DTTM – Chapter 17 : Had a nightmare?

Chapter 16 | 📚 Contents 📚 | Chapter 18

******

Translator: Silvery
PR: Decadence

The dream abruptly ends there.

Yu Sheng doesn’t feel like sleeping anymore either. Pushing himself up with his arms, his grip tightens over the phone dazedly for a second.

It’s been too long since he last had this dream, and he is surrounded by zealous voices reading English aloud, on top of that. Yu Sheng zones out for a while before he snaps back to himself, realizing he is no longer in his Middle School’s 2^nd Year classroom.

And he will never have to go back there again.

His mildly distraught emotions settle, bit by bit. Yu Sheng blinks, and the world before his eyes suddenly darkens.

There is a hand hovering before his eyes.

The fingers are long and parted ever so slightly, waving back and forth.

Yu Sheng smacks Jin Linkun’s hand away:

“What do you want.”

Having just woken up, his throat’s not the most comfortable. The moment he speaks up, it becomes obvious how impossibly hoarse it is. He can’t help but clear his throat twice.

“Had a nightmare?”

Jin Linkun scrutinizes his pallor and switches hands to graze his forehead.

His excuse still remains firmly implanted in Yu Sheng’s head. Only, his sluggish body refuses to budge for some reason, so he pays that hand no mind and abandons his phone to glance at him:

“Need me to come down with another stomachache?”

Jin Linkun’s hand pauses. Catching on to his point, he opens his mouth and chuckles:

“That’s not it.”

He extends his hand and the back of his palm lingers on Yu Sheng’s forehead for a while. He turns his hand and presses his palm back in:

“You don’t look well, so I’m a bit worried.”

His tone is gentle as always, not bearing one ounce of his usual blitheness or aggravating demeanour. This in turn, makes the words that came out of his mouth sound unnaturally sombre.

Yu Sheng also stops for a couple of seconds without knowing it.

He doesn’t know if he is feverish to the extent where the warmth of that hand has dulled. All he knows is that that palm seems extraordinarily careful and light.

The long fingers curve along and plaster themselves to his forehead.

His palm feels a lot softer than he imagined.

Yu Sheng closes his eyes and doesn’t lash out. He evenly pushes away the hand that is resting on his forehead.

Still suffering from sleep deprivation, his temples pulse once more. Together with the dream which has yet to fully dissipate, jumbled flickers of scenes flash back to him, summoning the memories which have long since faded out.

The eyes of the man which made a full 180 after being rejected. The faltering teacher right before he stepped onstage. Two scripts exactly the same onstage.

Even then, they still announced his name and passed the certificate to his hands. Then, he was forcibly hauled offstage there and then, the trophy brutally smashed into a thousand pieces before a couple thousand people’s eyes.

The woman hugged the teen, stiff with embarrassment as she consoled him under her breath.

The brows of this familiar person bundled up, and her unwaveringly gentle eyes landed on him.

Don’t you already have so many medals? Does having another really matter that much?

You are smart and good at your studies. All of these things come easy to you, but your younger brother is different. Your brother toiled so hard to memorize for so many days…

It’s tough on me as your mother. Why can’t you be a bit more sympathetic?

……

Yu Sheng covers his eyes.

“You don’t have to.”

He hears himself say, pushing Jin Linkun’s hand back to him:

“Save the effort. It’s got nothing to do with you.”

Don’t you already have so many medals.

Aren’t you the ones who said, we can all go back home for a meal once I get this medal.

The thing which he had been pouring all his efforts into suddenly became a meaningless joke.

Nobody cared when he had a fever at home. Nobody cared when there was a parent-teacher meeting. Nobody cared when a competition required the parents’ contact. Even when he injured his wrist right before that public speaking competition, and wore a wristband, nobody noticed it.

But because his grades were good and he could easily secure that medal, they came to care about him.

The unreadable eyes of the man and the trophy shattered on the floor twinkled as they mocked him. The confusion and disappointment in the woman’s eyes which were made worse by her gentleness became the last straw on the camel’s back.

He pushed her aside, bit by bit. And then, he took a step back, raising his head.

The eyes of the youth lost its warmth for the first time. Frosty and sharp, a chilly, piercing look infiltrated their furthest depths.

……

Yu Sheng struggles to suppress the ridiculous thoughts flooding him because of that head pat, but he fails no matter what he tries. With a deep-seated scowl, his hands tighten into fists which he jabs into his temples, grinding them hard as he shuts his eyes.

He isn’t quite the same as others. Everything he sees will be imprinted in his mind immediately. No matter what it is, all he needs is a glance to have it down better than others.

Most of the time, those things he sees can be summoned at will, but the moment he’s rattled, they will come back to stalk him untimely. It’d be impossible to suppress them, no matter what.

Since he’s in a crowd of strangers, Yu Sheng toils through his churning mess of thoughts and plucks out the name of the bastard beside him:

“Jin Linkun.”

His fist tightens:

“……Do me a favour.”

The chair beside him lands on all fours with a clatter. The warmth closes in on him from afar, plastering to his arm.

Soon enough, it seems like that warmth has always been here right by his side, watching over him from not far off.

Yu Sheng is silent for a while. He stretches a hand out to him:

“Lend me a book.”

Jin Linkun startles: “What?”

“A book.” Yu Sheng repeats, “Any sort will do.”

He needs to look at something urgently, just so he can shift his mind away from those shitty, emotional things.

Jin Linkun must have been thunderstruck by his request. Stopping for a flabbergasted moment, he thrusts the book he is holding to Yu Sheng before he cracks open his eyes.

Yu Sheng takes it and he flips it open.

Yu Sheng shuts it, looking at the cover page.

《TEM-8 PYP Editing Exercises》

……

Jin Linkun: “Not to your liking?”

Yu Sheng is expressionless.

Jin Linkun pushes himself up, patting on his shoulder and looking around the crowd:

“That’s okay. I can find something else too.”

He leaves his seat and wanders around the room, tirelessly stopping before every table and bending down for a couple of seconds.

The Study God is out on patrol. The entire room of school tyrants intuitively picks up on the oppressive pressure. The noise in the activity room dies down for a second. By chance, everyone collectively lowers their heads and reaches for their phones.

【Studying_Makes_Me_Unhappy: May I ask? What could God Kun be doing now?】

【Unexpectedly-we-shouldnt-answer-too-fast: …Stretching his feet?】

【StrivingForNO.1: Here’s my little conspiracy theory. He could be here to dominate and mock us. Even though he hasn’t spoken a word, just by looking at his mildly furrowed brows and pursed mouth, I can already detect the contempt he holds towards plebeians like us.】

【NO&ShapeComBi: As expected of a liberal arts student! When I’m describing this scene, I can only think of the blank white “Show Off”.】

【I_Love_Vernier_Scales: Yes, definitely. His intentions must run along those lines. God Kun could be coming to see how low-level our reference books are, and while he’s on the way, he’s going look over our shoulders and cruelly point out the mistakes we’ve made.】

Jin Linkun has only taken a few steps before he discovered the whole room of academic tycoons have gathered up their reference books and hastily shoved them under their desks. Someone even crams his question paper in his bag at Godspeed.

……

This new batch of Third Years are truly more united, jumpy, and lively compared to the last one.

The Senior Study God who got suspended for a year makes a circle around the room and glances at the bare and naked tables. At last, he manages to borrow a book from Student Kong titled 《CET6 Dictionary – Root Characters + Utilizing Phrases》*.

(*College English Test Level 6 (A test available in China only)

*Examples of Root Characters + Utilizing Phrases: 词 + 词根 ;
A word in an idiom + The idiom itself;
“Apple” + “An Apple a Day Keeps the Doctor Away”)

Jin Linkun returns to his seat and leans against the side of the table. Flipping through the green glossy book he secured, he diligently hands it off to Yu Sheng.

“This one is good.” He is very earnest, “There are even illustrations.”

Two hours later, Yu Sheng lays back on his dorm bed, thinking he must have been cursed.

And it’s the sort of curse which he needs to buy a talisman, burn it, down it with some water, then have a good sleep in order to cleanse himself off of.

He’d actually sat in the classroom and memorized 2 whole hours of Level 6 words.

Ever since that Public Speaking Competition, he has never caught another glimpse of English again. Without practice, his vocabulary bank has already deteriorated grievously. A good half of the words are unrecognizable to him by now, actually.

When he first abandoned his studies in his 3^rd year of Middle School, he still felt uneasy somewhere deep down. Therefore, he tried to crack open the books a couple of times.

But each time he does it, what leaps out at him with those English words is that trophy, smashed to bits on the ground, as well as the furious, yet cocky gaze of the sheltered youth on the other side.

And those eyes bearing chagrin and incomprehension, concealing the faintest disappointment.

Even now, Yu Sheng still doesn’t regret going onstage and reciting the exact same speech; He had caused that little rascal who stole his script to panic to the extent of stammering out a whole chunk of Chinglish, referring to his script multiple times mid-way through his speech, and alas, standing beet red to the side for a full 5 minutes.

He also doesn’t regret wishing him well before he went overseas; that he won’t get caught when doing this sort of shameless thing ever again, because he might just get his retribution.

He only feels like they’re not necessary anymore.

After the Finals for Middle School, he did not follow the escalator up into High School. Instead, he casually picked a High School from a city which nobody has heard of, which has never participated in any Provincial Tournaments, and wherein half the parents’ seats in Parent-Teacher Meetings are always left empty.

It’s all as he calculated. Nobody bothered him and nobody asked him why he gave up on himself.

If not for the two sums added routinely to his card, he would have almost forgotten he still has a Father and a Mother.

……

But for whatever reason, when Jin Linkun stuck close to his shoulder and flipped open a page of words, pointing at the illustrations and racking his brains to come up with a story, that something which had always been stuffing his chest up relaxed all of a sudden.

Jin Linkun left immediately after the event and he doesn’t know where he headed off to either. In the empty and silent dorm room, Yu Sheng simply can’t sleep, so he picks up his phone to play with it.

He has only just entered the opening interface of a mobile game when the dorm room’s door abruptly slammed open.

Jin Linkun lugs a hefty-looking luggage in, entering the doors with a noisy clatter. Thereafter, he rubs his biceps and heaves a sigh of relief, picking up the glass on the table for two mouthfuls of water.

Yu Sheng draws his brows together. He sits up, and turns on the lights with a slap:

“What’s that?”

Jin Linkun only brought his personal identification documents and forms with him when they were at the auditorium, but the number of things he brought to the dormitories is actually quite a lot. Even now, there is still a ginormous luggage dumped under his bed that is stuffed full.

Yu Sheng thought that in itself was plenty enough. But to think there’s actually a second luggage.

Jin Linkun is crouching on the ground and laying the luggage on its side. He lifts his head at his voice and rolls up his sleeve, plenty jolly. One hand smacks the luggage cheerfully:

“This time, there’ll be no issues.”

Yu Sheng raises his brows.

He really doesn’t get what this person’s feeling so accomplished about. He slides off the bed:

“What is it—”

Yu Sheng: “……”

It is a luggage chucked full of books.

《Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind》,《On the Social Contract》,《A Brief History of Time》,《Outline of Chinese History》,《Peaks and Troughs》,《The Feynman Lectures on Physics》, 《Strategic Applications of Named Reactions in Organic Synthesis》.

Meeting Jin Linkun’s plenty confident eyes, Yu Sheng falls silent and takes a step back.

That thing which had inexplicably loosened up in his chest resolutely, solidly, decisively and completely stuffs it back up.

******

Silvery: 《人类简史：从动物到上帝》，《社会契约论》，《时间简史》，《中国史纲》，《波峰与波谷》，《费曼物理学讲义》，《有机合成中命名反应的战略性应用》
Me, looking at the list of books I had to translate:

Decadence:

Next Time on DTTM!
Chapter 18: <Then, I’m headed back.>
Preview: Yu Sheng leaves.

******

Chapter 16 | 📚 Contents 📚 | Chapter 18

Donating to C19 / BLM

For every USD$3 donated to one of the charities above, I will be releasing a chapter on the same day, subject to chapter availability.

Alternatively, you may also choose a local charity of your liking. I know how cross border tax may end up sapping a portion of the donations, so that’s totally fine by me.

When you’re done, do remember to take a screen-shot of the receipt / check your inbox for the email confirmation & forward them to aubade074@gmail.com so we will be notified. 🙂 It’ll be extra helpful if you could drop a comment here too, in case your email somehow ends up in our spam box.

Thank you loads for your interest in donating! (ღ′◡‵)

Current Donation Counter: $0/3
Current Chapter Availability: 4