Still on the rain-soaked Wuchuan Road pitch, Wang Fa had once delivered various types of passes there, demanding they defend and clear the ball with either foot in one touch, ensuring it flew past the midfield.
As if by instinct, those training sessions surfaced in their exhausted bodies. Kick after kick, they stubbornly blocked Hanling Victory’s attacks.
Until—
A Hanling Victory player fell in the penalty area.
The whistle blew. In the final moments of the match, no one could clearly say what had happened. Everyone stared blankly at the referee.
The referee didn’t make an immediate call. He simply looked up at the sky.
The moment he lowered his head, his finger pointed to the penalty spot.
In the final moments of the match, the referee awarded Hanling Victory a penalty.
The sidelines erupted in chaos.
The four teachers from the sports department nearly charged onto the field.
Wen Chengye, utterly drained, dragged his weary body up, shouting furiously at the head referee.
Teacher Xu pulled out his phone to record, vowing to file a complaint.
Wang Fa simply stood and walked to the edge of the pitch, slipping his slightly trembling hands into his pockets.
The captain of Hanling Victory, holding the football, strode toward the penalty spot.
The entire stadium fell silent in an instant.
Everyone’s heart rate skyrocketed. Clenching fists or gripping tightly, tension pumped blood through their veins so fiercely it felt as if their hearts might stop.
Feng Suo stood alone before the goal.
One breath in, one breath out.
The surroundings faded to gray. In his eyes, only the black-and-white football remained.
The Hanling Victory player began his run-up, blades of grass flying.
He remembered once asking his coach: if the referee was bound to award the opponent a penalty, how could he save it?
Wang Fa had told him he must believe he could stop the ball, with even greater conviction than his opponent.
The ball flew with blistering speed, but to Feng Suo, none of that mattered.
In all the penalty-saving drills Wang Fa had personally guided him through, the most crucial lesson was: forget everything, and bravely dive to one side.
He closed his eyes, stretched his body, and just as in countless goalkeeping drills, crashed heavily onto the pitch.
The hard ground, the jarring impact—Feng Suo’s entire world seemed to plunge into darkness.
After a while.
Thump, thump—his heart slowly pumped blood.
The pain was numbing, yet the sensation in his arms was crystal clear. It was a football, soft yet firm, blazing as if still aflame, one he knew all too well—the very ball he had just saved.
Feng Suo slowly opened his eyes.
In his field of vision, the Hanling Victory captain knelt before him, completely drained.
He had saved the penalty that should have leveled the score.
The final whistle blew immediately after.
Twenty-one days and nine hundred and one minutes since Lin Wanxing had left.
Hongjing No. 8 Middle School, with a hard-fought 2-1 victory over Hanling Victory, advanced to the finals!
Wen Chengye, Fu Xinshu, Qin Ao, Lin Lu…
Every player from Hongjing No. 8 Middle School lay on the ground. At that final moment, each instinctively glanced toward the sidelines.
The figure they most longed to see still hadn’t appeared in the stands.
Everyone closed their eyes.
Sunlight poured down like a heavy rain, drenching each of them.
Countless training sessions, too many reasons to give up.
The world is full of obstacles and hardships, life’s passersby come and go in haste, and they still seemed like those youths who couldn’t see the path ahead clearly.Yet at a certain moment, in that very instant, victory was like a sharp blade cleaving through a narrow path.
They knew they could keep going.
Chapter 124: Interrogation
Most of the time, life isn’t a competition.
We don’t have clear opponents, unwavering goals, or the conviction that we must win.
It feels like we’re just living day by day.
Hanling City, Bright Cinema.
It was midnight, and an animated film was playing on the screen.
The movie hadn’t been heavily promoted, and the late hour meant the audience was sparse.
After checking all the screening rooms, Lin Wanxing came to the only one still showing a film. She finished filling out the theater’s log sheet and took the last empty seat. One of the perks of being an usher was being able to watch a movie after work or when the theater was nearly empty.
The film had only been playing for ten minutes.
It was a fan-oriented movie. Many had read the comic as children, but more than a decade had passed, and those kids who once secretly read comics in class had long since grown up. With work the next day, few had made the effort to stay up late to watch it.
On the screen, the animated girl fell heavily on the badminton court. A pristine shuttlecock landed inside the boundary line as her opponents hugged tightly, celebrating their victory.
A few scattered gasps came from the audience.
Sweat dripped, and outside the gymnasium, the rain fell heavily, as if trying to shatter the roof. The downpour was the perfect catalyst for the atmosphere. She and her doubles partner had lost the crucial match. They were about to enter high school and would no longer play badminton together.
In Lin Wanxing’s memory, it seemed the comic had been abandoned at this point.
Back in their class, everyone had been itching to know what would happen next—whether the male and female leads would end up together.
But they never got the ending.
As time passed, whenever she remembered it, she began to feel that the regret of that rainy day was a fitting conclusion.
Time has a way of beautifying everything.
After defeating Hanling Victory, the senior students of Hongjing No. 8 Middle School were about to face their second mock exams.
In the period leading up to the second mock exams, the school had many small tests. Additionally, Teacher Xu felt she couldn’t handle all the teaching responsibilities for the football team students. So, all the football team members had to return to campus life.
Xu Yuning had thought long and hard before making this decision.
When she spoke to the students, she was worried they might have other ideas, so she emphasized that it was because she felt her teaching abilities were inadequate, not because she was unwilling to teach them.
The boys didn’t react much.
The classroom fell silent for a while before someone asked, “So she’s really not coming back, is she?”
For the students, staying at Yuan Yuan Cram School meant there was a chance Lin Wanxing might return someday. Returning to school, however, meant that Lin Wanxing would no longer be involved in their academic lives.
“If we leave, maybe she’ll come back. That wouldn’t be so bad,” Qi Liang said.
Lin Wanxing’s classes had always been very casual, with little focus on formal textbook content.
The subject teachers all felt that the football team students, accustomed to a free-spirited lifestyle, would struggle to sit properly in class for 45 minutes, tackling exercises and exams. The outlook wasn’t optimistic.
The teachers were concerned, so before the official classes began, they distributed the recent test papers to everyone through Teacher Xu.
The day before returning to school, after finishing football training, the students gathered in the classroom at Yuan Yuan Cram School to work on the test papers.
The sunset gradually faded, and the classroom grew quiet. Fu Xinshu stood up and turned on the light.The fluorescent lights flickered softly, yet none of the students looked up.
The classroom was filled with the soft rustling of pens on paper.
Under the glow of the lights, no one could quite pinpoint what that emotion really was.
Returning to school for classes didn’t mean they couldn’t use this classroom anymore, and no one was stopping them from doing so.
Until the finals, they would train at Wuchuan Road Stadium, and after school, they would still gather on the rooftop to eat and hang out.
But what about after that?
The competition would end, they would graduate, and one day, they would leave this place.
The stories that had unfolded would turn into memories, and everything would gradually become the past.
And they would never see Lin Wanxing again.
There are always moments like that.
You sit in the darkness, unable to figure out so many, many questions.
It feels as though something is interrogating you, yet you don’t even know what the questions are.
On their first day back at school, the students saw a celebratory notice about them.
The notice was posted outside the school cafeteria.
Last time, after they defeated Yuzhou Silver Elephant, they had hung a banner here themselves, creating quite a stir.
Now, it was an official notice from the school, even going so far as to rally people to watch the match—almost the exact scenario they had dreamed of.
Yet it felt strangely unreal.
No one around seemed to pay it much attention.
But the students still walked over.
Next to the notice was an announcement: the school would organize students to go to Yongchuan to watch the finals, and interested first and second-year students could sign up with their homeroom teachers.
Fu Xinshu took out his phone, snapped a photo, and prepared to send it to Lin Wanxing.
Only when he opened WeChat did he realize that his chat with Lin Wanxing had long since slipped down the list. The most recent message was one he had sent her unilaterally—information about the finals.
Lin Wanxing had never replied.
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