To hell being infected, I’m tryna see if you have a fever.” Sheng Wang stubbornly pressed his forehead to this, and felt a patch of burning heat.

“Why the sudden high fever?” Sheng Wang straightened up. He rushed to get the campus map the logistics teacher gave out, and frantically tried to find the location of the sickbay.
Jiang Tian sat on the bed for a while. “Maybe I got up too early yesterday.”

“It still wouldn’t be this bad though.” As Sheng Wang spoke, he suddenly recalled the offhanded comments the teachers made last night, and also the bare cloud of water vapour left in the bathroom before he showered. He came to a halt in the middle of flipping through the pages.

He gazed at the slight tinge of redness beneath Jiang Tian’s eyes that came from the fever, and asked, “Ge, did you not use hot water when you showered yesterday?”
Jiang Tian did not look up. He rubbed his temples like he was minding his own business, and his lips, dry and cracked, slightly moved. “I did.”

Liar.
Sheng Wang thought.

The teacher said a successful orator can use their words to overwhelm people with a myriad of feelings, to cause a surge of emotions, to make people laugh their hearts out, to reduce people to tears, to cause people’s hearts to be filled with something but not a single word adequately formed.
However, Jiang Tian was different.

He did not say anything, yet he managed to accomplish everything.

TO BE CONTINUED.