Chapter 5: A Shocking Return on the Track

During the next few classes, Jiang Ciqiu was never called on even once.

Maybe her trick of hiding behind a tall wall of stacked textbooks was working. Or maybe the old Jiang Ciqiu had already left every teacher with the impression that she was a loner who never answered questions. Either way, it worked out in her favor.

The thirty-year-old former magical girl, now an office drone, let out a long sigh of relief. She could not understand the textbooks at all.

The boy next to her was a whole different story.

As the famous kid who took sick leave on the first day of school and then missed seven full months, Lin Xia got called up in nearly every class. He answered without stumbling, even drawing parallels and expanding on the material. The teachers praised him endlessly.

This bought him quiet resentment from the miserable high schoolers in the classroom. After all, if you failed to answer after him, you got the same judgment: “He missed seven months and still knows this. You have sat through seven months of class, so why are you worse than him?”

Jiang Ciqiu could only roll her eyes beside him.

It was not really surprising. In her memory, Lin Xia had always been too smart for his own good. He remembered everything after a single glance. Maybe the heavens had poured every stat point into his brain. That would explain why his body was so fragile, why he was a sickly boy who could barely breathe after two steps. It was practically the standard script for “heaven is jealous of genius.”

The last class of the morning was PE.

The moment the bell rang, several boys who could not sit still anymore snatched up basketballs and shot out of the classroom like dogs off their leashes, yelling about claiming a court. The girls took their time, hooking arms in twos and threes and clogging up the stairs, which drove the boys behind them crazy.

Lin Xia packed up his desk, turned around, and invited Jiang Ciqiu. “Going to the track together, Ah Qiu?”

“Let’s go.” Jiang Ciqiu readily agreed. She looked over the boy’s slim frame with a hint of a tease. “But you just got over a serious illness. Are you really going to run? Do not choke halfway and drop dead.”

“Don’t worry. I can do it.” Lin Xia smiled and patted his chest.

The corner of Jiang Ciqiu’s mouth lifted. “Great. Just don’t let me lap you.”

****

Ten minutes later, on the sun-scorched track, Jiang Ciqiu was beginning to seriously suspect something.

If she were running with that thirty-year-old body, the one that lived all day in front of a computer or lying in bed, she would go into tachycardia after one lap and keel over dead on the rubberized track.

Huff… huff… How much farther?

Even with a sixteen-year-old body, after four hundred meters under the blazing sun, she was struggling. Her chest felt tight, and her lungs rasped like bellows.

Zhang Yucheng, the equally sports-hating otaku who sat in front of her, was also flushed and gasping for air.

“On your right. Make way.”

Halfway through the eight hundred meters, a golden blur passed them like a gust of wind. Ilya was not even breathing hard. All she left behind was an elegant back view.

Jiang Ciqiu told herself it was not worth getting worked up over a race. “If your lips go purple and your heart starts racing later, do not count on me to save you.”

She adjusted her breathing and glanced down the track. There was no sign of Lin Xia.

‘What do you know,’ she thought, a little smug. ‘That guy has been a sickly child his whole life. Sure enough, he fell behind me. And he had the nerve to say he would be fine.’

But before her small flicker of pride could turn into worry, a clear, familiar voice came from behind.

“Keep going, Ah Qiu!”

Jiang Ciqiu turned her head in shock. Lin Xia took a few long strides and drew up from behind, looking like he wanted to chase down Ilya.

Tsk. “Kid, do not get too cocky.”

“You sprint halfway through a distance run. What are you going to do for the last hundred or two hundred meters?”

And then Jiang Ciqiu could only watch helplessly as Lin Xia kept up his sprint for several hundred meters, crossed the boys’ finish line, and came to a steady stop.

“Wait. He actually lapped me?!”

Zhang Yucheng, still gasping for breath, was red in the face. “I mean, Jiang-ge… was Lin Xia really discharged from the hospital yesterday? Not some kind of secret agent who came back from a mission?”

Jiang Ciqiu’s four minutes and twenty seconds barely scraped past the girls’ passing line. Lin Xia, on the other hand, clocked a startling time under three minutes in the boys’ one-thousand-meter run.

Even Ilya, an A-rank magical girl who usually looked down on ordinary people’s physical abilities, could not help but take a second look at him.

This was supposed to be a weak student who had missed more than a semester? A one-thousand-meter result starting with “2” was a monster stat even by sports school standards.

Lin Xia, however, did not notice the shocked looks. He was too busy clenching his fists, soaking in the joy of using his body without restraint.

So this was what a healthy body felt like.

His lungs did not feel like they were leaking after two steps. His muscles did not strain when he moved a little too freely. He did not have to worry about accidentally snapping a bone.

Jiang Ciqiu dragged her heavy legs over and sat down hard on the stone steps, panting.

“Do not sit down right after intense exercise. You could die suddenly.” He reached out and lifted her up like a little chick.

She rolled her eyes. “Fine, fine, Lord of Sudden Death. I will listen to you.”

She leaned against the railing. “What exactly is going on with you? You were discharged from the hospital yesterday, and today you are flying around the track?”

A visible flash of panic crossed the boy’s face.

It disappeared almost at once. But it did not escape Jiang Ciqiu’s eyes, which had been sharpened through countless years of reading people across dinner tables.

Jiang Ciqiu narrowed her eyes. “What is the deal? Did you take medicine?”

“Yes! Medicine!” Lin Xia latched onto the excuse like a drowning man. “I have been taking an imported medicine from another city. It works especially well.”

The words were barely out before his heart dropped.

What if Ah Qiu was just testing him? What if she asked what medicine it was, or where he bought it? How could he cover that lie?

But Jiang Ciqiu did not seem interested in pressing further. She only said “Oh,” then murmured things like “nine dragons pulling a coffin” and “sharp pointy head,” nonsense he could not follow.

To Jiang Ciqiu, a mature office worker who had spent years in the workplace, managing social boundaries was second nature.

She knew that if a question would embarrass someone, she should not ask it. She might end up being the embarrassed one instead. And if medicine could make Lin Xia healthy, then that was a good thing as far as she was concerned.

Besides, technology in this world was highly developed, and different cities specialized in different areas. She had heard of memory bread that gave you experience as soon as you ate it, and preservation boxes that could keep anything in its current state forever. In a world of calamity beasts, magical girls, and mysterious evil organizations, an imported medicine that strengthened the body was not hard to accept.

She unscrewed her water bottle and took two big gulps.

“A healthy body is the capital of revolution.”

She immediately felt that was not something a sixteen-year-old high school girl would say, so she coughed and tried to cover it up.

“Cough. I mean, in my memory, you were always stuck in bed. You would run out of breath just looking at the leaves outside the window. I was even thinking about drawing you a couple of green leaves. And now you are bouncing around like this. It is really great.”

Looking at her awkward but sincere expression, Lin Xia’s eyes softened. He nodded quietly.

In his memory, Jiang Ciqiu had always been the energetic one.

When he was small and the older kids picked on him, she had charged up like a little tiger and taken on four of them at once. Later, she still came to his sickbed and kept encouraging him. Ah Qiu had always been like a flame, warm and bright.

If she looked so tired today, it was probably because she had stayed up late last night. Plus, his sudden return had been a big shock to her.

He told himself not to think too much about it.

A breeze drifted past. Jiang Ciqiu pulled at the collar of her uniform, fanning herself as she tugged it forward and back.

Lin Xia’s eyes followed the motion before he could stop them, landing on the stretch of fair skin at her collarbone.

The next moment, heat climbed up his face. His willpower forced his gaze away, and he stared down at the track beneath his feet.

“Want to play ball, Ah Qiu?” He pointed at the boys in the distance, who had already started dividing into teams. He was trying to distract himself.

“Not me. Go ahead. I am drenched and sticky and need to change clothes in the bathroom.” Jiang Ciqiu waved a hand, got up, and walked toward the teaching building, fanning herself as she went.

Lin Xia stood still and watched her leave.

At first she looked fine. But after fewer than ten steps, he noticed something wrong.

The girl’s steps began to wobble. Her center of gravity tilted forward without her control.

In Jiang Ciqiu’s vision, the teaching building suddenly began to warp violently.

Dizziness slammed into her without warning. Darkness swallowed the edges of her sight. A piercing ring filled her ears. Then a familiar metallic sweetness surged up from her throat.

‘Oh no,’ she thought.

Had the joy of seeing Lin Xia come back from the dead made her forget what this body had endured? At nine years old, she had been forced to transform into a magical girl while still a boy. Those aftereffects had never faded. Even after she lost the ability to transform, she would still vomit blood, and sometimes bits of flesh, every few days. The pain clung to her like a maggot gnawing at a bone.

Just as her body was about to give out and slam onto the track, a figure shot across more than ten meters and caught her in his arms.

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