Chapter 159: Spring Bamboo Shoots Are Like a Witch Cooking Soup
"..." Xu Sirui said, "It's not that serious. The games I launched previously were profitable."
Ever since he discovered programming in his freshman year of high school, he'd been eager to experience the process of independently developing a game and releasing it on Steam. Initially, he simply planned to go through the process and create a simple game to upload. However, his severe obsessive-compulsive disorder and advanced perfectionism meant he couldn't control his mind when it came to the actual project, constantly feeling that there was room for improvement. As a result, this impromptu idea wasn't completed until the second semester of his sophomore year.
After putting the game on Steam, he promoted it on social media platforms both at home and abroad. Unexpectedly, the game received a good response and attracted a lot of comments. By the end of the first semester of his senior year, after deducting the platform's share, he had $40,000 in his account, and this amount was still increasing steadily.
Sun Mingyuan was amazed for a long time: "What game is it? What's it called? Why don't you tell me anything? Are we still buddies?! Tell me now! I want to play!"
"Tower defense game," he said. "The one with the simple graphics."
He is also the artist, and as he has to take on multiple roles, he has no time to spend too much time on art. As a result, this simple style has become his style.
Sun Mingyuan downloaded the game and immediately started playing. Two hours later, he called him and said, "You're awesome, Brother Xu! Wow, actually, I don't think there's anything particularly innovative about it. The gameplay is the same old thing, but it's just so fun. Everything feels good, and the numerical design is also very reasonable."
Xu Sirui snorted twice in a smug manner.
When he plays games, he particularly pursues smoothness, and believes that comfort is the most important thing. Of course, he also follows this approach when making games. 80% of his brainpower is used to polish numerical design, game rhythm and action smoothness.
At the end of the conversation, Sun Mingyuan returned to the topic that Xu Sirui had mentioned at the beginning, which was that he wanted to use the money to buy a house in the city.
"Why did you suddenly think of buying a house? Are we already at the age where we need to consider a house? If we want to buy a car, we have to buy a car first." As he spoke, he listed the car brands and said to himself that a man should buy a desert off-road vehicle first.
Xu Sirui didn't explain much, just said: "The house is pretty good."
It can shelter from wind and rain, and most importantly, it represents a person's taking root in the city.
He himself had no obsession with the house, but because of Zhao Laiyun's incident and various things that had happened before and now, he realized that Zhu Yingning did not have a place that could truly be called home.
She didn't even have a room of her own.
He is not yet able to solve those complicated problems for her. Maybe in another ten years, he will not be able to become the man standing at the top of the business pyramid in his fantasy. That is too magical. He is just an ordinary person with no ambition. He just hopes to live an ordinary life.
But at the very least, he could provide her with a space to rest when she was tired, a house that truly belonged to her, so that she would have enough backup energy to deal with future storms.
The fantasy was beautiful, but he also knew that the possibility of Zhu Yingning accepting the house was infinitely close to zero. She would even find a way to pay him back for the down jacket. Taking a house from him for nothing, she probably woke up with nightmares every night.
She stubbornly adhered to the old idea of "not accepting food given out of pity" which no one knew how to do. Xu Sirui was both troubled and helpless, and had no intention of telling her about it for the time being.
He was used to informing the parties involved only after there were signs of something going on. Anyway, he thought, they still had many years to go.
**
Senior year of high school is a boring and repetitive year, so repetitive that it seems redundant to describe it in words.
Zhu Yingning and Xu Sirui go back and forth between school and home every day. The change of location is at best just a change of study place.
They were assigned to the same key class, and Zhang Jiacheng was in another key class. It seemed like a huge change, but everything was not much different from usual.
Because it was a key class, there wasn't much joking or joking around during breaks. Chatting was rare, and most people stayed at their seats, absorbed in their studies. Influenced by this atmosphere, Xu Sirui and Zhu Yingning also stayed quiet. Even when they did chat, it was usually about "Can you lend me your test paper?", "How do I do this question?", and "What's today's homework?"
Xu Sirui is a person who cannot stand boredom, so after graduation, whenever he was asked questions like "If I give you one million, would you be willing to go back to high school?", he would choose to give up the one million without hesitation.
Wu Bo was in a regular class. During lunch break, she would often come over with exercise books or papers to ask Zhu Yingning questions.
She told Zhu Yingning that she lost ten pounds after entering her third year of high school, realizing the dream she had been pursuing but had failed to achieve.
"I wish I hadn't lost weight," she said with a sad face. "It's so painful. Senior year feels so long, yet so short. Sometimes I wish the college entrance exam would be tomorrow, so I could have a quick death. But sometimes I break out in a cold sweat when I see the countdown on the blackboard. Time flies by so fast, and if I don't study, I'm doomed."
Zou Hao was in a second-best class. Unlike Wu Bo, his family placed too much emphasis on his senior year of high school, making him a tonic soup every day—a sizzling old hen soup with various nourishing herbs, supposedly something his mother learned from a friend in Guangdong.
Zou Hao's weight ballooned, and he suffered from frequent nosebleeds. His mother insisted he was too weak, like a witch brewing a potion, constantly adding new and more bizarre herbs to the broth. Wu Bo, on the other hand, insisted he was overdosing.
"You didn't graduate from high school with any higher grades. Your mom made you have three highs," she gloated.
They sometimes have dinner together, and the only place is the school cafeteria.
By the time they reached their senior year, Zou Hao's attitude toward Xu Sirui had completely changed, often using their meals together to ask him for advice on academic challenges and methods. Zhu Yingning felt that he possessed an indescribable tenacity, an ability to grasp every available resource to climb higher, regardless of whether he deeply valued it.
Xu Sirui basically answered questions based on his mood. If he was in a good mood, he would talk more, but if he was in a bad mood, he would just be casual and perfunctory.
In short, everyone is working hard in their own way.
The 100-day oath-taking ceremony can be said to be the only window for them to catch their breath in their senior year of high school.
Before the event, the teacher said that everyone could wear their own clothes, put on makeup, and invite friends from other schools or their own family. However, Zhu Yingning chose to wear the school uniform simply. She had expected Xu Sirui to dress more flamboyantly, but she didn't expect him to wear just the school uniform.
Arriving at school, they seemed completely out of place. Some of their classmates were wearing formal attire, others were cosplaying as all sorts of characters: Usagi Tsukino from Sailor Moon, Chun-Li from Street Fighter, Ye Xiu from The King's Avatar. Someone even managed to get a set of Ahri costumes from nowhere and was wearing them.
Junior high school students in the first and second year of high school set up stalls on the roadside to sell goods for charity and to cheer for their seniors. They sold a variety of things, some sold Tuzki dolls, some sold sticky notes with "Hello Cai Cai" printed on them, some sold the comic book "A Shuai", and some sold celebrity postcards.
Walking on the campus, everyone was chatting animatedly.
"Why is there only 'A Shuai'? I, 'Laughing School', am the first to disagree."
"Since I'm already selling comics, I might as well donate my copy of 'Stealing the Stars in September'."
"Your copy of 'Stealing Stars' is a pirated copy, right? Don't think I don't know. Even the plastic cover is different from the original."
"Huh? So there's a distinction between genuine and pirated versions? I saw it was the same price as the genuine one, so I bought it."
"Do you have any postcards from EXO?"
"Omg, family! I didn't expect there are planet fans here too."
"Am I the only one with a four-leaf clover?"
"Get lost, Clover. Turn left when you get out of here, no thanks."
"Haha, didn't you see that our postcards sold out faster than yours? You guys from EXO still have five left, but we from TF only have two."
"The "e" in EXO is silent. Please pronounce it correctly. Thank you."
Wu Bo donated a set of "Yilin: Little Miss" and asked a schoolmate she knew to help sell it, saying that it was to accumulate good luck for her college entrance examination.
Each class's banners were more outrageous than the others, with slogans like "Everyone in Class One is a Tiger, and everyone is guaranteed a minimum score of 985" appearing one after another. Xu Sirui's assessment of this was that it was incredibly tacky.
In his opinion, the only acceptable event was the lion dance performance after the oath-taking ceremony.
Yes, lion dance.
I don’t know where the school leaders invited these experts from, but they performed on the football field in the middle of the playground, and their dancing looked quite realistic.
All the classes lined up on the track, divided into groups. Initially, the teachers and school leaders were able to maintain some discipline, but when the lion-on-stilts segment came around, everyone went wild. Formation and discipline were completely forgotten. The more active ones rushed forward, the quieter ones jumped back, those who needed to find friends did so, those who needed to scream screamed, and the scene quickly became like a market.
"Can you see it?" Xu Sirui was pushed next to Zhu Yingning.
She was the type who jumped around in the back. After jumping around for a while, she realized her vision was still limited, so she stared at a tree behind her and said, "I'll climb up the tree and take a look."
"?" Xu Sirui laughed. "Are you planning to be criticized by the whole school later for saying that a girl in Class 1 climbed up a tree like a monkey?"
"You're the monkey!" she said unhappily, exclaiming her theory. "Humans are born with the ability to climb trees. It's a primitive skill. You've regressed... Hey!"
The second half of the sentence got stuck in her throat because Xu Sirui grabbed her waist with both hands and lifted her up.
The students around her dwindled in size in her field of vision. She felt like a bamboo shoot, suddenly growing from a seedling into a lush green bamboo. Everywhere she looked, she saw the tops of other people's heads, a vast, black mass, like a patchwork of wild grass.
He asked from behind her, "Can you see it now?"
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