The boys exchanged glances, unable to understand immediately, so they didn’t act right away.
"I don’t get it."
"I worked so hard writing this, and you’re telling us to cross it out."
"Since you think it’s completely impossible, what’s the point of writing it down?" Lin Wanxing retorted.
The students were stunned: "This… this…"
"That doesn’t sound like something you’d say, Teacher."
"What should I say then?"
"You should say, 'Anything is possible as long as you want to do it!'" Lin Lu shouted.
"Well, I think your 'I want to go back to the past' isn’t realistically achievable." Lin Wanxing began pointing out.
"Who knows, maybe science will advance."
"I can pretty much guarantee that Earth’s science won’t reach that level in your lifetime. Unless we’re talking about an Alien Deus Ex Machina, then forget I said anything." Lin Wanxing said.
"Oh." Lin Lu nodded, accepting her explanation, and crossed out the "time travel" line.
After someone took the lead in asking questions, the students seemed to grasp something and began boldly crossing out lines on their draft papers.
Lin Wanxing paced around and pointed at a line Zheng Feiyang had crossed out: "Why can’t 'wanting to maintain world peace' stay?"
"Huh?"
Yu Ming was also puzzled: "It’s not like I can be Superman."
"Does only what Superman does count as maintaining world peace? What about city management officers?" Lin Wanxing asked curiously.
"How can you compare those?!"
"But Superman is in comics. The city management uncles and aunts work hard every day to maintain order at our school gate, preventing unauthorized stalls—that’s something happening in reality every day."
The students stared wide-eyed, as if they hadn’t expected her to say that. They opened their mouths but ultimately couldn’t refute her.
"But I already deleted it! What do I do now?"
"Circle it and bring it back," Lin Wanxing said lightly. "Or you could write it in more detail. How do you want to maintain world peace? For example, 'Join the peacekeeping forces to maintain world peace,' like this…"
Lin Wanxing wandered around the students on the rooftop, who were sitting, lying down, or sprawled out.
"I think you should just cross it out." Suddenly, Qi Liang’s relaxed voice chimed in. He had somehow moved next to Feng Suo and offered his advice.
"Don’t interfere with others," Lin Wanxing immediately called him out.
"He asked me," Qi Liang said, poking his messy hair with a pen and yawning.
"Asked you what?"
"He asked~ whether he should cross out the line he wrote: 'I want to catch up with Bao Xiaotian from Class 5.'"
Lin Wanxing immediately perked up: "Who’s Bao Xiaotian? Boy or girl? Is she pretty?"
"Of course she’s a girl!" Feng Suo said proudly.
"She’s the school belle—of course she’s pretty~" Qin Ao added.
"Got a photo? Let me see," Lin Wanxing said eagerly.
Feng Suo took out his phone, opened his photo album, and found a picture.
Lin Wanxing held the phone and looked at it for a while, then observed Feng Suo for a moment.
Lin Wanxing: "I think…"
"What?" Feng Suo looked at her.
"You should cross that line out after all."
Lin Wanxing was met with Feng Suo’s drawn-out "Aooo!" howl. She could only ruffle the boy’s hair and laugh, saying, "I’m joking. You can keep that line."The students began discussing and chatting among themselves, eliminating things that were truly impossible in a practical sense, leaving behind those that, while seemingly incredible, weren't entirely unattainable.
Lin Wanxing observed her students.
They joked with each other, helped one another, and seriously analyzed things with their peers.
Chen Jianghe stopped Fu Xinshu from crossing out the item "I want to get into a top-tier university."
Meanwhile, Zheng Feiyang pointed out to Qin Ao that "I want Jay Chou to release a new song" was really beyond his control.
When the rooftop gradually grew quiet again, Lin Wanxing leaned back against the railing.
Fu Xinshu said, "Teacher, as you said, we don't even have 10 things that are completely impossible for us."
"Have you finished crossing them all out?" Lin Wanxing asked.
"Yeah."
"Pretty much." The students nodded from various spots on the rooftop.
"So there aren't 10 items left now, is that right?" Lin Wanxing looked at them and said, "Then now, please cross out the things you don't want to do as much right now."
Hearing this, the students' first reaction was to lower their heads and start doing as she said. But soon, they felt something was off.
"Do we still need to cross them out?"
"Yes," Lin Wanxing said seriously.
"Then why did you make us work so hard to write these in the first place?" Qin Ao asked discontentedly.
"Yeah, we put so much effort into this!"
The boys were somewhat displeased. Anyone would feel reluctant to casually cross out things they had painstakingly thought of.
"It's just to make up 10 items. You've already crossed out quite a few earlier."
Her voice was gentle, and the boys felt that while this was a bit annoying, it didn't seem all that difficult at the moment.
Lin Lu crossed out "I want to eat Nanxiang Steamed Buns."
Yu Ming thought that "buy two boxes of Zhonghua cigarettes, smoke one and play with the other" wasn't all that important for the time being.
...
A minute or two passed, and most people successfully managed to come up with 10 items.
When everyone lifted their heads and looked at her again, Lin Wanxing said, "Now, please cross out these ten things."
The outburst after the silence was expected—the entire rooftop suddenly erupted in noise.
"What's this about?"
"We have to cross them out again?"
"Teacher, do you have any idea how hard it was for us to write these?"
"And what's the point of crossing them out?"
"I feel like you're just tormenting us!"
The boys' voices were loud, but Lin Wanxing's soft, calm voice overpowered them at that moment: "You can think of everything we've done today as a thought experiment."
She raised the tattered exercise book in her hand and said, "You'll feel a lot of reluctance next, but please believe that the things being crossed out now don't mean you'll never be able to achieve or obtain them in your lives. It's just that in this experiment, they aren't that important to you for the time being, so they need to step aside for a while."
The students were still somewhat confused, but the initial persuasion was straightforward.
They thought about it and felt it made some sense. After all, there were many things on that draft paper that could be deleted temporarily without issue.
For example, "want to eat a Michelin-starred meal" or "want to sing 'Skateboard Shoes' for the whole school in the broadcast room"—these were rather whimsical ideas.
Lin Lu was the fastest to complete the deletion of the next ten items. After all, he had written too many things related to "eating." So rather than agonizing over what to eat, it was better to just not eat anything at all.
The next things that were easily deleted were the simpler, more achievable items.For example, "I want to go swimming," or "Need to learn how to drive." Some were things they could do tomorrow if they wanted; others were things they didn't particularly want to do but felt compelled to because everyone else was doing them.
Lin Wanxing sometimes circled around the students, but more often, she stood alone at a slight distance from them.
Gradually, more and more people completed this second round of elimination.
As the students gradually put down their pens and the night regained its tranquility, Lin Wanxing said, "Next..."
"We have to cross out ten more items, right?" a student had already learned to anticipate her.
"Yes," Lin Wanxing replied.
The boys fell silent. They had already used plenty of excuses to procrastinate. Now, in the deep quiet of the night, the scent of hotpot on the rooftop had dissipated, and the city lights that had been shining brightly were gradually dimming.
No one spoke. They lowered their heads, staring at the remaining answers on their papers, and began to think hard.
But it wouldn't happen that quickly—Lin Wanxing knew this well.
What the students had to deal with next represented some of their dreams.
Chen Jianghe struggled between "Go to Wimbledon" and "Watch the Milan Derby at San Siro," ultimately crossing out the former.
Qin Ao still insisted on "Want to go to a Jay Chou concert," giving up "Buy a Bandai Authentic Gundam" for it.
They began to categorize—some things they wanted to do could actually be grouped together. Then, they would select the most important item from that category and eliminate the others.
Although there were many ways to go about it, as the scope narrowed, the students' pace of crossing out items slowed considerably.
Their breathing grew deeper, and each of them began to make their decisions with increasing difficulty.
Cross it out, or keep it a little longer?
Many had already moved from their original seats to sit directly on the rooftop's concrete floor, as if full contact with the ground could provide them with support and a sense of reality.
The process of thinking and deciding was long, and they no longer communicated with each other.
Until, at a certain moment, the students put down their pens and looked up.
They had gone through a period of contemplation and self-selection, having let go of some things. Their eyes held hesitation, confusion, and pain.
Now, the rooftop was filled with seated students, but no one was willing to speak first.
"Let's continue."
Lin Wanxing heard her own voice floating in the night air, and she also heard the rustling of draft papers in the students' hands as the wind lifted them.
The draft papers beside them had become crumpled from all the writing and scribbling. But most of their papers weren't filled with 100 items—60 at most, some only 30 or 40...
"Just tell us directly, how many items do we need to keep in the end?" Qin Ao cut straight to the point.
Lin Wanxing thought for a moment and said, "Now, please each of you keep 5 options."
"Why 5?" Chen Jianghe asked.
"Because psychologists say that people can only handle no more than 5-7 choices at once. Any more than that, and we experience what's called 'choice overload.'"
"Five?"
"Well then..."
The boys lowered their heads, either sitting or leaning over, looking at what they had written on their papers.
After going through some difficult decisions about what to abandon, everyone was feeling a bit downcast. And they were well aware that the choices to come would be even harder.
"Teacher, can you give me another piece of paper?" Lin Lu, sitting on the concrete floor near the dining table, suddenly raised his hand and asked.
"What's wrong?" Lin Wanxing asked him.The boy's voice was soft and gentle, tinged with a hint of bashfulness: "I can't bear to part with them all, I want to copy them down."
"Then why not just underline them lightly?" Lin Wanxing chuckled and retorted.
Lin Lu: "That's not the same."
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